by Karen Melang

The church is odd and very difficult to describe. You know this if you’ve ever belonged to one. No matter what you say about it, you are likely to be only partially right.

Is the church a congregation or a denomination? Is the church a building? Is it a worship service? Do all those who are confirmed, contribute, and commune at least once a year make up the church? Is the church all the baptized or all the bishops?

Yes. The church is all these and more.

Up Close and Personal
The church is where God’s people gather to hear God’s word. Most of us come to know and love the church through our congregations. We sing praises to God, baptize babies (and grown-ups, too!), eat the meal of Christ’s presence, and pray for the world and all its needs. We might even hang around after worship and drink coffee with fellow churchgoers. Congregations are places where we are welcomed, cared for, and loved.

Our congregations delighted in our performances at Christmas pageants when we were very young. They appreciated our first attempts at playing musical instruments and noticed that we were getting taller. They supported our servant trips and sent us cookies and cards when we went away to college.

Perhaps we were married in our congregations or our children were baptized there. Now, we attend meetings at church and teach Sunday school, cook Lenten soup suppers, and pray in small groups. We are challenged and empowered in our congregations to reach out to those in every sort of need, both physical and spiritual.

When we cannot come to church, our congregation comes to us in the hospital or the care center. And perhaps when we die, our loved ones will commend us to God in the church that was home to us.

For most of us, our congregations are the places where church is lived out, where we see it up close and personal. Unfortunately, the congregation is also the face of the church where people are most likely to be wounded, disappointed, irritated, irked, and generally disgruntled by the church. When people leave the church, it’s very often because of something that happened in the congregation.

Variety of Meanings
But the congregation is only one meaning of church. Worship is another. When we think of inviting someone to church, we usually intend to ask them to a worship service.

We also use the word church to refer to a building. In our part of the world, church often means a facility with a gathering space for worship, a fellowship area, a kitchen, a few meeting rooms, and perhaps some offices. Of course, church buildings can run the gamut from tiny storefronts to huge auditoriums to stately cathedrals.

The smallest church I ever visited was in eastern Cameroon. It was a structure with no walls, just a thatched roof supported by several poles. Still, you’d have recognized it as a church because of what happened there. Two elderly women were baptized the day I visited. We celebrated communion while chickens and goats strolled by. It was a church all right, even without a welcome center or signage offering directions to the offices and the restrooms.

Through my work for Habitat for Humanity, an ecumenical Christian ministry, I visit churches of various denominations. I go to tell the Habitat story, but I almost always leave with a new perspective and some questions, having had a guest’s peek at how other people in other places do church. How is their worship different or the same as the one I’m familiar with? What are they singing? Who and what are they praying for? What events are they publicizing? Are they studying together? How does it feel to be with them?

Congregation, worship, building, denomination — they can all correctly be called church. But as significant as all of these are, we know that in its fullest sense, the church is bigger than any of them.

So what is the church? Who is the church? Here is a simple definition: The church is the assembly of all those who call Jesus Lord. "No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord,’ " St. Paul says, "except by the Holy Spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:3).

In the Apostles’ Creed, we confess that we believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, and the communion of saints. Creating and nurturing the church is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit starts by calling individuals to faith in Christ.

Perhaps you were called to faith when you were an infant, carried to the baptismal waters by someone who loved you. Maybe your conversion was like St. Paul’s, who was knocked over as he rode swiftly down the road away from God. Or perhaps like most of the first disciples, you were just doing your job, minding your own business, when you heard the Spirit calling you to Christ, and then your whole life was different.

The Church Universal
However it happened, God called us as well as millions of others. Century after century, from that upper room in Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, God calls us to faith in Christ. Now we call Jesus Lord.

But an individual person can never be the church. The church is always a community of believers. God did not plan for us to be stand-alone Christians. Instead God forms, shapes, and nurtures the communion of saints, as the creeds call it. God gives us to one another by creating one holy catholic and apostolic church, as the Nicene Creed says, out of isolated believers.

God knows we are not very good at communities and relationships. When sin entered the world, people distanced themselves from each other and from God. Our relationships are a big part of us that needs saving and transform transforming. In the church universal, God is at work restoring genuine, holy human community.

Our church community is holy because God promises to come to us through fellow members who share space and time with us. From Scripture, we know God can show up as the starving one, the stranger, or the prisoner (Matthew 25:35). But God is just as likely to sit next to us in the pew or the choir loft. When we look into very familiar faces, God is there, too.

The church is also made up of believers from other places and other times. We share this holy community with believers who lived long ago and with those who will come after us. We are the church with people around the world, people who live and pray in cultures and societies very different from our own.

Perhaps you have worshipped in a setting where everyone else was speaking a different language. Maybe you joined in praying the Lord’s Prayer and confessing the creed in your own language and experienced a miniature Pentecost.

My husband and I once attended a worship service in Rome. During the passing of the peace, many people greeted us. Even though we spoke differ versal language of the one holy catholic and apostolic church. It was delightful to know that we belonged to this community despite being far from home.

All of us in the communion of saints claim Jesus as Lord. It’s the only glue that holds us together. Sometimes we forget that this community of the church is not like other communities or networks, where we share interests or concerns, history or biases. We may start to think that the church is an organization for people who are a lot like us, who should share our political views and social agendas.

This is just what the communion of saints is not. The universal church is full of many people who are not at all like me. Some of them are almost certain to rub me the wrong way. But this church is God’s, not yours or mine, and it should be as embracing and welcoming as God is. The communion of saints is a place where the walls that separate people are coming down.

In the church’s earliest crisis, Jewish Christians were faced with Gentiles, non-Jews, who wanted to be part of the church, too. The letter to the Ephesians addressed this new gospel fact: The wall between Jews and Greeks was coming down. "For [Christ Jesus] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us" (Ephesians 2:14).

We are the Church
The church is God’s grand experiment. One-hundred percent of its population is made up of sinners, even though holy transformation is silently in process. And there are some real characters in the church, people with a full complement of weaknesses, quirks, and shortcomings.

In this community, God’s merciful loving-kindness is both necessary and ever available. God’s faithful forgiveness is exactly what makes possible and creates a holy community out of individuals as contentious and feeble as we are.

God’s experiment is still more staggering. The church is only the beginning of what God is up to. In fact, through the church, God is working to make the world and all its people holy and whole. The church is the spongy little yeast, the pinch of salt, the tiny light that God is using to spread grace and mercy, light and love to all God’s beloved creation.

I am going to church council tonight. Our agenda includes hiring a church administrator, building the endowment fund, and forming a member-care committee. Pretty standard stuff. We will probably discuss our benevolence dollars, our tutoring program, and the guys who are accompanying some college students on a Katrina relief trip.

I bet we’ll laugh some and tease each other a little. We might disagree about some budget issues or think silently that someone suggested a pretty hare-brained solution to some problem.

At the end of the meeting, we will pray for our congregation. We will pray for the sick, the hurting, and the dying. We will give thanks for babies and healings, for new jobs and new opportunities.

We will be held together by the glue of God’s grace. We will depend mightily on the forgiveness of sins. Perhaps we will look at each other with clear vision and see how richly God has blessed us with each other. In the basement of our building that needs an expensive new roof, we are the church.

Karen Melang is the executive director of Fremont Area Habitat for Humanity, Fremont, Neb. She is a member of the Lutheran Deaconess Conference, class of 1971.