Trust & Obey, Week 2: Matthew 16 & 18, Part 3
When you hear the word “church,” what comes to mind is likely a contemporary expression of church in your culture. For me, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, USA, I think of church buildings. My county has something like 700 church buildings of all shapes and sizes. Some have steeples, some are store fronts, and some space inside movie theaters, hotels, or other churches.
Now think about activities happening in those buildings. Primarily, worship services, right? Those worship gatherings often take place in a large room with rows of chairs or pews, usually a high ceiling, sometimes stained glass windows, sometimes an organ, sometimes a variety of other musical instruments, sometimes in a well-lit room, sometimes a darkened one. Though we like to talk about how differently churches worship from one another, whether evangelical, Catholic, Mennonite, megachurch, or many other kinds, Christian worship gatherings are mostly similar. They all include some songs, bible reading, offerings, sermons, and prayer.
We have a word for those elements of worship services: Liturgy. You might say, “But my church is not a liturgical church.” I suspect, actually, that your church is liturgical. It’s just that your liturgy is different from the liturgy of formal churches. Here’s what I mean. Liturgy is what we do in worship. Liturgy technically means “work of the people.” In ancient Greece it was kind of like civic duty, but in time it became spiritualized to refer to what takes place in worship services. Yet in some (many?) church worship services, liturgy is not the work of the people. In those churches, worship is the work of a few professionals.
Put this all together, Christian churches in contemporary American expression are generally two things.
- A property management company. Building, grounds, rentals, cleaning, utilities, repairs.
- A worship production company. Live music, lights, camera, video, audio, concert, monologue.
Yet, neither of those two things are what Jesus meant when he said the word “church.” The word he used is ekklesia. A gathering, an assembly, of people. That’s it. A group of his followers, gathering together. But gathering for what purpose?
Never did Jesus say, “I want you to build buildings in which to hold worship services once/week, led by professionals.” Instead, he talked about a very specific purpose, and he talked about it a lot. Not church.
Guess what word Jesus and the Gospel authors use instead of “church”? Kingdom!
While Jesus uses the word “church” two times, guess how many times the word “kingdom”?
Matthew: about 50 times, featuring “kingdom of heaven”
Mark: about 15 times, featuring “kingdom of God”
Luke: about 38 times, featuring “kingdom of God”
John: 4 times
Total times Jesus and the Gospel authors refer to the Kingdom of God. About 107 times. Church two times. Kingdom 107 times.
Yet, when we think of the visible expression of God in the world, we think of church, I suspect, much more than we think of Kingdom. But clearly, for Jesus, Kingdom is everything. It could be because the church is very physical (people, buildings, worship services), easy to grasp, while the Kingdom can seem abstract. The Kingdom is not, however, abstract, as we will see in the next few posts. But I must admit that when compared to the physicality of church, at first glance the Kingdom can seem that abstract.
Let me be clear, when groups of Christians in a community buy property, pay to build buildings, pay professional staff, and hold weekly worship productions, they are not doing anything wrong. Yet none of those things are required by Jesus.
And that begs the question: What is required by Jesus? Check back to the next post as I attempt to answer that.
Photo by Edward Cisneros on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 