What comes to mind when you think of church?
Do you think of the wooden pews and intricate stained glass windows that line the sanctuary? The stacks of Bibles and hymns? What about the stage and pulpit? When you think of attending a megachurch, you probably think of a large auditorium setting.
All these details tell us what we see when we look at the building, but they tell us nothing about what the church is supposed to look like Biblically. There are no instructions in the Bible about the form of seating or how to use the stage. There is no mention of the required carpet color or the use of stained glass windows. In the early days of the church, there were no chapels or cathedrals with spires. That’s because the church is not a building.
Believers make up the church, the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27).
How we look as members of the body of Christ is based on our relationship with Jesus and the mission He has given us. God has called us to be a multiplying people, a community that grows and touches the lives of others. It is a group of people who are becoming more and more like God.
C.S. Lewis wrote about the purpose of the church: just christianity. As he explained, “[T]The church exists only to draw people into Christ and make them little Christs. If they don’t, cathedrals, ministers, missions, sermons, and even the Bible itself become mere wastes of time. ” (HarperOne, 2001, p. 199).
Lewis’s statement may surprise you at first. Are building buildings, evangelizing, and studying the Bible a waste of time? They are if people are not growing in Christ and making disciples. The group of believers aims to become more and more like Jesus and to help others become reflections of Christ. If the church does not do that, then the church has not achieved its purpose. It doesn’t look like a Biblical church.
But what indicates that a group of believers is achieving this purpose of growing more like Christ?
Although the Bible does not give instructions on what a church building should look like, it contains a wealth of information about what it is like to live as an individual who belongs to the church.
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