Jesus Has Left The Building

You know that Christendom has "succeeded" when even those who aren't a part of it (or are antagonistic towards it) accept certain "truths" that it has created.

Few of those "truths" are more accepted by churchgoers and non-churchgoers alike than the idea that church is defined by place. More specifically, church is defined by ownership of space.

If you don't have a place of your own to hang a sign, how can you be a church?

Today at work, one of my co-workers asked about Immanuel, how it was going, and so on. He had heard that we were "doing something different", but wasn't sure what that meant. I did my best to relate the differences in our approach, spoke about house churches, our concept of "belonging before believing", and so on.

When I talked about our commitment to never purchasing property, he seemed confused. He isn't the first.

I should step back for a minute and explain here what I explained today. Immanuel is a community of Christians that meet in various houses. When the regular attendance at these weekly house church meetings gets to be about 25, the group births another house church. This was something different than what he had imagined.

These house churches also gather for a time of worship every week. This was beginning to sound more like church. Except that we gather at someone else's building. The idea is to never have to own our own space.

But what about when we max out the space we're using? At that point, we apply the same birthing concept to the larger worship gathering. When we get to be about 200, we send 50 folks to worship in a second location. We can use other church's buildings, or music venues, or schools. The possibilities are endless. It allows the Immanuel Austin church to exist throughout Austin without ever having a building and a sign that says Immanuel Austin is here. It allows us to be defined by the people and what Christ is doing through them and not the space and what Christ is doing in it.

That isn't to say that we don't think gathering together is important. If we didn't, we wouldn't meet together at least twice a week (a group of us also gathers with friends at a local pub on Tuesdays and to serve at a local food pantry on Saturdays). We just think that we're the church when we're in our homes and at the pub and at the food bank and at the building. As Christ himself promised "whenever two or more are gathered in my name, I am there."

The universal Church has known this for centuries, but Christendom has often made that knowledge more theoretical than practical. Of course the church isn't the building, we say, but we still hold up a specific hour in a specific space as our defining moment. The problem is that by making the space particularly sacred, the event ceases to define us outside of that space.

Every church has its stories, Biblical and otherwise, that it points to for meaning. One of those, for Immanuel, has been the tranfiguration (see my previous blog entry on the transfiguration for more complete thoughts on this). The transfiguration was that moment on the mountain when Christ was revealed in all his glory to a few of his disciples. One of them, Peter, responded by suggesting that they build a place on the mountain in order to remain in the moment. Jesus' response is to go back down the mountain and heal a young boy.

All of us need the time for mountaintop experiences, a time for Christ's glory to be revealed and celebrated. But we must not fall into the trap that Peter suggested, of remaining on the mountain. If he had, he might have been able to continue to dwell upon the experience for some time, but he would have missed the fact that Jesus wasn't there.

As churches, we need an increasing awareness that Jesus has left the building. Not that he isn't present in our times of worship, but that he isn't confined by them. His desire isn't that we simply worship in a specific time and space, but that the experience of worship would redefine us and push us out the door and down the mountain. Our mission isn't to get people to "go to church" it is to be the church and go to people.