By Jake Thurston
When you hear the word, “church,” what comes to mind?
Typically, three images rise to the surface when people think about church. First, there is church as a building. It could be an old timey building that features a tall, pointy steeple with a cross at the top, or a large, stone cathedral built hundreds of years ago. It could be small, or it could be HUGE. All the same, the church is a building.
A second image that comes to mind is church as an event. Here, church isn’t just a building you go to, but an event you attend. It could be an hour on Sunday mornings for a worship service, or an hour on Wednesday night for youth group. When people say, “We’re going to church,” they’re often referring to church as an event.
The third image of church is church as a group. Ekklesia, the Greek word that we translate as “church,” originally meant a group or assembly of people. In this sense, church isn’t just a building you go to or an event you attend. Church is a group of people—more specifically, a community of believers in Jesus.
So here’s our three images of church: We have church as a building, church as an event, and church as a group. These three common images of “church” describe what is known as The Gathered Church.
The Gathered Church is when a group of Christ followers gather together at a certain place, at a certain time, to worship God, confess sins, and hear the preaching of God’s Word. The Gathered Church is like a team huddle before a big game, where the players hype each other up to get their head in the right mind space. This occurs on Sunday mornings, Saturday evenings, Wednesday nights, and plenty of other times throughout the week.
When people are sensing a call to ministry, the common thought is to get a job in The Gathered Church. These jobs include lead roles to preach and give direction; executive roles to manage teams and execute tasks; youth roles to run youth ministries; children’s ministry roles to manage Sunday morning kids church; worship leaders to recruit music volunteers and plan services; outreach directors to manage service opportunities; and administrative roles that ensure all the details get done.
The common theme is that all these jobs help make The Gathered Church function on a weekly basis. If a student is called to work for the Gathered Church he or she may go to college specifically to get a degree that equips a church’s people, manages the church’s events, and tends to the church building.
However, there’s a fourth image of “church” we haven’t discussed yet: church as a movement.
The Church was never meant to be confined to a group of people who meet in a building for an hour once a week. The Church, God’s chosen people, are ultimately sent on a mission to make his name known everywhere they go through everything they do. Therefore, the Gathered Church’s job is to build up God’s people so they can scatter into the mission field. This is called the Scattered Church.
The Scattered Church is Christ-followers doing ministry outside the church building’s walls. They are actively engaging in the mission field through their work, families, and extra-curricular activities. Every waking moment, the Scattered Church is rubbing shoulders with people who don’t know Jesus, are far from him, or need built up in their own faith. This occurs when a barista encourages a customer who is having a bad day, a businesswoman casts a vision that makes the world a better place through Christian values, or a stay-at-home dad who reads Bible stories to his three kids. But then, after a week of ministry, the Scattered Church gathers together again on Sunday for worship, confessing sins, and being built up by the Word before scattering to their mission fields again.
We need the Gathered Church and the Scattered Church. We cannot have one without the other.
As a young ministry leader, you may be trying to discern what kind of ministry God is calling you to. Is he calling you to work for the Gathered Church, to make its weekly functions run? To run a youth group, children’s ministry, or worship services? Or, is God calling you to work for the Scattered Church? To minister to people’s needs as a nurse, artist, chef, businessman, teacher, or vet?
But what if you feel stuck trying to figure out what God is calling you to do? If you’re having a hard time figuring this out, I want you to consider signing up for a Calling Coaching Session. These are 1-hour video calls to get to hear your story and help you discern the kind of ministry God may be calling you to do. If you’re interested, you can sign up today by CLICKING HERE, and someone from our team will follow up with you!
Regardless of what you choose, the Lord will use you for amazing things no matter where you are or what you do. Just remember: As a member of the church, you have to gather for worship and fellowship, and you have to scatter for ministry and mission. The two go hand-in-hand.
