Modern churches have prioritized comfort and performance over biblical community. A truly biblical church centers on people as the family of God, not audiences watching programs.
TL;DR: Modern churches have prioritized comfort and performance over biblical community. A truly biblical church centers on people as the family of God, not audiences watching programs. This requires intentional structural changes, elder leadership, and ruthless commitment to scriptural mandates over extra-biblical preferences.
A biblical church is the people of God being the family of God, walking out their lives according to God’s direction (the Bible).
This answer won’t surprise anyone familiar with scripture. What should surprise us is how far the Western church has veered from it.
Here’s a diagnostic question that exposes everything: If a random visitor attends your church meeting, will they be able to say emphatically from observation that the church is “the people of God”?
Not from your mission statement. From what they actually see practiced.
Most churches would fail this test.
We’ve gotten exceptionally good at the Sunday performance. Organized stages. Beautiful worship. Well-spoken preachers. Comfortable seats. Stunning facilities.
None of these things are bad. They’re extra-Biblical practices we have liberty to implement.
The problem emerges when these things come at the cost of explicitly Biblical mandates.
Core Insight: Extra-Biblical practices become problematic when they replace or prevent Biblical mandates from being practiced.
Every time period in history has its own challenges. Ours is comfort.
We naturally strive for comfort and organization. At times in our life as a church, this leads to subtle small changes that, if unchecked, slowly replace the Biblical with the extra-Biblical and sometimes the unbiblical.
The distinction matters:
Many comfort-driven changes have crossed from extra-Biblical to unbiblical.
We’ve mastered concert-like gatherings. But those large Sunday meetings are not the full expression of the church. You may have 5-10% of the congregation actively involved at any given time.
The other 90% are watching.
Audience, not family.
Key Reality: Comfort-driven church design creates spectators instead of participants, violating the biblical model of every member functioning.
Years ago, one of us sat in a favorite seat at an evening church meeting. Looked left. Looked right. Saw the same people always there.
Then a question surfaced: I’ve attended church gatherings with these people for years, but do I know them? Have we ever truly experienced fellowship?
The answer was painful. We hadn’t.
We attended the same meetings. Listened to the same messages. But we didn’t truly fellowship together.
All the one-another commands in scripture were mostly forsaken at the expense of another meeting.
The meetings weren’t bad. They just didn’t leave room for the explicitly important commands of scripture to be practiced.
That realization led to revisiting the scriptural commands: What makes a church a church?
Once you see and practice being the church in greater bandwidth, it changes you. You cannot unsee the beauty.
Christianity and the church get redrawn before your eyes in color. It breaks you in the best way possible because nothing else than the authentic experience will suffice.
Turning Point: Recognizing that regular meeting attendance does not equal biblical fellowship forces a complete re-examination of church practice.
The Western church has overemphasized corporate gatherings at the expense of everything else.
The most authentic expressions of the church happen where all the gifts are encouraged to function.
The church must have:
That’s where the body of Christ shines. That’s where it takes on its full color.
The early church in Acts didn’t just meet on Sundays. They met in homes daily. They shared meals. They knew each other’s struggles.
When one person suffered, everyone knew. When someone had a need, it was met before they had to ask.
We abandoned this for efficiency and scale.
But efficiency isn’t a Biblical value. Love is. Knowing one another is. Bearing one another’s burdens is.
These things don’t scale well because they require proximity, time, and intentionality.
Historical Pattern: Early church prioritized daily proximity and mutual knowledge over efficient large gatherings, resulting in genuine burden-bearing community.
The Bible teaches that the body has many different members and functions that all work together.
The principle is simple: provide context and opportunity for these members to contribute and practice their gifts.
There’s no need to make the Sunday meeting all about singing and a message.
Seating arrangement: We don’t all sit facing the stage. The hall is arranged in a semi-circle where everyone sees everyone else. This simple change encourages interaction with one another, not just with the person at the front.
Meeting components:
Open-sharing time: None of it is scripted. Sometimes there are pauses with silence. That’s okay.
Silence doesn’t always need to be filled because God can speak to us in the silence. We don’t need to act like we have everything figured out.
In our early days, we didn’t necessarily have a speaker scheduled for every meeting. We would remain in prayer until the Lord gave one of us something to share.
Those were some of the best meetings we’ve been part of.
It’s better to hear silence if it’s not God inspiring someone to speak.
We can’t say we’re perfect or that it’s easy to swim against a culture of individualism. But it’s worth it.
Implementation Principle: Structural changes that enable all members to participate trump programmatic excellence that creates passive observers.
Here’s what we learned the hard way: biblical freedom without biblical leadership creates disorder.
The challenge of the church, as the reformers put it, is to be in the place of “reformed and always reforming.”
It’s easy to stop when a comfortable place is reached. It takes energy and intentionality to keep pressing into the heart of God’s word.
We learned that if a meeting doesn’t have a leading coordinator or responsible person (what the Bible refers to as elders), it allows carnal or immature believers too much leisure to sow disorder.
The Bible teaches that one of the roles of eldership is to keep watch. We take the position that a plurality of elders in a church is even better because there’s more help in that area.
Elders create an environment in which the body and all of its gifts can function.
We cannot control everything. There’s no need to expect that no odd situation would come up.
But setting good expectations for the meeting and what is welcomed has served us well.
For example, in open-sharing time we welcome everyone to share anything the Lord is prompting them to bless the church with. But we mention it’s not a time for anyone to teach.
This way the opportunity is there to bless one another.
If anyone does stand to teach or abuse this time, it’s the leading elder’s responsibility to do the difficult thing and step in.
It doesn’t happen often. But when it does, the elder kindly but firmly interjects and asks the person sharing to wrap up.
Biblical leadership protects biblical freedom.
Leadership Function: Elders create environments for participation while protecting against disorder, balancing freedom with responsibility.
Transformations are amazing to share. Harder to experience.
Maturity happens much slower than we expect.
We try to model community, and much of the time that’s enough to seep into each person’s life and allow the Holy Spirit to work in and through it.
We also encourage communication and healthy debate.
One brother visited on and off for an extended time. After understanding his non-committal view of church commitment, we had several conversations challenging that perspective.
We believe every believer should have a home and should run with a group of believers together.
It took a few years. But after it finally dawned on him, he couldn’t see it any other way.
He’s currently a committed brother in our fellowship, serving the Lord together.
What kept us investing in those conversations when most churches would have written him off as a consumer?
God is gracious to us. None of us come from perfect backgrounds. It’s the grace of God on our lives that teaches us to serve.
But here’s the deeper truth: once you get to see more and more of the church as the word of God meant for it to be, it breaks you in a way that won’t let you settle.
You cannot unsee the beauty. Nothing else than the authentic experience will suffice.
Part of that experience is the beauty of interacting and fellowshipping with other believers who think differently and challenging each other.
It’s a culture and a way of life for a church. It’s a must if we want to grow.
Transformation Timeline: Genuine community transformation takes years of patient investment, not weeks of program participation.
For a church leader sitting in an office looking at a stage and rows of seats, here’s the very first practical step to take tomorrow morning:
Start by breaking habitual and traditional ways of doing things.
Step out of the typical. Start small.
It’s such a healthy practice. Anyone who has experienced this shares that it becomes painfully obvious how legalistic and rusty we can become.
Let the Lord take it from there.
The key is ruthless examination.
Learn to re-examine the way you read your Bible. Do what the Bible commands you to do first and foremost. Do not put anything you deem nice and useful ahead of that.
Ask yourself how the commands are practiced practically. If something doesn’t work, ruthlessly cut it out.
It will hurt. It will be hard because it will cost much.
But that is the cost of being a disciple of Christ.
Change Strategy: Start with one small disruption to habitual practice, then ruthlessly examine all practices against scriptural commands.
If you don’t see the body of Christ as the most awesome thing on earth, read the Bible again.
There’s nothing more amazing than the expression of the body of Christ on this earth because it should be the mirror image of Him.
Not a mirror image of our comfort preferences. Not a reflection of entertainment culture. Not an echo of corporate efficiency models.
A mirror image of Christ Himself.
That means sacrifice. It means proximity. It means knowing people deeply enough that their struggles become your struggles.
It means creating space for every member to function, even when it’s messy.
It means choosing people over programs, every single time.
The Western church has mastered the concert-like gathering. We’ve perfected the Sunday production. We’ve built beautiful buildings and created compelling experiences.
But we’ve lost something fundamental in the process. We’ve lost each other.
The good news is we can find our way back because we can return to the one-another commands that scripture emphasizes repeatedly. We can create environments where the body actually functions as a body.
It starts with asking that diagnostic question: Will a visitor be able to see that we are the people of God?
Then it continues with the courage to change whatever needs changing until the answer is yes.
The church was never meant to be about the method, model, type of meeting, or setting. It was always meant to be about the people.
The family of God. Walking out their lives together according to God’s direction.
When we get that right, everything else finds its proper place.
And the world gets to see what they’re truly hungry for: a mirror image of Christ, lived out in community, in full color.
Ultimate Vision: Church as the mirror image of Christ requires choosing people over programs, resulting in visible family dynamics that reflect Him to the world.
Extra-Biblical practices are neutral tools we have liberty to use (sound systems, building designs, service times). Unbiblical practices violate scriptural mandates (forsaking fellowship, limiting member participation, prioritizing programs over people). The problem occurs when extra-Biblical preferences prevent Biblical mandates from being practiced.
We combine prepared elements (exegetical teaching, planned worship) with unscripted open-sharing time. Elders set clear expectations (sharing is welcome, teaching is reserved for designated times) and provide oversight. This creates an environment where the body can function while preventing disorder. Biblical leadership protects biblical freedom.
Silence doesn’t always need to be filled because God can speak in the silence. It’s better to hear silence if it’s not God inspiring someone to speak. We don’t need to act like we have everything figured out. Allowing silence demonstrates trust in God’s timing rather than human programming.
Maturity happens much slower than we expect. Real transformation takes years of patient investment, not weeks of program participation. One example took several years of challenging conversations before genuine commitment emerged. We model community and allow the Holy Spirit to work through it over time.
Start by breaking one habitual practice. Take the Lord’s supper from the hall and break bread at a table. Skip planning a teaching for one Sunday. Start a 5am prayer team. Start small and let the Lord take it from there. This makes it obvious how legalistic and rusty we can become.
The early church in Acts met in homes daily, shared meals, and knew each other’s struggles intimately. When one person suffered, everyone knew. When someone had a need, it was met before they had to ask. We abandoned this for efficiency and scale, but love, knowing one another, and bearing burdens don’t scale well because they require proximity, time, and intentionality.
A plurality of elders keeps watch and creates an environment where gifts can function. Set clear expectations for what’s welcomed (sharing for blessing, not teaching). If someone abuses the time, the leading elder kindly but firmly interjects and asks them to wrap up. We cannot control everything, but good expectations serve well.
In traditional Sunday gatherings, only 5-10% of the congregation is actively involved while 90% watch. This creates audiences, not family. Authentic church expression happens where all the gifts are encouraged to function through multiple gathering types (corporate, midsize, small-group, inward and outward ministry).
The goal is reflecting Christ through community: Church should be a mirror image of Christ visible to visitors through how people relate, not through mission statements or production quality
