The United Church of Canada is wrestling once again with how to sustain itself institutionally, but the basic question “What is a church?” is seldom asked; or if it is, it is seldom grounded in Scripture.
Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998) has a lot of interesting things to say about the nature of the church. He notes, for example, that while there were many good Greek words in the first century to describe religious communities, the early church chose a completely secular word – ekklesia – as its main descriptor. An ekklesia was “the assembly of all the citizens to which every citizen was summoned and expected to attend.” [“On Being the Church for the World” in Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian: A Reader, Paul Weston, ed., Eerdmans, 2006]
The church is the ekklesia tou theou, the “assembly of God,” the gathering of God’s people in a particular place. In time, the reality of the church was inseparable from the place in which that church gathered. Local congregations were not branch plants of a larger organization, but the fullness of the church of Christ, assembled in that place. We might say that, as with real estate, so with the church : it’s all about location, location, location.
The implication of the church as ekklesia, according to Newbigin, is that “the structural forms of the church are determined by the secular reality, and not by the internal needs of the church.” The church is not defined by the needs, wants and tastes of the members, but by the particularities of the place in which the church is gathered.
Churches in a consumer culture, like ours, tend to be associational. People choose to associate with the church that “meets their needs.”
But a biblically-based ecclesiology, according to Newbigin, starts with the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the call of the faithful to be witnesses to that truth, and then with what is required of Jesus’ followers in the place where God has set them.
Amidst the ruins of Christendom, when inherited ecclesiastical structures are crumbling, we need to return to biblical models of the church. Reflecting deeply on the meaning of the church as ekklesia would be a good place to start.
Paul Miller is a United Church of Canada minister from St. Catharines, ON, and Presbytery Support Minister for Waterloo Presbytery.
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