What’s the Point of Church…?

Paul writes – I’ve been listening to Jason Clark recently. Good stuff. But in the case of a sermon titled, What is the Point of Church? It was hard to listen to. I had to wrestle with my own heart and motives, and to reflect on my experiences of church, experiences that have led me to wonder a lot about the point of church. Why belong? Why would anyone want to pastor and lead a church? (A good question asked of a friend recently). Jason comments:

“…Church takes place when groups of people get together with other people and do something outside of [their] own interests…[and in doing that] what we start to find is that community, church, fellowship is inconvenient, it’s costly, it’s about other people, it is organised, it is planned, and it’s intentional – some [of] the things that we’re all allergic too…

One of the reasons 55,000 Christians [across Europe] are leaving church every week is because – the problem is with the church, but [it’s] also because we will not pay the price of orientating our lives around following Jesus together…”

Jason is talking about the cost to our contemporary, some would say post-modern sensibilities. We don’t like inconvenience, we don’t like not getting our own way, we don’t like intentionality, we don’t like not getting something out of belonging (a return on our investment of limited time), we don’t like not getting our Sunday morning sleep in, we fear what others who don’t belong to a church will think of us, we don’t like structure, we don’t like having to involve ourselves, we don’t like ____________ etc.

Belonging to church, participating (“you come to church we do everything together”) rather than consuming (“you come to church and we do everything for you”) is costly.

You can hear Jason’s sermons by downloading them from here. They are also being podcast.   

Comments

[len]

helpful paul.

A few weeks ago I came out of a course on "church health" (yeah, I know!) reflecting again on what is the difference between a spontaneous, random gathering of believers and an ekklesial expression. For me it comes down to .. shared self-awareness.. we are a church; articulation.. we talk together about what this means and preferably write it down; intention.. we do something together in the world that expresses who we are.

[bil]

I think Jason is right (though I haven't listened to the sermon yet). Church is an objective reality rather than a subjective experience. It's definition is not based on context, only how it plays out. Walking in the way of Christ (and being the church) requires intention, intention that will put you at odds with the ways of the world and your own flesh. To put it more crassly, if church isn't costing you something significant, if it isn't frequently inconvenient, then I don't think church is what you've got.