Page 10 - Contact Autumn 2020

“The church is the assembly of the covenant
people of God, the congregation of believers,
the household of God, the fellowship of the
Holy Spirit, the body of Christ.”
The meaning of ‘church’
A popular saying in Christian circles today
goes something like this: ‘We don’t go to
church, we are the church!’ In many respects
I agree with this saying. Church is not a building
and a building is never referred to as a church
in the New Testament. That’s why many early
Christians referred to the building as the
‘meeting house’. However, there is another
sense in which ‘going to church’ is essential to
what it means to ‘be’ a church. The Greek
word translated ‘church’ in the New
Testament is ‘ekklesia’. It’s derived from the
Hebrew word ‘qahal’ which referred to the
‘assembly’ or ‘gathering’ of the people of God in
the Old Testament. Even in the Greco-Roman
culture of the New Testament period the word
ekklesia simply referred to any public assembly
or gathering. That means that at its most basic
and fundamental level the church is a
gathering. So in that sense we ‘go’ to church
because we go to gather with God’s people in
our local assembly. Also, if you look at all the
synonyms for church in the New Testament
they all refer to a corporate gathered entity:
a flock (1 Peter 5:2), a body (1 Cor. 12:12; Eph.
4:12), a family (Eph. 2:19), a temple (1 Cor. 3:16;
Eph. 2:21), a covenant people (2 Cor. 3:6).
When you think of some of these images, we
cannot really be called a ‘flock’ if we are
scattered sheep, we cannot function as a ‘body’
if all the parts are removed from one another,
and a temple can only be constructed when the
‘living stones’ (1 Peter 2:5) are built up together.
This is not to say that the church is never
scattered – we gather to scatter into our
various callings in the world throughout the
week – but it is to say that the essence of the
church is a gathering of God’s people.
God commands us to gather
This problem of people wanting to opt out of
gathering with brothers and sisters in Christ is
not a new one. Over 400 years ago the writers
of the Westminster Confession of Faith faced
the same issue in their day.
In the Directory of Public Worship they state,
‘When the congregation is to meet for public
worship, the people…ought all to come and join
therein; not absenting themselves from the
public ordinance through negligence, or upon
pretence of private meetings.’ The reason the
Westminster Divines took the public gathering
of God’s people so seriously was because they
had read the words of Hebrews 10:24-25, ‘And
let us consider how we may spur one another
on toward love and good deeds, not giving up
meeting together, as some are in the habit of
doing, but encouraging one another—and all
the more as you see the Day approaching.’
The author of Hebrews wants to remind the
people that gathering is essential to their
spiritual wellbeing and is necessary for
encouraging one another as they await Christ’s
return. We too would do well to heed this
admonition and gather for encouragement
whenever possible.
We need to build one another up in love
In both 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4
Paul refers to the church as the body of Christ
and speaks passionately about the need for all
the parts of the body to work together in order
for the people of God to be built up in
maturity (Ephesians 4:11-13). He goes on to
speak of realities that can only be carried out
as the people gather together: ‘…speaking the
truth in love, we will in all things grow up into
him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him
the whole body, joined and held together by
every supporting ligament, grows and builds
itself up in love, as each part does its work.’