The Word “Church”
Posted on June 18, 2009 · 4 Comments
During this past week’s Sunday morning conversation on “Using the Bulletin as a Tool for Hospitality” a participant raised concerns that in written communication we have been substituting other words for church.
It is a concern that I share and have been struggling with for some time (and I am not alone – Rev. Dr. Mark Roberts, a Presbyterian pastor, has an excellent series on the meaning of church on his website).
Church is an amazingly powerful word and an amazing concept. The theology that I grew up with in Calvinist circles (the same theology our denomination uses as its base) always taught me that church was not a building – it was the people. We, the children of God, are the church. Christ stakes his hopes for humanity in us, his church. This core theological belief has led to many of Jan’s sermons imploring us to “Try and be the church as opposed to merely going to church.” She blogged on this nuanced word use again earlier this week.
Yet, we often do not think of church as this. Even with many sermons and with our base theology on the word church, we likely have a different idea of what a church is. And it’s no wonder – even in the Calvinist circles I grew up in, I learned this nursery rhyme (and accompanying hand-motions pictured on the right) that you may know, too:
Here is the church,
Here is the steeple,
Open the doors,
See all the people.
Likewise, we make statements like these:
- I will meet you at church.
- Church got done late this morning.
These types of statements have us thinking of church as:
A service
A building
This view is also clearly reinforced by our wider culture. When movies talk about a church, it always has to do with a service or a building. Television shows, such as the Simpson, indicate church as something that we struggle to wake up for on Sunday morning or something to suffer through. Even if we reject the struggling to wake up for or suffer through, we likely implicitly agree with/understand the concept that church is something you go to. Not something that you are.
I think part of the reason for this is an epistemological bind that the word “church” puts us in. The word actually does not appear in the New Testament. Instead the word that is often translated as church in our English Bibles is actually ekklesia (ἐκκλησία) or literally “assembly, congregation, council.” The word church actually comes to us by way of Old English and West Germanic from the Greek word kuriakē, meaning “of the Lord.” The current English word church is likely a shortened version of “house of the Lord” (kuriakē oikia) and “congregation of the Lord” (ekklēsia kuriakē). So when we use the word church – it is no wonder that it is used for multiple things and has a tentative link with our theology – we’ve both lost things in translation and we are using it as shorthand for multiple concepts and ideas.
Over the last few months, in things like the bulletin we have been using words like “community” and “gathering” instead of the word church. After lots of thinking and many discussions, we had hoped that using these replacement words would provide a more precise usage of language and more explanatory of what we thought our church was. For both new guests and for our longtime members, we would use words with more precise meaning to actually link with the meaning of church that we were intending to use in each separate use.
This brings me back to the conversation on Sunday. As I said at the outset of this blog posting, I am concerned with using other words than church for who we are. Church is a powerful theological concept. We are the church. We are of God. I do not want to reject the biblical concept nor do I want to reject our theological view. We should use church.
But my concern is that we do not now think about church as being a people. We think about a building or a service. We are more likely to look at the picture on the left and think the church is what is containing the people instead of the people being the church. We can write “The Church Leaves to Serve” at the end of every worship service till the end of time and we still will not replace the implicit understanding of the word as a service or building.
So I ask each of you – how do we solve this? We will likely schedule an organized Sunday Morning Conversation this fall on the topic but that shouldn’t preclude us from discussing it this summer (and hopefully on this blog). Help us figure out the answers to some of these pressing complex questions:
- How we claim to be the church in the theological sense and the Biblical sense without losing things in translation?
- Would it help to refer to us, the people, as the church and other things as gatherings or the building?
- Do we go back to Greek and say things like “church community,” “church gathering,” and “church building” and explain that church means “of the Lord”?
- Or do we simply give in to our cultural understanding and continue to use church for multiple concepts?
- And how do we do any of these things while being precise and being true to who we are?
I love words. Love them. They are powerful and mystical. Mark Twain said that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. I wholly agree, and I think this is an interesting conversation.
The one who interprets the word is just as important as the one who uses the word, so I wonder if we should consider for whom we are making this distinction.
I think the use of “church” to mean the physical structure, the designated worship time, and the people who are following Christ is not contradictory or confusing, but it’s been part of my vernacular and tradition since I was a little kid (though as an aside, I think we do need to be careful about using “church” in a derogatory was, as in, “we decided not to have x activity because it’s too churchy”).
Those who find their way into the physical structure of FPC, through whatever means, have an understanding of this on some level too — they’ve identified a building that houses a community that they’d like to find out more about.
If our concern is that those who have no experience, or no positive experience, with what they think of as “church” won’t feel welcomed or seek out our community because of that identification, then we aren’t doing what we’re supposed to to show love and ministry. If we are trying to live our lives in the model of Christ, we should be engaging those who aren’t currently among us in a way that no matter what we call ourselves they will know what we believe. People may not think “there’s something missing in my life, maybe I should go to church” but they may think “there’s something in my life, maybe I should do something about it” and hopefully someone is there to show them love and grace. If that person happens to be affiliated with a church, I doubt it would scare them away.
I think the movement away from using the word “church” shows a tremendous desire for change and growth in a radical way, but maybe focusing on our behavior rather than the words that describe our behavior may need to come first.
I’m looking forward to reading other thoughts about this topic in this forum…
I wrote about this again here:
http://www.achurchforstarvingartists.com/
I agree with Brooke that our behavior is crucial – and more crucial than discussions on words. But for me, if I know that people see me as part of “the church” it helps inspire/motivate me to live accordingly in a way that “going to church” doesn’t.
“Church” was also adopted by early Christians to usurp the term used for “building” much like Jesus did with “temple” before he died. (“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for 46 years, and will you raise it up in 3 days?” But he was speaking of the temple of his body. John 2:19ff)
Brooke, thanks for your great thoughts! I especially agree that actions are definitely more important than words and that our focus needs to be on behavior that models what it means to be the true meaning of church. I still struggle with ways to be precise, however, because although you and I may understand the word’s multiple meanings, I think there are still many in the congregation who do not.
Seems to me like I’ve heard a lot of “either/or” around the use of the word ‘church.’ (Not so much in these comments on this blog, as in other conversations in the last couple of weeks.)
In a postmodern world, shouldn’t we be taking a more “both/and” approach to the word? One of the things that makes Christianity special is how so many facets of our lives come together under a single word. The term ‘church’ encompasses all that is set aside: in our lives, our communities, our schedules, and our properties. There’s a power in this that would be lost if we spend too much time fretting over which definition people mean when they speak the word ‘church.’
When outsiders or newcomers struggle to deal with the many layers of meaning this word contains, we have two options: invent new words and phrases to suit them, or engage them through our actions and words. I prefer the latter: it opens up our world to them and deepens our mutual understanding. When we do the former, we are essentially pandering to the common culture, without really engaging the complexity of the situation: that, because I belong to the ‘church,’ I go to ‘church’ which is held in a ‘church.’ I see great strength in this overlapping of senses in a single word.