LOCATING THE CHURCH

When I was growing up we went to church three times a week…Sunday morning and evening and Wednesday night. We also went to all the special ‘Meetings’ and singings in between. When we went ‘to church’ we went to the located building called ‘the church house’ or ‘the church building’ or simply ‘the church.’ When it was time to ‘go to church’ we knew where we were headed. It is still very much this way in most traditions, most thinking and most vocabularies.

I was probably in my late teens before I started reading anything including the Bible and I stopped reading Tarzan, Popeye and Superman as my main reading source. It was in my mid-twenties in Bible study that I started to notice that ‘the church was not located somewhere in a building’ of some kind. It was clear to me that the ‘location of the church’ in the New Testament was ‘within the believer’ and that “we are the temple of the living God” (2 Corinthians 6:16). This also meant that the Old Testament temple model was not the New Covenant model, although historically it has remained as ‘the holy place where God is’ and where we go to meet him where a professional priest is there to help us meet God.

Well, ‘So what?’ This to me is ‘so what,’ Words matter—except when they don’t. Covenants matter…except when they don’t, “A new and living way” matters…except when it doesn’t.
“Since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” (Hebrews 10:19-22)

“I am the way…” Jesus