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Church Body
The church struggles to find its place in a new age. It casts around looking for a working model to enable it not just to survive but to grow gracefully. Rather than tinkering with the mechanics of the institutional church, we might better look at the Early Church model of the Body of Christ. She is relevant for Christians today.
Mystical Reality
This mystical reality transforms small groups, institutions and denominations toward the great vision of the universal, global and heavenly Body of Christ.
It quietly energizes today's leadership, clergy, lay leaders and ordinary Christian men and women. In the Mystical Body, we rediscover a vision of a church that is no longer encumbered with buildings. She is set free to be God's hands and feet in the world. She is the Mystical Body of Christ.
David Watson wrote, "Two thousand years ago, it was the person of Christ that was compellingly attractive, not the individual disciples with all their individual blemishes. Today, it is the Body of Christ, when deeply united in love, and not individual Christians, that can most of all make one hungry for God." 1
Body of Christ?
You probably have many questions concerning the Body of Christ. What is it and what does it do? Is "the Body" the same as the congregation we attend on Sunday, or is there more?
What does Christ's Body have to do with the man named Jesus who lived in A.D.30? What does the Body of Christ have to do with the Christian today? What is the Body of Christ anyway?
Church and the Body of Christ
Our mistake today is to imagine that our church is necessarily the same as the New Testament Church. "The Body of Christ" meant "church" to the early Christian community. Paul writes, "for the sake of his (Christ's) body, which is the church." 2
For the first three centuries after Christ, there were no church buildings as we know them today, only the intimate family groups nourishing the faith. "Church," as we now describe it, is several times removed from the original model of the Body of Christ.
Questions for Discussion
1. Describe the Body of Christ in your own words.
Notes
1David Watson. 2Colossians 1.24.
For the sake of his (Christ's) body, which is the church
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