Where Do People Get Their Ideas of Church?

By Mark Roberts

Part 3 of series: What is a Church? Biblical Basics for Christian Community

People today have a wide variety of ideas about what a church should be. If you ask a dozen people you'd probably get a dozen different answers.

One of my favorite answers came during a children's sermon preached by a young seminarian. This story was related to me by someone who was in the congregation that fateful day. For those of you unfamiliar with this genre, a children's sermon comes in a worship service when the folks twelve and under are brought forward for a sermonette by the pastor or some other church leader. Often the sermon begins with a question like, "What is God?" The preacher gets a bunch of funny – and incorrect – answers, and then offers the right answer, sometimes with a visual aid.

At any rate, a young man was doing his seminary internship at a church. As low man on the totem pole, he got tabbed for the children's sermon, and decided to talk about what the church really is. He gathered the children together in the front, and began with his question: "So, boys and girls, what is a church?" He fully expected that the kids would say a church is a building and so forth. He'd get to wrap up with the correct answer, that the church is not the building but the people. As soon as the seminarian uttered his question, one of the boys shot his hand into the air.

"Yes," the young preacher said, "what is a church?"

"The gathered assembly of believers in Jesus Christ," was the boy's answer.

The seminarian was speechless, not knowing where to go from here. The kid had said exactly what the preacher was going to reveal at the end of a three-minute dialogue. From his point of view, there wasn't anything more to say. So after a few seconds of embarrassed silence, he thanked the boy and dismissed the children. (What the seminarian did not know was that the theologically-sophisticated boy was the son of a seminary professor in the congregation, and should never have been called on first!)

Most people don't get their ideas of church from seminary professors, however, or even from their fathers. Rather, then get them from a wide variety of sources. At a recent meeting of leaders from my church, I asked, "What shapes people's expectations of church? Where do people get their ideas of what a church ought to be?" Their answers were revealing:

1. People get their ideas of church from their past experience of church.

Indeed, this is surely true for people who have some past experience of church. These days, more and more people come to church with no religious background whatsoever. But most folks still have at least some prior history of church, even if it's limited to weddings and funerals. As a pastor, I've found that people usually have both positive and negative experiences from which to draw. They want a church to be like what they've experienced in some ways, but not like other aspects of previous churches where they've been involved.

Many people look upon their past church experience through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia. I've had people from my church, for example, complain about some innovation in worship and talk about how wonderful their church was growing up. When I ask if their church helped them to know Christ, to grow as His disciple, or to have a desire to worship God, they'll say something like, "No, but that's not the point." Looking back, they love what they remember about worship in their childhood church. But, in point of fact, that church did not actually teach them to know and love the Lord, and it didn't even help them want to worship God when they were young.

In tomorrow's post I'll discuss three other ways people get their ideas of what a church should be.