Going to Church

Whenever someone meets you the first time, he or she will, predictably, ask you two questions: “what do you do?” (meaning where do you work?), and “where do you go to church?” Both questions are intended to identify and define, and even ‘label’, you. Their perception will vary, depending on whether you are a Pentecostal cashier at Wal-Mart or a Baptist VP of Wachovia.

The latter question troubles me. When someone asks me where I go to church, I want to respond “Church is not someplace I go, it’s who I am.” In one of the two times that Jesus speaks of the ‘Church,’ He defines it relationally: “where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” (Matt. 18:20). His Church is made up of individual believers meeting in groups as small as two. Whenever Altha and I go out for coffee to share the Word and pray with one another, we are, in effect, co-pastoring a church of two!

Don’t get me wrong. I think every believer should be connected in some way to a local church. But far too many Christians have learned, incorrectly, that being a Christian is about ‘doing’ and ‘going,’ rather than ‘being.’ They have stopped “doing” things and “going” places they used to. Now they “do” and “go” to church—“Going” to church being the mark of a good Christian.

When I ask the question “Where do you go to church?” I want to know where someone is sowing into the Kingdom, doing the 'good works' God created him to do. The Church is not a place. It's an organism. So, let’s not get caught up in “doing” church and “going” to church, and forget we “are” the Church. Even so, “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another ... And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds” (Heb. 10:25, 24). Now, that’s a whole lot more than "Going to Church!"