“One of the things we have nearly lost is the simple idea of a neighborhood parish. Every neighborhood should have a congregation or parish that they can walk to, worship with and learn from. But we can’t get sloppy with our language. We don’t call services or meetings on Sunday “church.” We call them “public meetings”. Weekly services are great things to do—gather publicly for worship, share prayers and needs and upcoming events, put our money together, to read Scripture, share communion. But that is not Church; that’s just the Church gathering together in a building. We are the Church. We don’t call a building a “church.” The Church is who we are—the body, the bride, the living incarnation of Jesus in his people...So the idea of a “commuter church” or “church shopping” becomes quite senseless, especially if the sermon or soloist is not the center of our public meetings—but what is the center is Jesus, taking communion together, sharing needs and activities coming up and ways to find community. You can do those things anywhere. And they don’t need to be fancy or take lots of money. These make a lot more sense to be grounded within walking distance or close to it from where we live. One of the congregations we are connected to here in Philly is growing rapidly. The Spirit is just doing beautiful stuff among us. But every time we grow beyond 200 people in services we start up a new location for public meetings. We don’t need them to be big, in fact they work much better small.”—Follow Me to Freedom: Leading As an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne and John Perkins
<idle musing>
Yes! The church is not a building; you can't go to church. Church is people, Christian people. Once you realize that, the size of a church is inversely proportional to how much it can truly be a church.
</idle musing>
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I think that this post rightly gets at one of the biggest problems of church today, the fact that we understand our faith communities as a free act of the will of a group of individuals, rather than a free act of God's will. While we pay lip service to the idea that we are "called to this community", in reality most of us have chosen a church based on what we want to get out of it. As Lewis, speaking as Screwtape said, "If you can get your target to focus upon how the person in the pew next to him is singing off key, it doesn't matter if he is in a church" (pretty widely construed paraphrase). The churches we are creating need to be full of people constantly afraid to fall into that trap, and when this happens church-shopping and related ills will become a thing of the past. [Disclaimer: I'm pretty bad at this myself, but we Christians need to strive for the higher things, no?]
Daniel
www.christianinteldaily.com/
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