What’s the purpose of the Local Church?

Part 2 of The Local Project

(Note: This is the next part in my research project on the nature of the Local Church. For a brief introduction, check out part 1 here.)

In the summer of 2020, I interviewed 30 pastors, ministry leaders, seminary professors, and lay leaders on the nature, purpose, and future of the local church. I asked them 10 questions. In this post, we will look at the first question I asked each of them:

What is the purpose of the local church in your opinion?

How would you answer this question right now? Without prep time, without consulting specific verses, or asking your pastor — what would your answer be? As I mentioned in my first post, defining the “local church” is oddly difficult. We probably agree that we should have local churches, but why? What is the purpose?

I started with this question in the interviews because it gets right to the heart of the matter. If we cannot define the purpose for doing something, then why do it? For this question, I wanted to establish a baseline definition for the discussion and in some cases get a gut reaction from the person. I had three goals for this question: to determine whether the interviewee

1. Has a working definition of the local church ready
2. Can articulate that definition
3. Can justify their answer somehow

Highlights

As I mentioned in the first post, I don’t plan on listing every response I got to the question. Instead, I’m going to take the answers and pull from them the common themes, concepts, and highlights. This should help us get an overall picture of what was discussed and find key takeaways.

In general, this question was answered in similar ways amongst all those interviewed. The question is broad, so few of the interviewees had a clear and concise answer ready. However, most were able to land on a few key points and functions of the local church after a bit of thinking. Some of the most common purposes of the church were along these lines:

• The local church is to equip believers to fulfill the great commission
• The local church is to be a gathering place for fellowship and encouragement
• The local church is the local instance of the global body of Christ/global church
• The local church exists to glorify God
• The local church exists to meet the needs of its local community

These five ideas were communicated by the majority of the subjects interviewed. To arrive at these answers, some drew on examples (both positive and negative) of their own churches. Others cited scripture for their reasons. One or two of the subjects recited the mission statement of their own church. If the subject was not prepped on the questions ahead of time, they typically had a harder time crystallizing what the purpose of the local church was. Perhaps this is to be expected if they aren’t prepared, but it is notable that very few people could easily, readily, and quickly articulate the purpose of a local church regardless of prep time or not.

Interesting Points

The most common functions of a local church according to the subjects were: discipleship, evangelism, and fellowship. This is perhaps unsurprising due to the fact that these are the functions of a local church that most believers and leaders interact with or hear about regularly. Though it may be a challenge to get people to be part of evangelism, it seems to be a foundational aspect of the church in the minds of those in leadership.

Only about a fourth of subjects brought up the importance of serving their surrounding community. People talked about reaching their communities and evangelizing, but service was not a commonly discussed vector for outreach. This is not to say that these churches or leaders don’t think serving the community is important, but it is worth noting that it wasn’t one of the main functions of a local church that came to their minds.

One of the best articulations came from Nick Engstrom, a lay leader and worship leader at Tate Springs Baptist Church. He used an interesting analogy to describe the function of the local church by compared the global church to a general physician and the local church to a specialist. The local church is supposed to be the specialist when it comes to reaching their immediate community, rather than trying to be a generalist and spreading itself too thin. As Nick put it, “Any church will say that their job is to fulfill the great commission, but the local church needs to be in touch with the community and know how to inject the gospel into that location. Otherwise, they have lost sight of their local purpose. The local church’s job is to answer the question of how do we witness to the people in this location.”

Takeaways

Before I asked these questions and before I examined the data of the answers, I wrote down my own answers to each question. One of the big lessons I learned at Seminary was that it is always a good idea to write down what you already know/think before diving into the thoughts of others.

Just like those I interviewed, it was difficult to pin down one concise answer to this question. After reviewing it and the answers of the interview subjects, I have come to the following answer:

In my opinion, the purpose of the local church is to gather those of like faith and fellowship in a local context to worship, disciple one another, encourage each other, serve together, and become equipped to represent Christ in the community (Matthew 28:18–20, Ephesians 1:20–23, 2:19–22 and Acts 2:46–47).

In other words, if Jesus was doing ministry in my local community, what would that look like? As we answer that question, we have to ask if our local churches are Christ-like in this way. Are we as a community of believers ministering to the surrounding community the way that Christ would? We can justify a lot of programs or actions under the banner of “expanding the kingdom” but we must examine whether we are focused on being Christ to our communities.

While it is good to list general functions of the local church, if we generalize too much, then we end up with the same definition as the global church. True, the local church is a subset of the overall global church, but there needs to be nuance if we are to tackle real, tangible problems in our local contexts. Perhaps it would be fair to say that the purpose of the local church is to be the global church here — wherever “here” happens to be.

In part 3 of The Local Project, we will examine the second question asked: “Why does your local church exist?”