The church is not a building, but...

It's going to be interesting to see how the church has fared over lockdown. With some churches opening doors for restricted services for the first time in months last weekend, we'll begin to see what has happened to congregations. While one suspects that some churches will have fared absolutely fine, no doubt others will struggle and some will probably never open their doors again.

One phrase we heard during lockdown was something like "the church is not the building but the people." Actually this has been a phrase used by evangelicals for a long time. This is, of course, a broadly protestant notion. There is a well-known Australian evangelical who would tell us the church building is just a rain shelter. This is a useful protection from some of the unhelpful excesses of the idea of the church being a particular sacred space found in varieties of catholicism but hard to support biblically. Similarly, there were plenty of evangelical churches who had transferred temple theology from the Old Testament to a church building, hence the "welcome to the house of God" language you sometimes find said and written in churches.

However, using this language in a pandemic may have needed a little more nuance. I think it's right to warn against venerating a place or a building, but lockdown has caused something more than separation from a building. It has been separation from people and if the church is not the building but the people then there is a sense in which it's not a very helpful statement for lockdown. Not only have we been separated from the building, but we've also been separated from the people. In fact, if we are going to follow the Old Testament temple imagery into the New, then one aspect of that is that Christians are built together into the temple (1 Peter 2:4-5).

Now I know that there is a sense in which we have been able to meet virtually and I'm thankful for that. I also know that there is value in a time such as this in being positive and thankful about what we are able to do, rather than emphasizing what we are not able to do. However, there are risks. If we communicate that meeting together physically as church is not that important then it will not be surprising if people don't come back - and not just the people we might have thought would at some point drift away from church anyway. If we communicate that so long as they watch the YouTube service then they are part of the church, we may have a problem.

It seems to me that the sweet spot will have been to encourage people to join for online services and so forth, while also lamenting that, for now, this is all we have been able to do. As we gradually go back, I think we may find we have more work to do on our ecclesiology. Both of the leaders and the members of churches!