What is a church?

What is a church?   When you read, or hear, that word what comes to your mind?  For the majority of our world it is a building.  A place that people go to hear about God. Some see it as a club.  A place where only members belong.  You can join the club; but in order to become a member you have to fulfill certain requirements:  regular attendance, monetary giving each week  and active participation in church functions.  You are expected to do your part to make programs successful.  In all of this descriptive information there seems to be something missing for me.  God/Jesus!  The very reason for coming to the church building to begin with.

Now I invite you to think about the world before God came in Jesus' skin.  It was much like it  Is today.  A world of insiders and outsider.  The clean and the unclean! The acceptable and unacceptable!  The Jews and the Gentiles!  With the big temple building, on the mount in Jerusalem, where every one came to be near God (to the Hebrew people believed that God only resided in the temple). It was a holy place to them.  These faithful Jews took their religion very seriously.  They still do today.  We Gentile Christian could learn a lot from the Jewish people about faithfulness to God.

Enter Jesus into this culture of traditional Jewish rituals, traditions and understanding of God.  Being of the Jewish faith Jesus was raised as a good Jewish boy. However, in  my imagination, as Jesus grew he became aware of many teachings and traditions of his faith that seemed to contradict his way of thinking and being.  First of all, being God himself,  he knew that God was not just in the temple.  And at one point in his ministry, with the disciples, the issue of temple worship became a point of learning.  See Matthew 12:1-8 below).  Jesus didn't need a building!  He was the "...  lord of the sabbath."  He was the point of worship.  The building was not to be worship.  He was!  And ministry was done a midst the people.  All people! Not just the insiders -- the acceptable.

I am wondering this morning if the Christian people of today need to reconsider what it means to worship and follow Jesus in the streets of their towns.  Instead of spending so much time in a closed building to do all their worship.

I am just wondering!  Don't you

1 At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat.

2 When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, "Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the sabbath." 

3 He said to them, "Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry?

4 He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests. 

5 Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath the priests in the temple break the sabbath and yet are guiltless? 

6 I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. 

7 But if you had known what this means, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless. 

8 For the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath."