(As of Sunday afternoon, we were without electricity at home and at church. We didn’t have any services. It seemed like a good time to rerun this post from July 27, 2010.)

Do you need to have a building in order to be the church?

The answer is no.

Do you need ushers? Do you need to take an offering? Do you need carpet? Do you need PowerPoint or projectors or pulpit or pews? Do you need small groups or big groups or one-on-one conversations? Do you need a parking lot or a car or a hybrid car? Do you need flannelgraphs for kids or foosball tables for youth or fair trade coffee for adults? Do you need matching silverware for the dinner after or alliterative sermons for the service before? Do you need a bulletin or a program or a newsletter or a website or a DVD or a bus or a billboard? Do you need stained glass or unstained teeth? Do you need a home or a phone? Do you need two services or three hymns or four Sunday School options or five gold rings? Do you need to be there every time the doors open? Do you need doors? Do you need donors?

In order to count as church, you need God. In order to count as church you need at least one other person. In order to get the most out of church, it is most helpful if that other person is an obnoxious ingrate. Just like in the mirror.

God delights in making church out of obnoxious ingrates. When they discover that they actually get along, actually love each other, they realize that only God could have done it. So they discover God, too.

The reason for all those things at the top that we think are church?

They give us something to be obnoxiously disagreeable about. So that someone else learns how powerful and transforming God’s love is. As they struggle to learn to love us.

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Related: I’m tired of long sentences and parentheses about church.