First Things

Why We Gather: Part I

This season of searching has got me thinking a lot about church gatherings.  I’m not talking about gift exchanges, pot lucks, and singing Christmas Trees. I’m talking about the regular gathering of the church.

As Christians, we’re reminded to “go to church”.  But have you ever wondered why we gather? 

It seems like a silly question, that is until you think about it.  I mean, does attendance alone satisfy the requirement to “not forsake our gathering” (Heb. 10:25)? Or is there’s some purpose that we should be collectively striving toward when we meet?

I suspect most would say that the reason we gather is to worship.  After all, it does seem like our church services are built around activities like praise songs and prayer.  And since the worship service has remained essentially unchanged for the last 1,800 years, it’s easy to assume the way we gather satisfies the reason for our gathering.

But I’m skeptical. 

After a lot of research and practical experience, I no longer believe “worship” to be the primary goal of gathering.  Nor do I think much of what we do in a typical church gathering is particularly effective for achieving the Lord’s real purpose in our gatherings.

Over the next three posts I want to uncover why we gather as believers. 

Properly understanding why we gather will help us shape how we gather.  Where our practices are misaligned with the Lord’s purpose for His gatherings, we should consider an adjustment in how we do church.  Where there’s a complete departure from His purpose, it seems rational to reconsider our manner of gathering altogether.

I recognize it’s exceedingly arrogant to suggest that most churches could be getting this wrong.  But I ask that you keep an open mind as you follow my logic.  When discussing methods of church practice, we tend to view what’s right in terms of tradition.  So, before we start, I’d ask you take any preconceived notions about “what church is” or “what church should be” and lay it at the altar of our King.  (After all, it’s His church.)  Starting with a clean slate in our minds will help us see more clearly the Lord’s original purpose for our gatherings.

As always, I’m open to correction on any of this and invite you into the discussion as I work out my own thoughts on this topic. To be clear, this is not a study on the purpose of the church, but rather to examine the purpose of our meeting together as a church. While these two things are related, they’re not quite the same.

In this article, we’ll start with our aperture on its widest setting to consider why believers gather.  We’ll consider ideas that you never thought of related to church gatherings. This will help limber up our minds to consider the context that will follow. In the next article, we’ll focus on what scripture can tell us.  In the final article, we’ll put it all together, draw conclusions, and respond to common objections.

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The beginning is always a good place to start. In fact, let’s start before the beginning.

The Gathering of the Trinity

Since all creation reflects its creator and mankind was created in God’s image, maybe there’s something about God Himself that can give us insight into why His children gather. 

In a previous post, I wrote on the Lord’s Eternal Purpose.  There, I described the eternal fellowship that existed among the members of the Godhead—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. This idea is derived from John 1:1-2; 17:5; and 17:24 among other places in scripture.

Here’s what I wrote…

“Before anything was created, there was only the uncreated Trinitarian Community:  the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.  What were they doing?  From the scriptures above, it would seem that they were focused on a single activity:  Engaging one another in eternal fellowship, unbroken communion, and boundless intimacy.  It was eternal because its members had no beginning. (The Trinity is uncreated.)  It was unbroken because there was nothing from which to divide their attention.  Their intimacy was boundless because boundlessness is the nature of God and everything that flows from Him.  The Father loved the Son by way of the Spirit.  The Son returned the Love to the Father by way of the Spirit.  And this was all there was–a fellowship based on fathomless intimacy that was beyond human description.”

– The Eternal Purpose (post)

When was the first church gathering? Was it at Pentecost as chronicled in the first chapters of Acts?  Or maybe as Jesus gathered with His disciples?  Or could it have been in the various assemblies of the Jews in the Old Testament? 

I would suggest that long before anything was created, the Trinity participated in what could be called the first church gathering. 

Why did they gather? 

They gathered to behold one another in love, appreciation, reverence, and beauty; to speak words of eternal truth; and to glorify one another. 

How did they gather? 

They gathered in community. 

In his book The Community Life of God, Milt Rodriguez makes the case that the Godhead was intended to be the model for all relationships in the church.  In other words, the communion of the Father and the Son was characterized by the exchange of divine life between them. So if that same divine life has now been given to His church to participate in its nature (2 Peter 1:3-4), then the same relationship and interactions that occur within the Godhead would be replicated between the Lord and among the members of His Body (John 17:20-23). 

Says Rodriguez,

“True ‘church life’ is the spiritual and practical expression of the corporate life of the Triune God.  This is lived out through human beings. We do not have a community that is separate from His.  He IS our community!  If a group of believers is not a community, then they are not the church.  The church is not a building, organization, or event.  The church is the community of believers who are the expression of the corporate life of God.  This is a continual flow of divine life, not just a meeting.  This is a tribe, a society, a lifestyle, a family of brothers and sisters.”

Milt Rodriguez, The Community Life of God

The implications of this idea are staggering. It completely shatters the experience of a typical church gathering.  Here, we not only do we model the relationship within Godhead, but we’re given the privilege of participating with the Trinity in their gathering!  We don’t invite the Lord to come into His presence for an hour on a Sunday morning.  Rather, He invites His children to come into His presence to join what He’s has always been part of.     

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If this any of this is true, we should consider the following:

• If the church has been invited to participate in the gathering of Father, Son, and Spirit, what would it look like?   What kinds of activity and interaction would take place?

• If the Lord Himself has invited us into His gathering, who leads the gathering?    

• If the Lord is part of our gatherings, how do we engage Him?  How does He participate with us? 

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As you ponder these questions for yourself, here are my thoughts:

If we’ve been invited to participate in the gathering of Father, Son, and Spirit, I would guess that most of our time together would be spent engaging one another in the same sort of interaction. As we are filled with the Life of the Lord is given to us, we would share that life with others. That Life would include things like love, truth, wisdom, adoration, and encouragement. The exchange of that life would not be uni-direction (always originating from the same source and always being received by the same recipients), but rather multi-directional. Every member of the assembly would be both a giver and receiver of the Life of the Lord provides to its human members.

Regarding who would lead such a gathering, it sort of depends on what we mean by “lead”. I define leading as “sharing something that the Lord has given me with another”. In one sense, the Lord always takes the lead. He is always leading–always. But in an assembly of believers where He is present, He most often leads through each member as the Spirit enlivens each member. He can do this through a pastor or member of the clergy. But he also leads through ordinary men, women, and even children. It’s not a matter of who has a role or title of leader. Rather, it’s a matter of who the Lord has chosen to speak through at the given moment and who is willing to respond to His nudge.

If our gatherings are truly a participation in an assembly of the Lord’s leading, it would seem of utmost importance to first truly believe that He is imminently available and in our midst. The second thing is that we take the time and prepare ourselves to be receptive to what He would say to us. For unless we give Him space to speak, it will be very difficult for the Lord to participate in our gatherings.

Let’s continue…

Clues from Anthropology

Maybe it’s a stretch, but I believe one way to understand why Christians gather is to understand why all humans gather.  After all, the Lord designed humanity to be social.  He could have just as easily created us to be solitary creatures, perfectly independent from each other.  But he didn’t.  He created us to gather in communities and do things together.  Of course, sin and the Fall maligned our gathering instincts, giving us less than noble reasons to gather (such as conducting war, engaging in organized crime, subjugating weaker societies, etc.).  But deep within us is the drive to be with and do things with other humans. 

This drive has been recognized and studied by secular anthropologists and social scientists.  Their research tells us that humans gather several reasons. These include: 

• The need for safety and security:  There’s safety in numbers.  Being together is vital to survival.  Isolation means death—not only physical death, but mental and spiritual death as well.

• The desire to work toward shared goals:  As independent as we want to be, there are things we can’t do alone.  We gather to work toward goals that couldn’t be done with fewer people. Achieving these goals isn’t merely through the division of labor, but also through the motivation, accountability, and support that’s required to reach it.  Through cooperation, we pool and leverage our individual strengths to get the job done.

• The need for mutual support and encouragement:  Humans were made for connection. People gather to support one another mentally and emotionally. Our interactions provide context through which we weigh our own thoughts and actions.  Despite advances in telecommunication technology, there’s something about being in the physical presence of others that “digital presence” can’t replace.

• The need to belong:  There is something inside of every human that causes them to want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. We want to feel valued and accepted as part of a group as we contribute to its purpose.  This explains why things like social organizations, being a part of a military unit, and even membership in gangs and terrorist organizations have such draw.

• A desire to share experiences.  People gather to share their common experiences. This not only includes doing things with others, but also talking to others outside the group about the things they experienced.  By telling the story of our own experiences, we bring others into that experience.

Note that while any of these reasons could be corrupted, they are neither inherently corrupt nor the result of corruption.  It’s as though these desires were placed in our hearts as part of the Lord’s original design.  But since the Fall, we’ve struggled to satisfy them. We worry about safety, struggle for the help we need, and pursue unsatisfying relationships in the hope of satisfying these needs.

But in Christ we are a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). Being a new creation applies to not only the individual, but also the corporate body of those who have been made new. It’s through the gathering of the new humanity (the church) that the Lord has given us the means and ability to live our lives consistent with our anthropological design. If so, humanity’s social design would be most fully realized in a gathering of believers under the headship of Christ.

It’s only in such an assembly that we can completely satisfy the need to:

• Rest in the safety and security (since we rest in Christ who is in our midst–Matt. 11:28; 1 Peter 5:7; Heb. 4:9-10), 
• Work toward shared goals (since mankind’s greatest endeavor is to leverage our individual strengths to demonstrate, embody, and proclaim the Kingdom–1 Cor. 12:21-27),
• Support and encouraging one another (since our support and encouragement comes from the love that Christ has given us to share–1 Thes. 5:11),
• Attain the highest sense of belonging (since humanity’s highest call is to serve the True King by advancing His Eternal Purpose–Eph. 3:11-12), and 
• Share experiences with other brothers and sisters (by learning from one another as we pursue the Lord together–Rom. 15:14).

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So, if humanity’s social design was to be most fully realized in an assembly of Christians, here are a few questions to consider:

• What kind of changes would be required in order to gathering this way?

• If Christians were free to gather in a way that aligned with the Lord’s communal design, what would their gatherings look like?  

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Again, here are my thoughts:

For the church to assemble in a way that reflects the five bullets above would require a significant amount of time, space, personal commitment, and intentionality. It would require the involvement of every member–not just as passive spectators. It would also require a level of closeness and intimacy among members that would rival those of the closest friendships. Lastly, it would require an awareness of our purpose that’s light-years beyond mere “church attendance”. This would require interaction beyond the church’s “regularly scheduled programming”–even possibly outside of it.

I think for most of us, a gathering like this would look very much like a gathering of close friends or family members. Except that instead of the typical topics of such gatherings (politics, sports, weather, school, etc.), the focus and source of our interaction would be on the Lord Himself.

Let’s keep going…

The Synagogue

After the fall, the Lord sought to redeem the world through the Hebrew Nation. I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on how the Jewish Synagogues may have influenced why we gather as Christians. After all, Christianity was born out of Judaism.

The word “synagogue” is taken from the word synagōgē (συναγωγή) which literally means “gathering”.  While tradition stories vary, history suggests that the synagogue began out of necessity during the periods of captivity after the Judeans were exiled to Babylonia around 598 B.C. Because they no longer had access to the Temple in Jerusalem, disbursed Jews would gather for group prayer and communal worship.  After the end of the exile some 50 years later, many but not all Jews returned to Jerusalem.  As they migrated and settled into Palestine and throughout the Mediterranean basin they would continue meeting in this fashion.  While the Temple continued to be the focal point of Jewish worship until its destruction in 70AD, the synagogue assembly had been firmly established in Jewish culture by the first century.  By then it had come to have its own specialized buildings for worship.  These are the places that Paul and Barnabas visited in Asia Minor to share the good news of the Messiah’s return during their first missionary journey recorded in Acts 13-14.

Like the earliest church, few details are recorded about the core purpose and manner of gathering of the first century synagogue.  Like the church, their manner of assembly has changed throughout the centuries. A synagogue service today, and even during the medieval period is significantly different than it was back then.  But the details we have in scripture and the Mishnah provide a tantalizing look at the manner and purpose of the first century synagogue and Christian church may have looked like (since the earliest Christians were Jews and Gentile “God fearers” who participated at such gatherings).

Each synagogue was an autonomous body–there was no organizational structure above them. While the Pharisees were technically in control of the synagogues, their influence into the regular assembly meetings was spotty outside of Jerusalem and the major population centers. 

The members would gather every Sabbath. At that time, rabbinic leadership of a synagogue was rare. Instead, they were communal institutions led by a plurality of elders and archisynagogoi (Greek for “heads of synagogues”) (Mark 5:22; Acts 13:15). Also, the “service” itself was not performed by one person or even a group of permanently installed officers. Rather, it was conducted by a group of lay peers chosen by the congregation at the beginning of each assembly to perform during specific parts of the gathering.  While it is common today for men and women to be separated in an orthodox synagogue service, evidence suggests that the women sat with their husbands and children in the 1^st century.

The primary purpose of the typical assembly was worship and instruction. Worship was done in the form of communal responsive prayers (Matt 6:5, Josephus, Life). The prayers of that time were most certainly based on 19 eulogies and four benedictions which were said in a very specific order in a liturgical style.  To some degree, the gathering was a procedural necessity, since certain prayers could not be said unless at least 10 or 11 men were gathered.  As part of this liturgy, the Shema was recited which declared their allegiance to the Lord.  Interestingly, songs in the form of hymns were not a part of the 1^st century synagogue service.  Rather, the prayers were chanted or intoned (with the precise intonations having been handed down by tradition).

Toward the end of the service, Instruction was given in the form of reading and interpreting the Torah and the Prophets (Acts 15:21). This part of the service was less liturgical and more “free form”.  Any Jew could access the Ark of Scrolls and could be invited to give a reading (as we see Jesus doing in Luke 4:16-21).  We see Paul and Barnabas taking advantage of this flexibility as they were invited to speak on various occasions from Acts 13-19.  A “sermon” would then be given, followed by a priestly blessing.

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So, given the form of the 1st century synagogue gathering…

• In what ways would the purpose and manner of the Jewish assembly have changed with the reality of the Messiah?

• In what ways could it have remained the same?

• Why did 1^st century Messianic Jews find it necessary to assemble separately from the Jews of tradition?

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Again, here are my thoughts…

If accepted by the synagogue, acknowledgement of the Messiah’s would have radically changed the posture of Judaism. It seems the purpose of the 1^st century synagogue gathering was to serve primarily as a reminder of who the attendees were as Jews.  It provided a means of “anticipatory maintenance” which served to keep the Law alive in their hearts and to maintain communal connections with their tradition and with one another.  The various feasts and celebrations that the synagogue would observe such as Passover, Pentecost, and the Day of Atonement were shadows which anticipated the coming Messiah.

However, when Christ arrived and His Kingdom declared, the purpose of such assemblies would have shifted to align with the new paradigm. Specifically, their focus would shift from being primarily reflective and anticipatory to being declarative and celebratory. Not only has the Messiah arrived, but He is inducting ordinary believers into a priestly class (1 Peter 2:9) to be the vessels of the very Spirit of Christ (Col. 1:27; Rom. 8:11), taught directly by God (John 6:45) and empowered to bring the message of the Kingdom to the four corners of the world. These differences would necessarily introduce new practices into the early Christian gatherings beyond the traditional elements that I described above.

This said, there are many elements of the synagogue gathering that could have easily been retained in a messianic Jewish gathering. We need to keep in mind that throughout the first century, Christianity was viewed as an odd sect within Judaism. The book of Acts and other epistles spend significant time describing the contentious interactions between the New Wine and the old wine skins. Clear distinctions between traditional Judaism and Christianity would not be drawn until the 2nd century.

John Kennedy, in his book The Torch of the Testimony, believes that the synagogue was the natural springboard from which the messianic message should have taken root. (The synagogue assemblies should have been the first churches!) While this happened in some cases, in other cases it did not. Where this new idea was unwelcome, Paul and his missionary partners had to find space outside of the synagogue assemblies for the church to assemble. Regardless, the first Christians were Jews and there’s no reason to believe that liturgical elements of intoned prayers and creed were not retained as part of the earliest Christian assemblies. The difference would have been that the traditional prayers, creeds, and liturgical elements that at one time anticipated the Messiah and His new reign were now viewed and performed from the perspective of being fulfilled in their time.

An Obligation to the Common Good

Depending on your Bible translation, the word “church” is used around 115 times in the New Testament.  “Church” is a distinctly English word whose derivation (from Greek to Latin to German to English) across the centuries is rather cryptic.  But if we can crack the code on its original meaning and intent of this word, it might shed some light on what the Lord intended for our gatherings.

Whenever you come across the word “church” in scripture, the Greek word used there is the word ekklesia (ἐκκλησία) which is generally translated “assembly” or “gathering”.  It’s a versatile word that could be used to refer to social, political, and religious gatherings.  It could even be used to refer to groups that never formally gathered.

However, during the 4^th and 5^th centuries B.C., the word ekklesia held special significance.  It was used to refer to an assembly of approximately 6,000 Athenian citizens. This group was summoned by herald as often as 30 to 40 times each year to make decisions affecting the public.  When summoned, they had a civic responsibility to assemble on the Pnyx which was a hill to the southwest of the Acropolis in Athens.  There, they would seek the common good of their city-state through deliberation and by voting on proposed decrees, treaties, laws, and elections.

If you were around at that time, you would have noticed no grammatical between these two meanings of ekklesia.  It would have been like using the phrase “white house” to refer to either a white-colored house across the street or the place where the President of the United States lives.  What was meant by ekklesia would have been derived from its context.  Regardless, prior to Jesus, ekklesia carried no special connotation as a “group of Christians”.

Among the gospels, Matthew is the only one where the word ekklesia is mentioned.  It’s used in Matthew 16:18 where Jesus mentions that He will build his church.  Of course, we run into the problem of trying to figure out the term that Jesus actually used since he likely spoke Aramaic before Matthew translated this event into Greek.  But we know that Luke (in Acts), Paul, James, John, and the writer of Hebrews used ekklesia in their epistles to refer to the congregations of Christ’s people.

It’s interesting that there were other Greek words could have been used to describe the church as a gathering.  For example, plethos (πλῆθος) indicates a large group of people.  Theates (θεατές) refers to spectators or onlookers.  Laos (λαός) refers to a collective group with a common purpose.  But despite this variety, ekklesia was chosen and consistently used to describe the Body of Christ. 

There are a couple of reasons why scholars believe the word ekklesia was chosen to refer to the church in scripture.  One reason, suggested by Robert Farrar Capon, proposes that ekklesia was the obvious choice to describe assemblies under the new covenant based on how the Hebrew was translated into the Greek in the Septuagint.  The Septuagint used the words ekklesia and synagoge to describe the assembly of Israel.  Since the word synagoge had already been taken to describe the Jewish synagogue, they believe the New Testament writers used the only remaining word to describe the church (which they viewed as the fulfillment of Israel’s purpose) which was ekklesia. 

But there’s another theory. 

Some scholars have suggested that the word ekklesia might have been applied to the church to intentionally invoke the idea of the Athenian legislative body we just described.  In her dissertation, The Ekklesia as an Assembly That Invokes Response, Tara Caudle writes:

“The aspect of citizenship holds great influence in both the Greek context and the biblical context of the ekklesia. With citizenship comes the responsibilities of being a citizen. For the Greeks, citizenship means obedience to the law of Athens and contributing to the good of the polis through participation in the ekklesia. For the kingdom of God, citizenship means obedience to God’s commands to love God and others and fulfill the great commission. This is done, in part, through participation in the ekklesia, by assembling with the other citizens of God’s kingdom. . . . In the Athenian assembly, the common advantage is sought for the sake of a healthy polis by which man has the good life. In the biblical assembly, the common advantage is sought for the sake of the gospel by which man has eternal life through Christ.”

– Tara Caudle, The Ekklesia as an Assembly That Invokes Response

In other words, just as the Athenian assembly were citizens summoned by herald into the work of the polis, the church are citizens summoned by Christ into the work of the Kingdom.  Just as the Athenian assembly was obligated to the community to contribute to the common good of its citizens, the Christian assembly is obligated to the Kingdom community to contribute to the common good of its citizens (1 Cor. 12:7). 

I don’t know about you, but I find this concept intriguing (and not just a little bit exciting). 

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Presuming that the Christian ekklesia was intended to have a similar role and obligation as the Greek ekklesia:

• How does the interaction between members of the Greek assembly compare to that of the Christian assembly? How are they similar? Different? Why?

• How might things change if we understood the purpose of gathering as a place where every member has an obligation to contribute to the spiritual and practical needs of the assembly?

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First, the Greek assembly appears to have been autonomous. Its members had final say in the responsibilities to which they were summoned. There was no presiding leader to overturn their decisions. Instead, they hashed things out through deliberation and simple majority voting. This differs significantly from the common church experience. Unlike where authority is retained within the clerical class or special body of elders, the Greek model appears to reflect the scriptural principle of functional equality and inter-dependence (1 Cor. 12:20). But while the Greek assembly made decisions through popular vote, it appears that the earliest church appears to have practiced a form of consensus decision-making among its members (Acts 15:22,25).

Second, I think a sense of obligation and purpose for all members would be a game-changer for the church. Today, many of us view church as a spectator activity where professionals and a small cadre of specialty volunteers offer the masses an opportunity to participate in a few songs and listen to a teaching. But if we were to see our purpose in gathering as a place where we have all been summoned by Christ to mutually contribute to one another’s spiritual and practical well-being, what would happen?

To be honest, I think it would scare some people off. Many church goers are very comfortable and happy with being disconnected spectators. These folks would quickly leave and find another place where they could continue spectating. But others I believe would be radically enlivened by an awareness of their divine responsibility to others. I think they would become energized as a participant (and not merely a consumer). The traditional “order of worship” would be insufficient to facilitate this kind of interaction. Like the Pnyx of ancient Athens, space would have to be carved out of the existing paradigm for this kind of activity.

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In this post we evaluated the Christian gathering at a very high level by looking at several prototypical models of the church. These models reflect various ideas concerning how the Lord might want His church to function. The purpose of this exercise was to break up traditional, historical, and eisegetical paradigms to stretch our thinking about how and why the church gathers.

We considered the communal interaction between the Father, Son, and Spirit as the model of the church’s gathering.  We looked at the church gathering as where the Lord’s social design for humanity is most fully realized.  We evaluated the 1st century synagogue assembly as the church’s immediate precursor. Lastly, we pondered the idea of the Greek legislative assembly as a model of the Christian assembly.  After each section we asked questions to consider why and how the church would gather in light of these models.

After taking a close look at these models, we notice a few significant themes of the church gathering. These include:

• Close communal relationships among the members
• Purposeful and effective interaction and mutual participation among the members
• An awareness and focus on the Lord who is active and present in the gathering
• Practical, declarative, and celebratory expression of the Life that God shares

In the next post, we’ll narrow the focus by looking closely at what the New Testament specifically offers us on this subject.