:: AIP#9 - BEING the Church (part 1) ::

Today’s post is long, but important: it begins to answer the question, “what will this ‘different’ church look like?”

One of the first things I tried to communicate in the first “adventure” of this blog is that the basis for this new church community stemmed from the question, “what would it look like if Christians in the heart of Fort Worth LIVED AS the church, instead of just GOING TO a church?” A closely-related question that quickly followed that one was this: “if we had no preconceived ideas about what the church looks like (which we all do), and if were to start a church with only the Bible as our guide (which it should be!), what would that church look like?”

As we scoured scripture to answer that question, we realized a few things:

• The mission of the church is the mission of God: as God sent Jesus into the world, so we exist as a community, seeking the redemption of God’s people as he sends us into the world as well (Matt 28:18-20; John 20:21; Acts 1:8; 1Pet 2:9).
• The early church was less a “formal institution” meeting weekly for an hour, and more a people living out their faith and values in daily life, gathering regularly in homes and public places, working together toward God’s mission (Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-37; 5:42; James 1:22-25).
• While there was strong leadership, there wasn’t a model of “clergy” doing work, which “lay people” received – every person worked for the good of the church’s mission (Rom 12:4-8; 1Cor 12; Pet 4:10; 2Tim 2:1-2; 40 “one another” passages in NT).
• The early church trained their people and sent them into ministry, so the church could live on God’s mission together (Eph 4:11-16; Rom 12:1-2; 1Ths 5:11-22; Heb 3:13).
• The gospel is not just a one-time “switch” from (whatever) to Jesus, but the life of God flowing into and transforming every aspect of our lives (Rom 12:1-2, 9-21; Eph 4:17-32; Php 2:12-13; 1Pet 1:14-16).

We found that the church of the Bible looks very different from our 21st-century, American model of institutional, formal “church!” In fact, as Hugh Halter and Matt Smay explain in their book, The Tangible Kingdom, “church” started looking like the model we’re familiar with, not with Christ or the apostles, but around the time Constantine legalized Christianity and “furthered [its] institutionalization” in the Roman empire (p.50-56):

“The easiest way to envision the pre-Constantine church is as a fringe movement. Although the early Greek, Jewish, and Gentile Christians were deeply embedded in the culture the day, and were pushed outside of what was considered ‘normal’ simply because they lived such radical lives of love and sacrifice and service… Yet at the same time the church was intriguing and inviting to those who watched them live out their communal faith… This ancient church literally turned entire cities upside down. Its members had incredible influence on the culture…

“Seventeen hundred years later, we’re still entrenched in Constantine’s Christendom way of church. Church is the place you go, and commoners don’t have to do too much in the way of mission because the paid pros do it for them. We show up at church to get what we want (which is feeding from a leader, not what we need (to feed ourselves and others). And if we don’t get what we want, we head to the basilica next door because that chaplain is better at giving us what we want… Basically, we’re just playing musical pews…”

If we follow the modern model, we’d likely find ourselves fighting for the same 15-20% of the population already involved with other great churches in our city – that’s not what we want to be about! So we realized that there’s something intriguing about returning to our roots, “being the church” in a different way – not just to be different, but because we think this return is necessary for the mission of God and the 80+% of folks who don’t resonate with existing models.

So what’s that mean on a day-to-day basis? While we’ll build out the DNA together, I’ll explain the skeleton structure of The City in the next couple posts. As a preview though, here’s who we are: “one church in many locations, living as communities on mission and coming together to celebrate.”