What Does it Mean to Be Church?

For Reflection Roundup each week, we gather news stories, notable pieces, and other important items for Christian leaders today. As always, listening broadly draws together differing perspectives from which we can learn but may not concur.

This week, as a change of pace, I’m sharing some preliminary thoughts regarding leadership identity, a research project Carson Reed and I are exploring this semester, listening broadly to history and drawing implications for moving forward.

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What sort of church structure describes Churches of Christ, Christian Churches, and other non-denominational congregations?

Emerging from the two major expressions of Protestantism – Lutheranism and Reformed – came yet a third expression. This third group, known early on as Anabaptists, took a number of more radical steps away from institutional frames of the church. For example, these Anabaptists received their name from others because they chose to be rebaptized as believing adults. The instinct for this differentiation stemmed from an initial separation of church and state. Upon Constantine’s christianization of the empire, children were born Christian and subsequently received baptism as infants. Recalling the New Testament church’s sharp contrast with the surrounding culture, the Constantinian compromise between church and state was found to be contrary to the distinction the early church made. Founding a “congregation of true believers” was the need, in contrast with the multitudes who called themselves Christian simply because they had been born into a Christian country and baptized as infants.” [1]

This distinction regarding baptism upon public confession of faith provided a union with Christ that the Anabaptists experienced, particularly in communion with the gathered body of baptized believers. The experience of community was so strong among Anabaptists that they felt only in this space could one truly be a Christian. Christian life, they felt, had a distinctly corporate nature, rooted in Pauline theology regarding the church as Christ’s body. Christ’s incarnate form was experienced in the gathered body of believers. [2]

These communities understood their identity as the local, gathered body of believers, which distinguished them from Lutheran and reformed churches that found identity in the larger, institutional expression of church. Congregations claiming that the foundational expression of church is found in local communities are often recognized as free or independent congregations. Various practices have emerged since the 16th century, yet the emphasis of the local expression of congregational identity still serves many church traditions today, including Churches of Christ and Christian Churches.

To pick back up with the idea of church expressed in the community these baptized, gathered believers – the incarnate body of Christ – formed a community of priests, “a royal priesthood,” according to 1 Pet. 2:9. These Christians viewed their union, through their baptisms, as commissioning them to the priesthood, ideally approaching God as a body rather than as self-sufficient individuals. Communion with God, for the priesthood of believers, meant communion with the church. “As the priestly people of God, we are priests for the entire community of belief, and they are priests for us – while all of us, as the believing community, are priests for the world.” [3] So with this deep commitment to the priesthood of all believers, anchored in the practice of believers’ baptism, a number of questions about other practices of the church arise for us. One leading concern is, if everyone is a priest, then what does it mean to “ordain” someone to be a minister?

Watch for a continued exploration next month of the sacramental connections empowering ordination.

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[1] Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 69.

[2] Daniel Liechty, Early Anabaptist Spirituality: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), 12.

[3] González, The Story of Christianity, 53.