What is the church? People + Worship + ... Evangelism??

            I’m going to ask a question. It’s such a completely obvious question that it seems almost like a silly thing to bring up, but then again the most obvious questions tend to be the ones that never get asked. So, here we go: What is the church?

            OK, so there are a few levels to that question. Most often when pastor-folk ask ‘What is church?’ they are trying to get you to say this: “The church is not the building but the people.” Gold star. 100% on your confirmation test. Congrats. That’s a great answer. In fact, it’s an answer we need to give more often. We tend to revere our church buildings too much. Like Peter following the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain, our first thought in the midst of something holy is to build a dwelling place for God (Luke 9:33). But (of course there’s always a “but”) the church is also more than just people. What are those people doing? Why are they gathering? What is their purpose? So many questions...

            We have a tendency to treat church like a club. Some of this is logistical—we have “members” and “non-members.” Some of this is sacramental—we have the baptized and the non-baptized. Some of this is practical—we have newsletters and prayer lists. Some of this is historical—we have families of charter members and cemetery committees. Some of this is simply human—we like to be comfortable.

            Is any of this a problem? No and yes. No, it’s not a problem to act like human beings. It’s great to find a sense of belonging in a place like a church--better than, say, a strip joint or a casino. For that matter, there are many good things that church bodies do. But everything I just wrote are side effects of what the church actually is. It’s not a building and it’s more than people gathering together, even more than people worshiping; that’s a start but not the whole picture.

So, my answer to the question, “What is the church?” is this: The church is people worshiping God AND spreading God’s word. This is what we call evangelism, which might be the only word scarier than “stewardship” in church parlance. Evangelism is going out and telling people about Jesus, and honestly we’d just rather not. Evangelism means breaking through our walls and letting others in. That’s petrifying. It means that our “club” is always admitting new faces; that our history is not as important as our witness in the present; and that our words and actions must mean something to the world that does not understand our little codes and customs.

The reason I bring this up today is because I live in Kittson County. Kittson County is an awfully strange place. It is one of those places that somehow has more Christians than it has people, where prayers are common at high school graduation, and the school gymnasium still holds the occasional worship service. This might seem to absolve us from evangelism, and, in fact, we have acted like it has. We spend a lot of time on worship instead, assuring that our services remain ever faithful to the one, true church handed down through Jesus to Martin Luther and on to our
"Midwest brand of Presbo-Lutheranism," which is, as Reverend Lovejoy once said, "is the one true faith." Meanwhile, we have left evangelism to those churches in the city where all the atheists live (please understand that that is a tongue-in-cheek reference; please, internet, I'm asking you to hear the sarcasm).

But, unfortunately, our churches have had 167 hours--give or take--where there is no worship service during a given week, and, so, we have had to figure out how to fill our time. Our solution? Issues that have almost no relation to Jesus! You see, we get our fill of Jesus in that one hour on Sunday morning and that frees us to debate anything and everything central to our tight-knit community in the time in-between Sundays at 9 or 10 or 11 o'clock. We have little idea what our mission is outside of an hour on Sunday morning.

I hope you see that we can’t only be people in a place gathering to worship—that is only a part of what the church is. The rest of our time has to be spent on something and I think I know where to start. We have to be evangelists. We have to be stretching our walls. The fact that evangelism in rural areas looks different than in the city only means we have to be creative. We have to work together across imaginary lines—not to steal from one another or convince others that we do things better but because the only way to remain a community of faith is to stop gazing at our own belly buttons.

See, the church is a weird thing. It is a location and a people, but it only does its work as the body of Christ when that people leave that location and head off into the world. If they return again to feed themselves but care nothing for the world beyond the doors then they have failed at being church. If they take their faith out into the world to combat the faiths of other Christians then, again, they have failed at being church. Only when the people gather and leave with good news to share, whether in a word spoken, a smile given, or a kindness offered, then the church is actually being church. This is a hard thing in this little corner of Minnesota, but it is our best hope for a future that is more vital and energetic than what we experience today.

So, I started with a question that I tried to address and I'll leave you with a question I hope you will consider in turn: How and where will you be an evangelist today?

Good luck!