Does Jesus Live in a Church?

Very few theologians would state that the answer to the above question is "yes." Despite my hyper-awareness of every sound in the church building after the sun goes down, I don't expect to find Jesus taking cookies out of the freezer or anything. I do that. Jesus doesn't.

So why do I ask the question about where Jesus lives? I think we functionally understand that Jesus lives inside the church walls, looking out at a broken world and hoping people will come to Him for solutions. It sort of reminds me of the psychiatric stand in the Peanuts cartoon strip. We hold this view when our outreach strategies and programmatic endgame is to get people within the walls of a church building so that they can meet Jesus. This plan, however effective it may have proved in the past (even this is disputable, this plan has created the current reality of the US Church), has significant drawbacks. Those drawbacks are as old as the book of Genesis.

When God created, God formed a Temple worthy of God's beauty and majesty. This Temple was called the universe, or Creation if you want to use more Church-language. Within that Temple, God created a smaller temple called Eden. God moved about the temple as a smaller version of the big thing, but with one notable exception- the presence of human beings. But human beings thought that God was confined, and so they opted for "wisdom" and instead received shame. They hid in the mini-temple from God. A place which had told the story of God's beauty suddenly didn't. It now told the story of hiding. And so that mini-temple was abandoned.

The second mini-temple was the tabernacle, culminating in the construction of a physical temple in Jerusalem. This temple also reflected the cosmic Temple with the exception that there were now steps of entrance so that human beings could be in the temple space with God as well. But the problem came when the people of Israel thought that God was confined to the mini-temple, and not the Temple. So with a version of God neatly confined to the Jerusalem temple, the Israelites trashed the cosmic Temple with waste, denial of sabbath, injustice and idolatry.

The New Testament introduces a new mini-temple- the Church. Not the building, the physical bodies of the people. Now the cosmic Temple unites with the mini-temple. And the Holy Spirit resides in both.

And so now we come to the dangerous theology of Jesus living inside the Church structures. Church buildings, in my estimation, are good. They can house worship services, community functions, and provide resources for ongoing ministry to the most vulnerable and marginalized in the community. However, they also run a particular risk of believing that Jesus is waiting on us to minister before He will get involved.

The New Testament seems to say that Jesus wants to partner with us in ministry, but not to wait for us. Indeed, it seems that we inherit Jesus' ministry, which means that Jesus is already outside the walls and working. Jesus is on the streets and sitting in the homes of the lonely. Jesus is in the eyes of the starving and providing encouragement to those in despair. In fact, when we meet Jesus in Revelation 3, Jesus is trying to go to church but has been locked out. The people inside are too busy caring about other things than getting involved in Jesus' work of love, justice and reconciliation. For those who are wondering, it is the Church of Laodicea, who famously get called "lukewarm" and have been the subject of intense sermons for centuries.

Friends, we have been hiding since Genesis 3. We have been trying to rest on our own "in-ness" since the Old Testament. Jesus is already at work in the great Temple of the universe, and the Holy Spirit has been flitting about creating since Genesis 2. Our choice is to let Sunday morning be our encouragement to move out into the world and join Jesus out there, or to stay in the walls and wait for Jesus to find the spare key in order to get back in. Let's go.