What is the Church?

Last week my conversation with Dr. Kenton Anderson aired on the Thinking Teams Podcast. I am grateful for the time Kent took with me. Kent was open and honest about the challenges we are all facing in Christian and theological higher education. His confidence in God, and God’s providence, was inspiring. While it is hard for me to imagine what it might be like to be president at even one school, Kent’s done it twice. That takes character, resilience, and grit.

One part of the conversation has been swirling in my mind for most of the week. It was when we were talking about the church’s relationship with the theological school.

In Kent’s book Theological Education, co-written with Greg Henson, they suggest that the mission of the theological school is the mission of the church. I wanted to hear more about this from Kent, so I asked him about it around the 35-minute mark (you can watch or listen to it here). Kent noted that the school is not the church. He described how God has promised to use the church, which I understood to mean that no such promise was given to schools. Therefore, the purpose of the school must be aligned with the purpose of the church. He went on to say that many churches have lost confidence in theological schools and that trust needs to be regained.

This all makes sense but the distinction between “the church” and “the theological school” got me thinking, what exactly is “the church”?

We use the word “church” to describe several different things and that can get confusing. We can mean the people of God across time and space. We can mean a local congregation. Or we can mean an institution with a building, leaders, programs, doctrines, and organizational structures. When we use the same word for all three, it can become easy to assume that the institutional expression is the church itself.

When I was a child, I remember singing a song called We Are the Church. The refrain goes like this:

I am the church!
You are the church!
We are the church together!
All who follow Jesus,
all around the world!
Yes, we’re the church together!

While simple, I think it’s spot on theologically. The church comprises the people of God, with Christ as its head.

What is the church?

I think I understand where Kenton (and many others!) are coming from when they draw sharp distinctions between what is and isn’t the church. The church gathers in local congregations. Those congregations generally meet in buildings. They have pastors. They participate in ordinances or sacraments. So, in this paradigm, it can seem as though the church revolves around what happens on Sunday morning.

But the church is also so much larger. The church is also present when those same Sunday morning people gather for board meetings, small group Bible studies, mid-week children’s ministries, or youth gatherings. Right?

So, what is the church? Could it not be argued that the church is the people of God who gather anywhere in the name of Jesus Christ?

Much of Protestant and Evangelical thinking about the church has been shaped by Reformation-era debates and the structures inherited from the medieval church. But I wonder whether those categories sometimes cause us to miss something simpler in the ministry of Jesus and the New Testament letters.

In After our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, Miroslav Volf offers a compelling definition of the church. After referencing the use of Matt. 18:20 by Ignatius, Tertullian, Cyprian and others, Volf writes:

I will join this long tradition by taking Matt. 18:20 as the foundation not only for determining what the church is, but also for how it manifests itself externally as a church. Where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, not only is Christ present among them, but a Christian church is there as well, perhaps a bad church, a church that may well transgress against love and truth, but a church nonetheless.[1]

I think much of our thinking about the church has been shaped more by concepts of the church than by taking the church for what it actually is. It is a gathering of Jesus’ people. We have allowed the notion that “the church” must be constrained by institutional or organizational parameters to cloud our thinking about how the Triune God relates to people.

When I look at the life of Christ, I see him gathering and forming his people as he walked the roads, worked, and lived alongside his disciples. He was beginning to build his church as he walked the roads and performed his trade alongside his disciples. They were not the church only when they gathered on a certain hilltop or inside a home. He was building his church in the fishing boat and the temple courts. Then, when he was crucified, died, was buried, then came back to life, he continued building his church on the beach and in the upper room by drawing people to himself and his Father. Then when the Spirit came, as recorded in the early part of the Acts of the Apostles, Christ continued to build the church through the work of the Holy Spirit. The church was, and is, the people of God gathered in the name of Christ. The church was present in prisons (Acts 16:24-34), homes (Rom. 16:5), and in the temple courts (Acts 2:46).

Could the church be in theological schools?

Returning to the idea that the school and the church are separate. To argue that they are distinct is dependent on an institutional understanding of the church. It is a concept of the church being something that exists outside of people. In this paradigm, Christ is the head of a body that is understood as his followers gathered at a certain time, place, and under a certain institutional banner. This concept of the church goes well beyond Volf’s definition, and I would say that of the New Testament, of two or three gathered in the name of Christ. If the church is defined by a set of doctrines and led by set apart leaders, then no, the church would not exactly be in prisons, homes, and theological schools.

However, if the church is the gathering of God’s people in the name of Christ, then the church could, in fact, be present in theological schools. When believers gather in the name of Jesus Christ, he is present.

Full disclosure of where I stand: I am convinced that the church can be anywhere and everywhere people gather in the name of Jesus Christ. The early church met mainly in homes. It was led by teams of leaders, some local and some itinerant. No one was paid for their ministry. You can read more about this in my upcoming book, Wages in the Kingdom.

Since completing that manuscript, my new questions have been about ecclesiology. If the early church was led by self-supporting teams of leaders who gathered where it was convenient, what does that mean for our understanding of the church? What if the church was simply the people of God gathered in the name of Jesus Christ? What does that mean for our institutional conceptualization of the church?

I’ll say more about this in the future. For now, I have no plans to make hard-and-fast delineations about something being the church and something else not being the church. We are the church if we believe in Christ and gather in his name. Whether that happens in a building called a church or in a theological school chapel, I think it matters little.

[1] Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, 136.