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What is the church?

When I was little, my Sunday school teachers taught me a little ditty.

Here’s the church,

Here’s the steeple.

Open the door,

And here’s the people.

The point of the ditty was that the church is people, not a building. That’s true, of course. The church is people gathered by God’s grace for worship and sent by God’s gifting for service.

But even my little Sunday school ditty doesn’t pierce to the essence of churchness. To do that, we need to pay attention to what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:16-17:

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.

To properly interpret this verse, we need to compare and contrast it with 1 Corinthians 6:19, where Paul writes:

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?

Both verses use the words temple and Spirit, so some have interpreted them as referring to the same thing. That would be a mistake, however, for their contexts are very different. First Corinthians 6:19 refers to how individual Christians use – or misuse – their bodies. There, Paul exhorts the Corinthians to avoid sexual sins because they pollute their bodies, which are temples of the Holy Spirit. In other words, 1 Corinthians 6:19 uses the word temple to refer to the bodies of Christian individuals.

Here in 1 Corinthians 3:16-17, however, Paul uses the word temple to refer to the Christian community. Throughout chapters 1-4, Paul has labored to end divisions in the Christian church by focusing their attention on “Jesus Christ and him crucified” rather than on their favorite leaders. In 6:19, the sin is sexual sin committed against one’s own body. But in 3:16-17, the sin is division within the Body of Christ. The church itself, understood as a community of believers, is God’s temple, not just the body of the individual Christian believer.

The essence of church, then, is relationship. My little Sunday school ditty is correct that church is people in relationship to one another. Not every relationship with others is church, however. Families are not churches, businesses are not churches, sports teams are not churches, and governments are not churches, even though all of these involve relationships.

The missing element in these relationships, the essence of churchness, is relationship to God through his Holy Spirit. In Israel, and throughout the ancient world, a temple was the place where heaven and earth met, where God came to dwell among men. That is what makes the church unique among other relationships. God joins in.

If God joins in, the church must reflect his character. He is holy. He brings grace and peace to his relationships. True holiness does the same.

God is holy. God’s temple is holy. We are God’s temple. We must be holy too.