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

Community

Isolation and alienation (loneliness) is characteristic of the modern psychological state. As a culture we have bought into the western value system of the "rugged individualist" and our personal psychology and our communities have suffered because of it. At its best, individualism serves as impetus to great achievement. In every arena, the most helpful advances to the human condition have been accomplished by great individual feats, not as a result of the work of committees! However, at its worst, individualism is unbridled self-interest, hardly a kingdom value.

We are created for "otherness." Be it at the level of looking for "the other" (a mate), or just looking for friends, connectedness with others is a deep human longing frequently crushed under the brutalities of life experiences in a dysfunctional individualistic culture.

However, a mere aggregate of people who share similar interests or social status, does not constitute a church any more than a pile of bricks constitutes a building. In order to have a building, the bricks must be aligned (put in place) then bonded (mortared) all according to a plan.

Unfortunately, the Church is often characterized by relational breakdown and separation. The pressures of life that are divinely designed to weld and strengthen bonding commonly cause fracture and separation instead. When relationship and community are lost, the human spirit instinctively reaches out for alternatives. This is why various fraternal organizations and cults become populated. The relational vacuum in the Church sucks people into communal options where some sense of belonging exists. Even if it is shallow, people will chose shallow over nothing. They will choose shallow over religious pretension, and in the worst case, choose what is devilish.

This is why relational breakdown in the Church (at every level, marital, interpersonal) is so serious. When believer's fail to be reconciled, it must not be dismissed as, "oh well, we just had a difference of opinion." We must see it for what it is: the dissolution of the bond of love and a demonstration to the observing world that Christ is dead and our faith is not real. For at the very core of Christianity is the message of reconciliation. Our culture's determination/attitude toward the Church is: if the bricks cannot hold together, the building is not worth owning. They are right. There has been failure in representation and we must admit it.

The Church is the place where individuals are placed according to God's plan into the fabric of relationship, where God's love becomes the binding mortar. Difficulties, trials and tests are meant to tighten the weave of the relational fabric of the planting of God.

A Purpose

The Church is a community of people who have been shaped by God and fitted together for a collective purpose and mission. Each individual believer has a personal purpose, but each community of faith, the local church, also has a unique purpose in its immediate geography and in the world.

One of the great joys of participation in the Church is discovery of purpose and plan. In a culture that tries to convince us that our existence is nothing more than the meaningless collision of a few atoms (we came from nothing and we are going to nothing-all that there is, or was, or will be is the cosmos as Carl Sagan deftly phrased) discovery of purpose brings an invaluable sense of well-being.

Yet if personal fulfillment and destiny does not have a context of love and service to others, it degrades into simple self-actualization with the same net result on the human soul and in the culture as purposelessness.

The nihilistic material determinist ends up living for themselves, because neither their life, nor the lives of others, has any transcendent meaning. They may appeal to "higher purpose" but in doing so, they are logically inconsistent and using borrowed ethical capital from Christianity. In a purposeless world, self-existence is all there is.

However, the Christian who awakens to "destiny" for their lives, but who lacks the context of service to God and others (a situation common in many young people's discipleship groups), likewise ends up living a self-centered existence energized with religion. There is no difference between them and the determinist unbeliever. It is still all about...me. If I had to choose between a hopeless self-centered person and a religious self-centered person, I would opt for the former. Both are blind, but the profession of sight in the latter makes the self-centeredness particularly loathsome.

Only where the ethos of Calvary is present, in the New Covenant Church, is destiny legitimately awakened and lived out.

Conclusion

What are we to make then of the question: "What is a Church?"

The Church is a state of being, not a place I attend once a week. The Church is the place where God has determined for the eternal to intersect the temporal. It is a place where two dimensions of life meet, and in a spiritual thermonuclear fusion, a new creation results, a living thing, centered in Christ: the Church of the Living God.

The Church is a state of belonging, an arena for the expression of life in community: success and failures, joy and pain, happiness and sorrow. It is a place where a person discovers his completeness and incompleteness: individually complete in Christ, yet incomplete without brothers and sisters. In the valuing of others, I discover I am valued.

The Church is simply the community of those who have genuinely experienced the renewing and regenerating life of the Lord Jesus Christ. They gather together on the basis of a common living union with the Lord Jesus Christ. Together they experience His bonding, and commit to sharing Him with others.