Before I came to Evart to become the retreats director at SpringHill, I was a campus minister for ten years. I always felt blessed by the timing of my ministry there. I came in right as we began to really see the fruit of God moving.
The ministry was growing, and people were noticing. In fact, the pastors of another church in town took notice. They invited Matt, the other campus minister, and I over to their offices for a meeting.
I remember being a little nervous—these were men I highly respected. Their church was, and is, a model of relevant and influential ministry in the community.
“Matt and Eric,” he began, “we have just one question for you. Are you a campus ministry, or are you a church?”
It caught us both off guard. It was a question we had not considered. Clearly we were a campus ministry… we thought.
So, after our meeting, we went back to campus with a new filter, and a homework assignment: we needed a better picture of what it meant to be a church, and we needed to decide if we were that.
So we decided to take an informal poll. We wouldn’t ask our students if they thought our ministry was a church, we would ask them where they went to church.
The response was fairly consistent, in fact, almost universal.
“What do you mean?” they would reply.
“Where do you go to church?” I repeated myself more slowly and with better enunciation. They still didn’t understand, so I clarified, “Where do you go on Sunday morning and sit for an hour for worship?”
Our students clearly had a better understanding than we did. “Oh, I get it,” they would say. “This is my church,” pointing to the ground to indicate the lecture hall where we met week after week on Thursday nights. “This is where I worship, where I grow, where I’m connected in a small group, where I serve, where I give, where I’m encouraged and challenged. And on Sunday, I go to church at…” fill in the blank.
Wow. We didn’t call ourselves a church, but for those students, at that time, we were being the church. And we were teaching them a lesson I wish we could erase: that the church was where you went for an hour on Sunday morning and sat in between worship songs.
Friends, it’s not. Your church is not a church simply because of what happens in your building on Sundays from 10 to 11am. And, while that time together is vital for the church, it does not make it one.
So in the fall of 2002, we asked that question of our ministry. We asked it every which way we could think of. And every way we asked it, we found the answer was the same: that we were being the church on campus.
And when I walk into my local church on Sunday morning and look around, I see the same thing. I see people who would say, Crossroads is my church [pointing at the floor]. This is where I worship, where I grow, where I’m connected in a small group, where I serve, where I give, where I’m encouraged and challenged. This is my church.
But you know what? I also see people I don’t know. People who might say, This is where I go on Sunday morning to sit for an hour, and I think I like it. This is where I go to church.
The church needs to be a place where they are welcome too.
So how do you see it? Is your church where you go for an hour on Sundays? Or is it something more?