I use to know what the church was. Well, I thought I did. I think I had a pretty good definition. But, in re-examining everything about my spirituality I have asked the question fresh. Here is something I came across today. It's from "Holy People" by Gordon Lathrop:"The church is an assembly. The church is a gathering of people in a particular place who are, together, through concrete means, participating in the mystery of Christ and so are being formed into the holy assembly. The church is not a collection of consuming individuals, choosing religious goods according to their own self-perceived needs or desires. It is not a club supporting a particular ideology. It is not the audience for a speaker's eloquence, a choir's concert, or a priest's rituals. The local church-assembly is itself, as gathering, the primary symbol. By its participation, by its communal mode of song and prayer around Scripture reading, meal keeping (the Lord's Table), and bathing (baptism), it is being transformed into a primary witness to the identity of God and the identity of the world before God."
We are an assembly of people that come together before the risen Christ to be transformed and to witness to the world the body of Christ. Why have we made it so much more complicated and convoluted? Our love for each other is founded on the broken body and spilled blood of the Mysterious One. How humbling is that?
Can't even think of anything else to say. It's about Him, not us.
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