BOOK REVIEW: What on Earth is the Church?

Kevin Giles seeks to provide us with an evangelical ecclesiology for our day. He provides us with a good one-volume addition to the discussion of ecclesiology with the use of recent New Testament scholarship.

One of the positives of Giles study is his definition of Church. He defines Church as simply a “Christian Community.” This is a good definition because it is broad in the right places and narrow in the right places. It is broad enough to include the different common uses of “church” like in reference to denominations, but excludes parachurch and social action organizations. The Church is made up of Christians doing Christian activities and doing them in the context of “community” or together.

This idea of “community” is another strength of Giles work. He shows the very communal nature of the early church found in the New Testament. He gives a healthy criticism of how Western individualism has jaded the vision of Christian Community. Our spirituality must be done together. As we say in Grace Community Church after our study of the book of James, “you can’t claim to be spiritual if you are a jerk to everyone around you.”

Finally I want to point out an interesting argument for the institutional nature of church. I don’t know if this is very original or if I have only read “free church” ecclesiologies, but I had not really heard of this. Giles points out that the New Testament church becomes increasingly institutional as it evolves. He notes that the church is pure and loose in the beginning then becomes more theologically understood then evolves to clear guidelines for leadership in the Pastoral Epistles.

I remain a “free church” advocate, but I like his reasoning. Giles takes this reality as a proponent for Anglican institutional realities that I disagree with, but I do agree that theology is evolving and the Church can evolve to a degree.

Let me give an example. Giles criticizes basing our understanding of Church too much on simply doing a word study on “ecclesia.” It would appear that the early Church needed to call what they were doing something and “ecclesia” made sense. I am pastoring a six-month old church plant. The church is constantly evolving toward a more institutional state. Giles helped me realize that this was not a negative reality, but simply a certain reality. Concerning “ecclesia” we have had trouble deciding what to call our Sunday evening meeting. It has been called “church”, “meeting”, “service”, and “time.” Our time is very similar to the early church in that we meet in a home, have worship prayer and Bible study, and we eat together. In this way it is a cross between modern day Community Groups and Sunday Worship Services.

I share this in order to say that local churches and the Church both evolve towards institutionalization. We need to understand this reality in order to utilize it instead of being controlled by it. I pray that as GCC becomes increasingly more institutional we remain lucid enough to follow God’s leading and remain faithful to the New Testament vision of the Church.