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Frontline.City is a new church with a Digital Service. It is a safe space to explore the Christian Faith.
Before I was a Christian, what I associated with the church was, first of all, boring services.
Abraham Lincoln once said (and I had sympathy with this): ‘If all the people who fell asleep in church on Sunday morning were laid out end to end, they would be a great deal more comfortable.’
There are many beautiful church buildings. But do you know that for the first 300 years of the church’s life there were no church buildings?.
So that’s not what church is about. That’s not the essence of church.
It’s a bit like marriage. You say, ‘What’s marriage about? Well, it’s a ring, a marriage certificate.’ Yes, but those are the trappings. That’s not the essence of what marriage is about. At the heart of it is something much more profound. And at the heart of the church is something really amazing and beautiful and just glorious, actually!
In the New Testament, there are over 100 images and metaphors about the church, and we couldn’t even begin to look at all of those in this article. But I want us just to dip a toe in the water. This is not a theology of the church, this isn’t even an introduction to a theology of the church; it’s like an introduction to an introduction! It’s just a little taste.
So let's start by look at 5 words which give us that introduction:
"I call you my friends" - John 15:15
That’s what Jesus says to you: ‘I call you my friends.’ Isn’t that amazing: to be a friend of Jesus! And we’re called not just to friendship with Jesus but friendship with one another. And that’s what’s so amazing.
Someone came up to me at the end of an evening service here a few weeks ago and they said that they were slightly disappointed that in their Alpha small group they only had two people. So I said, ‘Well, what did you do?’ They said, ‘Well, one of us asked the questions and the other one answered them!’ I said, ‘How did you get on?’ They said, ‘Oh, we got on really well. We both became Christians, and we’re getting married to each other in August!’
— Nicky Gumbel
There’s something amazing about this friendship. And the word that’s used in the New Testament, it’s really hard to translate this word: it’s koinonia. It means ‘fellowship’.
It was used in the marriage relationship, and it’s a depth of relationship that cuts across all age, ethnicity, background, culture, personality types. This level of connection that is so amazing, it’s different from being a Facebook friend. There’s something— I’ve experienced in the church a level of friendship that I never experienced outside of the church.
And we need one another. We need our friends. Someone said this: ‘There are two things you can’t do alone. You can’t get married alone, and you can’t be a Christian alone.’
In other words, he says, ‘Some people just give up. Like Alpha’s just a course. Do it for ten weeks, and that’s it.’ But the writer of Hebrews says, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t give up meeting together, but encourage one another.’ Because your faith will never survive on your own – it will dwindle.
There is a story about one young man. He’d had faith at one time, but he felt that was losing it. So he went to see this older man, a wise Christian man, and he was in a cottage in the country and there was a fire in the fireplace. And as they were sitting there, and he’d asked his advice, he didn’t say anything – he just went to the fire with a pair of tongs and he took out a single, red-hot coal. That’s how we’re meant to be with our faith: red-hot. He took out the coal and he put it on the hearth. And very soon that glow had gone. It had gone like dead.
And then, without saying anything again, he just went with the tongs, picked up the coal, put it back in the fire. In a few minutes, it was glowing again, red-hot. And the young man understood perfectly well why he had lost his enthusiasm: because we need one another.
We are not only friends but family! We are the family of God. The church is not an organisation that you join; it’s a family where you belong. St John writes this:
You can’t say you love God but you don’t like his children, you don’t like the church. God is your Father, and that makes you brothers and sisters. Have a look round: these are your brothers and sisters. None of you have moved at all – you’re so British! Have a look round! These are your brothers and sisters. And if you’re not a Christian yet, they are your potential brothers and sisters. I don’t know whether that puts you off becoming a Christian!
Becoming a Christian involves three things:
Baptism is the mark of being a member of the church. And it symbolises washing, being cleansed – the water is cleansing, like we were cleansed through the blood of Jesus on the cross.
And then it also symbolises dying and rising with Christ. So Paul uses this image. He says when you’re baptised – if this piece of paper represents you and this Bible represents Jesus – he says you’re baptised into Christ. So everything that happens to this book, it also happens to the piece of paper. So Paul says:
The New Testament refers to the church as Home.
In the Old Testament, the physical temple was God’s home. That’s the place of his presence. That’s why people loved it so much. In the New Testament, it’s not a physical building – it’s a building made up of people.
Jesus said: ‘Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the middle, in the midst.’ In other words, when the church comes together like this, the whole Trinity’s there – God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.
And that’s why it’s so amazing. Sometimes people walk into a church and they’ll say, ‘Wow, there’s an amazing atmosphere here!’ What are they sensing? The Holy Spirit, Jesus, the presence of God. And that is amazing.
The church is God’s home.
There’s something amazing about coming home to be refreshed, revived, reinvigorated, re-energised. And that’s what the early church did: they came together for those things. It was like coming home. And when they came together, what they did was they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching – the equivalent for us would be hearing the Bible expounded; to the fellowship – to this friendship that is so encouraging; to the breaking of bread – to communion; to prayer – praying for one another included in that.
And church is designed to be a place where people come, and are not judged, but they’re loved, accepted, and welcomed home.
The Apostle Paul says that Jesus is the head, you’re the body, and together you make up Jesus to the world. This is how the world will see Jesus: through you.
Jesus never wrote a book; he formed a community. He started with a small group, and that small group grew rapidly. For 2,000 years it’s been growing. And the universal church consists of all those worldwide and down the ages who profess the name of Christ.
And it’s vast. There are now 2,300 million Christians in the world. I used to think the church was declining: nothing could be further from the truth. I read some statistics recently that since 1970 the Christian church has grown by over 1 billion: 1,000 million new Christians. Tens of thousands of people are becoming Christians every day. Today, tens of thousands of people around the world became Christians.
Of course, we’ve had a bit of decline in Western Europe where we live, and therefore it’s easy to think, ‘Oh, the church is in decline.’ But that’s not representative of what’s happening globally.
And it includes, of course, parts of the church where they’re persecuted. More people have died for their faith in Jesus Christ in the last 100 years than in all the other centuries put together. But by all accounts, even in those places, the church is strong and vibrant. And it’s a huge privilege to be able to worship without being arrested, imprisoned, threatened, or even tortured and executed.
So we are the body of Christ. Paul said, ‘You are the body of Christ.’ So we don’t want to be divided. Tragically, the church has divided so much over the years. But the exciting thing, and this is what we can observe all round the world – is the Holy Spirit is doing a new thing. He’s bringing Christians together of all different churches. And people are recognising that we need one another; that the church is multifaceted, but it needs to be united.
And unity is so important. We need one another. I don’t have the whole truth! No one has the whole truth. It’s only together that we get a better view of the one who is the truth: Jesus is the truth. And we need one another. Unity and truth go hand in hand.
A divided world demands a united church.
We’re supposed to set an example of unity. And unity is so powerful. It’s so beautiful. What unites us as Christians is infinitely greater than what divides us.
Unity doesn’t mean uniformity. Of course, there are lots of different parts, and the variety is great. We can learn from one another. A lot of folks think that if a church is different, ‘Oh, they must be wrong!’ Whereas, we should think, ‘Wow, if they’re different, what can I learn from them?’
Paul says: ‘Consider others better than yourselves.’ That’s a challenge! When we see another part of the church, let’s consider them better. ‘They’re doing things differently: they must be better.’ Maybe we can learn things from them.
So this united church where everyone has a part to play: everyone praying, everyone giving, everyone serving. And the church is the biggest volunteer organisation in the world: feeding the hungry, visiting people in hospital, serving people in prison, caring for ex-offenders, fighting injustice, fighting human trafficking – doing all these things.
Just one little tiny example of what the church does. I read this recently: that churches in the UK provide half of the toddler-and-parent groups, they have the biggest network of debt counsellors, and they will feed over 100,000 hungry people this year. That’s just one thing that they do. The church is Jesus. It’s his body to the world.
Love. Church is a kind of love affair. We love the church because Jesus loves the church. Jesus loves you. Paul writes this:
He says, ‘Look, marriage is not the be-all and end-all.’ Jesus never married. In a way, marriage is like a picture of something even more amazing and beautiful and profound: the relationship between Christ and the church. Marriage is a great analogy. Marriage is like an institution, but if you take marriage as an analogy, if you just have marriage but no love, it’s kind of dead and dry. If you just have love but without marriage, it’s a bit unstable. If you bring together the love that two people have for each other, and the institution of marriage, then it is so powerful. And it’s the same with the church. If you just have the institution of the church, it can be a bit dry. If you just have the love and fire of the Holy Spirit, the faith, it can be a bit unstable. But bring together the love, the fire, the enthusiasm and the institution of the church and it is so strong and so powerful! Marriage is also long-term. Alpha’s just the beginning. Alpha’s like the wedding, maybe the honeymoon, but it’s not like the whole relationship. And what matters is the long term, the marriage. Where are you going to be in your relationship with Jesus long term? Jesus loves you. He gave himself up for you. If you’d been the only person in the world, Jesus would have died for you. He loves you unconditionally, wholeheartedly, continually. And we express our love for God in our worship and by what we do in our service. And the church should be famous for our love – a love that is radical, inclusive, unconditional, of people of different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, lifestyles, perspectives. The church is not a museum that displays these ‘perfect people’. It’s more like a hospital that welcomes the broken, the hurt, the wounded, and helps them to find healing. This unconditional love breaks down barriers. It puts people back on their feet. It restores and it heals. |
Frontline.City is a new church with a Digital Service. It is a safe space to explore the Christian Faith.