As mentioned yesterday, we’re kicking off an in-depth conversation about online church. Over the next several weeks, we’re going to “focus on specific issues and aspects of online church one at a time. The objective is not to definitively prove whether virtual churches are legitimate churches or not, but to help the church become better by discussing where virtual churches have unique the potential to advance the kingdom of God and where they face challenges to becoming healthy, fully functional churches.”
I think the place to start this conversation is by looking at what specifically an organization must be and do to be a “real,” biblical church whether online or offline.
In his book SimChurch (affiliate link), Douglas Estes explores several definitions of church:
Estes starts by defining a church as “a localized assembly of he people of God dwelling in meaningful community with the task of building the kingdom.”
He quotes Martin Luther who defined a church as “the gathering of believers, in which the gospel is purely preached and the holy sacraments are administered n accord with the gospels.”
John Calvin added to Luther’s definition saying a church must include correct church government and discipline.
In his book Purpose Driven Church, Rick Warren defined a church as having 5 specific purposes: evangelism, worship, discipleship, fellowship, and ministry.
So, which of these do you believe is necessary for a church to be a biblical church? And why?
- Evangelism
- Worship
- Discipleship
- Fellowship
- Ministry (Serving those within the church)
- Missions (Serving those outside the church)
- Sacraments
- Authority (Established/overseen by a denomination or similar organization)
- Government (A charter or bylaws establishing organizational structure within the church & membership process/rules)
- Discipline (correcting members who behave in appropriately and rooting out false doctrine)
- Gathering together on a regular basis
- Preaching by an ordained minister
- Sunday school or small groups
- Nifty Fifties
- Motorcycle ministry
- Others?
Please help spread the word about this discussion specifically to those involved in the development and pastoring of online churches. We’d want as many people and perspectives involved as possible. And don’t forget to vote in the poll in the right sidebar.
43 Comments
Quote by Paul: "Brian, thanks for your comment. So, are you saying evangelism, worship, discipleship, fellowship, and ministry and the 5 things a church must do to be a “real” church?"
Yes. Those things are categories, but even those things are not an end in themselves. They are God given expressions of how to express our love towards God and love towards others. These are the tracks which love run on. To clarify, people could come together and say "Ok, now I've worshipped" or "I've served" or "I've enjoyed fellowship" and that is not church. That is a checklist. They've missed the point because they have not walked away with knowing that they love God/others, or knowing they need help in loving God/others and choosing to make changes.
This leads me to ask "What is love?" I'm glad God tells us what love looks like, not only from 1 Cor 13 (where, ironically, Paul is telling the Corinth church how to have public services and "do church"), but also the entire story of the Bible.
Now back to the issue at hand, churches express that love through worship, discipleship, evangelism, ministry and outreach. All the other things serve and express those 5 purposes.
The church is defined as the body of people who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior. That body is instructed to observe and seek several things. Communion, water baptism, laying on of hands for physical healing, baptism in the Holy Spirit, and the assembling together as they see the return of Christ coming are a few of the more prominent. Most of these cannot be done in a virtual church environment.
I feel that there is a very real benefit seeing that a particular body of believers in this town exist in physical form. You get that when you attend a service in person. You don't get this in a virtual service. For all you know you might be chatting with a computer program written by a computer science researcher in artificial intelligence.
It is nice that people who consider themselves shut-in can get religious fellowship on-line. It would be better if the power of God was working in more of us (myself included) as it was in the New Testament church so that we could go to minister to those shut-in and perhaps see some miracles performed or healing done so they wouldn't be shut in any longer.
At any rate, any such church that you are trying to define must accept Christ as its foundation and the whole Bible as its guidebook (and not just the convenient bits that people like to hear).
The church is already badly fractured. Perhaps the pieces will never be put together again before Christ comes. Having many pieces works to Satan's advantage and not Christ's. Anytime Satan can convince someone to not attend church because the Christians are fighting with one another or disagreeing about how their particular faction should worship or what bits of the Bible they believe and what bits they think only applied 2,000 or more years ago, he has won a victory. When people get mad and move to another church instead of fixing what is wrong, Satan wins another victory. If he can keep people at home where there are greater numbers of temptations and distractions, he wins again. If anything, we should be trying to unify ourselves once again to fight a united front. Adding more virtual churches makes things much worse and adds to the likelihood that people will receive unsound doctrine.
That isn't to say that having a web presence is bad. It is useful to be able to get a sermon if you were out of town or something. But it should be secondary to the primary physical focus.
I just got into the mix of this discussion, but I do believe that we can emulate the first church to a certain degree. But I will not go into great detail but will answer the first question, What is a Biblical church. The simple definition of a church is a body of called out (from the world, Saved), baptized (scriptural baptism is nothing other than immersion according to scripture by one who is authorize to perform such tasks)believers, set apart to do God's business. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
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To William Haller — I couldn't disagree with you more. But Paul has asked us not to address the question (as you nevertheless did) about whether online churches are legitimate or not in this post. So I'll stick to the question alone:
In trying to capture the essence of what a "real" church is, I look to the example of Jesus, around whom all our beliefs and practices are supposed to be gathered.
So…
Things Jesus did and explicitly instructed his followers to do:
*Baptize people
*Proclaim good news to the poor, the sick, the powerless, and the oppressed, INCLUDING healing them, feeding them, and taking care of them.
*Pray, using the model he gave.
*Love one another.
*Break Bread & Remember — While Jesus *did* share bread and wine with his followers, the actual instruction was to REMEMBER Jesus whenever we did those things.
For me, these things (above) are the essentials of being part of the church. Emphasis here on the church "universal" rather than local. We are the body. All of us, wherever we are.
Neal, we actually agree more than you think – at least according to the rest of your comment.
To clarify my post, Paul first asked "what specifically an organization must be and do to be a “real,” biblical church whether online or offline".
The items I listed were specific Biblical requirements for the body of believers. I simply added that they were very difficult to achieve in a virtual church environment since that was where he was going with the final objective of the expected several week long thread.
If you had one virtual church that everyone participated in, you could probably make it work and be closer to what Christ had in mind than what we have now. You could issue instructions to all believers in city Y to gather by the river or pool for a baptism ceremony at an appointed time. You could all meet somewhere for communion. You could meet in chat rooms for learning, and on and on.
If there were members of the virtual church in every town, there would always be someone (if they were willing) to do His work when a physical presence was needed. If you had enough bandwidth, you could even broadcast the group activities to the world for a witness.
But you'll never have a single virtual church situation. You'll have thousands of little virtual congregations with little unity doing their own thing, with people from around the world joining in to whatever one suits their fancy at the moment and moving on when something doesn't suit them. If they are adjunct to a physical presence and under that authority, you have safer footing, but it still doesn't solve the many heads and chiefs and too few workers problem. The bricks and mortar church people problems I described are where we are falling down in living up to the "real" Biblical standards Paul mentioned. Adding multiple virtual churches to the mix just exacerbates the current situation and its problems while opening up many more.
Of the items Paul listed: Evangelism, Worship, Discipleship, Fellowship, Ministry, Missions, Sacraments, Authority, Discipline, and Gathering should be included. Why? They're commanded. The Bible should be the Governing document. Preaching by an ordained minister would not necessarily be required although the person should be operating with that gifting. I would group Sunday School or small groups in with Discipleship and Fellowship. The rest I assume were added for humor sake.
The interesting question is what would Jesus in fact do if he had been born today instead of 2,000 or so years ago. I maintain that he worked person to person. He didn't use the media of his day in any way that is recorded. Paul certainly did, and we have the New Testament as a result of his and others letter writing and historical documentation efforts. But Jesus himself worked strictly on a verbal one to one or one to many level. That's something to think about as the "church" is evaluated.
I could see that in times of persecution the fellowship of the church could be done on the internet. The problem is that the internet relationships cry out for face to face meetings. The group meetup.com is an indication of the need of not just cyber relationships but in the flesh meetings to bring some interactions together. I believe that the taking of bread and wine together is significant. So a community can relate using internet and can use the internet for what a communicty of faith does such as pray, worship, evangelize, and teach. Using such a tool can help us do this but would we choose to only do church this way unless under persecution.
William–we still disagree on a very fundamental level. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to engage some of your points more fully when the appropriate post comes up.
One thing (since it’s directly related to the question at hand):
I’ve stated that my own understanding of the church is tied to things Jesus expressly instructed his followers to do (as opposed to things he just *did* which may still be good examples to follow).
You seem not to disagree me on that point, if I’m understanding you correctly, so if we can back up to there…
Where does Jesus expressly command his followers to gather, and what in his words (or at least the Greek in which they were written) indicates to you that “gathering” is something that can only be done with bodily proximity?
Mind, I’m not necessarily arguing that gathering isn’t important for a church — just that it’s on shaky biblical ground if we are focusing on things Jesus instructed us to do, and that even if he did, the concept may be more broad than we allow it to be.
Also, for the record, since Paul asked us to refrain from judging whether or not online churches are legitimate or not, I think it would be helpful to choose our words carefully.
For example: Saying that something is “difficult” or “challenging” or even “problematic” to do in a virtual environment is quite different (and more charitable) than saying something “cannot be done” or “you don’t get this in a virtual service.” I would submit that when such finality is used, it tends to shut down the conversation before it gets started — and it doesn’t acknowledge the humility that you might also be wrong (especially if you’ve never experienced a wide variety of virtual church services firsthand).
As the order goes out from Rome to shut down the church buildings, unless it is to worship the antichrist, none of this discussion will matter much. Those who worhip the Lord will need to worship him in spirit and truth. There will be no brick and mortar worhip nor will there be cyber worhship for that will be shut down also. It truly will be a rare occasion that we find ourselves gatherd for fellowship in the last days. So let us hold true to what is truely important which is the spreading of the gospel, the teachings of Christ doctrines and being led of the spirit of God. Since we are the church the question asked of what is necessary to be considered a biblical church is answerd by the fruits that one manifestes after he accepts Jesus. The lord said you will know who belongs to me by the way they treat(love) one another. There is no validation needed for a brick and mortar church or cyber church all that is needed is for the Lord to build it.“Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it”—Psa.127:1. Sound doctrine by the leading of the Holy Spirit is what is required. The bottom half of the proposed list really falls in the area of entertainment and activities which are satans substitutes for joy in the church. God Bless