Ask most people to define church, and you’ll get a building, a time slot on Sunday, or a list of programs. That’s an understandable answer given how we experience church in our daily language, but it’s not what the word originally pointed to. The New Testament writers weren’t describing an event you attend. They were describing something you belong to and something you are part of, whether or not you happen to be sitting in a room at the moment.
Not a Building, a Body
The word translated church simply meant a gathered, called-out group of people. But Paul’s favorite image for that group wasn’t an audience. It was a body, made of different parts, each one necessary, none of them optional. A body doesn’t have some members who show up and others who just watch. Every part is either functioning or the whole thing suffers for it.
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
— 1 Corinthians 12:27
That image assumes interdependence. It assumes you need parts of the body you don’t naturally appreciate, and that other parts need you in ways you might not expect. Nobody gets to be a spectator in a body. Spectators aren’t part of the body at all.
What This Means for a Sunday Morning
The gathering on Sunday matters, but it’s not the whole of what church is. Church is also happening when someone brings a meal to a family that just had surgery, when two people pray together over a hard decision, when someone tells the truth to a friend who needed to hear it. The building and the service time are containers. The church itself is the people, functioning as a body, in and out of that room.
So the question worth asking isn’t just whether you attend church. It’s whether you function as part of one. Those turn out to be very different questions.
Andrew Washkow 
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