Responding to Misunderstanding the Church Part 1

The Rt. Rev. Patrick S. Fodor

“I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the House of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.” (1 Tim. 3:15)

The Church is not a religious social club. It is not an institution for which one simply “shops around” to find something to suit one’s tastes. It is not a mere emotional support group. It is not a place for entertainment. The Church’s nature, purpose, and design are not to stimulate our fallen nature’s desires. God’s design is not to make us feel good, but to make us good by joining us to Jesus.

The Church is the Family of God, gathered by and around Him to adore Him, to receive Him in His Gifts, His Holy Mysteries (1 Cor. 4:1), and to be increasingly conformed to His likeness (Rom. 8:29; 12:1-2; Phil. 3:8-21), filled with all the fullness of God (3:19), and made partakers of His divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). The word “church” is the usual English translation of the Greek ekklēsia, derived from the Greek kyriakon which means the house of the Kyrios, the Lord. This is a double entendre, as Greek word for “house” (and the matching Hebrew word bayiṯbefore that)refers both to family1 and to a building. From the third century it became common to refer to a church as a place Christian liturgy was celebrated. One is an extension of the other. The Family of God, gathered to Jesus, gives its name to the place. The other Hebrew word behind ekklesia is qahal, usually translated as “assembly,” “gathering,” or “congregation.” The later language of “synagogue” carries the same sense of a summoned gathering. The first mention of qahal/ekklesia is in Deuteronomy 4:10. The people there are called holy, and the place they adore YHWH is, too. God says, as He did from the beginning, “Be ye holy as I am holy” (cf. Lev. 20:7; 1 Peter 1:15-16). He calls us to be set apart, purified, made whole by being wholly His. That’s His Church. We’re called to be His people (Ex. 20:8; Heb. 10:24-25), conformed to Him.

Connected to this, the Church is the Bride of Christ (Rev. 21:2, 9; John 3:29). She is joined to be one flesh with God-Incarnate (John 6:51-56; Eph. 5:31-32) in the Eucharist. She is joined to Him in His death and resurrection in Baptism and the continuous baptismal life of repentance and faith (Rom. 6:3-14) that flows to and from Jesus’s altar. She is sharing His mind (1 Cor. 1:10; 2:16; Phil. 2:5; 1 Peter 4:1).

God calls us into this Family, adopting us (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:5; Eph 1:5), and giving us all that is necessary to live faithfully as His Own people. This includes sharing with one another the specific callings, gifts, and abilities He gives, all for the common good of the Church (1 Cor. 12:7 and that whole chapter, and 14:12), His Mystical Body (Col. 1:18; 2:18-20; Eph. 1:22-23; 3:19; 4:13). He calls us to be His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic people.

The common life of the Church expresses these realities. We’re gathered by Christ. We come to ask Him to make us whole, with the holy place where He resides in a special way in the Tabernacle as the place of refuge and a hospital for sinners. We come to adore Him with the highest expressions of reverence and awe of which we’re capable.

We are not the gathering of a crowd of people with common hobbies and interests. We’re not the local coffee house. We don’t come looking for light shows and forms of music which stimulate the Old Adam in us. Instead we come to be transformed, to be touched by God Almighty, to be forgiven and healed and changed to become our truest, full selves, New Creations in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15; Rom 8:18-25). We come for help to put the Old Adam, with its desires, to death (Gal. 5:24; Rom 13:14; 1 Peter 2:11). We come to adore the Triune God. We’re fed, healed, strengthened, and then sent out to live our whole lives as His Own, precious and holy to Him (Col. 3:23).

Will our local parish fully conform to these realities- in an obvious external sense? That’s pretty unlikely. But we can thank God that He makes our gatherings always perfect, by uniting them to the perfectly heavenly liturgy (Heb. 12:22-23). And we should ask, what can I do to make the gathering of God’s people better reflect what’s truly happening, hidden to the senses?

Whatever additional activities beyond worship take place in the local community of God’s people, all of those things take a back seat to the adoration of God. That means hearing His Voice (John 10:27), engaged with the study of Scripture (2 Tim. 2:15), delving deeply into His Words, praying them and grafting them into our hearts and minds (Ps. 119:11), and asking that all He has won for us by His life, Passion and death, and resurrection would be poured into us, made evermore alive and active in us. That’s what the Church is all about. “I will thank Thee in the great congregation; in the mighty throng I will praise Thee” (Ps. 35:18).


1 Like “the House of Stuart” or “the House of Hanover.” See 2 Sam.7, where David proposes to build God a house (a temple), and God says that He will build David a house (a dynasty), and cause the unending heir to come from his family line, with the Messiah of the house of David