What makes a church a church?

• A building?
• A congregation of a certain size?
• Sunday meetings?
• A pastor?
• Three songs, a sermon, and a response song? (for white churches)

Put a different way, what differentiates a church from any other social gathering?

When I first started working through this exercise recently, I started with the question, “What are the markers of a healthy community of believers?” Over time, though, I decided that it would be helpful to distill it down even further to look at what the markers are that, without them, the community/gathering is no longer a church.

The Process

Qualitative Analysis (the technical bit)

I started with a loose qualitative analysis, coding passage-by-passage, to see what themes surfaced. So far, I’ve gone through Ephesians, Romans, Acts, and I’m partway through Matthew. Basically, I would read a passage, ask, “What statement or statements does this say or imply about what we should expect from authentic, Christ-following groups of believers?” and begin to group similar passages with tentative theme descriptions. Once I got enough passages in each grouping, I reviewed the list to see if there were better descriptions that more accurately describes the themes emerging from scripture, or if the number of groupings needed to change so that each grouping had a distinct theme.

Emerging Themes

After a bit of this (I still intend to go back to the analysis, finish Matthew, and do additional books of the Bible), I felt like there were fairly clear themes starting to emerge. Encouragingly, as I have been reading books on “fresh expressions” of church, or house/micro churches, I’ve seen a large amount of overlap between the themes I’ve found emerging from scripture, and what those books describe as the themes they see in effective and growing churches.

I came up with three 2-part sentences at this point that captured the themes I was seeing up to this point:

A people who, in every circumstance,

• praise God and enjoy the delight of his presence.
• conform our lives to the image of Christ, and participate in the feast of unity with the Body of Christ.
• demonstrate the power of God’s self-sacrificial faithfulness, reconciling all creation to God.

I was trying to capture a lot of complexity while attempting to keep it simple enough for the average person to grasp and remember. In this version, I felt it was still too complex, or at least too ambiguous of what it would look like to live out these themes.

Bare Essentials

At this point, I shifted to focusing on absolute simplicity. I began asking the question, “What are the minimum, essential elements without which a group is no longer a ‘church’?” The church must always walk the line between being uncompromising in the gospel/essential message, and being relevant to the local/regional context (society) in which the church is seeking to minister. Over-emphasis on relevance, and there is no longer any power, because it’s no longer the gospel. Over-emphasis on being uncompromising, and non-essential traditions that have more to do with “how we’ve always done things” than the gospel become barriers that get in the way of non-Christians seeing how the gospel applies to their lives and the hope the gospel carries.

At the risk of oversimplification, I wanted this version to be as simple, approachable, and understandable as possible. Ideally, it should be something that anyone and everyone can easily memorize for use as a plumb-line/test to check the spiritual health of their own life or the community of believers they’re a part of.

The Heart of It All

These are the three aspects that I came to of the core of gospel-centered life:

• Experience God
• Submit my life
• Demonstrate the faithfulness of God

While these are short enough to be memorable, the cost is that it is less clear what they mean or how to live them out. So I paired it with an expanded version.

Expanded Version: How to Live It Out

This version uses sub-items to help expand on how to live out each of the three core aspects while still keeping it simple and flexible enough to apply in many different contexts. I’ve included in parentheses after each sub-item the word or phrase of how that item is often referred to within Christianity.

Experience God

• God delights in me and and I am his beloved. (identity)
• I delight in God in response, seeking Him above all else. (worship)

Submit my life

• I submit every area of my life to the Lordship of Christ. (discipleship/sanctification)
• I give preference to the needs and unity of the community of believers over self-interest. (unity)

Demonstrate the faithfulness of God

• I demonstrate the radical, welcoming love of God toward all. (radical hospitality)
• I demonstrate the mercy and justice of God by working to protect and promote the vulnerable. (social justice)
• I demonstrate the power of God in accordance with my gifts. (Spirit-empowered)
• I demonstrate the message of God by teaching others to follow these principles. (evangelism)

While, for simplicity and memorability, I longed to reduce the Demonstrate the faithfulness of God section down to two sub-items, I found that it simply was irreducible without losing something critical.

I might blog later about each area and/or sub-item to go into more depth and explain why I chose the wording I did. For now, I hope you have found my ideas thought-provoking.

Do you agree with the list I came to? Is there something you feel I’m missing? Comment below!