By: Ian McKerracher, FBB Staff Speaker

      I had a conversation with a pastor friend of mine, sometime last summer. Our casual sit-down exchange was centred around the Church and this infernal Covid that has, seemingly, captured the conversation of every living human being in the universe. One of the things he mentioned at the time was that he was not sure that we were getting anywhere close to the finish line with all the Covid business that swirls around us. He saw that there will be effects on the Church for a long time to come, regardless of when we are done with the measures imposed on us by the government, or even regardless of the effectiveness of those measures. The problem was already in the mold and was quickly setting like a demolition Jell-O into a serious need for a renovation of thinking amongst the people of faith and the gathering together into our clans, assemblies, and denominations. 

            He said at the time, as evidence of his concern for the future, that, in conversations with other pastors, he had found a common complaint that he shared with them all. He said that they are all quite concerned because they do not know who their congregation is. They are unsure who is coming back from the lockdown, who is going elsewhere, and who may have left “organized religion” completely. The pastors were meeting brand new people, obviously mature Christians, who have joined their congregation from other churches, and they have looked in vain for some of the steady-eddy congregants they know and love, who they had assumed were committed to the local church that they serve yet are nowhere to be found. 

            For me, these revelations about the fractured state of the Church were a little disconcerting. I believe that, whether they know what they are doing or not, the State has not fully understood the social ramifications of their measures. They were only looking, perhaps with a certain level of naivety, at the finish line of the unreachable goal of non-death. The dismantling of the cohesion that makes individual members of our communities into a society, was not foreseen, it seems to me. In the Faith communities of the Christian Church where it can be said that we were slightly fractured at denominational lines already, this is becoming a serious breach of unity. At the individual level, it becomes even more serious indeed! May God help those who struggle with being shy, or people who are too far from family and friends, or have lost their social connections to the various social communities that populate our cities and towns, the things like membership in a bowling league, a bridge club, or some other way of getting together.

            In the Church, various methods and ideas have been imagined and instigated to counter the social disruptions that are plaguing us these days. There is a concerted effort to ensure that the Church continues with the model that has served us for centuries. Zoom meetings, parking lots full of drive-in congregations, and live-stream services are all great ideas for a limited time. One congregation I heard about experimented with the formula by having all the people who are comfortable only when they are wearing a facemask in a company of people around them who are also masked, sitting on one side of the sanctuary, and those who are unable or unwilling to wear a mask for reasons of their own, on the other side of the centre aisle. I have heard of some congregations that just simply shut down and everyone took a holiday from attending Church. All these ideas have been and are still being tried in various measures and degrees throughout the whole Universal Church worldwide. And there are WAY too many who are missing the purposes of God in His design for what the Church, that is the local assembly of believers, is to provide for God’s people.

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  Why do we go to Church? Why do we block off a certain portion of our week to meet at a particular place to do particular things together? What is it that happens corporately that just cannot happen individually? Since the early Church met in houses scattered around the Greek peninsula, Asia Minor and, of course, The Holy Land itself, we, the Church, have been gathering together, to see each other’s face. Common things that occur when we meet now and when we met in the past, are commonalities that seem to have been going on, in some fashion, for the entire 2000 years of the Church Age. They are things like communal singing, scriptural instruction, and fellowship.

            You see, the Church is a spiritual gathering of like-minded souls under the direction of our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ. It doesn’t take very long as we read in the writings of Paul to be faced with the reality that the Ecclesia is a major part of the Christian experience. Let us rid ourselves completely, of any notions that there is no need to be part of the Church that God established through Jesus. That means we must dispel the popular notion that we can be part of the Universal Church while refusing to be a part of a real local assembly of believers. It is there where we are recognized, where we are challenged to do works of service, and where we can learn the practices that are contrary to our human nature; things like generosity, sacrificial servanthood, and loving the unlovely. (Let’s face it, not everybody in the Church is as wonderful as we think we are.)

            It is in this last point that I must distance myself from those who want to believe that a Zoom-meeting church service is adequate to the task of being the Church that Jesus needs in this sin-sick world. A web-based church will do if you have the attitude that your attendance is for the sole purpose of YOU receiving something. The instructions for living a Christlike life can be sent via e-mail if you want. What it cannot do is be an example of a Christian lifestyle. It cannot allow for making disciples. A Christian worldview cannot be demonstrated when the pastor is not really present, where the congregation is not there to sharpen the irons of their brothers and sisters. If you go to Church mainly to receive, at some point you will be full and no longer have a need for anything deeper than an immature, Me-centred Christianity. If you believe that Jesus died so that you can sit in a pew on a Sunday morning, or watch a screen depicting a distant gathering, you will have missed the very reason why you were saved in the first place. I am sorry to have to say this, but your salvation isn’t about you. It never was. It is about Jesus building his Kingdom.

            So, Shepherds, arrange to have your flock at a gathering place, masked or not. Members, be there, ready to “keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3) Come to serve. Come to grow “till we all come to the unity of the Faith, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13) These things require the Body doing what the body does, “edifying itself in love” (Maybe you should read the whole 4th chapter of Ephesians). It requires that we be present and accounted for, “with what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share” (See! Ephesians 4 again). 

Let’s assemble the Body of Christ!