What is a Church?

Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).

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Debates about the nature of ‘church’ have been around for ages. It’s a complicated and perennial topic, but we thought it was worth another outing in this edition because it’s also very practical.

It’s practical not just because what you think a ‘church’ is will shape what you do in church. What you think about ‘church’ will also have big implications for all those other Christian activities or gatherings that aren’t ‘church’ (according to your definition).

You can also read one of Phillip’s articles on church: What is Church For? or listen to a sermon series on The Biblical Church.

The previous episode is Keeping Sabbaths and Preparing for Ministry.

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WHAT IS A CHURCH?

And why do you want to know?

Tony Payne: Perhaps before we get into why our definition of ‘church’ will have very significant implications, we probably should start with the word itself and its numerous contemporary meanings.

Phillip Jensen: Yes. You see, words can have different meanings based on their context. Their definition can change over time and sometimes they can have positive or negative connotations depending on how they are used in certain contexts. The word ‘church’ is powerful in its connotation for Christians because it’s a word that appears in the Bible. In Acts 20, we’re told that Jesus died for the church. Well, that makes the church very important. In Ephesians 3, we’re told God’s plan and wisdom will be shown in the church, which makes it an important thing. Jesus speaks in Matthew 16 of building his church, which again says that it must have some significance for the whole purposes of God. 1 Corinthians 14 talks of all the things that we need to do to build the church. In fact, building the church becomes the kind of criterion by which we evaluate the things that we’re doing in the church. 

TP: Yes, edification is the great criteria in 1 Corinthians 14 for figuring out how to order our activities in this thing that’s called ‘church’—so as to build up, to comfort, to encourage, to produce a benefit. That argument flows right through chapters 12 to 14.

PJ: Yes, and 1 Corinthians 3 talks about church being founded on the Lord Jesus Christ and on the apostles, which is important. And then 1 Timothy 3 talks about the church being the bulwark and pillar of the truth, and it calls it the ‘household of God’. So the language with which the Bible describes or talks about church shows that it is an important and big thing for Christians, but that doesn’t tell you necessarily what it is. And the problem for us, when we think of church today, is that we read all our concepts of church back into those passages. We can use the word ‘church’, for example, to refer to a building—but these passages quite clearly cannot mean a building. Or we use the word to say, “I’m going to church”, by which we don’t necessarily mean the building I’m going to. 

TP: In that instance, we’re using of an event—going to something that happens, or perhaps to a place where things happen.

PJ: And then we talk about the Presbyterian Church, or the Anglican Church, or the church of Rome or the Church of England or the Church of Ireland. See, sometimes it’s a national church, or other times it’s a kind of denomination that we’re talking about. Sometimes the denomination doesn’t use the singular, it uses the plural. So there’s the ‘Union of Baptist Churches’, which is trying to say that the individual churches are the church, rather than the association of churches being ‘the church’. 

TP: I remember the Presbyterian Church in Dubbo used to take that principle into its own description of itself. So because they had three or four congregations meeting at different times in that building, like a Sunday morning and a Sunday night, the sign out the front said ‘Dubbo Presbyterian Churches’.

PJ: So within that context, the word ‘church’ means ‘congregation’. 

TP: Yes, a congregation that meets together is a single thing, and there are several of them here. So we say ‘churches’ in the plural. We use the word in a bunch of different ways today, don’t we?

PJ: Yes. So what’s the truth? You can use the word any way you want to; that’s the beauty of the flexibility of language. But yet, what does the Bible mean when it’s talking about the church? Can we define that? Is there a consistency in its understanding of the church that we would want to be able to say, well, yes, we call these other things churches, and they participate in the meaning of the word church in the Bible, but they’re not actually what the Bible is talking about? 

TP: Well they might be related in some way to the thing that the Bible is using that word to refer to, but they might not be exactly the same thing and might not have the precisely same features. And that’s what raises this really interesting question. Why does all this matter? Why do we need to define this and figure this out? Surely, language just changes over time. Why is it important in this case that we have a field of meanings for the word ‘church’ in English that means all kinds of different things, and then you go to the Bible and it uses a word that’s translated the same as that in English as ‘church’ and yet the field of meanings there seems a little different? 

PJ: Yes, we someone wants to ask ‘What is a church?’—what are its exact marks and features?—the question I first want to ask is: ‘Why do you want to know?’

TP: Now I can think of a number of reasons. Firstly, it can simply be that I want to make sure that I’m obeying the Bible or being faithful to the Bible and to do what the church is meant to do.

But there are other reasons, not always so honourable, that people might want to know the answer to a certain definitional question like this. I’m thinking of a Pharisaic kind of attitude to definitions of things, that I want to define something tightly so that I’m free to do a whole bunch of other things, so long as I don’t transgress this one definition. 

PJ: I’m sorry to say that in practice, that is a very common reason. Your first reason was noble and good—that people would want to know what a ‘church’ is in order know what do to, such as how Paul writes in 1 Timothy 3 about how to behave in the church of God, in the household of God. But in practice, so often people are keen to be definitionally clear not so that we may know what to do and be godly, but so as to control others, to control the congregations themselves, or to control society.

Who is the church that’s preaching the truth of God or telling the society what to do? Is it any church? Or is it our church? They want to restrict others by telling them you’re not allowed to do things because you don’t qualify as a church. You’re not allowed to put a sign out calling yourself a church. You’re not allowed to declare that you are the church. You’re not allowed to plant a church in our parish, because we already have a church in this parish. 

TP: So that does become a mechanism of exclusion and control, doesn’t it?

PJ: Yes, and the reverse is true too. If I tightly define this is church or what church is, well, I’m not church, therefore I don’t have to obey that. I can do anything I like, because we’re not church here. 

TP: It’s interesting how in the New Testament, we see both sides in the Pharisees and scribes in their very tightly definitional approach to the law—for example, they want to carefully define what is or isn’t Sabbath breaking, so as to make them the arbiters of what is righteous. It gives them a great degree of power, but it also allows them to do all the things they want to do—for example, not really give money to their parents, as Jesus says in Mark 7. They’ve defined things in such a way so that they can do what they want without being seen to break the law. It’s both control of others and liberty for me to do what I want.

PJ: Yes, and sometimes in history, and it’s still currently true in some places, national churches have been able to exclude the preaching of the gospel and missionary work on the grounds that you don’t belong to ‘the church’ as we define it. In our own Anglican history, John Bunyan the writer of Pilgrim’s Progress, which I think outside the Bible is the second most read or published Christian book in history, was locked up in jail for 12 years. And that was because he conducted services without being authorized by the Church of England, and he conducted services which would not have been in accordance with the way the Church of England would set its liturgy, and it was preaching the gospel without a license. And so when you’ve got a national church that claims to be the church of God, then somebody who doesn’t or won’t fit into our church, well, that is a great matter. And in the 17th century, you could actually be put in prison for it. That’s absolutely appalling. But of course, this is the history of Pharisaism. It’s got to do with control, exclusion of people, and their own liberty. It’s playing games with words. It’s not actually dealing with reality. 

TP: Let’s come back to the Bible and what it’s saying. What are the key theological landing points that help us understand this question? 

PJ: Well, the basic model of the church is the ‘day of the church’, as it’s called in Deuteronomy when God met all his people on Mount Sinai. It’s described in Deuteronomy 4, and then keeps being referred to in the rest of Deuteronomy such as in Deut 9:10, 10:4, and 18:16. It talks about the ‘day of the church’ or the ‘assembly’. 

TP: So the word ‘church’ means ‘assembly’ right? It means gathering a group of people. 

PJ: Yes, but it was a special gathering to meet with God by hearing God’s word. They didn’t see him. That’s not what it was about. It was about him speaking to them and their response. And that day is referred to in the New Testament. So when the New Testament talks of church, that concept is still there over a thousand years later. So Stephen talks about the gathering in the wilderness when God spoke to his people (in Acts 7). And in Hebrews 12, it speaks again of this church, but now it actually moves it, because it now says we’re not in that church. Now we’re in a different church or assembly, that is a heavenly church where Jesus’ word of mercy and forgiveness is being preached, and now it’s a spiritual reality that we are in. So it’s an eschatological–an end of the world–thing that is already there. Therefore it’s a spiritual thing, not a physical thing that we’re in, when we are gathered to hear the word of Christ.

TP: That’s a really important passage, Phillip. How about I read that passage – Hebrews 12:18-21: 

For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given, “If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.” Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.”

That’s a reference to Deuteronomy 4–the sound of the trumpet, they heard the voice, they didn’t see any form, and they begged that Moses would go and speak to God on their behalf. Deuteronomy 4 is the archetype. But then he goes on in Hebrews 12:22-24:

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn [there’s the word ‘church’—ekklesia] who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

PJ: Because Abel’s voice cried for vengeance. Jesus’ voice declares mercy. It’s a lovely image that the hymn writer of “Glory be to Jesus” picks up. 

TP: Yes, that hymn alludes to that verse. 

Abel’s blood for vengeance pleaded to the skies, but the blood of Jesus for our pardon cries.

PJ: So we gather to hear the word, to hear the gospel, which is the new covenant that is mentioned there. So the model of the church with the gathering of all God’s saved people to hear the word of the covenant at Mount Sinai has now been replaced by us going to hear the voice of pardon from Jesus, the risen one. And so church is a way of describing heaven. It’s the assembling, the gathering of all God’s people to hear his word of the gospel. 

TP: They’re gathered there by that word. They’re gathered there by his blood and for salvation. We have talked before about concepts that are associated with words, even if they’re not part of the actual lexical meaning of the word itself. It’s interesting how often salvation is associated with the gathering, as opposed to say scattering, which is an image of judgment. 

PJ: That’s right. It goes right back to the Tower of Babel, the idea that we will gather all together and build our way to heaven, and God comes down and looks at their puny efforts and then scatters the nations in judgment. So for us individualistic Westerners, we miss the emotional significance of this word ‘gathering’. We can talk about ‘the meeting’, but people then think, ‘Oh not another meeting. I hate meetings.’ 

TP: Yes, ‘meeting’ is now almost like a casual thing or has got some functional task and purpose. It’s a terribly pragmatic kind of operation.

PJ: Yes, but it has a negative connotation. Whereas the word ‘gathering’ is fellowship, is relationship, is people sharing together in great things—and what we’re sharing is that we are the people of God listening to God’s word speak to us, which is now the gospel word. And so whenever we gather, we gather in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to hear his word. We’re participating in our eternal life. We’re participating in that heavenly church which already exists, and of which, if we’ve been born again by the Spirit of God, we are in it.

TP: Jesus said, I will build my church, I will build my gathering, my assembly. Do you think he’s talking about that heavenly gathering?

PJ: Yes, eternity, it’s his salvation. It’s his and he’s doing it by his death and resurrection. But he’s not building an institutional organization here in this world; he’s building his heavenly salvation, gathering his people together around him and in his presence. 

TP: It’s the same imagery in Ephesians, where we’re raised up to the heavenly places to sit with Christ. There’s a whole series of references to the gathering or the assembly in Ephesians—about how the great congregation or assembly demonstrates to the heavenly powers (the spiritual rulers and authorities) how extraordinary God’s plan and wisdom is. In Ephesians it’s talking about the great gathering made up of Jew and Gentile, of all peoples now gathered together into one temple, one household, one assembly. It’s one mighty, majestic population of people gathered around the Lord Jesus Christ.

PJ: The oneness of it, though, is that there’s one in heaven. There’s not multiple in heaven, but here on Earth, there’s multitudes of churches, all kinds of gatherings. The root of the word ‘church’ means ‘gathering’ and so it’s used even in secular forms, such as in Acts 19 where it talks about a riotous mob. We’ve limited the word ‘church’ down to a religious gathering. 

TP: It was a normal, everyday word. It wasn’t a religious word. In the New Testament, it means a gathering, an assembly, and it can mean a temporary assembly, like the mob. This is a terrible gathering, only quickly formed and quickly dispersed, but it’s still a gathering. Or it can be a more permanent gathering such as the council that’s also mentioned in Acts 19, a gathering that does have an ongoing, institutional form to it. 

PJ: The one gathering of Christians is the heavenly gathering that Jesus is at work now in bringing together. It’s not in the World Council of Churches. Yes, it’s not in the Presbyterian churches or the Anglican churches. It’s not in the Church of England or something like that. 

TP: Would you say that when we say in the Creed, “one holy, catholic and apostolic Church” (where catholic means universal) that it’s talking of the same thing? 

PJ: Yes, that’s what we believe in, but we participate in that whenever we gather in the name of Christ. 

TP: To put it another way, because we are part of that eternal gathering, we now gather in all sorts of ways in the name of Christ. It drives us together. It’s not only that when we gather, we participate in it; it drives in the other direction too. Because we’re already part of the heavenly gathering, we are drawn together with other Christians and have fellowship with them in all sorts of ways. The primary reality is we all belong together to the congregation of Jesus in heaven, and therefore it spills out into all kinds of ways in which we fellowship and have community and gathering. 

PJ: Yes, it’s a reality we now share whenever we gather, such as when the believers meet in Nympha’s house in Colossians 4. So church does not have to be a building. And you don’t have to have a constitution. The constitution is the gospel. You don’t have to have an organizational structure. You don’t have to have bishops, priests and deacons or a body of elders in order to be a church. There are many things that are helpful for a gathering, especially one that gathers regularly and systematically. They’re helpful things, but they’re not the essence of what the church is. 

TP: Yes, they’re not the essence of what it means to gather in the name of Christ, because we’re already gathered in the name of Christ in heaven. I think you’re right because we can do that in all kinds of different ways to gather in the name of Christ for mutual help and edification and for all kinds of purposes that stem from our union with Christ.

One of those very important forms of gathering that the New Testament often talks about a lot is where we have a regular, ongoing commitment to one another, to a group of people that we we care for, that we encourage and are encouraged by, in which there are elders and overseers who care for that group of people who are seen as a flock, as it says in Acts 20 when he’s talking to the Ephesian elders. But that’s not the only kind of Christian gathering. 

PJ: Yes, I think that’s right. And please don’t get me wrong, I go to church every Sunday morning in that kind of public gathering of God’s word, like the one mentioned in 1 Corinthians 14 which speaks of the the outsider who comes to the gathering which is not necessarily a private gathering, but it is a gathering of God’s people, and they share the Word of God, because that is how the church is built. And so there is a model of what we mean now when Christians get together. When you and I gather to watch cricket, that is a ‘church’ (a gathering) but not a Christian church. 

TP: Yes. Some would treat cricket gatherings as a religious event as they would football and other things, but it’s not a Christian gathering. We’re gathering in the name of Christ for his purpose.

So this brings us back to why people want to discriminate between our various earthly Christian gatherings as to which ones are really ‘church’. We want to steer away from the dangers of Pharisaism of trying to closely define exactly what an earthly ‘church’ is—so as to exercise control or so as to have liberty. A better question would be: When we have a Christian gathering of any kind, what sort of principles, concepts, truths, and realities should shape the way we gather together and what we do?

PJ: Yes, that’s a much better question, which I think is beyond what we’re going to answer now, but it’s a question that you would apply to different gatherings, and you would get slightly different answers from different gatherings.

TP: Yes, depending on the scope, the longevity of the gathering, the particular purpose for which it’s gathering. 

PJ: Is it a one-off church or an every week church? What you do in this church might be different to what you do in another church, but you are gathering for the purposes of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

TP: It’s using the word ‘church’ there to mean something that derives its nature and purpose and rationale from the Christian gathering in heaven. So we’ve used the word ‘church’ a lot in the last minute or two, but in many cases we could have just substituted the word ‘assembly’ or ‘gathering’. But nowadays people often define the word ‘church’ very tightly to refer to a particular institutional thing, whether it’s a denomination or a particular congregational polity or structure, in a way that can be unhelpful.

PJ: Many people are wanting to say that something is ‘not a church’, because we don’t have ethnic diversity, or because we don’t have age diversity, or because we aren’t celebrating the sacraments, or because we don’t have an ordained minister, and so on. Those kinds of discussions are nearly all control Pharisaism. And I think that’s been detrimental to the spread of the gospel and detrimental to church life.

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