What is church?

Snowy days are good for study. For some reason the falling of snow and a hot cup of coffee create the perfect environment to study. If I could have one snowy day a week I could conceivably get more done.

Anyway, I was working on my message for Sunday (40 Days of Community series) and I happened upon some really good stuff written by John William Drane. But before I share that with you just a couple of thoughts.

1. The Greek word for church really has no religious connotations at all. The word "church" was used in everyday life to describe a meeting. The word church means, "a calling out to meet". It was used when people in a community wanted to have a town hall meeting. The key being that those who lived in the community came together to talk about the community and it's purposes.
   
2. Jesus said that upon Peter's statement (Jesus is the Christ the Son of the Living God) that He (Jesus) would build his church and the gates of Hades would not prevail against it. So in other words Jesus is saying that to those who believe in him as being the Christ the Son of the Living God are "called out" to form this community. A community so powerful that even the Kingdom of Death could not overcome it.
   

Now with that in mind consider the thoughts of Mr. Drane.

" Paul has a dynamic concept of the church, not a static one. He does not think of it as an organization that holds meetings from time to time, but as an outpost of God’s ways of doing things, ‘the kingdom’. This means that Christians do not ‘go to church’, but on the contrary they are the church, wherever they are and whatever they happen to be doing. Their responsibility for the condition of the Christian community does not end while they are at work or at home, for everything that happens to them has its effect on the whole body.

This is true of the human body, of course: an injury to one part will inevitably bring discomfort, or worse, to the whole organism. Paul discovered at his conversion that the church is no different: when one Christian suffers, the whole church is injured. But the opposite is also true: ‘if one part is praised, all the other parts share its happiness’ (1 Corinthians 12:26). For a Christian to be able to opt out of the church would have been unthinkable for Paul The concept of ‘joining the church’ (or leaving it) only makes sense in a modern church context, where such joining is a matter of enrolling in a particular sort of organization. But for Paul the church was not a club that could be joined or left: it was a commitment to a way of being, and therefore could be thought of as a living organism, in which Christians were inescapably related to and responsible for one another because of their new relationship with God through Christ." ~

Drane, John William: Introducing the New Testament. Completely rev. and updated. Oxford : Lion Publishing plc, 2000, S. 386

So what is the church? Are you a part of one? Are you helping to build one? Are you growing in one? Would your church miss you? Does your church need you?