What is “the church”? One might say it is where one attends a worship service on Sunday mornings. But recently it has become quite in vogue to deconstruct this definition. The church is not a building – rather, as Dan Kimball says, “We can’t go to church because we are the church.”¹ In our consumeristic age, we must recapture what it means to live in community, as opposed to being detached individuals who merely listen to sermons and sing worship songs on Sunday mornings. But at what point does church become merely about “community” and less about the gospel?

Michael Horton challenges the claim “we are the church” because it implies that church is defined primarily by what we do.² He traces this impulse back to Charles Finney’s belief that revivals can be created by “the right use of natural means,” and pietism’s shift away from doctrine to religious experience. Today, many claim that church is where Christ resides in us individually when we are personally committed to discipleship. Horton emphasizes the classical Reformed definition of church as where the Word is rightly preached, and the sacraments and discipline are rightly administered. The church is what God creates through the Word of the gospel – what we do in response to the gospel must be secondary, flowing out of our encounter with the good news of what God has done in Christ.

However, Reformed churches, while rightly emphasizing gospel-centered preaching and the sacraments, often underemphasize community. Tim Keller has observed that while Reformed churches excel in the “prophetic” functions of the church (preaching), it is the Willowcreek-style churches that excel at the “kingly” functions (strategic thinking, administration), and the emerging churches that excel at the “priestly” functions (community, justice).³ We must not ignore any of these aspects of the church. Sound gospel preaching can be easily consumed in an individualistic way, producing passive people who merely listen to sermons and fail to integrate them into everyday life.

Perhaps we would do well to emphasize both the primacy of the gospel Word which creates the church, and also the primacy of community as the context in which the gospel is worked out. Tim Chester and Steve Timmis put it like this: “the content is consistently the Christian gospel, and the context is consistently the Christian community.”⁴ We must not confuse these. The content can never be anything beside the good news of what God has done in Christ – it cannot be intimate community, or individual discipleship. However, the external Word must be accompanied by real, life-on-life community, which cannot be done at a Sunday worship service. We were created to be in community, and we can only bring the gospel to bear in our lives in the crucible of real relationships. The church is what the Gospel creates, but it never creates apart from community.

1. Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church. [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003], 91.
2. Michael Horton, People and Place. [Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008], 155-189.
3. Tim Keller, “The ‘Kingly’ Willowcreek Conference,” September 30, 2009, blog post, accessed at http://www.rcpc.com/blog/view.jsp?Blog_param=44 on December 23, 2009.
4. Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church. [Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008], 16.