What makes a church a church?

A seminary board meeting that I once attended included a fascinating discussion of this question. Previous meetings had mostly consisted of reports from faculty and staff members—also interesting, but considerably more passive for us attendees. The active discussion segment of this meeting especially appealed to me because it invited our own contributions and spurred us to think further.

Participants were from the south-central U.S. and included lay members as well as some seminary faculty and staff, mostly United Methodists but a few from other denominations. Most of the many clergy were relatively high-status—bishops, district superintendents, and pastors of large congregations. Given that inherent bias, it wasn’t surprising that many of these gave fairly traditional answers, but it was also refreshing that the meeting gave voice to some of us with less predictable ideas.

Is Jesus the main or only requirement? 

What are the two or three elements necessary for a group of people to be the church, and what makes the church distinctive from other community enterprises of goodwill and service? My own answer was that for a group to be a church, it must take Jesus as its model.

Without Jesus as an example and motivation, is a group something other than a church? Even though it may do valuable things for good reasons, such as making people happy or meeting important needs. Do you believe that unless the group exists because it attributes some kind of authority to Jesus, and thus sees the need to do what he did and what he commanded, that the group is not a church?

Many believe Jesus Christ as the sole basis is both necessary and sufficient - a group doesn’t qualify as a church without Jesus, and if a group seeks to embody Jesus, it doesn’t need anything else in order to qualify.  Is there more a church must believe or participate in?

How important are sacraments? 

Most other board members, however, seemed to feel that the “Jesus reason” was necessary but not entirely sufficient. Above all, many would also require traditional Christian sacraments. Since most of this group were United Methodists, for us that meant baptism and communion. Other Christians, especially Anglicans and Catholics, would add others. 

Are sacraments really essential parts of being a church? No doubt some ritual and discipline is useful, but why must it be only what is officially approved? Why is it not a sacrament to feed Christ’s sheep, to visit the sick and those in prison, to serve “the least of these”? What is really holier, liturgy or practical engagement? What can sanctify even our most everyday actions? It concerns me when sacraments seem to be little more than a kind of secret handshake, a ritual of honor granted to insiders purely by virtue of being insiders.

What is essential about worship? 

Many board members also mentioned corporate worship as being necessary for making a gathered group a church. Are they right about that? I’m not so sure. 

Many traditional worship services seem to depend on seeing God as an autocratic being who requires subjects to be subservient. I don’t see God like that, and I know that many other Christians don’t. In fact, such a portrayal, while it has “personal” aspects that many Christians value, can be a barrier to worship unless it is combined with other ways to reflect and portray God.

To me, “God” means instead something like an all-pervasive, impersonal order in the universe—in all that exists, whatever that may include. Demanding unthinking subservience from humans doesn’t seem to me like what such a God would do. 

Instead, such a God would inspire awe and reverence, often silence. But inspiring is very different from requiring. In too many typical worship services, awe, reverence, and silence are absent, and what is required is merely parroting traditional texts. 

Doctrines? Creeds? Beliefs? 

Familiar, traditional doctrines and creeds were also mentioned often in our discussion. Many participants felt that certain specific beliefs, especially about Jesus, had to at least be officially claimed by a group, even if not actually believed by every member, in order for the group to be a church. Among these beliefs were, predictably, that the Bible was the complete and only written statement from God; that Jesus was uniquely divine; that unlike anyone else he was bodily resurrected after having died; and that declaring belief in these things about Jesus guaranteed that believers would go to an ideal place after death while everyone else went to horrible eternal punishment. 

But these beliefs arose in times and cultures whose awareness of the world and knowledge about the universe was much more limited than what is now available to us. Consequently, many of today’s Christians feel that accepting these claims about the Bible and Jesus as literally true and reciting them regularly in our gatherings misleads churchgoers and keeps outsiders from finding the church credible. 

Would you claim to be among those who believe a church must participate in these sacraments, or affirm belief in set doctrines and creeds?

What do we need to do? 

The overall aim of the discussion I was part of was to ask what today’s pastors and other church leaders need to be doing, and how seminaries and other parts of the church need to be motivating and helping them. 
Part of what is needed, it seems, is to openly address questions, and to look actively for answers that will make sense to today’s people. We need to talk openly about the questions and possible answers, within the church and also outside of it. Merely continuing to parrot answers that were declared many centuries ago in cultures that had little resemblance to ours won’t serve the purpose. Letting ourselves be shaken up by hearing other possibilities and giving them serious consideration, rather than automatically assuming they’re wrong, is essential if we want to help transform the world in ways that Jesus advocated. Will the church ever become brave enough and energetic enough to do more of these things? I hope so.