As everyone already knows, the thing that really makes the Church the Church is not the building. That doesn’t mean that the building is always extraneous. Church buildings are powerful cultural symbols declaring the presence of the kingdom of God in our communities: they offer outsiders, and insiders, a clear, physical location where the gospel can be found and a place to turn to in a time of crisis or in beginning the search for God. Church buildings help make the gospel—in the hands of church people: us Christians—easier to find. Moreover, church buildings help to shape our histories as families, as the place where the significant stages of our lives have been marked. The births, weddings, and deaths of us and our loved ones are tied together into one story of God at work among us in part because those events—and many others—are celebrated in this place and as a part of the community that hangs out together here. Finally, church buildings, at their best, provide space for the non-utilitarian part of our existence. A church building is different than a bank or a home in that it doesn’t have to be utilized to the maximum to be really effective. In fact, if we find that our church buildings are operating in a way that is purely functional, even very effectively so, that probably means they are falling short of all that they could be and are failing to be all that they ought to be for us. (The same could probably be said of our pastors too.) A church building is supposed to be the kind of place where we can escape from the rest of our life in modern society, a life where we are always pushed to get the most return on the least investment. On the contrary, a church building should be a place that has different kinds of goals: worship, restoration, prayer, fellowship, relax, eternity. Especially in the city, almost all of life has been secularized; our church buildings are one of the few remaining places we have that are genuinely sacred, devoted to time spent with God and with one another in a way that doesn’t have to be maximized to be ‘worth it’.
Church buildings are fantastic, they are important, but they are not the Church.
So, what is the Church? The Church is not the church building; it’s the people. The Church is the body of Christ, and Christ himself is the head.
Of course the Bible uses many word pictures to talk about the Church, but the most common is this one, that we are in a real way the physical presence of Christ in the world, operating together as one body. His body. Paul says it most clearly: “You are the body of Christ,” he writes to the Corinthians, “and each one of you is part of it.” (1Co 12:27) The Church does not merely originate with Christ, in a significant way the Church itself is the tangible expression of Jesus Christ. And so, because we are his body, the best way for us to understand who, corporately, we are to be and how we are to engage the world around us is to look at who Jesus Christ was and how he engaged society when he himself was present among us in the body. The Church’s chief task is to be for the world in this day and age what the physical Christ was to it back then because, today, we are that body.
The body of Christ, then, is one thing, not many things. It is not even merely the compilation of many things all grouped together. We, like Jesus, are not the result of the assembly of a bunch of various parts. Jesus was conceived as a single human in the womb of his mother Mary and was born and grew and died as the inhabitant of one body. Likewise, the Church, fundamentally, is one thing. This is the primary reason why it is inadequate to think of the Church simply as the collection of all the Christians either in one local place or even throughout all of history. The Church’s essence is not a heap of individuals; the Church is the supernaturally constituted body of Christ in the world. Christ makes the Church exist. We individual Christians become members of the body as we are made members of Christ by God’s power, but we ourselves never make the body the body by gathering together in one place. The Church’s reality is grounded not upon you and me, but upon Christ himself, who is our head. The Church, the body, is one.
And of course right now it is shattered into pieces in all kinds of ways, and its broken-apart-ness seems impossible for us to overcome. That’s one of the reasons why every pastor should read Oscar Cullmann’s book A Message to Catholics and Protestants, not because it is a perfect book or that Cullmann’s proposal is the best of which we could possibly conceive. Not at all. Rather, Cullmann is remarkable because he honestly faces the divisions of the Church and admits that he thinks it is impossible to overcome them, but then he also confesses that these divisions are wrong, that they go against the grain of the New Testament and God’s plan for the Church, and then decides that he is going to be the kind of pastor who always works for the unity of the body of Christ, even in the face of the impossible task. We are limited, we cannot simply hold hands and unite all the churches together. That would be a disaster. We especially cannot unite together by abandoning our commitment to the truth of the gospel in the search for common ground, as some have tried in the past. But we can be men and women who recognize that Christ has only one body, that at the end of the age there will be only one bride of God the Son, and spend our lives working to make that future hope a reality in the present wherever God gives us the opportunity. The body of Christ is one body, not many.
As the one body, the Church is the primary plan by which God makes himself present to the world. Just as Jesus in his earthly life was called Immanuel, ‘God with us’, so too the Church is God with us: God himself, reaching out in love to the world in a way that can be touched and felt and experienced. Whenever the Church fails to make the presence of God real in the society around it, it begins to fail to truly be the Church. Like Christ, a central part of the purpose of having a body is to bring the presence of God into the world—into the midst of the lost—in a tangible way. The Church is the body of Christ.
And it is not always beautiful. The Bible says that neither was Jesus, although of course in his case we mean a lack of physical attractiveness, not the ugliness of sin that we can often see in the Church. But there is a parallel. When he became incarnate, Christ never gave up his identity as the eternal Son of God, and yet his whole earthly life was limited to one location, one time, and all the limitations—the strengths and weaknesses—that come with having a human body. It is the same with his body the Church. Like the incarnate Christ, the identity of the Church is universal—stretching across places and times—but its expression is particular. The local church is no less really the Church, really the full body of Christ, than the local Jesus Christ in Palestine is really the full Son of God, in spite of all his particularities. Being Christ’s body means being both universal and local, expansive and particular. This has meaning for me and my family too. In one sense, our membership is membership in Christ, in his universal body. But in another sense, just like the incarnate Jesus, there is no other body of Christ for us than the particular expression of the local Church. Besides all the pragmatic reasons—especially decision making, being committed to one another, and submitting to the direction and discipline of our leaders—we choose to be members of the local church because in doing so we declare our membership in the body of Christ, cosmically considered. I don’t have a universal family, I have a particular one: I need a particular church. That’s the place where my identity with the universal Christ finds local expression. I know that in some places church membership has been so cheapened that it seems to have almost no content; in this case, what others do doesn’t dissuade me. I am a local church member because the local church really is the body of Christ.
Further, as members together of one body, in a very real way we make each other who we are as the Church. No one part of the body is autonomous. Rather, each one contributes to making all of the parts together actually be a body, constituted with Christ as our head and our life. Sharing life together is a necessary part of being the Church because the Church was specially brought into being by Christ and bears the marks of his own Trinitarian life and craftsmanship. (Mt 16:18) The substance of the Church is a reflection of the substance of the Son, who its source and head. Remember: the essence of God the Son is not something that he possesses outright on his own; his substance—his being, or ousia—is the relationship of love that he shares with the Father and the Spirit. Three persons, one substance. This life of God is reflected in the Church. Each of us is a part, but none of us, or even some group of us, possess the essence of the Church on our own: the substance of the Church is our relationship together, and that of all of us together with Christ, our head. Not just the substance of the Church as a whole, but my substance as a church member: we make each other who we are. Many members, one body. The Church has substance not because we each individually bring a little bit and, pooled together, we have enough for Church. The Church is real because we mutually offer ourselves to one another in the presence of God.
There are two implications of this. First, the size of our local churches is not important, but the mutual love of the members is. The particular expression of the universal body of Christ can be big or small; what makes it the real Church is the way that its members offer themselves to one another in love, and together offer themselves to Christ. Being the Church is not achieved by accumulation, but by intensity of mutual love. Second, we should never let ourselves forget about members of our body who aren’t often present, because they are a part of what defines us together as the body. There are some people who—on account of work schedule, sickness, travel, missions, or a lot of other reasons—we don’t get to see very often in our services. Don’t forget them. I think that this is part of the meaning of corporate prayer, the very personal activity of declaring before God that this or that person is part of what makes us the Church, that we are not complete without them, and asking God’s favor and presence for them in their sickness or work or mission or whatever, just as we ask for God’s favor and presence on the rest of us gathered all together. Dear Lord God, that one, that friend, is a part of us, a part of me, a part of the same body, please care for them too this day, I am not the same without them.
The Church is the body of Christ, and so it looks like Christ.
It is also, of course, like Christ in the way that it acts. It constantly gives glory to God the Father, through obedience—holiness—and through worship. It socializes and enjoys God’s good creation, including the company of tax collectors and sinners. It is ready to suffer. It cares about, and works to meet, the physical needs of the people around it, and it especially cares about the spiritual needs of the lost. (Here we see how both missions and social action are not only required of the Church, but flow from the same source, care for others in Christ’s name.) The Church acts in the way that Christ acts by proclaiming as clearly as it can the good news of the forgiveness of sins, power over evil and death in the world (and in my life), and the arrival of God’s glorious kingdom—it preaches, teaches, evangelizes, and disciples. It is a shepherd both to the flock that God gives it and to the lost sheep that it extends itself to seek out and rescue. It stands ready to receive the insults of the world, but prays for God’s intervention to forgive the sinner and to change the world through its agency. The Church works out the plan of God for the world in a tangible way. The Church is the body of Christ.
By way of conclusion, a note to pastors. The Church is the body of Christ, but it is also his bride. And he’s in love. Part of what it means to be the pastor is to be a part of the Church’s preparations for the final glorious wedding: encouraging the Church in holiness, in evangelism, in understanding, and in readiness for the return of Christ the bridegroom. But also, like a best friend at the wedding, as church leaders we need to learn to lovethe bride just like Christ does, even if she sometimes makes us crazy and we have no idea why he chose her.
I probably read 2 Corinthians 11:28 dozens of times before I ever really appreciated what it was actually about. (I even memorized it Bible quizzing!) Paul, after listing all his troubles—like being beaten with rods, imprisoned, and shipwrecked—writes that “besides all this, I have the daily burden of my concern for all the churches.” How is that possible? How is ‘concern for the churches’ more serious than jail or starvation? For me, I never understood this verse until I became assistant pastor at a broken church and God taught me how to love the church like he loves it, the kind of love that rips you apart inside to think about all the grief it faces and how deeply you just want to see it succeed and flourish in the joy of life with God. God’s heart breaks when he sees hurting churches—and when he sees hurting people—and so he gives his pastors, his shepherds, the burden of sharing that love for his people, the kind of love Christ has for his bride. If you want to be a great pastor, one of the things you can do is memorize 2 Corinthians 11:28 and, when you pray for your church, pray that God will give you that kind of love, along with the strength to stand up under the weight of it. If we learn to love the Church like that, even though we will continue to make mistakes, I genuinely believe we will never go far wrong in helping to guard and prepare it for the day when Christ comes again and claims his bride, claims us, brimming himself with that great love.
If I was preparing for accreditation I would . . .
• Memorize 1 Corinthians 12:27 along with 2 Corinthians 11:28 and Matthew 16:18
• Read A Message to Catholics and Protestants by Oscar Cullmann, at least pages 11-19, and 26-36
• Be aware that sometimes in theological writing the word ‘Church’ is spelled with an upper-case ‘C’ to talk about the Church at all times and in all places, and is spelled with a lower-case ‘c’ to talk about the local church or about just one segment of the church.