A number of friends have put some version of this question to me in recent days. They know that my new book, One Assembly, argues against the multisite and service structure. I believe the Bible teaches that a group of Christians must gather regularly to be a church. Which means your 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. services are both churches, as are your north and south campuses, at least as the Bible views them.

Should COVID-19 quarantines and governmental restrictions on church gatherings impact how we view the nature of a church and whether or not multiple services or sites are permissible?

This question becomes especially germane with the talk of our cities opening back up. Suppose your church has hundred members, and your state says fifty people can now gather. Do you begin to meet again by dividing the church between two or three services?

Christ’s Church Doesn’t Change

A number of friends have put some version of this question to me in recent days. They know that my new book, One Assembly, argues against the multisite and service structure. I believe the Bible teaches that a group of Christians must gather regularly to be a church. Which means your 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. services are both churches, as are your north and south campuses, at least as the Bible views them.

Yet here we are with many “churches” presently “meeting” through Zoom calls or holding “services” through livestream. Does that make me reconsider what I wrote in One Assembly? Do these circumstances change the nature of the church?

Not at all. A church is whatever the Bible says it is. The commentators might breathlessly declare, “This pandemic will permanently change the way the world works—business, education, international trade, being good neighbors, even handshakes!”

But don’t get swept up in the hype. Jesus isn’t watching the COVID-19 outbreak from heaven, scratching his head, and thinking, “Well, now that changes things.” The nature of the church remains unchanged even in extraordinary times: assembly required. Exceptional circumstances don’t change that.

Our present moment might better be likened to the church having a broken ankle. The broken ankle is still an ankle. The challenge is simply to figure out how to hobble on it.

On the matter of hobbling along then, am I saying a church should never move to multiple services or sites in extraordinary times? In fact, I think a church can use more than one service or site in such times temporarily. And the key word there is “temporarily.”

Nature of the Church, Necessity of the Gathering

Lest you think I’m contradicting myself, let’s back up and think about how the New Testament uses the word “church.” I’ll start with an analogy. In the book One Assembly, I argue the NT uses the word “church” like people today use the word “team.” The Washington Nationals baseball team, for instance, has to gather and play in order to be a team. That said, we can still refer to the team as a team even when they’re not gathered to play, as when we say, “The team drove in separate cars to Nats Park.” In other words, we can use the word team to refer both to the people-gathered-to-play or to the people-characterized-by-gathering.

Furthermore, applying that to this present moment, we would not say that the Nats (2019 World Series champions, by the way) are no longer a team because they are presently barred from playing by the pandemic. They’re still a team. We would just say they are going through an extraordinary time. That said, the longer they cannot play, the rustier they will get as a team. And were the quarantine to last, say, five years, it would be difficult to envision how there would be much of a team left.

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