What is church for? I mean, really, why does church exist? After all, Jesus said, “… I will build My Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” That’s a pretty serious declaration.
The word “church” comes from a Greek word which means “those who are called out to gather together.” So, the church is not a building. Which is a good thing since the church basically did not own a building for some 300 years after its founding.
The Church is people. People who have been called out from wherever they were in life but called out to gather together, primarily for worship. Not for fellowship, not to have a variety of ministries, not primarily for education, not to build a facility, and certainly not for recreation. For worship.
So, perhaps a better question should be, “Who is the Church for?” Most of us think it is for us, but it is not.
Some contend that the Church exists for the “lost” who need to be evangelized. But that is not correct either.
The Church exists for God. Throughout the Old and New testaments, the story of God could well be described as “God in search of a people.” In the creation story, the perfect parent creates the perfect environment and places in it two individuals who, by the way, are made in the image of God. Given the power of choice, they make bad decisions and the story of humankind becomes a sad and desperate drama.
Jumping ahead several millennia, the Apostle Paul writes to the “called out ones who are gathered together” in a place called Corinth and states that, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their sins against them.”
Through Jesus, God reaches out to a people who the Apostle Peter calls “a chosen generation” and the Church is born. That’s a simple statement but the full story is too long to give full explanation here. In any event, God has His people and He calls them The Church.
When the Church gathers together, they gather for the primary (though not the sole) purpose of worshipping the One who has “called them out of darkness into His marvelous light.” They celebrate the reality that “in times past you were not a people but now you are the people of God.” And, so, the response is worship.
The songs are sung to Him, for Him. The actions of worship are to be addressed to the audience of One. We are the performers, He is the audience.
We have become so narcissistic and self-absorbed that we have come to the belief that the Church, if it is about anything, is about us … our desires, our needs, our demands, our whims, our goals, and our plans. But it is not. It is not about me and it is not about you. It is about Him.
Church divisions or splits, as a retired Baptist pastor once wrote (because he dared not write it while he still served as a pastor) “… are not about morals, theology, or any such things. Most are about ‘who shall rule in this place.’” In other words, people are more interested in getting what they want and couldn’t care less about what God wants.
I sat in a church service many years and thought, ”If God never showed up in this place, we would still have a good time because the service is so exciting.” And by exciting, I meant entertaining.
Nothing about the service was about God that day. It was all about giving the people what they thought they wanted … about keeping the children entertained, providing music that excited people, about a sermon that would wow the congregants.
Who am I to make such a judgment? I was the pastor and it was my church.
We were about us and we claimed we were about what God wanted. But we deceived ourselves.
It is a constant struggle and requires vigilance to try to keep things God-focused and Christ-centered. It is far too easy to compromise or to slip back into old, familiar patterns. It is far easier to give the people entertainment than it is to give a holy and awesome God the worship and the glory due His name.
The hard part is not God showing up. He tells His Church that if even two or three of the called out ones gather in His name, He will be present with them, in their very midst.
No, the hard part is coming to the realization that Church is about God and God alone. It is the called out ones gathering together to worship the only One who has ever been worthy of worship. Everything else that the Church may legitimately do flows from that beginning point.
It is not a step that may be skipped. If it is not about God, then it is not the Church. At least it is not the Church that God Himself envisioned.
[David Epps is the pastor of Christ the King Church (www.ctkcec.org.). He is the bishop of the Diocese of the Mid-South, (www.midsouthdiocese.org) which consists of Georgia and Tennessee and is the associate endorser for his denomination’s military chaplains. He may be contacted at frepps@ctkcec.org.]
