Language is such a funny thing. Sometimes we say something and mean something different. Sometimes words can have several meanings and we get confused when things are taken out of context. I once heard of an anecdote that posed a young Christian as dropping their Bible open to find out God’s will for their lives. They dropped it open and it said “Judas went and hanged himself” and then the next place it dropped open was to the phrase “go likewise and do the same.”
“Church” is a word that too often means very different things to different people. To most in the our day and age, “church” simply means the building that we go to on Sundays and Wednesdays. However, we would all agree that Jesus didn’t die to redeem a building.
A pastor has been challenging me to redeem the language of church. He says that we should kick hard against the notion that we ever “go to church” but rather, we go to gather with other members of the church. The church is me and the church is you. We can gather as the body that calls itself Sojourn Community Church, but we are not going to a building and calling it church.
Is this really such a big deal? I hope to answer this question more thoughtfully and eloquently later, but yes, it is a big deal. People for ages have been going to church and paying ministers to do the work of the Gospel. You can go to church twice a week and check those boxes off your to-do list and feel good about yourself. However, you cannot “be” the church and ever not consider your life as being a life on mission. We never cease being on mission if we consider that we “are” the church and we must reach out to a lost and hurting world that needs the healing power of Jesus Christ. May we go and “be” the church to those in our lives.
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