On Sundays we “go to church.” I still picture the sign out front—the one that tells the community, Christians meet here. For years, that’s how I thought of church too: the building and the time we spent inside it. But over time, my understanding of what “church” actually means changed substantially.

At some point I did what professors do—I went back to the words and their context. I started tracing how the New Testament uses the term we translate as “church,” and I realized it wasn’t a building at all. The word points to an assembly—a gathered people. In practice, it came to mean those who believed the gospel, obeyed it, and were baptized into Christ. And in Acts, the movement is repeatedly described as “the Way.” Even the label “Christian” seems to have begun as a derogatory designation used by outsiders, before believers eventually embraced it. That discovery changed the question for me—from ‘Where do we go to church?’ to ‘What are we becoming as the church?’

As I lived through—and watched—our “worship wars,” I kept feeling that something was radically wrong. We who call ourselves Christians can start acting as if what happens at the building is church, rather than a lived way of life.

Over time, “church” can shrink into a preferred method of worship or a familiar organizational structure, instead of what we are the other 166 hours of the week. Methods of worship, organizational structures, and even buildings, in my view, do not by themselves constitute people of the Way. That is not to say these things are automatically wrong—only that they can become substitutes for the life they were meant to support. So, I went looking again—not for a better method, but for a clearer picture.

Two passages in particular re-centered my thinking: Acts 2 and the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. In Acts 2, the life of the early believers is described in simple, human terms—devotion to teaching, fellowship, prayers, shared meals, and life together “from house to house.” And after the eunuch’s baptism, he went on his way rejoicing—without any recorded instruction about formal methods, organizational charts, or a prescribed structure for “church.” That contrast kept pressing on me: the New Testament gives a clear picture of a people formed by the gospel and known by a shared life—not primarily by a controlled method.

With that background, my questions changed. What are Christians? What is “church”? What does it mean to be people of the Way? I have come to think the answer starts here: people obey the gospel and are added to Christ, and then they show discipleship by the way they live. They gather for shared prayer and praise, for Scripture and exhortation, and for a shared meal that remembers the Lord. They are recognized by care for the needy and by using their gifts in service to others. Their life becomes their spiritual worship—not only what they do on Sunday morning in a building. Across places and cultures, the details vary—but the pattern repeats: shared devotion, shared meals,  shared mercy, a credible witness, and celebrating the Lord’s Supper And if I’m honest, I struggle to see how the kind of fellowship described in Acts 2 is cultivated when the Supper is detached from a shared meal and the gathering becomes mostly watch-and-go. So, what should we do about that?