Church: Not Just for Sunday Any More

Billy Graham, in The Journey, writes,

“Nowhere in the New Testament does “church” refer to a church building, since there were none in the first century (Christians mostly met in homes)” p. 127. 

He goes on to point out that, in the Bible,

“church” meant “a local group of Christians, or all the Christians in a particular city or area.” The word “church” in the Bible “refers to the company of all believers, who are spiritually united by their relationship with Christ. The church isn’t just a local congregation, it includes all believers everywhere...”

So this begs the question: how did we get to where we are today where one hour on Sunday morning spent in a corporate church building has come to define us as believers and take precedence in our walk?

What would happen if we stood back and stopped looking at church as having an address and a program and saw it as all believers in our community: many of whom we haven’t even gotten to know because we all go into our own little church bubbles each Sunday, thinking we can’t ever show up in the living rooms of other churches?

And what would happen if we saw church as the body of believers who work, eat, play, pray, travel and go to school every day of the week, and with whom we interact on a daily basis (maybe not even knowing they are Christians too?) 

Would we act in our daily behavior with the reverence, chivalry and good will that we do on Sunday mornings? Would we live as though we are in church all the time, because, as a body of believers called the church, that is exactly where we are all the time: in church.

Our limited contemporary definition of church has constrained us and at the same time let us off the hook.

It constrains us by keeping us from interacting with other believers who “don’t attend my church,” and it lets us off the hook by leading us into the false assumption that “church”—the building and Sunday morning congregation—is where we live our faith. 

So, the thinking goes, if we can pull off the living of our faith for one hour, then we can go home, and go to work and school on Monday, and never have to think about living our faith again until we head, once more, into the church building.

Year, after year, after year, after year; that is often what we do.

But if that’s the case, we’ve got it all wrong.

Copyright Barb Harwood

"For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field, God's building. According to the grace of God which was given to me, like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building on it. But each man must be careful how he builds on it. For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." 1 Corinthians 3:9-11

"Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?" 1 Corinthians 3:16

"Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?" 1 Corinthians 6:15a

"Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body." 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

"For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit." 1 Corinthians 12:13

"Now you are Christ's body, and individually members of it." 1 Corinthians 12:27

"So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God's household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit." Ephesians 2:19-22