What's the point of church gatherings?

Rethinking Church, part six

If you had to pick one word to sum up what church gatherings were all about, what would you choose? I suspect many would plump for ‘worship,’ but we dealt with that last time. So… what IS church about? Learning about the Bible? Chatting over coffee? Singing some songs? What is it all about?

Last time in this series we thought about what a church gathering was not (‘worship’ or a ‘service’ — and if you missed it, please do go back and read it before reading this!) In this piece, we’re going to focus on what a church gathering IS all about.

One of the things I said last time was that the words we use are not necessarily wrong but unhelpful, e.g. ‘service’. We need to bear in mind, however, that the problem is not simply a matter of terminology but goes much deeper. It’s not merely that we use the word ‘service’ instead of ‘gathering,’ as if the word itself is the issue, but rather that it flows from and reinforces a fundamentally misleading view of church itself. This impacts the whole way approach doing church, not simply changing the words that we use. I suspect that most of you will be dying to know — if there’s so much wrong with the way we do church, what should it look like instead?

In the last part we thought about how church gatherings are not about worship or service — let’s start by thinking instead about what a church gathering should be like. I feel here like we are getting to real substance of the issue, the previous parts have simply been laying the ground work.

Note: This is the sixth part of a series trying to rethink church from the ground-up. In part one we saw how we need to build on the Bible; in part two we thought about the role of ‘church leaders’ and then in part three we looked at bishops. In part four we looked at the church as family and house churches, and last time we looked at what church gatherings are NOT (‘worship’ or ‘services’).

One word: ‘Edification’

One of the most helpful things I learned from Dr Tom Wadsworth’s research was that we learn more about what the early church gatherings were like from 1 Corinthians 14 than any other chapter in the New Testament. It’s a fairly long chapter, and I suspect people often overlook it because it deals with the practice of speaking in tongues which is often seen as divisive. However, what Paul teaches about church has so much to say to us about church in general — we’d be hugely missing out if we skipped over the chapter. Let me quote a few verses to give you a flavour, and I’ll highlight the key parts:

Anyone who speaks in a tongue edifies themselves, but the one who prophesies edifies the church. I would like every one of you to speak in tongues, but I would rather have you prophesy. The one who prophesies is greater than the one who speaks in tongues, unless someone interprets, so that the church may be edified. [vv4-5]

So it is with you. Since you are eager for gifts of the Spirit, try to excel in those that build up the church. [v12]

What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Everything must be done so that the church may be built up. [v26]

For you can all prophesy in turn so that everyone may be instructed and encouraged. [v31]

If I had to choose one word to sum it all up, I’d say it was “edification” — which appears a few times in these verses. In fact, more times than it might appear: the word itself (oikodome) is used six times in this passage. It can be translated as ‘a building,’ but in this context means the act of building. Hence its translation, “to build up”. The idea that Paul is conveying here is that church gatherings should be a time when the church gets together in order to help build other people up. To put that another way: you come to give, not to receive.

This should be no surprise to us at all when we remember that the second greatest commandment, according to the Lord Jesus, is to “love your neighbour as yourself.” God placed us here on earth to love our neighbour. The church should be, in John Stott’s phrase, “God’s new society”¹ — the community on earth where God’s love is really demonstrated. The church should be a little foretaste of what life will be like in the new creation. Church gatherings, therefore, should be places where God’s love is demonstrated. This is what edification is about: when we gather, we should be seeking to build one another up in faith, rather than focussing on ourselves.

Let me quote again from the same paper by I. Howard Marshall which I mentioned last week:

The other word used to describe this activity is building up (oikodome), which is the stated aim of the use of all the charismata [spiritual gifts] in 1 Cor. 14:5, 12, 26. The same thought reappears in Eph. 4:12, 16, where the purpose of ministry is the building up of the body of Christ, and in 1 Thes. 5:11 where one believer is to build up another. The metaphor was also current with Luke who uses it in Acts 9:31 and 20:32. The point is that the function of church meetings and the activities which take place in them are now clearly seen to be directed towards the congregation itself and only indirectly towards God.²

As Marshall points out, church meetings or gatherings are directed “towards the congregation itself”. Churches don’t meet because God needs anything from us! Rather, churches meet in order to help and serve one another.³ It is in loving one another that we bring glory to God.

It hardly needs saying that this is totally different from the way that most church services operate today, but let’s assess a typical church service today from this angle.

Assessing a typical church service today

I can’t speak for every church and every Christian, but I probably have more extensive church experience than most people. It seems to me that most Christians today think of church services as a kind of refuelling session: “I feel empty; I need filling; church is a way of filling me up.” People also see church as a time to “worship,” i.e. singing praise songs while holding out their hands and closing their eyes — having a bit of ‘me and God time.’ I am not blaming people for this, by the way, because this is the view that a lot of churches encourage — intentionally or not — which we spoke about last time.

The problem with these attitudes should now be immediately apparent. If you feel in need of a spiritual refuel, for whose benefit are you going to church? Yours. If you want to ‘worship God’, for whose benefit are you going to church? Yours. Church services, as they are done today, take the focus away from loving our fellow Christians and instead focus on ourselves.

This doesn’t mean that love doesn’t happen in churches, far from it — but rather love happens in spite of the typical way we do church, rather than because of it. Think of a typical service of any tradition:

• You arrive shortly before the start and hardly have any time to say hello to anyone before the service begins. (Let’s be honest, from my experience in churches, about 90% of people arrive with less than five minutes to go before the start…)

• During the service, all you are required to do to participate is to listen, sing, and (for liturgical churches) join in with the spoken parts. You are essentially a passive consumer.

• Your only interaction with other people is with those up the front — whoever is leading the service or music.

• After the service, there is an (optional) coffee time where you can spend a few minutes chatting before heading off.

The point I am making here is that almost the entirety of the interaction for an ordinary churchgoer these days is between them and the person or people up front. In services today, people are not generally expected to interact with one another.⁴ But if, as Paul says, we should be seeking to build one another up, isn’t that a problem? If people are going to church services where they can just sit and consume without interacting with anyone else, isn’t that the antithesis of what church should be about?

In a nutshell, the problem with church services today is that they have become a formalised meeting where love is low down on the agenda. Church services are not expected to be places where God’s love is made manifest on earth; rather, they are places where people come to get their fix of God for the week and then go back to their own homes and lives.

It’s hard to express just how far away this is from the New Testament ideal of church. Those of you who have been here for a while will know that Sacred Musings started during covid, when I was struggling to understand why the church rolled over and accepted the government closing churches without so much as a whimper. Over the last few years, what I keep coming back to is this fundamental idea that churches should be about loving one another, and yet that is exact thing which is missing. Covid shone a light on the church, and revealed that what we thought was there wasn’t really.

Once again, this is not to say that there isn’t any true love for one another in churches. Rather, I’m saying that the typical way church services are structured does not emphasize and promote the need to love and edify one another. And, given how core that is to the mission of the church, that is a big problem.

What church should really be about

As I said above, the whole of the Christian life could be summed up in the one word, ‘love’. That is literally everything that God asks of us. Obviously we need God’s guidance as to what love is — we as human beings have a remarkable capacity for self-deception, and not everything that is called ‘love’ truly is love. But love is what the Christian life is about, love which is supernaturally given to us by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is why edification is a good work to describe what our church meetings should be about: edification is other-person focussed, it is an expression of our love for one another.

It strikes me that one of the biggest problems with the church at the moment is that, because the church has been distracted from its true calling and mission, it has failed to have the impact on society that it should. Over the last few years I’ve quoted from Francis Schaeffer’s book The Mark of the Christian several times, but it’s so important we need to keep hearing it:

The church is to be a loving church in a dying culture. How, then, is the dying culture going to consider us? Jesus says, “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” In the midst of the world, in the midst of our present dying culture, Jesus is giving a right to the world. Upon his authority he gives the world the right to judge whether you and I are born-again Christians — on the evidence of our observable love towards all Christians.

The church talks all the time about evangelism, and often initiates evangelistic programmes and events. But how much does the church talk about loving one another? How much time do we dedicate to this most basic and fundamental task which Christ gave us?

Note: I spoke about this a while back on Understand the Bible in a video (with transcript): Stop doing evangelism!

If we take the time to dedicate our church gatherings simply to loving one another, I think we will have a far greater impact on the world than any evangelistic programme or course.

What does that mean, practically, for how we go about meeting together? I’ve written 2,000 words already, so I’m going to leave that for the next part in this short series. Stay tuned and make sure that you are subscribed if you would like to catch that one…

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1. This was the subtitle John Stott chose for his Bible Speaks Today commentary on Ephesians, meaning that the church is not a team of individuals but “God’s New Society”

2. From this article

3. The article makes the point that ‘service’, as we thought about last week, is something which all Christians are to do all the time. “Their service of God is expressed in serving one another.” We should serve God and one another all the time — church gatherings should therefore be a time when we serve one another.

4. There are exceptions to this, e.g. ‘café church’ events were quite popular a few years ago, but these are far from normal. I can’t think of any churches who have adopted this model for their main Sunday gathering.