As far as I can remember, my first crisis of faith happened on a Sunday. I was riding in the passenger seat of my brother’s truck, listening to dad’s Led Zeppelin. We were driving down the road between the last neighborhood houses and the corner store. As we rambled, I felt oddly unsettled: “Who will make me go to church when I’m older?” It felt rude for this moment of self-awareness to intrude on Robert Plant and the cool morning air, but seeing my future play out in real-time pitted the freedom of my coming independence against the realities of my old self. One day, I’d have to choose. Turn the wheel one way, church. Turn the other way, ramble on. Which way, modern man-child?

It’s no secret that church attendance across the nation is down.1 Not only does the data paint a grim picture of religious practice, I’ve also seen it at the ground level while serving as a bible teacher over the last 8 years. It doesn’t take much to justify our way into missing church—or to write it off altogether. That’s the bad news.

The good news? Our situation is not hopeless, and getting people back into the pews starts with reminding them—or even teaching for the first time—what the church is and why the church gathers. If we can reclaim these core truths, we’ll rediscover that church is not an option, it’s who we are, and it’s where we belong.

What is the Church?

As a parent, I hear it every Sunday, like a liturgy for the opening of the garage door: “Why do we have to go to church?!” The difficulty in answering, though, is that the question itself is slightly askew. Perhaps you’ve heard it asked another way, like from a well-meaning mother on a Sunday afternoon (curious about the message and not your attendance, of course): “How was church?” These are great questions, but they imply something about the “church” that contributes to prevailing attitudes towards it, namely in how we understand what the church is. If we see the church as just a place or a production, we’ll quickly find that our devotion lies with spaces and smoke machines. If it is something far greater—and it is!—then we have a cornerstone worth building upon, one that will not fade or fail under the external pressures we push against it.

So, what is the church? Instead of a place or an event, Scripture describes it as:

  • A people (“Greet also the church in their house,” Acts 18:22)2
  • Who gather together (“And when they arrived and gathered the church together, they declared all that God had done with them,” Acts 14:27)3
  • And act together (“When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church,” Acts 15:4)4

People

The Church is a People. Before anything it does or any time it gathers, the church is simply people. More specifically, the Church (big “C,” universal church)5 is the body of believers in all the world.6 There’s no membership class or paperwork to fill out; if you have come to faith in Christ, through his grace, you are a member of this body, and it’s not just any body, it is his body!7 We are the bride, and he is the groom, together as one.8 It is an incredible thing to be part of the church, and this incredible reality comes with incredible responsibility.9

Who Gather Together

The Church is a people who gather together. Gathering isn’t just something that the church does, it is how Scripture defines it. Gathering is our namesake. The actual Greek word behind “church” is ekklēsia, which means “assembly,” or even “summoned assembly.”10 Wherever you see the word “church” in your bible, you are actually seeing the word “assembly.” The church is a group of believers, together. If we do not assemble, we are not the ekklēsia, a truth Jesus illustrates (where two or three gather, there he is),11 and an imperative the writer of Hebrews emphasizes (we should not neglect gathering).12 We aren’t just better together, together is who we are.

And Act Together    

The Church is a people who gather together and act together. There’s power in numbers, but only if those numbers do something in a unified way. The New Testament abounds with examples of the way the body of believers is to act. Among other things, the church worships, preaches, partakes in the ordinances, prays, fellowships, disciples, evangelizes, pursues justice, provides accountability, administers discipline, stewards resources, defends the faith, and engages in missions, together.13 The church is in motion, visible at work 24/7 as the hands and feet of Jesus.   

All of this aligns with the way we have historically viewed the church,14 including Baptists, who defined it more recently as:

…an autonomous local congregation of baptized believers, associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel; observing the two ordinances of Christ, governed by His laws, exercising the gifts, rights, and privileges invested in them by His Word, and seeking to extend the gospel to the ends of the earth.15

People, together, acting. It is no mistake that God modeled his church after his very nature: a triune Godhead (a people), perpetually in fellowship (assembled), and always at work (acting together). It’s incredible when you really think about it. To relegate the church to a place or time reduces it to the margins of our lives instead of honoring it as the common, unbreakable thread that joins them together.

Why Do We “Go to” Church?

Though the church transcends space and time, its charge to be at work in the world in our current space and time can make the mandate to gather a bit of a paradox. Accordingly, intentionality is critical, and the New Testament church set the standard in how they gathered, not just for the sake of having a day, but ascribing to it a higher purpose, one that we can see baked into the translation itself.

You may notice that “church” sounds nothing like ekklēsia.16 That’s because it’s not actually derived from it (fun!). Instead, it has roots back to the Greek kyriakos (of the Lord) or kyriakē (house of the Lord), which then transformed into the Middle English chirche, or Church! Since its inception, Sundays with the assembled church have been about the Lord, his people in his house—the Lord’s Day!

It’s true that Scripture doesn’t give us a comprehensive understanding of all the facets of the church, but, with a close reading, we can know that the church, at a minimum,

  • Assembled on the first day of the week in remembrance of the resurrection (not as a Sabbath, or new Sabbath)17
  • And on this day, they worshipped, preached, gave, and administered the sacraments/ordinances18

The people gathered (at a set time and place), and they acted (in many ways). The rhythm here is familiar. What it is and what it does are indivisible attributes of the church. This is why, as mentioned earlier, failure to gather is, at best, unqualified disobedience,19 or even worse, a rejection of the presence of the Lord.20 The link is so strong that some theologians, like John Piper, go as far as saying that walking away from the church is like walking away from Jesus.21 What is a body without its parts?   

Fruit of the Assembly

Even the newest believers understand that the Christian life is one of obedience (dying to ourselves, in fact),22 but in our modern context, we can struggle to see our lives outside the lens of, “what’s in it for me?” Pointing to the plain and clear way Scripture speaks about the church is not going to move the needle for many, but this is where we can get involved. In some respects, it is up to us to show that “church” is something more to those who only see obedience as legalism. Gathering comes with a multitude of benefits, and that’s why God, full of love and mercy, designed us for it. I could drone on about studies in statistics showing how regular church attendance dramatically decreases the divorce rate or even mortality rates, but better than this, our lives testify that gathering:23

  • Builds and strengthens communities
  • Builds and strengthens families
  • Provides a place of rest and restoration
  • Meets physical, emotional, and spiritual needs
  • Encourages, edifies, and holds accountable

There are many articles and studies out there that are far more comprehensive than this small list, but while the point is still clear in this list, these truths are worthless if they’re not evidenced by our lives.24

This is why, for example, regularly choosing to miss church for kids’ sporting events raises important questions. Prioritizing other activities over church may not reflect well on the importance of church in our lives. If we want others, especially our kids, to see that the gospel truly changes and reorders our lives, we need to both believe it and practice it.

In the End, We Will Love What Matters

I recently took our kids to a University of Texas football game where over 100,000 people made it a priority to gather together in the name of school spirit. A weekly occurrence, we sang songs, participated in sacred traditions, gave (too much), interceded (when the call didn’t go our way), and bore witness to a message of victory (thankfully). What took place on the field, and the rich tradition behind it, was enough to break down our walls and unify us together into something greater—you may even call it a homefield advantage. This world is increasingly hostile towards the gospel and the church, but we, too, have a homefield advantage at least one day a week in the church. To take advantage of it, all that’s required is for us to love what we say we love, and be what Scripture says we already are: the church.

  1. See this recent Gallup study. The apparent decline in national church attendance is more so from religious “nones,” as opposed to those who identify with a denomination. For example, SBC attendance is recently up. For the “nones,” see https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/is-anyone-going-to-church-more-now. ↩︎
  2. See also, Matthew 18:17, Acts 2:47, 1 Corinthians 12:28, and Acts 18:22. ↩︎
  3. See also, 1 Corinthians 11:18,33 and 1 Corinthians 14:23,28. ↩︎
  4. See also, Matthew 18:17, Acts 15:22, and 1 Corinthians 5:4-5. ↩︎
  5. For convenience, going forward I use “church.” Let the context inform the definition. ↩︎
  6. I make no distinction here between the visible and invisible church. ↩︎
  7. Romans 12:5. ↩︎
  8. Ephesians 5:25-27. ↩︎
  9. See, e.g., Luke 12:48. ↩︎
  10. Of note, always in the singular as it relates to local churches. Jonathan Leeman has a challenging and edifying book titled “One Assembly” that takes an academic deep dive on this topic. (https://www.crossway.org/books/one-assembly-tpb/). ↩︎
  11. Matthew 18:20. ↩︎
  12. Hebrews 10:25. ↩︎
  13. Ephesians 5:19, 2 Timothy 4:2, 1 Corinthians 11:26, Acts 2:42, Acts 2:46, Matthew 28:19-20, Romans 10:14, Micah 6:8, Galatians 6:1, Matthew 18:15-17, 2 Corinthians 9:7, 1 Peter 3:15, Acts 1:8. ↩︎
  14. Augsburg Confession (Lutherans), Thity-Nine Articles (Anglicans), Westminster Confession of Faith (Presbyterians), and 1644 London Baptist Confession (Baptists). ↩︎
  15. https://bfm.sbc.net/bfm2000, Article VI. ↩︎
  16. When Willaim Tyndale first translated ekklēsia, he used “congregation,” so it wasn’t always “church.” ↩︎
  17. See Acts 20:7, 1 Corinthians 16:1-2, 2 Corinthians 9:12, John 20:1, John 20:19, and Revelation 1:10. I also want to point you to a robust investigation on the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day in a volume by D.A. Carson titled “From Sabbath to Lord’s Day” (https://store.ligonier.org/from-sabbath-to-lords-day-paperback) ↩︎
  18. Colossians 3:16, Acts 20:7, 1 Corinthians 16:1-2, Acts 2:42. ↩︎
  19. Remember God’s directive to the divided nation of Israel? “But you shall seek the place that the Lord your God will choose out of all your tribes to put his name and make his habitation there. There you shall go.” (Deuteronomy 12:5, ESV). From cover to cover, God has wanted his people to worship together. ↩︎
  20. Matthew 18:20. ↩︎
  21. Galatians 2:20 ↩︎
  22. Galatians 2:20 ↩︎
  23. Regular attendance can reduce a couple’s risk of divorce by 47 percent, https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/03/20935/ ↩︎
  24. See, e.g., this list from H.B. Charles: https://www.9marks.org/article/assembly-required-25-reasons-to-regularly-participate-in-public-and-corporate-worship/ ↩︎