What is the Church?

Question

What is the Church? who is the Church? what makes a Church? can a Church meet anywhere?

Answer 1

The true Body of believers is physically the church. It is not a building made of wood and stone, it is not a denomination, it is not an organization anywhere.

Answer 2

Church is the assembly of the People that God has called together from the ends of the earth.

In Catholic usage, the word "Church" has three inseparable meanings:
+ The People that God gathers in the whole world
+ The local church (diocese)
+ The liturgical (above all Eucharistic) assembly

The Church draws her life from the Word and the Body of Christ, and so herself becomes Christ's Body.

In the Nicene Creed (from 325 C.E.), the Church is professed to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

The Church can meet anywhere. "Wherever two or more are gathered in my name."

However a church is a building specially designed for "the" Church to come together to worship God.

With love in Christ.

Answer 3

Simply put there are two Churches, the visible Church and the Invisible Church, also called the Church Militant, and the Church Triumphant.

The Visible Church consists of what we see; buildings, denominations, congregations, and organizations. The Visible Church consists of both believers and non believers.

The Invisible Church Consists of Only Believers. They can be of any denomination, they share faith in the promise of salvation through Christ. Membership in this Church is ALL believers, living, dead, and will be added to by all those who will come to faith now living and yet to be born. We confess the invisible Church in the Creeds as "The Communion of Saints, and as the "Holy Catholic (Catholic means universal, not just Roman Catholics) and Apostolic Church"

May God continue to bless His holy Church.

Mark

Answer 4

"Church" can have several definitions, depending on the context of the phrase.

"Church" can mean all believers of all faiths that have Jesus Christ as their savior. It includes those in this life, those in Purgatory, and those in Heaven.

"Church" can mean the members of those believers that have been called by God to lead the rest of the believers. This can mean ordained ministers as well as those non-clerical who teach and guide others.

"Church" can also be the building in which the faith community meet. It is a sign and symbol of God's presence in the community.

Yes, a church can meet anywhere. The church should meet everywhere.

Answer 5

A church is a building were people of a false religion gather to wind up their god on Sunday. Apparently these people believe that god is a watch that needs periodic winding. The church is more about money and subverting the government to enforce the doctrine of their false religion through theocratic law than it has to do with faith.

This is different from people of faith who need only a personal relationship with their creator.

Answer 6

you are the church. if ppl didnt go to the building called "church" then it would be just another building. God doesnt live in buildings made by human hands He lives in the humans He made. yes you can have church anywhere, at anytime.

Answer 7

A church is people who gather together in fellowship with each other and with God.

It does not have to held in a church building.

Answer 8

The church is not a building it is the body of believers in Christ. I don't go to church I go and fellowship with other believers in homes,schools, where ever 2 or more come together you have fellowship. We also do not have preachers. We share the duties of communion, prayer and lessons.

Answer 9

By the end of the first century the Church was formed around the bishop who represented the Church in apostolic succession. The great commission was well underway and had extended to the Gentiles as well as the Jews. In scriptures we see St. Paul in his epistles telling the Church to respect the Sacred Traditions handed to them coming from both written sources and oral ones. Even the written sources were delivered orally as transcripts were very rare and few people were literate. There was not widespread distribution of what we consider today to be inspired Scripture as decided at the African Synods by the Church in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Throughout the first sixteen centuries of the Church there was never any question that the authority of truth rested in the Church as the “regula fidei” where all teaching was and is measured by Sacred Tradition not by the Bible alone, especially when interpreted outside of its source the Church. To orthodox Christians this would be considered ridiculous as well as arrogant considering the church never wrote the Bible to be a sole source of faith, morals and practice and one author even reminded those who would approach its use in such a way as to consider it the only source that it is incomplete as far as teaching and that Christ taught much more than what it contained. In fact, it warns that it contains only a small part of Christ’s teaching, but the faithful need not fear because the Church was sent the Holy Spirit that leads the Church to all truths.

Obviously, because there are those who have rejected orthodox Christianity some lack the fullness of truth that is contained in the Episcopal structure of Christ’s Church. They lack the fullness of worship by not having the corporeal Christ present in their worship. They lack the fullness of faith by not receiving His Body and Blood that the Bible and Sacred Tradition say is necessary for eternal life. The Church is led by men as the enduring Church and not by a book easily misinterpreted and its teaching turned into the traditions and doctrines of men by those through eisegesis use it to support their desires of the flesh very often exhibited by their hatred for the Church and hatred for the most sacred of gifts to humanity His Body and Blood of the Eucharist. These misinterpretations also cause them to have animosity for each other with the same source, the Bible being used to justify schisms which are usually not so much the result of theological disagreements so much as pridefulness and deceit which are no gifts of the Spirit but attributes of the flesh that inhibit our process of sanctification that leads to final salvation. Perhaps this is why Jesus said as a prophetic statement, that unless we eat of His Body and drink His blood we have no life in us. Perhaps this is why the Bible teaches that it is not enough to cry “Lord, Lord” as some of those who do will hear at their judgment that Christ never knew them and be thrown into the lake of fire.

Christ did not teach that we are to gather around a book of Scriptures to find the truth but that the truth is found in the Church that gathers around the bishop. God was not the author of division as has occurred with those who have abandoned the Church for their private interpretations of Scripture into tens of thousands of exponentially increasing schisms without end. God is a God of unity where He prayed His prayer before His arrest and crucifixion that we all be one. He is not a God that can only be found in the pages of a Book but who is found in His Church and where His corporeal presence is given to His Church as He promised so that we may endure to eternal life and His Church may endure until He comes again. It is His Church where the truth resides and it is the place where we find the ”bulwark and ground of the truth”, there is no other.

In Christ
Fr. Joseph

Answer 10

A church is a very cold building where foolishly naive and hopefull people congregate on a regular basis to tell the priest all the naughty things they have done, and to sing to and worship a man that once walked on water.