Agape, Jesus, and Church

It is pretty clear, at least to me. that Jesus never imagines anything that resembles at all what today we call “church.” Except for three quick “bleeps,” Jesus never even says “church,” and when he does, he probably only means something like “your neighbors.” That’s what the Greek word the New Testament uses for “church,” “ecclesia,” means when it shows up in places other than the New Testament, and it shows up in the Gospels only in Matthew when Jesus tells Peter that he’s the “Rock” on which he’ll build his “ecclesia” and when Jesus tells his followers that when there’s a dispute among them to take it to the “ecclesia.”

But Jesus in the Gospels says nothing about church. No institutional guidebook. No “best practices” handbook. Nothing about structure or discipline or clergy or lay or fund-raising or ministry or pastoral care or youth or outreach or denominations. Jesus never files an annual report, officiates at a funeral, performs a wedding, makes a hospital visit, intuitively responds to some unreported need, or brings covered dishes for a potluck. Jesus never envisions a Sunday School, a Woman’s Fellowship, a church bowling league, a church choir, a capital fund drive, or an entire academic discipline called “church architecture.” Jesus never sits on a committee, creates a budget, fills out a pledge card, or leads a stewardship drive.

In the Gospels Jesus tells us nothing at all about “church,” and people struggling to be faithful to what Jesus teaches need to lighten up a little bit about our notions that we are most closely in line with God’s plan for church. The truth is that we people struggling to be faithful to what Jesus teaches have been making this whole church thing up out of whole cloth ever since the first Monday after the first Easter.

Except for one thing. Though Jesus tells us nothing about church, Jesus models a faithful life of agape, a life that always finds itself giving itself away. Jesus invites his disciples and all within earshot and, across the ages, he invites you and me to join him in living this agape life. What Jesus imagines and models is an agape community, gathered not so much to meet its own needs, but to find ever more creative ways to give it self, to give ourselves, away.

And that’s it. That’s all Jesus gives us about church. No rules, guidelines or “if you’re going to be a church, then you’re going to have to do thus and so.” Just the imagination and modeling of an agape life, of a community formed so that it can gratefully give itself away.