Some have argued that we ditch the terms "Christian" and "church" because of their negative connotations in our culture, and all the misinformation out there on those terms.
N.T. Wright, in his book Simply Christian, argues instead for the rehabilitation of the word "church", because while some have negative thoughts about "church", others have glowingly positive ones. His statement about what "church" means for some struck me as a great description of what the church does on a good day:
For many, "church" … is a place of welcome and laughter, of healing and hope, of friends and family and justice and new life. It’s where the homeless drop in for a bowl of soup and the elderly stop by for a chat. It’s where one group is working to help drug addicts and another is campaigning for global justice. It’s where you’ll find people learning to pray, coming to faith, struggling with temptation, finding new purpose, and getting in touch with a new power to carry that purpose out. It’s where people bring their own small faith and discover, in getting together with others to worship the one true God, that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. No church is like this all the time. But a remarkable number of churches are partly like that for quite a lot of the time.
The church is, "the family of God’s people, it is all who believe in and follow Jesus, it is the company of those who, in the power of the Spirit, are bringing God’s new creation to birth" (Wright). It is the "company of the committed," the "incendiary fellowship" (Trueblood). Let’s work to define the church biblically, and rehabilitate the word to make it useful and meaningful and true in our culture again.
I’m reading this book too. Haven’t gotten as far as you, but you’ve whetted my appetite for sticking with it. Wasn’t sure thru part one if I was jiving with him or not. Do you have a working definition of ‘church’ yourself?
Wright writes (ha ha) that book for people who know nothing about Christianity, or perhaps are even antagonistic towards it, so I imagine he is trying to find some common ground before diving into the Christian story, perhaps to bring people along in how it might be relevant for them. The experiences he outlines in the beginning (longing for justice, relationship, beauty, etc) serve to help people see that Christianity actually claims to answer all of those questions. So press on: I am finding it a wonderful explanation of the Christian faith (better than “you can go to heaven when you die”).
As far as my own working definition, I don’t have anything more to say than what Wright says, so far. I think we are called to be an expression of God’s new world, his new humanity, and that is expressed in myriad ways, from worship gatherings to soup kitchens, from prayer meetings to global justice meetings, from neighborhood childcare to adoption initiatives. The lid is off, really, if we think in terms of bringing God’s new world to birth. There are lots of ways to do that, all requiring the power of the Holy Spirit, all requiring our partnership and action with that power.