In addition to being a Protestant church, a biblically faithful church is a gathered church. It is a voluntarily assembled congregation that is not bound together by nationality, ethnicity, or family alone. No mere circumstance of birth should determine the membership of a biblically faithful church. Rather, a profession of faith in Christ and the act of submitting to the teachings and discipline of a particular church should regulate a congregation's membership. Christians choose to gather together regularly out of obedience to God's Word.
For centuries historical circumstances obscured the voluntary nature of the church. The Protestant Reformation was carried out by both magisterial and nonmagisterial Reformers. The magisterial Reformers were those who used the offices of the state—or the magistrate—to bring doctrinal reform to the churches.1 Furthermore, the magisterial Reformers, in both their Lutheran and Reformed varieties, began movements within established state churches. That meant that an individual's political citizenship normally entailed membership in the established church as well. But once the true gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone was recovered, forces were unleashed which acted to undermine the whole concept of a legally established church.
If participating in the ordinances was not saving in and of itself, a baptized communicant could remain unbelieving and unsaved. This dawning realization brought about more concern for the salvation of the individual. The nature of evangelism and missions moved from incorporating individuals into the community through ritual and education, as much Roman Catholic mission work had done, to persuading and calling for a deliberate commitment by the individual. Eventually, nonmagisterial groups like the Anabaptists covenanted together to form congregations not necessarily sanctioned by the state. Indeed they were often illegal. Yet even in legally sanctioned Protestant churches, sermons were used to exhort the gathered to examine themselves to make their own calling and election sure.
The local church is more than a congregation, a gathering, but it is never less. While the New Testament refers to a plural number of leaders in a single congregation (e.g., Acts 20:17), never does it refer to multiple meetings as constituting a single local church. Furthermore, the idea that there can be one bishop or presbytery with authority over various congregations is the essence of either an Episcopalian or Presbyterian understanding of church polity; it is the opposite of congregationalism, which understands that each gathering that has preaching and the administration of baptism and the Lord's Supper has been given the keys of authority by Christ and should therefore have its own leadership, accountable under God only to the gathered church.
In recent decades a new question—or, better put, an old question in a new form—has arisen: May congregations rightly be considered a church with a single government and yet, by design, not regularly gather together? This is the question posed by both multisite and multiservice churches, and it effectively calls into question the meaning of the word church. For instance one author wrote, "A multi-site church shares a common vision, budget, leadership, and board."2 But is a common vision, budget, leadership, and board sufficient to constitute a "church"? Notice that the element of gathering is absent from this definition. In what sense can it be a "church" if it never gathers together? Can a pastor or group of elders giving leadership to multiple campuses or sites rightly consider those different sites a single church? Can their collection of congregations be considered one congregation, one church? Most importantly, are multiservice3 or multisite congregations biblical?4
On one level the question is settled lexically by simply considering the meaning of the word ekklesia. The New Testament authors regularly use the word to mean "assembly." This is highlighted by the fact that the word is used for more than just Christian assemblies. In Acts 7:38, Stephen referred to the congregation before Moses and the Lord at Mount Sinai as an ekklesia. And in Acts 19:32, Luke used the word to refer to a confused and violent assembly of people in the Ephesian amphitheatre who were intending to persecute the Christians. From these simple considerations it is clear that what these two usages have in common with a Christian "church" is that these groups, like Christians, gather. That's essential to their identity as a group.
But there is more to the question than one merely of normal usage. The physical gathering of the church presents a theological reality. The refractions of God's image in thousands of cultures and races and millions upon millions of individuals is presented, however partially and imperfectly, in the weekly meeting. The visual witness of the diversity of the body of Christ united together is celebrated by the elders in heaven who sing to the Lamb, "with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation" (Rev 5:9). What John saw in his vision—"a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb" (Rev 7:9)—is publicly though partially seen weekly as Christians congregate together. In other words the visible gathering constitutes a significant part of the local church's eschatalogical witness. The picture of people assembling in one place for worship points the world to this marvelous end-of-history congregation.
Divisions should not lightly be introduced into a local church. Language, distance, and even size are legitimate reasons to establish separate congregations. But then each separate congregation must uniquely represent the unity of Christ's end-time assembly, and nothing should be encouraged which would obscure that witness—a witness of holiness and love, yes, but also of actual togetherness across lines of income, ethnicity, class, and more.
As churches have reduced worship to evangelism, they have begun to risk introducing divisions among these kinds of groups. They have adopted actions appropriate for evangelism (like targeting certain groups such as the old or young, the upper class or the artsy class, the rock-music or country-music listeners) as an excuse to "narrow" their congregations by dividing them along worldly lines. Yet these are the kinds of divisions which we must not introduce to Christ's body, just as it would not be right to try representing the reconciling gospel of Jesus Christ with services that are only for non-Jews or caucasians. A part of a congregation, especially a part that shares some kind of worldly unifying characteristic like age or ethnicity or hobbies, is not the whole. It's no witness to the unifying power of the gospel. "And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?" (Matt 5:47).
Such subgroups acting as complete congregations divide the church wrongly. In the New Testament Jewish and Gentile believers were not to have separate congregations. Indeed, their togetherness helped to display the gospel they proclaimed (see Eph 2:11–22). The same is true today. Churches that submerge differences of age, race, status, background, or employment give witness to the power of the gospel. Neither youth group meetings nor denominations scattered across a whole continent are—in a strictly biblical sense—a church. Nor are the leaders considered alone. A biblically ordered church regularly gathers the whole congregation.5
No bishop or pastor, eldership or vision statement, budget or building shared among a number of different meetings constitutes a single church. While a local church may have any of these things, it need not have any of them. And yet, without regularly meeting together, it ceases to be a biblically ordered church. It may be true in that the gospel is preached, but it is irregular in the sense that it is not according to the rule of Scripture.
Certainly a church is more than an assembly, but to use church for anything less than an assembly would mean substituting the part (e.g., leadership, budget, vision) for the whole, with all the distortions that follow. The spiritual reality would be further hidden, including the spiritual unity which becomes visible in the regular physical union churches are called to enjoy in their local assemblies. In this united meeting churches present a preview of one of the glories of heaven—a preview that can only be distorted by "congregations" that never congregate. Furthermore, the united meeting also facilitates other aspects of the church's unity—its Christlike love, its service and corporate worship and outreach, all "so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ" (Eph 4:12–13).
What about local churches that decide to forego meeting together weekly but instead hold a variety of times or locations in which subgroups of the whole congregation meet together? Such a formula at least raises serious questions.6 While a single congregation may meet more than once a week (e.g., by gathering a second time on Sunday evening or for a midweek meeting), it's difficult to see how they could do anything less. Christians have always met together weekly, even in the Scriptures. The fourth commandment established a weekly rhythm among God's people,7 and whatever the relation of the Old Testament Sabbath to the New Testament Lord's Day, the nature of Christian obedience always demanded that believers regularly assemble. It is not surprising that the New Testament churches apparently met at least weekly (if not more) and even began referring to the "Lord's day" (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor 16:2; Rev 1:10; cf. Acts 2:46). Preaching in the Bible presumes a gathered audience (e.g., Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37). So does celebrating the Lord's Supper. And the kind of discipline enjoined in Matthew 18 and mentioned in 2 Corinthians 2 certainly assumes the congregation assembles together. Christians grow in love and care best by meeting together regularly. Therefore, Heb 10:25 exhorts believers, "Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing."
This weekly gathering also characterized the early church. The non-Christian Roman official Pliny, writing to Emperor Trajan about the year 112, referred to the fact that Christians met regularly before daybreak on the appointed day.8 The Didache, an early second-century document, exhorted Christians: "On the Lord's day assemble."9 Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, described a common assembly on the first day of each week in which Christians came together for reading Scripture, preaching, prayer, and collecting an offering.10 Hippolytus in the early third century referred to the pastor being chosen by all the people and assumed that God's people assembled each Lord's day.11 Questions about the legitimacy of the Lord's Supper regularly turned on whether the bishop/pastor was present. From the church's earliest days, Christians have congregated regularly in local assemblies and have done so in obedience to God.12
Christians gather regularly for practical reasons: to hear God's Word read and preached, to witness faith professed in baptism and to take the Lord's Supper, to pray and sing together, to teach and give, to encourage one another, to bear one another's burdens and sorrows, and to know and be known. All of these aspects of a congregation's life are made possible or at least greatly helped by the congregational gathering. A congregation's united action is fostered by receiving the same teaching and having the same shaping experiences in public worship. In short, unity inside the congregation is easier to maintain when the congregation regularly gathers.13
Congregations are not formed merely by people gathering together but by their beliefs and commitments. An individual must decide to join a congregation, and then he or she must make the continual decision to participate through attendance, prayer, acts of service, financial support, and submission to the leadership of the elders and finally to the discipline of the congregation.14 That's why Peter commanded people, "Repent and be baptized" (Acts 2:38). Those who are truly saved have repented of their sins and trusted in Christ.
At the same time, a Christian must publicly express the decision to repent and believe by publicly declaring his or her faith and covenanting together with a specific congregation of Christians. The congregation also must affirm the credibility of an individual's profession of faith.15 It is not merely the decision of an individual to join or leave a church; rather, the decision to join or leave a church requires mutual consent between the individual and the congregation (other than by death).16 Churches exist, in other words, as Christians gather together to proclaim and hear God's Word and then to affirm one another in the faith. A biblically faithful church is a gathered church.
1 This was the case because political jurisdiction overlapped with ecclesiastical jurisdiction (with exceptions for groups like immigrants or Jews).
2 Geoff Surratt et al., eds., Multi-site Church Revolution: Being One Church in Many Locations (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 18.
3 I'm using the term multiservice—not in the sense of the whole congregation gathering more than once, such as at 9:00 a.m. and again at 6:00 p.m., but in the sense of meetings at which only a part of the church's membership is meeting as if it were the whole church. This is the case when churches offer multiple services, such as a 9:00 a.m. and an 11:00 a.m. service and encourages members to pick one service to attend.
4 For a thorough yet gracious critique, see Thomas White and John M. Yeats, Franchising McChurch: Feeding Our Obsession with Easy Christianity (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2009).
5 With occasional absences as well, of course.
6 W. B. Johnson, the first president of the Southern Baptist Convention, made an observation that, though it may seem controversial today, was taken for granted when it was made and for a century afterwards: "The term church indicates one church, one body of the Lord's people, meeting together in one place, and not several congregations, forming one church" (Johnson, "The Gospel Developed," in Polity: Biblical Arguments on How to Conduct Church Life, ed. Mark Dever [Washington, DC: Center for Church Reform, 2001], 171).
7 "The primary reason for [Sunday worship's] origin must be the Christian need for a time of distinctively Christian worship. The need for some regular time of worship must be clearly distinguished from possible reasons for the choice of Sunday rather than another day. The choice of a day of the week is entirely natural in a Jewish context and anything less frequent would surely not have met the need. . . . It was the need for a regular and frequent time of Christian worship that led to the choice of a day of the week" (R. J. Bauckham, "The Lord's Day," in From Sabbath to Lord's Day, ed., D. A. Carson [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982], 238).
8 Pliny, Epistle X.xcvi, quoted in Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), 4.
9 Didache, XIV.
10 Justin Martyr, Apology, I.lxvi.
11 Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition, I.ii.
12 See W. B. Johnson, "Gospel Developed," 235–36.
13 Is it fair to wonder if the popularity of multisite churches unintentionally encourages Christians to consumerism and passivity, viewing their church as simply a service provider rather than as a family gathering to work, learn, love, and serve together?
14 Ultimately, of course, the church is gathered by the action of God's Spirit. As Luke wrote of the early church, "And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved" (Acts 2:47). Yet God is not the only one at work in the local church. This divine action is met with a human response. As the New Hampshire Confession puts it, repentance and belief are the "inseparable graces wrought in our heart by the Holy Spirit of God" (Article 8).
15 See Jonathan Leeman, Church Membership: How the World Knows Who Represents Jesus (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012).
16 This seems to be clearly implied in Paul's words to the Corinthians in 2 Cor 2:6–7. For more on this, see Jonathan Leeman, Church Discipline: How the Church Protects the Name of Jesus (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012).