What is church?

What is church? I believe church is the people of God BEING the people of God. The church is the bride of Christ. The church is the body of Christ - of which Christ is the head. The purpose of the body is to be a display of the life that is in Christ. Would you leave a dead finger on your hand?....sure you may try to revive it somehow....but ultimately a dead finger is good for two things....spreading disease and death, and being what it is - garbage. Garbage that should be tossed away - thrown into the fire. As God's people, are we alive? Are we a display of the life that is in Christ? Or are we dead meat rotting?

Are we being renewed? Or are we up to our same old tricks?.... anger…. malice…. gossip (we love this one particularly in the church don’t we? - though we attempt to mask it by calling it "sharing" or better yet - "filtering" through others).... slander.... jealousy..... immodesty.... lust.... greed..... sexual immorality.... witchcraft? Are we lazy?.... Slothful?.... Indifferent that we've made no attempt to get to know our neighbors, co-workers, and classmates in the hope that we might share the love of Christ with them in word AND in deed? When we gather, do we sit and “spectate,” only punctuating the proceedings (as Art Katz would say) now and again with our occasional amens? Are we given to passivity? We will be held accountable for our actions, and our inaction - - and honestly….that terrifies me….and it should. As the late Art Katz once wrote:

I am suggesting a prescription that is totally opposed to passivity. In the conventional situation, we sit inactive, and only punctuate the proceedings now and then by our "amens" or "hallelujahs." In the Body, however, this posture is altogether unacceptable. "When you assemble," Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:26, "each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation." That is how the life of the Body is expressed to the Body. But where are we ever encouraged to "each one having"? Rather, we have been compelled to a passivity, and to looking up to trained men to conduct the service. Furthermore, we are only too willing to pay the cost of it that we might be absolved from the spiritual responsibility of having to share a hymn, a psalm, a tongue, an interpretation, a prophecy, a revelation or a teaching! The Body is therefore emaciated, being inadequately fed. We cannot grow, and we are therefore limp, disjointed and anemic. We are left weakened if this life-giving provision does not come out of, and into, our midst. There can be no excuse to justify our inactivity and passivity. When we come together, we should have prepared ourselves already in the place of prayer, fully expecting that God is going to quicken and bring something through us.

So where are we? Are we living this life in Christ in word AND deed? Are we expressing life in the Body, and as the Body are we expressing life to the world?  Or are we dead meat rotting?... camped out in our beautiful buildings equipped with all the latest gadgetry a dying world has to offer.  Still think church is a building or a "service" you go to?  Still think a Christian is called to "GO" to church - (rather than BE the church)?