What is church, really?
I decided to start a series on a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about lately - church. What is church, actually? We have expressions like “go to church”, “the church”, “my church”, “the local church”, “what church are you involved in?” etc. But what do we mean by church? And perhaps more importantly, what does God have to say about the church?
Barna in his book Revolution talks about “being church” in stead of “doing church”. Which prompts the question what is church all about? In any case, even the definition of the word seems to cause debate. An excerpt from Wikipedia (when it comes to Wikipedia I’m always very cautious, anyone can write in Wikipedia, but still):
Biblically speaking, the disciples of a single locality are often referred to in the New Testament as a Church (Revelation 2:18, Romans 16:4, Acts 9:31), and arguably Saint Paul even applies the term to disciples belonging to a single household (Romans 16:5, 1 Corinthians 16:19, Colossians 4:15, Philemon 2). Some theologians (e.g. Baptists, Congregationalists) accept this local sense as the only valid application of the term ‘Church’, in so doing rejecting wholesale the notion of a universal Church. These people argue that all uses of ekklesia in the New Testament are speaking of either a particular local group, or of the notion of ‘church’ in the abstract, and never of a single, worldwide Church.
You can read all the referenced passages here in a separate window.
So what is the church? Local? House? Universal? And what are the distinctions of a church? What makes something church?
To be continued…
Me, husband, father of three, 
Great question. I have spent the past couple of years wrestling with that very question, and I think there’s a group of us that have been wrestling with it even longer, something like 2000 years.
What if I said you… and, me… living the way of Jesus, both locally and universally? Together.
This sounds interesting, you just got added to my blogroll.