The Bible teaches Christians to meet up with each other (Heb 10:25). But these meetings are not ‘the church’, any more than a building is ever ‘the church’. The Bible instead defines ‘church’ as the actual community of Christians. In Christian meetings, we are meeting with the church not in the church. We should not say that we are going to church, because we are the church. When we leave church meetings, we are not leaving the church behind. Instead, the church is scattering!
The psalmist says, “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere” (Ps 84:10), and Christians sometimes feel that they do indeed love their church meetings, and that it is a real shame to have to leave. And yet, we spend most of our week not in house groups or Sunday services, but scattered all over the place.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest amongst Christians in what we do outside of church meetings. It seems to me that there are a number of reasons for this, including the following:
1. Changing patterns of life
Since the Sunday Trading Act was passed in 1994, Sunday in Britain has become less of a day of rest at home, and more about shopping, sports, and travelling to visit friends and family. This has affected Christians too. Instead of going to church every Sunday, many Christians only make it a couple of times a month. When on holiday, instead of trying to find a church to meet with, many Christians now look forward to having a Sunday ‘off’.
2. Reaction to meeting-overkill
Some Christians were once meeting-addicts, but then realised that they had been neglecting other important things, like their family, their physical health or their duty to serve the wider community.
3. Valuing every Christian’s work
Every Christian has the same fundamental calling: to love God and to love people. But in the church, the work of elders and other leaders tends to be honoured more than other forms of service.
Mark Greene at LICC (www.licc.org.uk) has argued that most Christians secretly believe in a kind of holy hierarchy, in which the people God really loves are gifted to be pastors and sit at the top of the tree, just above overseas missionaries, followed in turn by full-time church workers, house group leaders, doctors and nurses and teachers – with everyone else’s work being pretty unimportant.
So, there has been a strong movement to recognise that all our good works were prepared for us by God (Eph 2:10), to take church leaders down off unwarranted pedestals and to honour the good works that Christians when they are scattered all over the place every week.
4. Questions about the value of church meetings
Brits have largely stopped attending church meetings. From a high point of 50% regularly attending in 1851, there has been a long decline to the current level of about 6%. In recent years, churches have made a real effort to attract new attenders, but few could claim to have seen many conversions through their meetings.
Ten years ago, Richter and Francis (Gone but not forgotten) found that out of every 10 people in England, roughly:
(a) 1 is a church member
(b) 1 is a fringe member of a church community
(c) 2 used to go to church meetings and are open to returning
(d) 2 used to go to church meetings, got hurt and are closed to returning
(e) 4 have never been to a church meeting, except for Granny’s funeral
Now, about 76% of people who become Christians are from group (c). Even the best church meetings remain unattractive to groups (d) and (e), who not only make up 60% of the population, but about 80% of under 30s. Yet, during the 2001 census, 78% of people claimed to be Christian!
Clearly, there remains a lot of openness to Jesus, but there is a stigma attached to ‘organised religion’. All of this makes Christians ask searching questions about the purpose of church meetings… and so it should! I wonder, how do you feel about the value of church gatherings and what happens when the church scatters?
As other people have grappled with this question, many have been drawn to Jesus’ teaching about ‘the kingdom of God’ as the source of some answers …
Later posts in this series >>>
‘How does the kingdom of God relate to the scattered church?’
'What is the scattered church meant to do?'
'How does the gathered church support the scattered church?'