With the coming of the collapse of cultural Christianity I think that the Church, at least in the West, needs to start asking itself questions, not about it's place within secular western culture, but how it's own culture needs to be reformulated. Are we merely pandering to our pop culture standards (at least superficially) in our worship services and in our discipleship and in our living out the commands of Christ and the examples of the Apostles and leaders of the New Testament church?
What exactly does the biblical example of being a community of believers set apart for God and His glory look like? Why do we even need to be set apart as a distinct community? What is the focus of our communities and how they look? What exactly are we hoping to accomplish through how we form our church cultures?
That's alot of questions, mostly rambling. But I think these are questions that need to be discussed, obviously I'm just mumbling into the internet, but our churches need to sit down and thoughtfully consider our own church culture. But if those few people who read our blog will humor me, I will try to think through some of the questions I mentioned, it may even turn into a short series, but who knows?
First, and I think most importantly, is our focus as a community. What is the point of our gathering? What is the reason that we meet week after week, year after year? Simply put, it is Christ. Christ is the center of our community, He is the point of all of that. Sure, we have outreach, benevolence we have fellowship, marriages, births, funerals, graduations. But that is not the point of our gathering. "Living life together" is good, but that life needs to be the life lived in an through Christ. Philippians 1:27 says "Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel." and Jude 1:21 says "keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life" and Colossians 1:18 says "And He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything He might be preeminent."
From just these few verses (I think) we can see that Christ is the locus of attention for the church. If we as a church community put anything else as our center, then we are no longer a church but a social club, like a facebook group. Christ is to be preeminent in everything, and if the church is His kingdom, then the King must be the focus.
The Gospel of Christ needs to be front and center and His graciousness and holiness needs to be spoken of and talked about. Our God deserves to be praised because He is the Holy One, our Redeemer and King. If all we hear of the gospel is the "altar call" then our church is doing a poor job of keeping Christ and His Gospel as the center of our church's life as a community.
If our church is centered on the pastor at all, then that man has removed the focus of the church from its rightful Shepherd to His under-shepherd. I feel blessed that at our church our pastor and elders constantly try to point to Christ instead of themselves. Our pastor constantly reminds us that it is Christ that we should focus on.
Now, most everybody knows that the Greek word used in the NT for church is ekklesia, and that this means 'gathering', 'assembly', and yes 'church'. This word has a parallel in the Old Testament, kahal. This is also a gathering, an assembly. When the people of Israel were supposed to get together for a holy assembly, it was not just to celebrate a harvest or a new moon (although it seems they did do that too). The holy assemblies were annual, cyclical. Their "church year" was a continual cycle of assemblies and feasts that served to continually remind them of God and to recount His wondrous works that He Himself performed on their behalf. It was a means to remind them, to reorient their gaze from their normal day to day schedules to focus on the God who sought them, who made a covenant with them, and who wanted to have a relationship with them.
In a recent article over at The Gospel Coalition, Psalm 78 is explored, I will not go into what the article says (it's pretty good, go read it here) but I did want to put all of Psalm 78 here, but alas, I will link to that as well (or you can actually open up a real physical Bible and read it from there). I think that this is a good example of how the assemblies of Israel were supposed to function, and how our assembling together should function. We need to be recounting the marvelous acts of our God, with the most glorious of all being the Gospel. Our communities are supposed to be focused on such marvelous retellings of God's working through history. The two ordinances (or sacraments if you want to be hipsterish, Reformed, Orthodox or Catholic) of baptism and the Lord's Supper are meant to be sermons telling of how God has acted in history. The Lord's Supper is the remembering of the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, the Gospel itself. It is an image of His broken body and spilled blood, a memorial to take us back to focusing on that historical fact. Baptism shows how God works in the lives of individuals, bringing them into the Church. So with both, the focus is on Christ, and His work. If we as small kingdom enclaves lose sight of this, then how can we say we are focusing on Christ?