Needed, A New Way to Meet #2: Rediscovering the Biblical Church

I’m going to add one other element. We’ll come back to this. I still think I’m dealing with a mindset here that has to be cracked open. You’re still thinking of a place where you go and meet…and that will never work. The church isn’t a place you go to meet. Before you have meetings, you’ve got to have a church planter, and before you can ever have church life, you’ve got to understand that church life includes community. That means living out of one another’s lives, living with one another in one way or another. The church is not a gathering; the church is a people. It is a community. You do not need meetings when a church is a community. You don’t have to have them. The church is first a community, not a gathering.

I’m going to close by talking about the word ecclesia, and we’re all going to rush out of here really quickly. The word ecclesia is misunderstood. When we go back to the etymology of that word, I don’t know. The first time it was used in written language, someone stood in a court square and called the people out for a gathering. Then they took that thing, and they’ve stuffed that down our throats, theologians, for hundreds of years: the church is the “called-out ones.” That is a bunch of foolishness.

That’s the word’s etymology; that’s not how the word was used in the first century. The emphasis isn’t on the “called-out”; it’s on the gathering. And the gathering had a special meaning, and that meaning was not gathering to meet; it was the reassembling of Christ. It was the assembling, the putting together, the erector set being put together, the assembling together of Jesus Christ. Now you say, “Gene, that’s too much.” That’s right. So I’ll say it again. It is the assembling together of His physical body that’s left on this earth.

There’s community. There’s the church planter; there’s community; and there’s the body of Christ. Then you begin thinking in terms of gathering and meetings. Until we see these things, we’ll always lead with gatherings and meetings, and it’s going to sink the ship every time. Brothers and sisters, tomorrow morning, we will talk about the nature of the church, and we will begin to see why we must gather, but before we see why we must gather, we’ve got to see what she is. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in the morning.

You want to hear what a healer was? Probably a brother or sister in the church who really had a compassionate heart, who did lay their hands on people to heal them, and if they didn’t get healed, kept on taking care of them anyway, and nurturing them, and trying to do other things that would help them get well. That’s a church healer. Probably couldn’t read and couldn’t write. Didn’t have a tent. Didn’t give invitations. Didn’t take up offerings—just some brother who probably sold fish in the marketplace.

Pastor…pastor-teacher…probably someone who could read and write. Someone with a natural ability to care for people and give them counsel. Somebody you naturally turn to when you have a need. Someone who could also, from time to time, bring a word of teaching in the gatherings in a very simple way. Some local brother who meets the needs of people who need someone to sit down, love them, care for them, guide them, and give them guidance.

You want another one? I think the apostle is very clear because he really takes center stage in the New Testament. There’s no question he is center stage. He is the main character from Acts on.

Prophet – I think anybody, when the church was young, who could speak, who could share anything, was considered a prophet. I think any time anybody spoke, that was considered foretelling prophecy. I don’t know of anybody but Agabus who had the gift of telling the future. He was the original Pentecostal. He had drama. He was extra-local. He traveled. He was a different kind of creature. He was a true Old Testament prophet in the New Testament, and therefore the New Testament must have had a few of those people.

But I’ll tell you this: I don’t think he was standing up saying, “You should marry him, and you should marry her, and I have a word from the Lord that you should move tomorrow.” Too many prophecies today, my brother, driving people crazy. The young people are destroyed by it because they’re really… “I had a prophecy set over me when I just got saved. It was such and such.” This little boy is now 30 years old, 10 years later, and he’s still trying to live it out, and obviously, it doesn’t fit.

Some guys asked me what I thought about tongues and interpretations in the meeting. I don’t know. Some say it was the ability to interpret another language. I don’t know. I can only tell you this: whatever it is, it’s for doing at home. I am absolutely certain of that. That is so clear in Scripture; it’s to be done at home, and if you do it at home, it won’t bother me a bit. If you let a meeting be carried away from it, you are making the mistake of the Corinthians. I don’t know how we ever came up with any other interpretation of that passage.

I think we all need to understand this: all the gifts operated in Jesus Christ, and none of us will ever have that privilege. He is the gifts of the church, in fact. He is not the operation of the gifts; He is the gift. He is the gifts given to the church. He is the gift, the giver, and the gift. But their understanding of church was not teaching or theology or healing any more than it was rebuking Pharisees. They found that very interesting. You can tell that they did, but their enjoyment was the Lord. What drew them was Himself: He, the Man, the Lord, the God.

Was God in the Reformation? Is God in the Charismatic Movement? I am not a steward of the Reformation, nor am I a steward of the Pentecostal Movement, the charismatic movement, which, by the way, has been one of the largest things ever to happen in church history. In a hundred years, it has probably influenced Christianity as much as anything ever has.