What is Church?
by Alice Wilkinson
How has being a part of a church plant changed your personal understanding of ‘church’?
In the New Testament, post-resurrection, ‘church’ defined a group of people who met together to spend time as family, to study the teaching of Jesus, and to spread His good news to their communities. I don’t believe that that definition has changed. But my understanding of it has, especially during my first term at St Thomas’.
I grew up in a Christian family, and I attended church with my parents until I was about twelve. At that point, we began a house church, where I looked after the kids on a Sunday morning. Until the age of seventeen, my experience of church was non-traditional, and consisted mostly of my parents’ friends. Although I enjoyed that time, it meant that when I left for university at eighteen, I did not have much experience of church community.
And then I moved to York to study, and I joined The Belfrey. And I spent three years at The Belfrey, growing closer to God, learning more about Him and about myself, building a community and a family of people that I love and who know me better than anyone ever has. After university, I spent another two years there, working on the staff team in the student and then the youth ministries. And then this year, I moved to Newcastle with a planting team from The Belfrey, and we launched a resource church in the city centre - St Thomas’, aiming to resource ministry and mission in the area by planting churches and developing leaders.
With a planting team 25 strong from The Belfrey, you would expect the churches to be very similar. And they are, in some ways, but I have actually found them to be strikingly different. In fact, despite initially knowing 100% of the congregation, I felt very lost, to begin with. I didn’t know who I was here, because I was suddenly without many of the people who had surrounded and shaped me for the past five years.
Despite the fact that I had friends and had transplanted into a church which should have been familiar to me, I felt very far from home.
And that made me question what home actually meant, to me.
As a family, we used to travel a lot, and mum tells a story sometimes from when I was little. Someone asked me where I was from, or where I lived, and my answer, apparently, was that we didn’t have a home; we just lived in hotels.
The question of where I’m from, is something I have always struggled with, because I have never had a consistent answer. I was born in Sheffield, but have never lived there. I was raised in the Caribbean, but I am not ‘from’ there. And then my parents moved back to the UK, but to respond with “my parents live in Sheffield”, rules out an entire 18 years spent overseas, and doesn’t really answer the question anyway.
And so, in my lifestyle of transient places, I have always known home to be defined by people, rather than by place. The community in which I am loved, and where I belong, and where I am supported, and where I am taught and led closer to Jesus - that has always been home to me. I found home, at The Belfrey. I had found a community of people who were all pursuing Jesus, who supported and loved one another, and who I could call family.
So when I realised that maybe God was calling me to leave that place, although I was excited about St Thomas’ and about what God has for me here, I couldn’t really believe that this was the best option. How could it be the right thing to give up the family and the home that I had found in York?
And then, after several honest conversations with a variety of people, I realised - I hadn’t misunderstood home. I had misunderstood, ‘Church’.
Almost my entire experience of Church was The Belfrey, and I was confusing church (with a little ‘c’), with Church, (with a capital C). Although I probably could have told you the difference between the two, I had never before been in a position where I had to understand that difference personally.
Church is home, but Church spreads wider than just the cities and the buildings that we worship in. It’s a group of people, defined not by address, but by the fact that we have Jesus Christ in common. It is a body of believers who stand together, who worship God, and who love and support each other, with an outward looking focus. It is friends, and family, sharing in each others joy and walking together through each other’s pain.
It wasn’t specifically The Belfrey that was home to me. It was the people there. They were home because they were the hands and feet of Jesus in my life, as we were His hands and feet in the world.
My definition of Church was limited by my experience. So even though I found this move harder than I was ever anticipating, I am grateful for the personal and faith-related growth which has come from the discomfort of change. I only understand the national and, by extension, global nature of Church now, because I moved away from the church that I knew.
I still worship with my family in York, every time we text, or have a phone call, or we meet up; and I am still supported and loved by them. And I worship with my family in Newcastle in community, and on a Sunday, and as we reach out to our city and welcome them into a relationship with Jesus. We all still share the same call after all - to make Jesus known on the Earth.
It’s not a competition. It’s not about the numbers, or the quality of events, or the production value, or the aesthetically pleasing stage. It’s not about the music, or the pews, or the location. It’s not about us.
It’s about Him. It’s about family. It’s about building relationships within our communities, learning with them, in order to, as the body of Christ, be better equipped to go out a live a counter-cultural life, demonstrating the good news of Jesus to our cities, and our neighborhoods, and our workplaces.
The parable which has kept coming back to me through this journey is the story of the man who built his house upon the rock, in Matthew 7. It’s not about the house. It’s not about the size, or the colour, or the type of flooring. It’s about the foundation. And as a global family, with our foundation as the Word of God, when the storm comes, we will weather it together. Because that, is Church.
Church is home only because it defines a group of people called to love each other, despite their broken humanity. Church is home because it is where we find a sense of belonging, and of purpose. Church is home because it gives us a glimpse of the future Kingdom, and of the heavenly places to which we have been called.
“For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” Hebrews 11:10
