What We Talk About When We Talk About Church

Learning to participate in the mission and family of God

Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash

(An eight-minute read.)

Almost exactly seven years ago, back in 2016, my whole world was turned upside down.

I feel like a broken record when I talk about this, and I wrote a whole book that came out a year ago that details this journey. But I want to briefly describe that shift here because a) I don’t know that I’ve explicitly spelled it out via this medium before, and b) even if I have, I’ve discovered that we all need to hear things repeatedly in order for them to really sink in.

So I figured I’d take my first post of 2023 to describe this shift.

Because, despite all the other religious interests I have and the things I write, all my current thinking really stems from, is informed by, and seeks to ultimately serve my paradigm shift. Even when I wade into the weeds of academic interests, I always, always, always have an eye toward this larger vision.

When I say my whole “world” was turned upside down what I really mean is that my understanding of church was toppled—and, as someone whose profession is so intertwined with faith and personal identity, that essentially turned my whole world upside down.

To describe it briefly: prior to 2016, I essentially thought church was a program (or programs), held in a building each week, which people attended. Some of those people would devote most of their religious time and energy to preparing for and putting on the program(s)—including making sure what was taught during that program was exactly what the Bible taught—and then try to urge other people to attend the programs.

Sure, these people might spend some of their time with each other outside those programming hours, or they might do personal “witnessing” to people they hoped would ultimately attend the program and join “the church,” or they might do “community service” for an hour or two a month; but such activities, whether intentionally or not, had become optional add-ons that the super holy or serious religious people would do.

I won’t go into all the details about how and why my paradigm was shattered, but, through a series of events, the light-bulb turned on in March 2016 when I realized that church is not a program one attends in a building, but a life a person shares with others.

It’s not about a where or a when, but a who.

Church is not about trying to attract people to a building but about going out into the world and sharing life with others outside the walls of the building.

Church is God’s people doing God’s work in everyday life.

This simple graphic, which I came across one day, was really the clincher (the left side is what people typically think of as “church”; the right side is what the biblical vision seems to be):

This doesn’t mean we don’t regularly gather together as the family of God. We do. It’s just that gathering together is less about sitting as passive spectators in an auditorium while someone else performs ministry in front of and for us, and is more about sharing life with each other, encouraging each other in the truths of God’s story, and inspiring one another to participate in God’s mission in the world.

How this has practically played out for myself and the congregation I serve is that we prioritize two primary postures: we try to share life with one another as much as possible, and we try to share life with others outside our “fold” as much as possible. We embrace relational community more than anything else—feeling that safe, serving, and Jesus-centered community is the whole point of God’s story (see 1 John 1:1-3).

We certainly don’t do this perfectly at all. We have a long ways to go. But we’re slowly finding our way there.

Let me tell you three brief stories that illustrate what this has looked like for us (or at least me).

First is about our neighbor, Dick, whom I’ve written about before for this newsletter. He passed away 18 months ago but we basically “adopted” him as our grandfather soon after we moved into our house in 2011. A divorcee who lived by himself, we decided we’d commit to serving him. He had a standing invitation to join us for “taco night” every Friday night, my wife regularly baked cookies for him, we brought him to dialysis early in the morning, and had him join us for Thanksgiving multiple times.

When he passed away last summer (2021), I performed his funeral. I shared God’s love with the 150 people who were there.

Dick only “attended church” once with us—but he was clearly a part of our church. We shared life with him (as did a number of other people in our church family) and explicitly shared God’s story with him, seeking to give him a hope that he had a hard time believing (because it sounded too easy and sounded too good to be true).

Second is our other neighbor, Stevie (not his real name). He’s walked by our house for a decade, collecting bottles. He also lives by himself and has special needs. Over the years, we’ve slowly gotten to know Stevie better and I’ve given him rides to various places.

A year or two ago our friendship went to the next level after he told me he had cancer (which he’s since beaten). The conversations as he walked by our house each day got longer. He started sharing with me that he believed in God but he didn’t like the congregation he attended because the pastor talked about hell too much. It scared him.

I’m not one to quickly invite people to attend our worship gatherings, but I felt impressed to invite him. So pretty much every Saturday now we pick Stevie up and he joins us. He loves it.

He joined us for Thanksgiving this year as well and I baked a cake for the first time in my life a few months ago when it was his birthday. He calls me every day and we chat for a few minutes (I hate talking on the phone).

I don’t know if Stevie understands half the religious ideas our church talks about. But that’s OK. We’re just trying to serve him as best we can, being family to him. I have no other agenda than to share life with him and to try to make his life a little better and a little less lonely.

Lastly, there’s Jose. He used to work at the Mexican restaurant our book club would meet at each week. He was our server. After consistently having him as our server for a year or two, he got curious and asked if he could join our group so he could learn English better. Eventually he and I started meeting together one-on-one at a coffee shop and I learned his story.

He was startled to learn I was a pastor and told me he was an atheist, wondering if that was offensive and whether we could still meet. I assured him I wasn’t offended.

After a few months, he informed me he was returning to Mexico because he was undocumented and was feeling anxious about his immigration status because of some of the rhetoric our then-president was sharing.

A few weeks before he left, I decided to invite him to our worship gathering. He came and enjoyed it, feeling incredibly loved and embraced by everyone. He was also intrigued by one of the features we have each week: one person sharing their life story. When I drove him home, he asked me if he could share his story the next week. With a little bit of hesitation, I told him he could.

The next week he stood up and movingly shared his journey with our church family—including how he was an atheist but how he’d been blown away by our church family, leading him to decide that he would start attending church when he returned to Mexico.

These are just three stories of many—including many from other people in my congregation who’ve embraced this vision of church as well.

I don’t share them to make myself look good. I could tell you of many, many stories of times I’ve failed to live out this vision of church. And neither myself nor the congregation I serve have arrived at all—and I’d bet you’d be pretty unimpressed with all of us if you spent a week in our midst.

It’s just that we have feebly committed ourselves to the hard work of trying to be the church, rather than simply going to church.

I could give you all the Bible verses that I think lend support to such a vision, but I’ll forgo that for now. I could also spell out in more detail what it means to “share life” together and how that relates to traditional approaches to transferring information about the Bible to other people, but I’ll resist (I’m not trying to sell books at all, but you can find much more about these things in the book I just wrote on the topic).

The bottom line is that when I talk about church, what I mean is this: church is the family of God, feebly and imperfectly sharing life together and seeking to be family to others who aren’t consciously a part of it.

To be sure, we’d love for people to learn about and embrace our understanding of God’s story, but sharing life with others is not contingent upon them doing so. Nor is that our all-consuming agenda.

And ever since I’ve caught this vision of church, it’s felt like a fire in my bones.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.