The DC Mayor Doesn’t Get to Define Church

There’s a bit of space between “never assembles” and “doesn’t assemble in one place at one time for several months.” There’s even quite a bit of space between “never assembles” and “several years.”

For what it’s worth, my take:

• CBC has done the right thing by finding ways to be obedient to Romans 13, etc., while seeking legal means of relief from the restrictions.
• It’s absolutely best if a church can meet altogether at one time in one place every week.
• Much of the thinking going on is rooted in the feeling that the pandemic is not really that severe.

On the third point, I’m not really trying to debate whether it is all that severe or not, but it needs to inform how we frame our principles. What if we had a plague in which two out of three people who met together outside their homes dropped dead? Would we be arguing that a church that can’t meet all in one place at one time physically is no longer a church?

We’ve probably all seen church Sunday gathering canceled before for one reason or another. Here in rural Wisconsin, it happens every winter at least once, usually more than once, due to weather. Did we stop being a church when we failed to meet one Sunday? Nobody would say yes.

So what if it was two Sundays? Three? How many can it be, and doesn’t it depend on what the reasons for not meeting are? What if your building burns down? What if the roads are literally impassible?

My point is that in many cases we’re overstating/incorrectly framing what Scripture defines as a church because:

• Someone in government is telling us our meeting is restricted
• We think the government response is disproportionate to the threat to public health

We should be straightforward about that or we may find ourselves eating our words if/when we’re faced with a far more serious disaster.

“Welp, hurricane wrecked our building and there’s too much rubble to meet there…. got nowhere else to meet… guess we’re not a church anymore.”

So, there’s a problem with framing the issue solely in terms of ability to physically gather in one large group all at once in one physical location. If there are any conditions under which we would not physically meet yet remain a church, that definition is invalidated. A more flexible definition would be a truer one.

….as on another thread, could the early church have met this definition while Paul and many other pastors were in prison or dead, and where building an actual church building would have been impossible? I’m thinking that, just as believers in closed countries often improvise, they did back then, too.

It’s easier to ask questions than to arrive at solid answers. The question about churches not meeting together in one place for several months is assumed to answer that such an inconvenience does not constitute the abolishment of a local church. Would the same answer satisfy if the question were expanded? What if the government forbids churches to assemble for several years? Would that tip the answer in a different direction?

I think Jonathan Leeman probably has the right approach. However we answer the above questions, the fact remains that churches decide such theological questions, not government. That is the guarantee of the First Amendment. Thankfully, CHBC challenged the government and prevailed in court. (If Biden wins, we may well see fuirther erosion of freedom of religion in America.)

Here’s a conundrum for you related to the definition of a “church.” We do Sunday evening bible studies in homes twice per month. Attendance was ok before COVID. Now, it’s not good. One thing we’re pondering is whether we should just move Sunday evening bible studies to Zoom entirely. We did that for our bi-monthly theology class back in February, and I actually prefer it. We all have great fun. If we held theology class at the church, many people who attend by Zoom would not come.

The primary reason for our sunday evening bible studies is fellowship; not necessarily bible study. So, can we do the bible study by Zoom and still grow together as a family? We do it for theology class. I’m tempted to say yes. We shall see. It isn’t ideal, but it is the reality of the situation.

The church should not be tying itself into knots over this. The problem is not the definition of church, or how we gather, etc. The question is: does the the government have authority in this crisis as it has rolled out and manifested itself, to tell churches they cannot gather.

Focus.

You wrote:

The question is: does the the government have authority in this crisis as it has rolled out and manifested itself, to tell churches they cannot gather.

Yes, it does. I do not know why this point is so difficult for some Baptists to acknowledge. My acknowledgement says nothing about how long, or what conditions must be in place before the government goes too far (etc.). These are local and context-specific determinations. But, the brute fact of it is that of course the government has that right in a public health event. I continue to believe Dever’s “comply + resist” approach is far superior JMac’s “defy + resist.” JMac’s video he released, urging churches to open up and again suggesting COVID is a manufactured issue, is simply disgraceful.

This is really a worldview divide. JMac and many other fundamentalists and Christian Nationalists seem to have coalesced on this issue over a shared view of “the government” as evil, and a gleeful insistence on “fighting the good fight” on this one. That distrust and cynicism about government informs their actions. Dever (et al), however, do not appear to take that approach. My sympathies are clearly with Dever.

This is really, in the end, the broad difference between the fundamentalist and evangelical ethos and philosophy of ministry playing out right before our eyes.

So you surrendered the Free Exercise Clause, so what?

Why are you letting the Governor of CA and VA, and the mayor of DC, divide the body of Christ? This isn’t about Romans 13. Its about our 1st Amendment rights.

its bigger than that. Its about the Obama administration effort to change “freedom of religion” to “freedom of worship.” The Left and Democrats want to limit your freedom to freely exercise your 1st Amendment right to freedom of religion. Its plain as day. They wanted to restrict “freedom of religion” to be that you can do what you want on Sunday morning, but Sunday afternoon through Saturday night you’d better be a good secularist. Hence they used the term “freedom of worship.” Now those same people want to cut off church attendance in the name of a disease that turns out to be bad, but not atrocious. In the name of “public health” they want to limit church attendance inside. Well pardon me if I doubt their sincerity or authority.

At the same time, these hypocrites talk about how sacred the right to vote is and the right to protest is. But, the right to gather in worship. Well… that can be cut off as irrelevant.

These are the people you must reach with the Gospel. Why do you appear to despise them so much, and why are you so surprised that pagans don’t care about your right to worship?

I believe we look at the world very differently, even as we share precisely the same concerns.

Tyler, I’m not surprised that pagans don’t care about our right to worship. I’m surprised that YOU don’t.

Assemble. That’s the command. How do we apply it?

The point is that churches like CHBC are asserting the right to follow their conviction about how “Assemble” should be applied. Churches have a right to form those convictions and follow them. And individual believers have a right to form those convictions and follow them.

If you look at the decision on CHBC, the fact that the W,DC Mayor had attended large protests was a key part. It showed that gatherings were not the problem. Churches were.

Praise the Lord for this victory. My best wishes and prayers for Dever and his congregation. Marxism is an all-out assault on Christianity. The Dem party is fast becoming the Marxist party or Maoist. It deeply hates Bible Christianity. America as we know it is on the line as is the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Don’t take your freedom for granted. Vote!

[TylerR]

These are the people you must reach with the Gospel. Why do you appear to despise them so much, and why are you so surprised that pagans don’t care about your right to worship?

I believe we look at the world very differently, even as we share precisely the same concerns.

What does whether a mayor or a governor has the right to tell a church how they gather have to do with sharing the gospel?

I fight the system of liberalism and leftism, not the people.

Just was in a 90 minute faculty senate meeting full of people that support 100% LGBTQ rights and gay marriage in the name of “freedom”… but they will not hesitate for ONE SECOND to cancel Spring Break to “protect” students from gathering or returning home to party in groups either. These same people want to ban smoking on campus. What happened to freedom?

[Mark_Smith]

The church should not be tying itself into knots over this. The problem is not the definition of church, or how we gather, etc. The question is: does the the government have authority in this crisis as it has rolled out and manifested itself, to tell churches they cannot gather.

Focus.

Certainly the 1st Amendment comes in here, and yes, certainly the government is bound from treating churches in a way that other institutions are not. On the flip side, I’m thinking more and more that this crisis is an incredible opportunity for churches to learn the habits that made the ancient churches thrive. They didn’t have buildings, their pastors were always being executed, they had to hide and use code to talk to each other, and they turned the Roman Empire upside down.

What if the government forbids churches to assemble for several years? Would that tip the answer in a different direction?

It would.

Which is kind of my point in my first comment. Obviously, we have a problem (actually more than one) if

• The church doesn’t physically gather at all (or for a very long, but hard to quantify period of time).
• The government has told the church not to meet and has no legitimate public safety reason for doing so.

What we don’t want to do is take the actual present situation and read the two points above into it, then develop a definition of what a church is based on that.

“It’s not a church unless everybody meets every Sunday” shouldn’t even be on the table. I pastored for more than decade. When was everybody there? And, as I’ve noted, we skipped Sundays sometimes for weather. Sometimes nobody was “there.”

So, it’s important to separate the question of “what are the essential characteristics of a church?” from the question of “what should the government not do?” and separate both from “What should churches do when the government does what it ought not to do?”

These are closely related but distinct issues. We’ll be more biblical in our thinking if we consider them separately. (But we need to consider all of them.)