For many, the church is synonymous with irrelevancy: an archaic institution inhabited by pallid and wispy clerics, mumbling feathery platitudes to an audience of women, children, and the feeble of mind and body.

Stephen Crosby

When trying to explain the Church, the temptation is to rush to the Scripture for definition. What could possibly be wrong with that you might ask!? The Scripture is our source and surely has many wonderful metaphors to describe the Church! Indeed that is true. The only problem is our culture is not asking us if we are "scriptural." As hard as it is for those of us with extensive Church background to hear and to swallow, they don't care.

When we rush to the Scriptures we are attempting to answer a question of relevancy from a source no longer considered relevant by the asker. The question the Church is being asked by a skeptical culture is not, are you orthodox, but why should I buy your apples? We spend too much time fighting another generation's battles, providing answers for questions no one is asking and no one cares.

We seemed obsessed to defend the fact that our apples are all properly in a row in our cart, according to the principles of the universally approved and sanctioned standard of the fraternal order of apple merchants. However, the issue isn't the tidiness of our rows; it is the rottenness of our product. Our culture is not asking us about the basis of our belief system, it is asking for a taste and a drink! It is a taste and see matter, not a look and agree matter!

I am not saying that Scriptural and doctrinal matters are not important. They are simply not relevant to the people asking the questions. We provide the wrong information to the wrong people. So rather than quoting extensive Scripture, let's attempt to answer a question or two regarding the nature of the Church at a conceptual level, derived from Scripture. Perhaps we can discover a few points of unrealized expectation and close the gap between advertisement and experience.

The Church is like a coin with two sides. It has two identities: the eternal, spiritual, ideal entity and the practical, historical, and actual reality. How one answers the question concerning the nature of the Church depends on which entity you are trying to describe.

There is a difference, (and always will be) between what the Church is, and what it could or should be. Problems develop when expectations are based in the former and experience is the latter. I understand that from the eternal perspective, God's Church is destined to succeed. God is not a hand-wringing pessimist about how things are going to work out. I am going to limit my comments to the practical, historical entity-the Church in time and space-your church, and my church, and how we can cooperate in making her the best possible representation of the Lord's intent and heart that we can.

LIFE

Eleven dead men in a locker room do not make a football team. One hundred dead people in a sanctuary do not make a church. Whatever the Church is, whatever the something it offers is, it must be first qualified as a thing that is alive. The first requirement is always life and life is delicate. It is like a campfire. If it is not regularly fueled, it will expire. A Church is either a living thing or it is not.

What is life? Well, it is not enjoying the company of people who agree with your doctrine share your interests, social status, or geography. That does not constitute a church. Neither is much activity necessarily a sign of that which is alive. Busyness is not life, and may actually be a counterfeit for life. The Church is a fellowship of heart. Without shared life and shared heart, you can have all manner of structure, form, and activity, but it is not a Church.

Life in Christ is like the magnetic field of the North Pole. It cannot be detected without a compass. For the genuine believer, the life of God within them as the gift of salvation will "respond" like a compass in the presence of that which is alive in Him. When something is alive, you will know it, and when it is dead, you will know it also.

It is very easy to criticize organizations from a position or distance as if the institution was some how in itself a culpable entity. In reality, the quality of any organization of human beings is simply the net result of the accumulated individuals. If my Church is dead, the language of recovery is not "him, her, and them," but rather "me, we and us." I am the Church. The person next to me is the Church. The next person is the Church. Together we are the Church. The group--any group--will be revitalized in direct response and proportion to the revitalization of its individual members, not as a result of some magical climate change.