If I said to you, “Let’s go to church next Sunday,” what would you think that I was saying? I would suggest that most people in our society would think that I was inviting them to attend worship with me. We tend to think of the church as those people who gather for worship.
Emil Brunner suggests that when the New Testament speaks of the ecclesia, it is speaking of those who are called by God in Christ.(Makers of trhe Modern Theological Mind; Emil Brunner, pp. 117-118, by J. Edward Humphrey, Word Books, Waco, TX; 1976) While at first this may seem overly subtle, I would suggest that this has some profound implications for our understanding of the nature of the church in our times. If the church is the called people of God, then we do not go to church, but rather, we are the church. The church is the people who have been called by God as they meet in community.
The initial principle which marks us as the church is God’s call. Our response to that call draws us into community. To say, “Let’s go to church” would be an invitation to respond to God’s call in your life by joining with the community in worship.
In our contemporary society, I would suspect people are more comfortable with the concept of the gathered people than with the called people. By seeing the church as the gathered people, we continue to center the point of decision making in the voluntary decision to join in the assembly. We reserve the right to leave at anytime that the experience does not please us. The locus of the commitment is in the “I” and not in either the community or God.
The responsibility for a quality experience is in the hands of someone else which we call the church. We come to church to be uplifted, to provide values for our children, to be cared for, to associate with like-minded friends. We are willing to contribute our share of the expense of the institution, but we insist that we are the ones to define what our share will be. We are the consumer; the church and its services are the product. If this one does not please me, I will look elsewhere and if nothing pleases me, I reserve the right not to buy.
