BLOG 7/27/18. ELLESIOLAE IN ECCLESIA, LITTLE CHURCHES IN THE CHURCH
Where are you likely to know where to find a real church? Does this sound like a stupid question? Hey! This, admittedly, is a “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” blog—right up front. Face it, for some it is some traditional church institution that has been around for a long time, and folks get downright idolatrous about such institutions. But then again, there are such a vast number of expressions of the church, so how does on sort out what is real and what is just playing church games?
Shifting gears, however, brings us to the sobering reality that for a considerable segment of this generation of self-satisfied humanism, this post-Christian culture, whatever the church is doesn’t even register with them. It was such a discovery that I made in a coffee shop a couple of years ago when several people, with whom I was in conversation, had no idea what the church was, when they asked me what I had done in my career. It was out of that those encounters that I wrote What on Earth is the Church? An Inquirer’s Guide. Correct. For a whole lot of people, their answer to what is the church is: Who cares?
But, then, for many, along the way, when a lot of questions about life and meaning and hope begin to burble-up in them and the presence of communities of folks who also have grappled fruitfully with these questions emerges into a possibility for them. There can be a lot of disappointments in this quest, but pursuit might well begin to lead them to something that one can call a real church. It may be some traditional old church institution that has maintained its vigorous grasp of the message and mission of Jesus, or it may be a group meeting under a shade tree to share scripture and to sing songs of praise. The forms and patterns are multitudinous.
And then there are those old church institutions, whose lights have essentially gone out, and yet where there are those who have found some refuge there, and so who continue to meet together in what some along the way have described as ecclesiolae in ecclesia, or ‘little churches in the church.’ After all, Jesus never gave us any pattern for the church much beyond: “For where two or three of you are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matthew 18:20). (That “in my name,” however, carries a lot of freight—it means, quite un-equivocally, that those together are together in their affinity for both the message of Jesus and the mission of Jesus! It is not a spiritual tea party were one is free to espouse all kinds of religious stuff.)
The apostle Paul reminded the Christians in Ephesus that he taught them in public and from house. The early church in Jerusalem also had such a pattern of meeting in public and then from house to house. There was public teaching, and then there was the interpersonal processing of that message, and holding one another accountable for it. Such ecclesiolae, or little churches, were (and are) the habitations of the Spirit of Christ, … and, note, they were contagious with the message and the mission. One would be quite secure in saying that they were the primary form of both the message and the mission of Jesus Christ. They were mobile, flexible, versatile, and often temporary, … but they were the agencies of the testimony of Christ to a world desperate for the Bread and Water of Life.
Where to find the church? Where ever you find two or three gathered in the name of Christ! Got it?
[http://wipfandstock.com/what-on-earth-is-the-church-14083.html]
