Soma Church Blog

What is “church”?

This is a complex idea. Far more complex than some people give credit for. Some will say it is “the gathering of God’s people”. But what if God’s people are gathering to watch the football?

OK, so we might modify it to “God’s people gathered around God’s Word”. But does that mean Christianity, and the church particularly, is reduced to a ideology or worse a religion where people are gathering to learn about what they should and should not be doing? Besides how do we reconcile the idea that the church is a gathering by the universal church is all Christians across the world and history? This is an important question when it comes to planting a church, what is it that you are planting? So we are going to spend a few blogs on this. (And because I am speaking on it at a conference this week!)

I think the place we need to start is from Hebrews 12:18-24. Here we see a comparison between the first church which met around Mt Sinai (for a more detailed argument download an essay by Peter O’Brien here)

The point here the earthly church is a manifestation of the heavenly church. Once we get this right then we get a whole bunch of other things right too.

Heaven and Earthly Church
Church is primarily the heavenly gathering and the earthly gathering is a manifestation of this. This means a number of things: firstly, that the heavenly church is to show what the earthly church is like. The heavenly church shows it allegiance to Jesus by paying homage to him in praise and song (Rev 5:9, 14:3, 15:3, etc.).  But we cannot forget that it is a earthly church and so needs to work on building people up as members of this church.  It is  like a embassy of a nation where people come to enjoy and remember their citizenship and learn to be better citizens.

Local and Universal Church
This, then, make sense of the universal church idea. All Christians, everywhere, throughout history are gathered with Jesus (Col 3:1-4, Eph 2:6, Heb 12:22-24). But there are local, earthly churches that are all connected together because the members of the earthly churches are also members of the heavenly church.  There is a responsibility that people have for members of the universal church around the world, which is why we support mission work and compassion work to the churches in other parts of the world.

Visible and Invisible Church
But when we gather together not everyone who is gathered in the earthly church is a member of the heavenly church (1 Cor 14:23). So the earthly church is the visible church but the heavenly church is the invisible church. The mission of the church is for members of the visible church to be members of the invisible church, or rather the visible church to work towards people becoming members of the invisible church

Some people will argue that if I am a member of the invisible church then I don’t have to be a member of the visible church: Here are three reasons why:

1. Because the church is not about you, it is about God’s glory (Eph 3:10,21) God has called the church to show his glory, so get with the program.  The visible church is how God’s glory is manfested to the world.
2. Because God is calling a people to himself, so you have been saved so you can be a part of the church.
3. Because the church is there to serve each other as each part does its work. In Eph 4:16 we see that the reason that Christ gives gifts to each person is that His Body, the church, might be built up but as each member does it’s work. So you need to be a member of a visible church to build its members up, no matter what you can do.

More on the dimensions of church in the next blog….