One Assembly E-Book

Jonathan Leeman

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 268

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Many churches are switching to the multisite or multiservice models to manage crowded sanctuaries due to growing attendance. This solution seems sensible in the short term, but too often churches adopt this model without taking into consideration what the Bible says about it. Illuminating the importance of physical togetherness as a way to protect the gospel, this book argues that maintaining a single assembly best embodies the unity the church possesses in Jesus Christ. Jonathan Leeman considers a series of biblical, theological, and pastoral arguments that ask us to stop and examine intuitions or assumptions about what a church is. He reorients our minds to a biblical definition of church, offering examples of churches that have thrived with a single service at a single site and compelling alternatives for those looking to solve the complications that come with a growing church.

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“Evangelical churches that are multisite or multiservice are like that for good-intentioned, pragmatic reasons. Jonathan Leeman challenges us to think exegetically and theologically about a popular practice that may not be as strategic as so many assume.”

Andy Naselli, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and New Testament, Bethlehem College & Seminary

“Too often we don’t think about what it means to be a church or to do church together. Jonathan Leeman’s book, therefore, might shock our pragmatic and individualistic sensibilities. Still, Leeman makes an excellent case that the word church in the Scriptures means ‘assembly,’ and that two assemblies are by definition two churches. The matter is complex and people who love the Scriptures disagree, but I think Leeman’s case is the most plausible.”

Thomas R. Schreiner, James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“One Assembly is more than a critique of the multiservice and multisite movement. Leeman persuasively argues for the biblical faithfulness, beauty, and effectiveness of a single church service. Instead of slowing down gospel growth, the single-service model actually promotes the Great Commission by encouraging church planting. This is a must-read for anyone interested in church growth.”

Aaron Menikoff, Senior Pastor, Mount Vernon Baptist Church, Sandy Springs, Georgia

“Jonathan Leeman clearly loves the church. He loves it enough to lay out here, with clarity and compassion, the one-assembly model that Scripture so consistently presents. Eminently engaging and stemming from deep personal experience, this book helpfully shows us not only what Scripture says a ‘church’ is but also how churches with multiple sites or services can move toward a single gathering. Leeman’s carefully considered treatment is timely and relevant to all Christians, not just pastors and scholars.”

Anne Rabe, Former Lecturer in Classics, University of Kansas

“Leeman convincingly shows from Scripture and plain reason that a mark of the local church is one assembly, and churches do well to practice this biblical norm. I plead with church leaders to prayerfully hear Leeman’s case so that Christ is more exalted, we are more faithful, and our churches most effectively advance the Great Commission.”

P. J. Tibayan, Pastor-Theologian, Bethany Baptist Church, Bellflower, California

“This book analyzes the multisite and multiservice model with tremendous commitment to Scripture, clarity, and precision. Jonathan Leeman brings to light the implications of the multisite and multiservice movement’s chronological and geographical fragmentation of the one assembly: the redefinition of the nature of the church and the reshaping of the church morally. Every pastor must seriously consider his arguments.”

Jonas Madureira, Senior Pastor, Word Baptist Church, São Paulo, Brazil

“Many churches take multiple services as a given. Increasingly, churches are embracing multisite models. With the boldness, courage, and zeal of a reformer, Jonathan Leeman invites us to submit our assumptions and practices in ministry to the scrutiny of what the Bible says about the church. Even if you don’t agree with everything that One Assembly concludes about the church, Leeman is surely correct to call the church to build her life, worship, and service upon the foundation of Scripture alone. Let One Assembly provoke you, challenge you, and, above all, drive you to God’s word.”

Guy Prentiss Waters, James M. Baird Jr. Professor of New Testament, Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, Mississippi

“Jonathan Leeman has advanced significantly the discussion on what constitutes a local church. An ekklēsia, most fundamentally, is what it does: it is a gathering. Those looking to defend an alternative approach (either multisite or multiservice) will likely find some previously unconsidered arguments and data here. Leeman has assembled the most thorough case for one service/one church. Not everyone will be persuaded, of course; but Leeman’s work was influential in our church’s decision to move from multiservice to a single service.”

Ryan Kelly, Pastor of Preaching, Desert Springs Church, Albuquerque, New Mexico

“The church of Jesus and the apostles cannot be redefined by our culture or our needs. This book describes the difficulties in my own experience of pastoring a multisite church that lost its building and was forced to split into six home campuses. Leeman provides an alternative for the multisite model, including the church-planting strategy our elders are preparing to follow. This book will challenge you and bless other church leaders in situations like mine.”

Victor Shu, Lead Pastor, Radiant Grace Church, East Asia

One Assembly

Other 9Marks Books

The Rule of Love: How the Local Church Should Reflect God’s Love and Authority, Jonathan Leeman (2018)

Church in Hard Places: How the Local Church Brings Life to the Poor and Needy, Mez McConnell and Mike McKinley (2016)

Why Trust the Bible?, Greg Gilbert (2015)

The Compelling Community: Where God’s Power Makes a Church Attractive, Mark Dever and Jamie Dunlop (2015)

The Pastor and Counseling: The Basics of Shepherding Members in Need, Jeremy Pierre and Deepak Reju (2015)

Who Is Jesus?, Greg Gilbert (2015)

Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, 3rd edition, Mark Dever (2013)

Finding Faithful Elders and Deacons, Thabiti M. Anyabwile (2012)

Am I Really a Christian?, Mike McKinley (2011)

What Is the Gospel?, Greg Gilbert (2010)

Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church: A Guide for Ministry, Michael Lawrence (2010)

Church Planting Is for Wimps: How God Uses Messed-up People to Plant Ordinary Churches That Do Extraordinary Things, Mike McKinley (2010)

It Is Well: Expositions on Substitutionary Atonement, Mark Dever and Michael Lawrence (2010)

What Does God Want of Us Anyway? A Quick Overview of the Whole Bible, Mark Dever (2010)

The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline, Jonathan Leeman (2010)

What Is a Healthy Church Member?, Thabiti M. Anyabwile (2008)

12 Challenges Churches Face, Mark Dever (2008)

The Gospel and Personal Evangelism, Mark Dever (2007)

What Is a Healthy Church?, Mark Dever (2007)

One Assembly

Rethinking the Multisite and Multiservice Church Models

Jonathan Leeman

One Assembly: Rethinking the Multisite and Multiservice Church Models

Copyright © 2020 by Jonathan Leeman

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Dan Farrell

First printing 2020

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-5959-4 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-5962-4 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-5960-0 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-5961-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Leeman, Jonathan, 1973– author.

Title: One assembly: rethinking the multisite and multiservice church models / Jonathan Leeman.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020. | Series: 9Marks | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019036101 | ISBN 9781433559594 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433559600 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433559617 (mobipocket) | ISBN 9781433559624 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Multi-site churches. | Church.

Classification: LCC BV637.95 .L44 2020 | DDC 254—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036101

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2020-03-04 08:02:33 AM

Contents

Series Preface

Special Thanks

Introduction

 1  A Church Is the Geography of Christ’s Kingdom

 2  A Church Is an Assembly

 3  A Church Should Be Catholic

Appendix 1: New Testament Uses of Ekklēsia/“Assembly”

Appendix 2: Does Acts 9:31 Refer to a Regional “Church”?

Anne Rabe

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Series Preface

The 9Marks series of books is premised on two basic ideas. First, the local church is far more important to the Christian life than many Christians today perhaps realize.

Second, local churches grow in life and vitality as they organize their lives around God’s word. God speaks. Churches should listen and follow. It’s that simple. When a church listens and follows, it begins to look like the One it is following. It reflects his love and holiness. It displays his glory. A church will look like him as it listens to him.

So our basic message to churches is, don’t look to the best business practices or the latest styles; look to God. Start by listening to God’s word again.

Out of this overall project comes the 9Marks series of books. Some target pastors. Some target church members. Hopefully all will combine careful biblical examination, theological reflection, cultural consideration, corporate application, and even a bit of individual exhortation. The best Christian books are always both theological and practical.

It’s our prayer that God will use this volume and the others to help prepare his bride, the church, with radiance and splendor for the day of his coming.

Special Thanks

A number of friends read and offered good counsel on this book. So thank you, Alex Duke, Sam Emadi, Grant Gaines, Greg Gilbert, Bobby Jamieson, Michael Lawrence, Jake Meador, Aaron Menikoff, Anne Rabe, Matthew Sleeman, Matt Smethhurst, and Mark Vroegop. I’m also grateful to Mark Dever and Ryan Townsend for their support, encouragement, and feedback. Finally, Crossway—particularly Lane Dennis, Dave DeWit, and Thom Notaro—have been both patient and helpful every step of the way. Not all these names share my perspective, so don’t blame them. But each contributed in love to make the book better.

Introduction

The church’s main hall is full. People in the back scan the crowd, looking for an empty seat. You cannot see any. I am assisting a flustered usher. She is assisting a flustered mother with young children. Where can we put them?

Four young, single men sit comfortably in the back row. They’re oblivious. I want to say something. Hello, guys?

These days you have to show up early if you want seats. It’s the same upstairs on the children’s ministry floor. Want to check your toddler into childcare during the service? Better get there fifteen minutes early. Even then, you’ll find a crowd of parents hovering, waiting for check-in to begin.

Back downstairs with the big people, the usher runs out of bulletins. She panics. There’s nothing else I can do. I sit down with my family. Oh well.

Another Sunday morning in a full church.

Multisite or Multiservice—An Easy and Wise Solution?

I’m not exaggerating, by the way. The very Sunday after I wrote the words above, I arrived twenty minutes early at the children’s ministry check-in desk with my three-year-old. Her class was already full. I walked away quietly chuckling at the irony. “Are you sure you want to argue against multiple services or sites?” I asked myself. My daughter spent the entire service on my lap.

For moments like these, starting a second site or service does seem like the obvious solution. It seems like good financial stewardship because it’s more cost-effective than building a bigger building. It seems like good time stewardship because it’s less logistically taxing than planting a whole new church and can happen more quickly. It offers predictability and familiarity for church members and pastoral safety for leaders. You avoid sending forty vulnerable sheep off to start a new church with a young, untested planter.

Most crucially, it makes Great Commission sense. We want as many people as possible to hear the gospel. We don’t want them leaving because they cannot find seats. Therefore, let’s not be too persnickety over the structures of a church. Right? A number of good friends, whom I respect and who are better evangelists than I am, have chosen multisite or multiservice for just this reason.

Of course, not all reasons for adding sites or services commend themselves. One multisite pastor told his staff that becoming a multisite church made them appear “legitimate.” It was a status symbol for him. But never mind the bad reasons. What do we make of the good reasons, like the Great Commission?

That’s what motivated my pastor friend Mark to adopt the multisite model. He challenged me over dinner, “If a non-Christian walks into our church, and it’s full, I cannot tell him to go elsewhere.” He continued, “Suppose you have a revival, and an extra few hundred people show up one Sunday. Would you turn them away?” I hope not.

Another multisite pastor friend, J. D. Greear, wrote that the elders of his church chose to pursue a multisite strategy because they “believed it was the most efficient way to reach the maximum number of people in our city . . . as quickly as possible.” J. D. well understands that a concern for evangelism does not negate everything else the Bible says about the church. He, too, values “accountability, community, and faithful polity.” Yet, he maintains that “a church that does not have [evangelism] near the top of its priorities cannot be closely aligned with our Savior’s purposes, regardless of what else they get right. In heaven, there is more joy over one sinner that repents than how we organize the 99 who are already his.”1 Insisting on the single-assembly church, J. D. contends, is “evangelistically harmful.”

Both of these conversations illustrate the strength of Great Commission instinctsamong evangelicals. We recognize that salvation is most crucial. This is both a doctrinal conviction and an automatic reflex. Salvation is more important than goods and kindred, more important than the kingdoms of this world, and certainly more important than church order. As Martin Luther taught us to sing,

Let goods and kindred go,

this mortal life also;

the body they may kill.

So, in one sense, I agree with Pastors Mark and J. D. entirely. We should prize conversion and spiritual growth over church structure. And the Great Commission should be uppermost in our minds as churches.

Defining Multisite

Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon, and Warren Bird’s definition of a multisite church emphasizes the shared leadership and administrative structure: “A multi-site church shares a common vision, budget, leadership, and board.”* John Piper’s definition emphasizes the shared leadership and the teaching: “The essence of biblical church community and unity hangs on a unity of eldership, a unity of teaching, and a unity of philosophy of ministry.”†

* Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon, and Warren Bird, The Multi-site Revolution: Being One Church . . . in Many Locations (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), 18.

† John Piper, “Is It Important for the Sake of Community That a Church Have Only One Service?,” desiringGod.org, October 20, 2008, https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/is-it-important-for-the-sake-of-community-that-a-church-have-only-one-service.

Might We Be Shortsighted?

But hold on. Should we pit church structure and conversion against one another? I care about my children more than my house, but my house keeps my children alive and healthy. Likewise, evangelicals rightly prioritize salvation, but we cannot abandon the house of salvation, which is the church. Doing so will hurt our ability to fulfill the Great Commission. It’s true there is more joy over one sinner who repents than a rightly organized ninety-nine. Yet, let’s not grab an either–or where the Bible provides a both–and. Jesus in fact uses this very illustration about the ninety-nine and the one just so: rightly organizing the ninety-nine is crucial for reaching the one (Matt. 18:10–20). Read the parable about the lost sheep in context.

As evangelicals, we can be shortsighted, like eating candy before a marathon for the burst of sugar energy we expect it to give. We fixate on the number of people in the pews this Sunday, but lose sight of how a healthy biblical church is the best way to fulfill the Great Commission over time—to run the whole marathon with endurance. Biblical church order serves disciple-making. Biblical polity aids evangelism. Don’t separate them.

Too often, we are tempted to change the rules to get more of a good thing. Yet, in the process we undermine ourselves. Think of a university that addresses a downward trend in student grades by making tests easier. They might fix the grade problem in the short term, but they won’t produce better engineers, nurses, or math teachers over time. Or think of a clothing company that increases profits by producing cheaper clothes. They’ll do better in the short run, but they’ll hurt their reputation in the long run. I stopped shopping at one of my favorite stores because holes in the sweaters and unstitched seams in the shirts showed up after one season of wearing them.

In the same way, the good desire for conversions shouldn’t lead us to compromise other biblical principles. It will hurt those numbers and the church’s mission in the long run. “A growing number of people is not a number of growing people,” Mark Dever has said. Unbiblical methods and strategies for fulfilling the Great Commission might look good for a moment, like grade inflation ballooning the number of As. But they produce false positives, inaccurate readings, anemic churches, a weakened mission. They hinder the Great Commission. Healthy, biblical churches, on the other hand, advance it.

Those Sites and Services Are Churches

Which brings us back to the multisite and multiservice models. Here’s the biggest problem, as I’ll seek to show in this book: They’re not in the Bible. At all. And that means they work against, not with, Jesus’s disciple-making plan.

To put it another way: there is no such thing as a multisite or multiservice church based on how the Bible defines a church. They don’t exist. Adding a second site or service, by the standards of Scripture, gives you two churches, not one. Two assemblies, separated by geography or numbers on a clock, give you two churches.

Plenty of things exist today that call themselves multisite or multiservice churches: “Join us on Sunday at 9:00 or 11:00,” or “One church, three locations.” Such a “church” might be a legal and institutional reality, and I will use the singular word “church” throughout this book when referring to a multisite or multiservice arrangement as a legal and institutional entity. But make no mistake, biblically speaking, such entities form a collection of churches. Each site and service is its own church, even as they share pastors, a budget, and a brand. The “north campus” and the “south campus” are both churches. The 9:00 a.m. service and the 11:00 a.m. service are both churches.

What about the Differences Between Sites and Services?

A year before completing this book I gave a short talk on the topic of this book at a pastors’ retreat, and several pastors were surprised that I equated multisite churches and multiservice churches. After the talk, one pastor said to me, “Multisite and multiservice are different kinds of things. Why are you lumping them together?”

I agree they are things we experience differently. Different impulses motivate a church to go in one direction or the other. And the different institutional configurations have different relational and logistical implications, which means the two configurations will differently impact a church’s ability to fulfill its mission. That said, multisite and multiservice churches have this in common: theydivide the assembly. One divides it geographically, the other chronologically, producing more than one assembly. And if I’m right that, formally speaking, the regular assembly is an essential ingredient for making a church a church, then both multiple sites and multiple services present us with multiple churches.

Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matt. 18:20). He’s not “there” in the administrative structure that binds several campuses together. He’s not “among” the unified vision, budget, and board. He’s there in the gathering of two or three, or two or three thousand. The gathering represents him, speaks for him, flies his flag. If you want a proof text for this whole book, here it is in three present-in-time-and-space words: “gather,” “there,” “among.” Matthew 18:20 does not provide all the ingredients for a church, as we’ll think about in chapter 1. The New Testament also adds preaching and the ordinances for specifying how we gather “in his name.” Yet a church doesn’t possess less than the ingredients mentioned here. It’s not less than a gathering. Jesus is there at 9:00 a.m. He’s there at 11:00. Each speaks for him. Each can act for him. Each is a church. And this is the uninterrupted pattern we’ll discover throughout the New Testament regarding local churches.

It’s common these days to say that a church is a people, not a place. And that’s sort oftrue. It’s the peoplewho are a church—not the building, pastors, budget, vision, or brand. But those people become a church in part by gathering in a place. That place, that gathering, is the geography of Christ’s kingdom, as I’ll also argue in chapter 1. One might as well say, “A basketball team is a people, not a practice or a game.” Again, true, but it misses something crucial. The players become a team by practicing and playing together. No practicing and playing as one, no team. For a church, likewise, a physical togetherness, an assembly, is an essential part of the formula.

When you read “church” in your English Bible, the Greek word behind it is ekklēsia, which, in the plainest translation, is “assembly.”2 Again, a New Testament church is more than an assembly, but it’s not less, as I’ll seek to show. A people who don’t regularly assemble cannot be an assembly, a church. They’re just a bunch of people. Meanwhile, contemplate the word “multisite.” It means sites multiple, nottogether, not an assembly.

One friend told me he liked the idea of the whole church being together, but he was uncertain of “how much we should insist on this principle of being single service or site.” Let’s be clear, I replied. There is no explicit “moral principle” in the Bible saying churches should stick to one site or service. I’m not starting with that kind of moral claim. I am starting with an ontological or a descriptive claim, as in: no matter what you call it, the Bible would say you have actually started another church with that second site or service. The second gathering, whether separated by time or by space, simply is its own church.

“Church” Not a Direct Translation of Ekklēsia

Part of what confuses our understanding of what constitutes a church is the fact that our English word “church” doesn’t actually derive from ekklēsia. It roots back in the Greek word kyriakos (an adjective for “of the Lord,” kyrios) or kyriakē(oikia), referring to a house of the Lord, which was sometimes used for houses of worship after AD 300. This eventually passed on through to the proto-Germanic kirika to the Old English cirice to the Middle English chirche to our own “church.” As such, our English word “church” has spent centuries, like a slow meandering river, picking up all kinds of flotsam and sediment, from the idea of a building to the idea of a hierarchical structure (e.g., Roman Catholic Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church). So our English Bibles use “church” to translate ekklēsia, but the English word bears a much broader, more complicated range of meaning and resonance. Where ekklēsia possessed the comparatively brick-like clarity of “assembly,” “church” is a more elastic word, carrying two thousand years’ worth of accumulated intuitions and associations. One of the first translators of the English Bible, William Tyndale, therefore translated ekklēsia as “congregation”—for example, “and apon this rocke I wyll bylde my congregacion.” All of this is to say, when we hear “church” with our English ears, we hear a lot more than early Greeks heard whenever someone said ekklēsia.

Structural Conversations Are Moral Conversations

Now, that ontological claim comes with moral implications. The problem is bigger and more complex than what we name the thing, because changing a church structure changes its moral shape.

We evangelicals don’t know how to talk or think about structures, so strong are our individualistic and anti-institutional biases. At most, we treat the idea of church structure as pragmatic and arbitrary, as if it were a separate thing from what the church itself is. “A church structured this way or that way is still a church,” we assume. “And the Bible leaves us freedom for structuring it this way or that way.”

That’s a fair assumption for some things, like whether or not we have a Sunday school program or small group ministry or task-specific deacons or biweekly elder meetings. But when it comes to defining what a church is or its basic system of governance, that’s not the case. The very existence of a church depends upon some structure, some way of organizing and binding individual Christians together. No structure, no church.

Furthermore, realize what a “structure” is: it’s a collection of rules, or moral judgments, that bind and shape our relationship with other people. To become a father or husband, for instance, is to occupy a rule structure that comes with a set of responsibilities—duties—and a package of rights and wrongs.

Structural conversations, in other words, are moral conversations. That’s true in every domain of life, whether home, work, or government. It’s true in matters of church structure, too.

To the seminary ethics professors out there, you should teach church structure and polity in your ethics class, because that’s what church polity is—one subcategory of ethics.

So back to my original point: change a church’s structure and you change the moral shape of the church. You change how people relate—their sense of responsibility to one another—however subtly and imperceptibly. Changing from a congregational to a presbyterian or an episcopal church government, for instance, changes its moral shape. Each distributes responsibilities and duties between leaders and members differently. You give more responsibility to the leaders, less to the members. Likewise, changing from one service to two, or one site to three, does the same thing, even if people are not fully aware of those differences. Whether you mean to or not, you inevitably shift some degree of authority and responsibility upward onto the shoulders of the leaders, even if you maintain the same formal structure (congregational, elder-rule, etc.). Over time, that shift, like wheels aimed at a slightly new angle, will dramatically alter the direction of the church and how it fulfills its mission.

The question for Christians, therefore, must be Does the Bible say anything about church structure? Christian ethics must be biblical ethics. Where the Bible morally binds the conscience, we bind the conscience. Where it doesn’t, we don’t, but leave each believer to the realm of prudence and freedom. We want our ethics (or church structures) to depend not upon the wisdom of man but upon the inspired wisdom of God. We don’t want our church structures to demand more than the Bible says, but nor do we want them to demand less than the Bible says.

In short, we all need two lists: a list of the structural things the Bible mandates for all churches everywhere because they make a church a church, and a list of the things that can vary from context to context. My concern in this book is with that first list. We want to define the church like Jesus defines the church; else we’ll ask our churches to do different things than Jesus asks them to do. And that raises questions of faithfulness and obedience.

If Jesus points to an assembly and says, “That’s a church,” while we point to a collection of assemblies bound together under one administration and say, “And that’s a church,” recognize what we’re doing. We are changing the definition of what a church is. What’s more, we are giving at least some of the work that should belong to the assembly to the administration that binds the multiple assemblies together. For the leadership, that’s an act of usurpation; for the members, abdication. And this is true whether you are a congregationalist like me or not. We are, then, saying we know better how to handle discipleship, witness, and mission than Jesus. We are picking a fight with Jesus!

The Gospel and Gospel Structures

Let me say one more thing about biblical church structures: they emerge from the gospel itself. They are not arbitrary or artificially stapled onto God’s people. Rather, the gospel produces a social order, and that order shows itself in how we organize our churches. The organization or order in turn protects and promotes the gospel (see fig. 1).

The gospel and biblical church order do not work at cross purposes. They reinforce one another.

Figure 1. Gospel flow chart

One of those biblical minimums of church order, this book is arguing, is one assembly. You can no more be a multisite church than you can be a multisite body. The single assembly of a church demonstrates, proves, embodies, illustrates, incarnates, makes concrete, makes palpable and touchable and hearable and seeable the unity we possess in the gospel. Gathering as a local assembly is the very first imperative to the indicative of the unity we possess as members of the universal church. It literally makes that unity visible and active. The body of Christ is not just an idea. Nor is the family of God. Nor is the temple of the Spirit. You can actually see and hear and reach out and touch the body, family, and temple in the gathering. The gathering manifests the universal church, or what people sometimes capitalize as the Church. The gathering makes the Church present, and a church present to itself. That is, it enables the members to discover, see, and recognize themselves together as a church and as the Church.

What’s more, the gathering represents the authority of Christ. It depends upon and testifies to his lordship. Multisite advocates argue that once a church reaches a certain size, people cannot possibly know one another. This misses the point. A church is a church not because everyone knows everyone else, though we certainly hope everyone knows some people. A church is a church ultimately because of the authority of Christ and his declaration that he would identify himself with gatherings: “I’m there in the gathering of two or three in my name.” That was his decision, not ours. Consider, therefore, what a church gathering is: it’s a group of people bowed in submission to something. To what? To Christ. Their physical togetherness, then, testifies to his lordship.

Yet, divide the assembly in space or time, and gospel authority must move, once again, to the leaders who bind those assemblies together. The shared submission of those assemblies now testifies—again, even subtly—to the leaders who unite them.

It’s therefore crucial to keep presence and authority tied together—both because Christ explicitly tied his name to the gathering and because he makes every member of the church a priest-king. Presence and authority are in sync in the assembly.

That said, there’s an inevitability to the authority of Jesus in the gathering. A friend in a doctrinally solid multisite church recently told me their members’ meetings, which combine all the campuses, are in a downward spiral of conflict. Members of the three sites each prefer the leadership of their own campus pastors and find themselves tempted to mistrust the pastors from other campuses. It’s true their conflict might have had a number of sources, but the thought bubble above my head read, “You have separated presence and authority and gone against the biblical pattern. You picked a fight with Jesus. I’m sad, but not surprised by the resulting tensions.”

Church Intuitions

Let me explain our fight with Jesus one more way. We all have a basic set of intuitions about what a church is. An intuition, mind you, is your gut sense about something, your snap judgment about it before you consciously think about it. And we all have a gut sense about what a church is, an automatic reflex that shows up in the way we talk about a church.

Suppose you reflexively think of the church as a building. You will talk about “driving down to the church” or “walking inside the church.” You’ll exclaim, “I can’t believe they’re selling the church to a condo developer.” Or you might view a church as a performance event, like a show or a concert. You “enjoyed church yesterday.” You “are frustrated by how long church lasted.” Or you might view a “church” as its leaders. You “love the church’s vision.” You “heard the church excommunicated Jack” or “the church changed its doctrine,” by which you mean the pastors did those things.

In each of these scenarios, whatever your doctrine is, your intuitive or functional view determines your practice.