A Church is Also A Building

In a “covid shutdown culture” the idea that “A Church is not a building” has been pushed to the point that good christian people are believing that church is not a building. I beg to differ and here is why…

1. The first thing I need to acknowledge is that the church is made up of people. The Bible teaches this clearly. People who have received the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior make up the church. These groups of people are both in local communities and is also a world wide group of people. We must remember however that the world wide church is made up of smaller groups of believers that are meeting regularly at a local location they have agreed upon.
2. Atheist call a church building a church and they are not wrong. The church building itself is a testimony that there is a group of people who believe in God and meet regularly to worship. The church building is a testimony to the culture that there is a God and a group of people believe in Him.
3. The church building is a sacred space. A group of people put their funds together and built a building that would be dedicated to the proclamation of the Gospel. These same people agreed to meet there on a regular basis making it a house of worship. Its function is for religious purposes. Even when a church building is sold and something else moves inside of it, the community still refers to it as a church that was turned into a ______________________ (whatever business moved in)
4. There are churches that meet in bars. But those bars are never called a church. Every building has a main identity and even churches that start out meeting in different places wind up building something or renaming a building they have bought “a church”
5. The government recognizes church buildings to be churches.

Saying a church is “just a building” is like saying a grocery store is just a building or a hospital is just a building or a factory is just a building when in fact those building are not “just buildings” they are grocery stores hospitals, factories etc…

To imply that a church is not a building at all and we should abandon the idea of having a church building is a dangerous misconception. A misconception that feels like we are really saying something deep but in reality it doesn’t really make any sense…

…people just feel like it does.

Is the church a group of people that meet together on a regular basis? Yes.

Is a church also a building? Yes.

Let’s not fall into the trap of identifying it as something else.