The Church Is A Community Series

Can anybody tell me what date it is today? The 25th. So what does that mean happened about a month ago? Christmas. You guys are sharp. Very good. It was Christmas a month ago. It is hard to believe. This week I was reflecting on some of the great gifts I received this past Christmas. I know that many of you were here when we went through the series called Advent Conspiracy. What we got out of that was that we were going to promote more relational gifts. Gifts that you hopefully don’t have to spend a lot of money on, but it gives you the opportunity to spend more time with your family. I was blessed to receive a number of relational gifts. As I reflected on all of my gifts, I began to realize that actually one of the gifts was actually anti-relational. It didn’t really encourage relationship. It actually kind of discouraged relationship. That gift was a metal detector. It is one of those things that the old guys at the beach walk around with while their kids are at the pool. I got one of those. I couldn’t wait to get one of those as a gift. I was especially pleased when I received one. I was so excited to begin using it that I immediately began looking for pieces of metal in my living room. I quickly got bored with the living room and found my way out to the backyard and knew I would find something. Sure enough, after about 20 minutes, I found an interesting looking thing that I have no idea what it is. It is a piece of metal about 7 inches in diameter. I texted a few people from the church who should know what these things are. They couldn’t give me an answer. I said surely somebody must have an answer. So I went online and typed in metal detector enthusiast and I found out there is a whole community of people at this location called TreasureNet who are just sitting there waiting 24 hours a day , 7 days a week to help a newbie like me out. I posted a picture and within an hour or so I had an answer. Somebody suggested it was a wheel off a cart that used to carry an engine or something like that. I was very impressed because they were so helpful. It really created a bond between me and this place called treasure net. So if some Sunday morning you see I don’t show up or I show up late, it could be because I spent too much time Saturday night hanging out with my best friends on TreasureNet.

All kidding aside, when God thinks about community, he is not thinking about community in the sense of some place like TreasureNet. He has a very specific idea of community. He thinks of community more in the sense of a group of people who have confessed Christ as Lord and consequently have been called out from the world and called into a special relationship that he refers to as the body of Christ. We have been going through the series called The Nature of the Church. I spoke about the idea that there are at least four things that help give definition to the church. Those four things are that the church is Christ initiated, the church is spiritual, it is a community, and it is missional. I took all those words and created a mini-definition of the church. The church is a Christ-initiated, spiritual community on a mission with God to reconcile all of his creation back to him. A few weeks ago, we started to unpack this meaning. We looked at the idea that church was Christ initiated. Following Peter’s great confession of faith in Matthew 16, Jesus said “Blessed are you Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” The main emphasis being that it was Christ’s church. It is not our church. It is not a church that belongs to any denomination. It is first and foremost Christ’s church. Last week, I went on to talk about the idea that the church is spiritual. Spiritual in the sense that the church was created by the spirit at Pentecost. It filled up the church, specifically the people of the church at Pentecost. So much so that they began to speak the word of God very boldly and very creatively. Then that spirit goes on to form the church into the very image of Christ. That is where we talked about the idea of the church as a spiritual entity.

Today, I want to address the idea of the church as a community. We have already alluded that there are different sorts of communities out there. I thought I would use a standard definition of a community. A community is a social unit of any size that shares common values. Without too much of a stretch, I would suspect most of us would agree that the church fits the idea of a community. We are a social unit. We have people here. We have common values. The four common values that we have. In that definition, we really are a community. But again, when God is thinking about a community, he is moving beyond the basic definition of community. He is thinking about a spiritual community. We see that sense as we begin to look at a few key words and phrases that we find in the New Testament starting with the actual word church. The Greek word for church is ecclesia. Ecclesia is the Greek word that we translate church. Why do we care about the Greek? Because contrary to popular belief, the Bible did not fall out of the air in English. We received it by way of the Greek language. Related to this is another word that is commonly used among scholars. It is the word ecclesiology, which is basically the study of the church. So really as we look at the nature of the church what we are doing is ecclesiology. The word ecclesia actually doesn’t have much of a religious origin. It really just simply means to call out. A term that would be used as far back as 500 B.C. that just referred to the calling out of people from their homes or work places to come into and gather together to hear some sort of a speech from a politician or whatever. We actually see that the gospel writer Luke, who also wrote the book of Acts, uses the idea of an assembly when he talks about how a group of people came against Paul in Ephesus because of the fact that Paul was insulting their goddess Artemis. We see that here where he writes “The assembly (or the ecclesia) was in confusion. Some were shouting one thing, some another. Most of the people did not even know why they were there.” The point being made is that the word that we translate church really didn’t have a spiritual meaning attached to it. It was more of a secular term. As we know, when Christ came along, he took the word church and gave it more of a spiritual slant. Jesus didn’t think of the ecclesia as just simply the calling out of the people to listen to somebody give a speech. He saw the church as the people of God. The people that would be called out of the world not in a physical sense but more of a spiritual sense and called into a special relationship that he would call his church. A gathered community that would come together to help him carry out his mission on earth.