Do you know that gangs might have more things in common with the church or ekklesia in the first century than with the majority of today’s traditional churches? We don’t mean the crime and violence usually associated with them, but strangely these notorious groups seem to have grasped what it means to be a family than many Christians do today.
As we noted in our previous posts, people have often asked how we meet as house or simple churches. But church life is so much more than going to meetings. The New Testament talks about these gatherings specifically in just a few instances. Most of the New Testament passages about church is how people should relate to one other and to the world around them. However, for majority of Christians, church is centered on a 1-2 hour event that happens once a week.
Francis Chan narrates the story of one of his church elders, Rob, who used to be a gang member. When Rob gave His life to Jesus in prison he had to leave his gang. More than the very real threat of torture or death, Rob feared the rejection of those he loved: loyal, committed friends who looked out for him 24 hours a day. The gang was his family.
Strangely enough, as Chan observes, gang life as Rob had described to him is similar to what God has meant the Church to be (minus the drugs and violence of course). Some of you might be scratching your heads wondering why we would use Chan’s analogy — of all things — of notorious gangs to emphasize how Christians ought to live. (Look up Luke 16:8 about how Jesus used the example of the shrewd but dishonest servant.) But isn’t it a shame that criminal groups seem to have a stronger sense of what it means to be a family than what Christians do in a church? As Chan states:
From what you know about gangs, could you ever imagine gang life being reduced to a weekly one-hour gathering? No group would meet briefly once a week and call that a gang. Imagine one gang member walking up to another one and saying, “Yo, how was gang? I had to miss this week because life has been crazy!” We all know enough about gangs to know that’s ridiculous. Yet every week we hear Christians asking each other, “How was church?” Something that God has designed to function as a family has been reduced to an optional weekly meeting… Any gang member will tell you his homies have his back. They’re loyal, committed, present. Meanwhile, in many churches, you have as much connection to the people who are supposedly your spiritual family as you would to someone who visited the same movie theater as you.1
Church for the early Christians was a family — God’s family (Eph. 2:19; Gal. 6:10; I Tim. 3:15). They apparently did not view church as a place to go nor did they refer to their gatherings as “worship services” the way Christians do now. The term “going to church” does not appear at all in the New Testament. But such was church for us for several years. We never thought to question it because that was what everyone else did.
20 years ago, we began to have the same observations and questions as Francis Chan’s. Eventually we began to reconsider the meaning of the Greek word ekklesia, often translated as “church” by many Bible versions. A discussion of this belongs to another post but ekklesia is actually a non-religious word that at the time of Christ meant an assembly of called-out individuals, which decided or was consulted on matters important to that city, a practice adopted from the Greek city-states. In other words it was a group of people, not an event and most certainly not a building. (The English word “church” actually came from a different Greek word: kuriakos.) A Christian ekklesia, therefore, would imply a community of individuals called out by Christ for His purposes.
The Lord used this realization to bring us towards the practice of house, simple or organic churches. Early on we patterned these after the discipleship groups we have had since our college and young professional days with Campus Crusade for Christ. But just as discipleship is so much more than a bible study group, the house or simple church is so much more than a meeting. As Neil Cole rightly puts it, church happens wherever life happens. It happens wherever God’s people are – at home, in the workplace, in cafes, in schools — because church is the people of God. It happens everyday, whenever God’s people are in contact with each other and with the world. The focus is on how we live out Christ together with other brothers and sisters wherever He places us each day of the week.2
Yes there will be times when brothers and sisters gather together (Heb. 10:24-25) but those meetings are meant for believers to “spur one another to love and good deeds” — how they can live their everyday lives in relation to one another and how they can be God’s transforming agents to the world around them.
So how can a church be a family that God meant it to be? Coming up in our next post…
1 Francis Chan, Letters to the Church (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2020), pp. 71-72.
2Neil Cole, Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2005).
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