What a Church Is . . . and Isn't
A Jarring Conversation
During my graduate studies, I remember one conversation with a friend who worked for a Christian ministry that was not affiliated with any one church. He and I did attend the same church for a couple of years. But while I joined the church as a member, my friend didn’t. In fact, he only came for the Sunday morning service and would slip in about halfway through, just in time for the sermon.
One day, I decided to ask him about his half-hearted attendance. “I don’t really get anything out of the rest of the service,” he replied.
“Have you ever thought of joining the church?” I asked.
He appeared genuinely surprised by my question and responded, “Join the church? I honestly don’t know why I would do that. I know what I’m here for, and those people would just slow me down.”
As far as I could tell, he didn’t say those words disdainfully, but with the genuine zeal of a gifted evangelist who did not want to waste one hour of the Lord’s time. He had given some thought to what he was looking for in a church. And on the whole it didn’t involve the other members of the church, at least not that church. He wanted a place where he could hear good preaching from God’s word and get his spiritual jolt for the week.
What Is a Healthy Church?
Mark Dever
Guides both pastors and lay members to recognize key characteristics of a healthy church and then challenges each person to do his or her part in developing those characteristics in the local church body.
Yet his words reverberated in my mind—“Those people would just slow me down.” There were a number of things I wanted to say, but all I said was, “Did you ever think that if you linked arms with those people, yes, they may slow you down, but you may help to speed them up? Have you thought that might be a part of God’s plan for them, and for you?”
I, too, wanted a church where I could hear good preaching every Sunday. But the words “body of Christ” mean more than just that, don’t they?
A People, Not a Place
The church is not a place. It’s not a building. It’s not a preaching point. It’s not a spiritual service provider. It’s a people—the new-covenant, blood-bought people of God. That’s why Paul said, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). He didn’t give himself up for a place, but for a people.
That’s why the church I pastor starts its Sunday morning gatherings not by saying, “Welcome to Capitol Hill Baptist Church,” but “Welcome to this gathering of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church.” We are a people who gather. Yes, this is a small thing, but we’re trying to point to a big reality even in the words we use to welcome people.
Remembering that the church is a people should help us recognize what’s important and what’s not important. I know I need the help. For example, I have a temptation to let something like the style of music dictate how I feel about a church. After all, the style of music a church uses is one of the first things we will notice about any church, and we tend to respond to music at a very emotional level. Music makes us feel a certain way. Yet what does it say about my love for Christ and for Christ’s people if I decide to leave a church because of the style of its music? Or if, when pastoring a church, I marginalize a majority of my congregation because I think the style of music needs to be updated?
At the very least, we could say that I’ve forgotten that the church, fundamentally, is a people and not a place. At the same time, the Bible teaches that Christians should very much care about what happens at a church—what it does. In fact, the latter half of this book is devoted to such a discussion.
How do we balance these two things—caring about a people but also caring about what they do? If this were a book about raising Christian families, we would talk about doing certain things: eating dinner together, reading Scripture together, laughing together, praying for one another, and so on. Yet throughout the discussion, hopefully we would all remember that parents make mistakes and that kids will be kids. The family is not just an institution; it’s a group of people.
The church is a people, not a place or a statistic. It’s a body, united into him who is the head.
So it is with a church. Does a particular church fail to meet your expectations in terms of what it does, as in whether or not it follows what the Bible says about church leadership (one topic that I’ll cover later)? If so, remember that this is a group of people who are still growing in grace. Love them. Serve them. Be patient with them. Again, think of a family. Whenever your parents, siblings, or children fail to meet your expectations, do you suddenly throw them out of the family? I hope you forgive and are patient with them. You might even stop to consider whether it’s your expectations that should be adjusted! By this same token, we should ask ourselves whether we know how to love and persevere with church members who have different opinions, who fail to meet expectations, or even who sin against us. (Don’t you and I ever have sin that needs to be forgiven?)
Somewhere, of course, there is a line. There are some churches you may not want to join, or pastor, or remain joined to. We’ll return to this question in the section on the essential marks of a church. For the time being, the basic principle remains the same: the church is a people. And whatever we’re looking for, or whatever we’re saying the church should be, must be guided by that basic, biblical principle.
A People, Not a Statistic
Let me put up one more road block to bad thinking about the church, thinking especially common among pastors. Not only is the church not a place; it’s not a statistic.
When I was in graduate school, I remember encountering a letter of counsel written by John Brown, a pastor in the nineteenth century, to one of his students who had just been ordained over a small congregation. In the letter Brown wrote:
I know the vanity of your heart, and that you will feel mortified that your congregation is very small, in comparison with those of your brethren around you; but assure yourself on the word of an old man, that when you come to give an account of them to the Lord Christ, at his judgment-seat, you will think you have had enough.1
As I considered the congregation over which God had given me charge, I felt the weightiness of this day of accounting before God. Did I want the church I pastored to become big? Popular and much discussed? A church that in some way looked impressive?
Was I motivated in any way to just “put up with” or “tolerate” the group of people in front of me, to bide my time and wait for opportunities to make the church into what I thought it should be? Not that having desires for a church’s future is bad, but were my desires leading me to be indifferent, even annoyed, with the saints surrounding me in the present?
Or would I remember what was infinitely at stake for the several scores of souls, most of them elderly, already sitting in front of me on Sunday mornings in a room big enough for eight hundred? Would I love and serve these few, even if their unbiblical committees, and old-fashioned traditions, and not-my-favorite music selections stood in the way of my (I think, legitimate) hopes for the church? And I know it’s not only pastors who fall into “tolerating” the people around them, biding their time until the church becomes what they envision it can be.
The church is a people, not a place or a statistic. It’s a body, united into him who is the head. It’s a family, joined together by adoption through Christ.
I pray that we pastors would increasingly recognize our awesome responsibility for the particular flocks over which God has made us undershepherds.
But I also pray that you, Christian, whether an elder or an infant in the faith, would increasingly recognize your responsibility to love, serve, encourage, and hold accountable the rest of your church family. When it comes to your flesh-andblood siblings, I trust that you already recognize where Cain went wrong when he dismissively said to the Lord, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9). But even more I hope that you recognize, if you haven’t already, your higher responsibility to the brothers and sisters of your church family
A crowd was sitting around [Jesus], and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:32–35)
Notes:
- James Hay and Henry Belfrage, Memoir of the Rev. Alexander Waugh (Edinburgh: William Oliphant & Son, 1839), 64–65.
This article is adapted from What Is a Healthy Church? by Mark Dever.
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