Is Church an Institution? Or People?

It’s something I heard all the time, “We are the Church! It’s not a building! We are the Church!” 

Are you though? 

I started to notice a growing tendency with a few people in my church concerning what Church actually is. They’d say things like, “WE are the church. It isn’t an institution.”

Unless there was some sort of social or political crises in our neighborhood. Then the same group of people would call me and ask, “So what are you going to do about it? You’re a church, after all. You should be doing something.” 

Wait a minute. This isn’t adding up. When it’s convenient or advantageous, the argument was, “Church is people, it isn’t an institution. Stop making it all about the institution!” and when a person did not want to be bothered, the argument became, “What is your church as an institution doing about this? This is what you get paid for, right? You need to do something.” Whenever a Black Lives Matter protest broke out, or when a natural disaster hit nearby, or when there was some scandal in the nearest high school with some dangerous trends spreading among students, people would ask me, “Well as a church what are you doing about it?” 

I remember sitting down in the lobby one winter with a fellow church member and having a candid conversation about how we could help several families who had lost their homes to a major fire. Plans were put together to purchase winter clothing and have groceries brought to the families thanks to mutual help from members of our church. This woman had told me on multiple occasions that church is about people, not the institution, and that we should spend less time focusing on the institution of the church. As we discussed the needs of these families suffering loss, she looked at me and said, “This isn’t enough. There’s still more of a need here. You’re a church. You are who people go to when they need help. What kind of church is this if it cannot meet the needs of others?” I sarcastically looked at her, (and I’m not proud of this) and said, “I thought you were the church? What are you doing about it?” 

Though I wish I had been less crass in my response, my feelings towards the situation are the same: We cannot complain that churches focus too much on their institutions instead of people when we have something to complain about, but blame church institutions when we don’t want to carry responsibilities ourselves. That’s a dangerous game that only compounds issues. So is the Church a group of people? Or is it an institution? Well, first let’s ask this: How does the bible consider the Church? How did people in the first few centuries view Church?

Both the Book of Acts and early church fathers show us that the very first church was, in fact, an institution just as much as it was a group of people. The first major controversy regarding church behavior came down to the decision of a select group of people in the Jerusalem church. Many gentiles (people who did not practice Jewish dietary or sabbath laws, and who often participated in pagan rituals of worship and food preparation) were becoming followers of Christ, which begged many to wonder how gentiles should behave. Almost none of them were circumcised. Do they need to be? How difficult should we make it for gentiles to join the fellowship of the church? Though dozens of smaller churches had sprung up by this point, there was a central place of authority that was tasked to prayerfully decide how this issue should be handled, and that central place was the church in Jerusalem. According to church tradition (and also implied in the Book of Acts) The Jerusalem church was led by the Apostle James. Though there are thousands upon thousands of christians across half of the Roman Empire at this point, the most influential christians who carried the largest spiritual load of the people and who worked most laboriously to spread the gospel were entrusted to make the decision for every single other christian. That means that an institutional framework was applied to the church to delegate practical and spiritual matters, and there was a clear delineation of authority among christians. This pattern continued for centuries, though the location changed from Jerusalem to Antioch or Alexandria, where major Christian churches were established as well. There was always a central institution that represented the whole of the group and help oversee and source everyone else to some degree.

At the same time, no one can deny that the church only exists because individual christians make it so. The apostle Paul remarks several times (1 Cor 12:12; 27; Rom. 12:4-5; Eph. 2:19-22; 4:4; 15-16; 5:29-30; Col. 1:24; and more) how each believing Christian is like one brick, mortared into the structure that makes up Christ’s body on earth, the Church. We all have a role to play, and we all make the structure function, so of course the church is not only an institution: It is and institution comprised of God’s people on earth. But too often I hear people say things like, “Well, that building isn’t the Church, I am the Church!”

No. No you’re not. 

You, by yourself, are not the Church. You cannot be. In fact, if you manage to get a few other people who band together with you, and you all happen to be christians, you’re still not the Church. And here’s why…

The Church is God’s dynamic organism on earth, fulfilling His mission to spread His Kingdom of salvation and righteousness across the entire world. You are either working with other Christians to make that mission a reality, or you are sitting around complaining at how others are doing it wrong. If you’re working with other christians, churches, institutions and operations that are living to fulfill this mission, and you have regular participation, accountability, fellowship, and exhortation with these groups, then you are, in fact, participating in the church. If you’re sitting just outside the walls complaining that everyone does it wrong, are making excuses as to why churches don’t deserve you, and you are choosing to work for God all by yourself, you are not part of the church, because that’s not how it works. There is a mutual submission to each other, especially to people you don’t like, or people you disagree with, that comes into play when functioning as the Church. As both a people and an institution, we are supposed to struggle to find unity with each other until our personal preferences and preconceived biases are sitting up there on the cross with Jesus’s death, letting go of petty grievances and working together in mutual grace and mercy. 

Now over the last century, especially in America, there has been a large shift in how some churches function, and perhaps this is where some of the “corporate church” criticism comes from. As businesses and non-profits made their entire mission about raising money and building success, that mindset easily seeped into the minds of ministers too. The mission may have become cloudy concerning spreading God’s kingdom and instead focused on raising funds, getting every penny from tax exemptions and taking advantage of grants and property opportunities. Yes, at times in American history church institutions have appeared to sell out for the sake of worldly success markers rather than kingdom ones. But it is extreme to become anti institution over the failures of some churches throughout the years. The answer to a problem is not to fling too far in the other direction. That’s never the answer. Being anti institution is not being pro Church, because at the end of the day, the Church is still an institution just as much as it is a collective of Jesus followers.

Sometimes it’s easier to criticize a faceless institution than it is to criticize a person. That’s where the temptation comes in. People might think, “Well Joey’s a nice guy. He’s doing his best. It’s just his church that’s the issue.” 

Honestly? Just tell me that you have a problem with something I’m doing. Be honest. I can handle it. I’m supposed to handle it. Don’t blame the faceless institution. Talk to me. 

This happens with many generic complaints: “That church is really judgy,” or “that church is so legalistic,” and “the teaching in that church is just not enough for me.” Well, who at that church is judging everyone? Who is legalistic? Who’s teaching is sub par? Is it really every single person in that church? Of course not. But it’s hard to have those tough conversations, so we just criticize the entire institution instead. But if the church is made up of people, then we need to work through our issues with these people. Rather than blindly blaming “that church” or the “institution” of church, be honest and air that grievance with the person on the other end of it. 

Now if you are a person who operates alone not because you are anti church-institutions, but because the church has hurt you, kicked you out or snuffed out your ministry, I’m sorry. That’s truly difficult to experience, whether called for or not. Sometimes in the friction of disagreement, a mutual conclusion can’t be reached, and there are church leaders who would rather send a person away than find a different solution. Sometimes the church leader has no other solution and it really is best for a particular person to stop being involved in ministry. Sometimes lay people or pastors give in to fear and just avoid dealing with the long process of healing that is needed. But that doesn’t make these decisions less painful. We’re all stupid humans, and we hurt each other sometimes. If you’re on the fringes of the church institution because you’ve been hurt, I encourage you to seek restoration and healing rather than giving up on institutions. Maybe not in the same church, but somewhere you can make a clean start, because God still sees people who need you in the local church, and there are people in the local church that you need. Really, you guys need each other. 

Since moving into an RV and traveling full-time with my family, church has looked extremely different to me. I’ve spent more time around campfires and in front of coffee mugs (I’m pretty much always drinking coffee) having church in small settings. And I love that. I think America needs more of that. But there will always be a need for larger church institutions. Every community needs an institution, as well as small gatherings and home churches, because among that united church ecosystem the Kingdom of God will spread, and people will be loved. I still watch my home church online and participate with them, and I thank God for that. Without their institution, I wouldn’t have that resource. Is the Church an institution, or is it the people?

Yep. 

Why I’m (Still) A Christian

I spoke with an old friend of mine. Someone I had not spoken to in several years. I talked about how my family and I transitioned into a full-time RV lifestyle this past year, and he talked about his developing career in marketing and business ventures. I asked where he was living and where he goes to church these days, to which he hesitantly replies “I’m not going to church anymore.” Throughout the conversation, he explained how he has decided he is not considering himself a part of the christian faith at this time. He pulled apart his former beliefs and did not find anything worth keeping. After a few days it occurred to me: If he had just given me the name of a church, I would not have thought anything of it—I just assumed his faith had remained steadfast in the first place. It did not occur to me that I could have asked, “Are you still following Jesus? What has your faith been through? How has it stood the test of time and experience?”

In the last decade I’ve read dozens of stories of Christians who decided they could not continue to call themselves christians while walking the current path they’ve chosen. The only solution was to pull up their religious roots and call it quits. The popular term for a while was “deconstruction,” where you attempt to remove all bias (virtually impossible) and investigate the claims of your faith by holding them up to intense scrutiny and examination. In the last couple of years this term has become synonymous with quitting christianity, even though the term supposedly applies to much broader areas of philosophy and other lingual systems. Perhaps it’s my cynicism, but on my social platforms, people who challenge their faith and walk away come off as intellectual, while people who continue to embrace their faith appear ignorant and unwilling to examine it. After reading so many stories of people who have walked away from some form of Christian faith, I started to wonder, so who made it? Who has challenged their faith, torn it apart, and continued forward still following Jesus? I want to read those stories too. I want to know who has found something worth keeping, rather than assuming every follower of Jesus blindly believes the same thing they always believed because they are spoon fed church jargon, or they’ve challenged their faith and decided to leave it behind.

So I’ll start with my own story. 

In my early twenties, I chose to challenge every assumption and belief I held concerning christianity, and read everything I could that was contrary to orthodoxy. It would take forever to recount everything I processed during that time, so I’ll share three specific challenges I dealt with concerning orthodox christianity and it’s counter-arguments, and how I continued to claim Christianty is true afterward.

Christianity was fabricated and mythicized by the early church

One of the first arguments I came across that I never heard growing up in church was the claim that the bible is mostly fictitious stories made up by people who wanted power for themselves by promulgating popular legends about Jesus. At first I found this hard to reconcile with, and it caused me to have serious doubts about Christianity as a whole. How can anyone prove that the historicity of the accounts of Jesus and the early church were real? Am I supposed to rely on blind faith to accept biblical claims? Show me the evidence! 

The first real answers came when I read about The First Quest for the Historical Jesus, which is usually traced back to the writings of a guy named Herman Reimarus. Reimarus claimed that Jesus was a real person who never intended to establish a new religion, but thought of himself as a human messiah who would overturn the social paradigms of Rome and establish a new earthly, political kingdom (This is obviously completely contrary to the entire message within the gospels). Reimarus then claims that Jesus’s hopes were dashed when Rome crucified him, but Jesus’s disciples stole his body and rode the momentum of his movement to build a religious system that eventually became Christianty. These kinds of claims are jarring when you grow up never hearing such things, which is exactly what my scenario was. Reimarus’ writings sounded brilliant at first, and I felt like a fool for never considering that Jesus might be a figure mostly invented by people who crave power. This phase of my doubt was shortly lived, however, for a plethora of reasons.

The accounts of Jesus and the first century church are loaded with failure, doubt, contradiction and confusion. The entire gospel of Mark (which is one of the most reliable and earliest accounts of the stories of Jesus) portrays the disciples as faithless failures who never seem to pick up on Jesus’s greater message and constantly let him down. Why would the church intentionally downplay the performance of the disciples if the goal is to create followers of the disciples within the church? This would make things harder, not easier for the biblical writers, and likely the early church would have eventually removed these passages to garner more followers. But they didn’t. They continued to elevate Jesus in their writings even at their own expense. In other gospels like Matthew, Jesus shares many teachings that are difficult to understand even within the first century’s context, and there were plenty of struggles the early church did have issues with that never find answers in the gospels. If the stories were fabricated, why not create scenarios that answer heated debates and strife within the early church, like food laws, or the Gentile mission, or the purpose of water baptism, or church-state affairs? C.S. Lewis suggested that if the Bible is fiction, it is terrible fiction, and thus is more than likely wholeheartedly believed by those who wrote about it. Reimarus’s work has been mostly discredited by scholars now, but the ideas he put forth live on for many who simply haven’t studied the bible or the history surrounding it.

There probably was not a historical Jesus

This one was challenging for me, because when I decided to question whether or not Jesus ever really existed, I turned where most people turn… the internet. I was bombarded with poorly researched “history” that never cited real sources about how there is no historical mention of the Hebrew named Jesus in official Roman records, and that the entire story of God becoming a human was borrowed from pagan myths that existed centuries before Jesus. At first glance, this rocked me a little bit. I never learned any of that before. But after six months of digging deeper and reading scholarly books and historical records, I found out none of those things are true. 

Firstly, there are records of a historical Jesus in Roman texts. We have more proof Jesus existed than the Roman poet Virgil (which no one questions, because less is at stake if he isn’t). Some have tried to explain the historical Jesus as a real figure, but someone completely different from the Jesus of the Bible, like a cynic philosopher or social revolutionary (Like Reimarus mentioned above). These attempts also fail serious scrutiny. I learned this easily by reading the account of The Jesus Seminar and the 1st and 2nd Quest for the Historical Jesus (also mentioned above), which you can do too if you’re willing to run down that hole. The books that shaped my beliefs most on this are called Jesus and Judaism by E.P. Sanders and Who Was Jesus by N.T. Wright. 

Second, It is impossible to reconstruct a historical Jesus figure who did not claim to be God and who did not work miracles and perform exorcisms. Many have attempted this, and they failed. Even first century opponents of Jesus’s movement like Celsus and the Jewish historian Josephus admit to Jesus being known for supernatural power and claims of divinity, making it ridiculous to claim the church fabricated that identity onto Jesus over time. Celcus went so far as to suggest Jesus was trained in Magic by Egyptians. Clearly enough people were exposed to his supernatural activity that it becomes ridiculous to suggest he was not a real person.

You cannot prove God exists

David Hume’s famous argument, “What Caused God?” made a big ripple in my life for about 5 solid minutes.

The cosmological argument, which claims everything that exists needs a cause, or a God to start the process, was rejected by Hume as a simple matter of passing the buck, You say everything must have started from something or it can’t exist. Well, what started God?  

Oh man. Shaky. This one messed with me. Hume was brilliant. Until it occurred it me (maybe supernaturally brought to my mind by God, just to make my atheist friends squirm a little), Christianity never claims every single event has a cause. Christianity does not claim God has to come from somewhere because everything has to come from somewhere—this is a scientific analyzation tool that in no way answers questions that exist outside of the laws of scientific inquiry. The Cause and Effect model examines the physical universe only. Judeo-Christianity has claimed for thousands of years that God is not bound by His own universe or its laws. An intelligent thinker named Thomas Aquinas used the cosmological argument simply as a way to reference the idea that the seen and felt universe always operates with a system of laws of cause and effect. Challengers in his day made claims that material forces were randomly caused with no origin or purpose by other material forces. Scientific methods proved over time that this never actually happens in the material universe. Effects always need causes. Aquinas claimed that something bigger than “material” stuff, something outside of physics, has to cause physics. Thus God is the greater Causer.

Hume’s response: “Well, what caused the Causer then?” This is a nonsense question, because no one is claiming that God has to follow the laws everything else must follow. Atheists are the ones claiming only the physical universe exists. The cosmological argument claims that more than a physical universe must exist, because the effects of a physical universe must have been caused by something, so what material thing created all of your other material things? You have to start somewhere. God, the great Causer, does not need a cause to start him, because He is not limited by physicality. Only if you claim that the material world is all that exists do you need to answer the question, “Well, what caused the material universe then?”

Atheism often suggests that only something physically material can begat the physical universe. Christianity suggests that only something metaphysical can begat the physical universe. These two methods do not have to abide by the same rules and principles of science to answer their respective questions. Atheism was exciting to me for about the same amount of time Michael Scott loved that chair model in The Office. If Christianity was false, I was not going to find an alternative in atheism. 

In the end

I believe there is a major difference between seeking truth and seeking an excuse to be rid of a belief model you don’t want. I won’t imply that everyone who “deconstructs” their faith and decides to abandon it does so because they don’t care about truth. That’s an unfair position that insults the intelligence of many wonderful people who simply will not agree with some of Christianity’s claims. But I won’t pretend there aren’t some who deconstruct their faith because they are jaded by Christianity and welcome any reason to leave it behind. I did not approach things this way. I remember the day I prayed and asked God to rip apart all of my preconceived notions of truth and show me what is real. I did not want to blindly follow anything, but I also did not want a reason to abandon Christianity either. I just wanted Jesus, plain and simple, if He was real. In my experience, God has proven Himself to me time and time again. I cannot find good reason to doubt His existence or historical mentions, and I have had enough personal experiences in my life where doubt becomes too difficult. I have seen prayers answered, miracles performed (yes, real, supernatural things) people manifested with demonic activity (yep, that one too), and a myriad of other experiences that become hard to deny. But that’s my experience, and it does little help for someone else who might be struggling with whether or not Christianity is worth it. If that’s you reading this, I pray you get all the answers you’re looking for. I wanted to share my experience because I feel too few people who have traveled through doubt and come out still believing, too few of us ever really talk about it. We should all talk about it a little more. 

Significance of the Virginal Conception

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Christmas story is the miraculous conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit, within His mother Mary. The first chapters of the gospels of Matthew and Luke reveal that Jesus was not conceived by man, but by God Himself within the womb of a betrothed young virgin (Matthew 1; Luke 1). Believers in the story today tend to focus most on how incredible God’s miracles are, with Jesus’s conception being a powerful way to start the miracle showcase on earth in Jesus’s ministry. After the Enlightenment and the emergence of Deism in the 18th century, leading thinkers and college professors required miracles to be challenged and viewed with extreme skepticism, relegating them as less important than universal truths or reason. Yet in both cases, many who view this miraculous story often miss the broader significance of the virgin birth: God is the author and sustainer of all creation. 

In the second century, a church father named Theophilus introduced the concept of creatio ex nihilo, “creation out of nothing.” This statement meant that the Hebrew God of the Bible is absolutely unique in that He is not simply a deity with powers higher than our own; He is the Creator of all that exists and brought all things into being when they did not exist. Other beings can create, but only God can create something from nothing. In the time period in which Jesus was born, just before the height of the Roman Empire, many pagan and philosophical religions considered spiritual beings to be real and have certain power. But the concept of a single, transcendent, divine creator was virtually unknown to the Greek world. The Hebrew people, however, had believed the God of their scriptures was the Creator God since the very beginning. In Genesis 1:1, when God creates the heavens and the earth, the author of Genesis uses the word bara (to create). This word is uniquely reserved for God alone when it comes to creation. Though scholars go back and forth on the precise purpose of how this word is used, they unanimously agree that in Hebrew literature God possesses a unique power to create that no other being holds. His creation power far exceeds all others. Unlike all other creators, God is above and outside of the limitations of time and space, and He alone can form something beautiful without any starting materials. God does not need a single thing from us in order to make something amazing. So in the midst of darkness, formlessness, and nothingness, God created.

Early in the bible, mankind has abandoned God yet again with their pursuit of self, so God starts over, creating a new nation out of nothing. Out of that nation, God will send a redeemer who saves all of humanity. God calls a simple man named Abram out of the wilderness and promises to multiply his family into a nation that will transform the world (Genesis 12-17). In other words, God came upon a landscape that had nothing, a wilderness, and He made something incredible from it. God calls Abram from nothing, renames him Abraham, and creates a nation where there was no nation. The author of Genesis wants you to understand a theme here: God makes things out of nothing, and from that nothing comes something eternally significant. 

Fast forward almost 2000 years, where the angel Gabriel visits Mary and tells her she will conceive and bear a son, who will be named Jesus. Her first question, of course, is how? She is a virgin after all. Gabriel’s answer, God will form the child all on His own. Gabriel explains to Mary that the Holy Spirit will form Jesus in her womb. He then reveals that Mary’s relative Elizabeth, who is barren, has already conceived a child and is 6 months into her own pregnancy. Every society in the known Roman world determined a woman’s value by her ability to bear children, so Elizabeth would seem to amount to nothing in her world. But that is perfect, because God will make something out of nothing. In Mary’s case, she will not need to conceive a child, because God is the one who will send His Son Jesus, the world’s savior, into the world in the most eternally significant event in history in a way that only He can: From seemingly nowhere and out of nothing.  

Ironically, many religious leaders did not accept Jesus as God’s chosen savior because they knew he was from Nazareth in Galilee, and the prophecies told them they would not know where the Messiah would come from (John 7:27). What they did not realize was that Jesus came from Heaven, not from ordinary places. God did not need a starting point in any town or city, He did not need the perfect environment or the right conditions to magically align. He did not need anything at all. God fulfilled His promise in the same way He always does, uniquely as the Creator, Sustainer, and Savior of all things. The Virgin Conception is a beautiful reminder that God never runs out of options and He is not limited to what we can offer Him. If the world seems too dark and hopeless for God to have His way, that is actually perfect. Those are the exact conditions God has supernaturally worked through before, and He will do it again. God will take the darkness and emptiness and nothingness and form beauty, fullness and salvation from it. God is the God of creatio ex nihilo, who will take our nothing and make exactly what He wants to out of it. I cannot think of a more wonderful promise of hope, and I will never look at the Virgin Conception the same way. If your world is too dark, your hope is gone, and your wilderness seems unending, you are actually in a great place. Give God your life, and let Him make something amazing out of nothing.

Sexual Immorality, the Human Body, and Community Holiness.

Paul’s first address to the church in Corinth articulates a unique theology of the human body and its purposes in God’s inaugurated kingdom on earth. In examining 1st Corinthians 6:12-20,  Paul addresses boundaries and abuses of freedom in the Christian life (6:12-13), God’s purpose for the human body in Christ (VS 14-20), the sinful practice of sexual immorality against both the body and the Lord (VS 14-18), and communal holiness for the collective church as Christ’s body (15-20). This paper will endeavor to explain and support the position that Paul’s theology of the human body, explicitly expressed and supported in this passage, was unique in Paul’s day and is coherent and consistent within greater Pauline literature. It will begin by addressing the wider issue at stake in Paul’s entire letter to the Corinthians.