Why Go to Church?

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Why Go to Church?
       

Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Jeff Lampl

 

 

Alister McGrath writes about his change of opinion regarding going to church?

"What is the point of church? The Oxford congregations I had attended provided rather meager fare—sermons that focused on encouraging us to read our Bibles and trust God. As a result, I thought I could get more from reading books or talking to friends than from attending church. I was unaware of the vitality of Christian community. I had not read Cyprian of Carthage’s famous maxim: “He can no longer have God for his Father who has not the church for his mother.” If I had, it would have baffled me. The church, in my view, played merely an educational and social role.

So I was struck by Paul’s words in Philippians 3:20: “our citizenship is in heaven.”  When I had attended a lecture at Oxford on the Roman colonial system, I had failed to connect it to this passage, which uses the Greek term politeuma, translated here as “citizenship.” A jumble of thoughts surged through my mind as I began to connect the dots.

The church is an outpost of heaven on earth, what Romans termed a colonia - not to be confused with the English word colony.  Philippi was itself a Roman colonia at the time, an outpost of Rome in the distant province of Macedonia.  Paul's readers would have easily related to this imagery.  Roman citizens residing in Philippi had the right to return home to the metropolis after serving in the colony.  For Paul, one benefit of knowing Christ was being a citizen of heaven.  Christians live on earth now, where there is much to accomplish for God's kingdom.  but we are citizens of heaven, and that's our real home.

The  church is a community of believers, an outpost of heaven on earth, a place in which a "spirit of grace" (Zech. 12:10) dwells.  Just as the Romans at Philippi spoke the language and kept the laws of Rome, so we observe the customs and values of heaven.  As Christians, we live in two worlds and must learn to navigate both while ultimately being faithful to our homeland.

This helped me to finally make sense of Christian community.  I began to see the church as a place that helps Christians straddle the two worlds of faith - where we are now and where we shall finally be.  It's like an oasis in a desert, equipping us to work and serve in the world while fostering and safeguarding our distinctiveness as Christians.

I began to realize that the church was an imperfect yet important anticipation of heaven, whose worship and ethos were integral to my faith.  The church was a community gathered around the public reading of God's Word, its interpretation and application through preaching, and its enactment in worship and prayer." **

**Excerpted from Christianity Today, January/February 2015

 

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