What Should Church Be Like?

I realized my last post was more of a gripe and didn’t offer any positive solutions to the problem. I thought about it some more and determined that the format of church is antiquated. It made sense when a neighborhood (or small town) was built around a single church and everyone saw everyone else on an almost daily basis and the fellowship happened “automatically” during the week. So, it was ok to only have a once a week time for worship and teaching and leave out all the fellowship and meal business. But that doesn’t meet the needs of the modern generation. Depending on how far away from the church you live, you may never even see another church member all week. This is sad.

Acts 2 – “42They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. 44All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

1 Teaching, 2 Fellowship, 3 Communion, 4 Prayer.
They were “together” and had stuff in common, they shared with each other. They ate together.

I think once a week corporate worship is probably ok. I think that traditional church is designed around a message and all the other features; fellowship, communion, and prayer take a second seat. I think that the sermon/teaching stuff should be separated out into its own entity. And it needs to be more informal. How many times have you had a question in the middle of a sermon and wished you could just raise your hand and ask it?
I think that there needs to be an element of fellowship in the weekly event. And having rows of chairs lined up so that you can sit and listen to a message discourages fellowship, especially when the room is so crammed with chairs that there isn’t even room to stand and talk (maybe it should be in two different rooms). And taking 1 minute to introduce yourself to the person sitting next to you doesn’t count as fellowship. The people attending church ought to know each other, they ought to recognize when there is a visitor. During this fellowship time, people’s needs should be brought forward for prayer and to see if anyone in the congregation can help meet those needs. Praises should be raised and stories of how God is working should be shared so that everyone can benefit from the joy. Church should be very dynamic and useful.
Small groups need to be pushed much harder. People should be “doing life” with their small group. They should see each other more than just at church. They should be serving each other and serving the community together. (There should be corporate service as well.) They should be fellowshipping and eating meals together. They should be helping to raise each others kids and be the first ones you call when there is an emergency. And you can’t just give up when you don’t get along with someone, you have to work through it and learn to live and love as Christ did.

Those are some of my ideas, I wonder if we’ll find anything like that . . .