CM: Young Mr. Boh asks why… church?

It was his first time in church; you could tell by his actions and reactions during your innovative, wit-filled, thought provoking, oh yes, biblical message!

The Thinker by Nayer

Feeling confident that this bohemian-looking, twenty-something would want to talk with you after that oh-so-cool presentation, you introduce yourself after the service. He says, “I’ve never experienced anything quite like this.”

“This is going well,” you say to yourself.

“How so,” you inquire.

He says to you, “Well, I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t understand anything that was going on. Why people were doing the stuff they did when they did it?”

“Oh,” you reply deflatedly.

“But I liked the vibes.”

“Oh,” you mutter.
Regaining composure, you propose, “Would you like to get together for coffee to unpack your experience?”

“Sure.”


You are sitting in Peet’s sipping your latte, and he an Organic Pu-erh tea (your second indicator that he is not fitting into categories with which you are familiar).

His first question is, “Okay, so what is church all about anyway? Why church?” Whew, he’s brought the ball back into your court. You’ve structured your church for growth and its working. Even just last night you listened to an Acts 29 (or fill in your church growth specialist of predilection __________) pod-cast.

You reply phlegmatically, “Well, we taylor our church service to connect with people like you.” (“Oops,” you wonder, “will that make him feel like a target market? And why didn’t he understand what was going on?”)
But this guy is unflappable, “No, I mean what is it all about, you know, epistemologically and ontologically, the stuff the really matters, the core, the essence. Why church? And what is church?” “Sip,” went the Pu-erh tea. “Gulp,” went the coffee!

Fortuitously, last night before bed, you read an article in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia where Geoffrey Bromiley asserted that the Church can be “described in several pregnant phrases!”

So rather than explaining to young Mr. Boh what the local church does, you dive in…

“The Church is:

• the people or Israel of God (Eph. 2:12; 1 Pet. 2:9-10),
• the household or family of God (Eph. 2:19; 3:15; 4:6),
• the planting of God to bring forth fruit to His glory (1 Cor. 3:9; Jn. 15:1),
• the temple of God (Eph. 2:21; Jn. 2:19; 1 Cor. 3:9; 1 Pet. 2:4),
• the bride of Christ (Eph. 5:25),
• the body of Christ (Eph. 4:15, 1 Cor. 12:12, 27)
• a building (1 Cor. 3:10-15; Eph. 2:21),
• a spiritual house (1 Pet. 2:5),
• living stones (1 Pet 2:5),
• a city on a hill,
• salt and light (Mt. 5:13),
• a shepherd and his flock (John 10:1-18),
• a wild olive branch (Ro. 11:17),
• dough (1 Cor 5:6-7),
• an ambassador (2 Cor. 5:20),
• a virgin (2 Cor. 11:2),
• a golden lampstand (Rev. 1:20),
• a chosen lady (2 Jn. 1),
• a royal priesthood
• and a holy nation (1 Pet. 2:9).”

“Sometimes I feel like a wild branch without a trunk,” he replies. "Okay, that makes sense." (“It does?” you wonder, yet continue with your musings on last night’s reading.)
“These pictures overlap and approach essential issues from different angles. Rather than canceling each other out (e.g. “Do we focus on evangelism or fellowship?”), they provide parallax to promote the birth and growth of vigorous, fertile churches.”

“Got it,” responds young Mr. Boh. “So how was what the Bible describes as 'church' reflected in what you did last Sunday morning?” “Sip.” “Gulp."

Why we do what we do is quite important to our ecclesiology.

Because the imagination is heavily involved in metaphor-based church living and evaluation—one pictures a palette of ideal possibilities—the modernist church leader will tend to imagine, for example, the ideal modern "temple," while the postmodernist will imagine, well, postmodern ways of being "temple," a gathered people possessed by the Living God. And the imagination is engaged, whether modernist or postmodernist, always seeking to live not like living stones or ambassadors, but both concomitantly.

One-size-does-not-fit-all yet forms must always embody Scriptural essence.
Pastors, elders and all disciples who build upon the foundation of the Church—Jesus Himself—should use the Biblical metaphors to guide and evaluate their work. I.e. does the form of church we are living embody the essence embedded in the pictures Jesus gave to us?

The goal is to continuously move toward church-ness, how Jesus imagines His Church, whatever form that might take. And we want to use forms recognizable even to people like young Mr. Boh so that when he asks, why church? the answer—Jesus' presence among his people in the world—rings resoundingly true.