The purpose of a church is to create the atmosphere in which faith grows. Notice I say “the” atmosphere. It’s the same thing as saying we pursue shalom. Peace with God has distinct boundaries, referred to as a covenant. The purpose of a church is to build up those boundaries around a community covenant identity that separates them from the world around them.
That community must become a moral and spiritual extended family household. It must be feudal in the ANE sense, where the treasure is the people. The whole point is to obey the Lord together. There is nothing to accomplish as humans measure such things. There is no requirement for professional training in the leadership, but moral conditioning so that the Spirit rules. There is no particular need for special purpose facilities or even real estate.
There is no particular expectation of growing beyond a certain size. Once it gets too many for a single head of household to manage, it’s time to divide and make it two bodies. It’s not that those bodies cannot cooperate and come under the broader leadership of someone higher up the chain in capability, but the task for that sort of leadership is quite different from being the head of household.
We aren’t digging into the details of all that, just outlining what a genuine biblical church looks like. It’s not a corporation; there’s no contract and no membership. It’s a family, a feudal household. All they have to do is strive after peace with God. It’s not about programs; those things will arise naturally from the necessities of the context. It’s not about “outreach” as is commonly defined in Western churches. Evangelism is living the Word so that folks outside the covenant community can see the power of the Word. There’s no sales pitch. Your shalom is the whole testimony. Talking about it comes as a mere side effect of getting people’s attention.
We are not in a First Century Mediterranean society where preaching in the marketplace is the only way to publish the message. Most people these days can read; the average Joe in the Mediterranean Basin was illiterate in the First Century. Their primary source of information was hearing things in a language they understood. First Century churches were places where reading aloud the Scriptures was the only way some folks would ever know what it said. The context has changed, but the underlying mission has not.
Nowadays teaching is far more important than preaching. There’s nothing holy about preaching; it was a contextual adaptation. It was the only way to introduce the call to faith to people who had never heard, or had heard too little. The primary mission of a church is to teach. There is a place for sharing prophetic concerns, but preaching is no longer the primary means of learning faith. We need more explanation so that people can move the thousands of miles and years to be nearer to divine revelation.
The First Century churches were modeled on synagogues for a good reason: The synagogue was an education center first and foremost. That model arose long before the Hellenized Talmudism of Jesus’ day. There was worship, as well, but organized worship was nothing like what we commonly see today. Most of the synagogue service was taken up in explaining the Scriptures, often from several different teachers. The common Protestant notion of hogging the schedule with elaborate music and oratory had no place in the New Testament.
It’s long past time to reexamine what actually happened in the New Testament and to figure out why it was like that. We need better clues than mere tradition. We should build a set of practices that fit our context from those clues.
