Church in Three Dimensions | Part 1: Church as a Gift

This reflection began life as a sermon preached at St John’s Newtownbreda as part of a series on the nature of the church. I’m sharing it here because the question it explores — whether the church is a gift or a possession — feels larger than any one congregation.

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“Church” is not a neutral word. It carries history — and histories are never neutral.

There are many today who will be warmed by the mention of church. Others will be left cold. For most, our experience of church will be a mixed bag — full of encouragement and disappointment.

A recent documentary I’ve been engaging with describes the Church as something better and worse than you ever imagined. That feels exactly right.

Better, because it can be a place where lives are mended, hope is learned, beauty is made, and mercy is practised.

Worse, because it can also be a place where power is misused, truth is hidden, and people are harmed.

If we have needed a reminder of that “worse” side, many churches — including my own denomination — have been forced to reckon with it in recent times. That reckoning is painful but necessary. My heart breaks for those who have been hurt, and I write as someone who loves the Church enough not to pretend these realities don’t exist.

And yet — paradoxically — alongside sorrow and anger, I also feel gratitude for local congregations that have touched my life with encouragement and support, and for the many people in those congregations who have embodied patience, kindness, and grace.

So here’s the question that I wrestle with:

If the Church can be both better and worse than we imagined—if one can experience love and another harm—what kind of thing is the Church, really?

Not a Project, but a Gift

The claim I want to make is a simple but a demanding one:

Before the Church is anything else, it is a gift.

That might sound jarring, especially for those whose experience of church has been painful. And we should never minimise that pain. But I want to suggest that much of the Church’s failure comes precisely when it forgets that it is a gift.

A gift is not something we make for ourselves. It can only be received.

And so it is with the Church. It is not a human project we construct or control; it is something given to us by Christ. And when we stop receiving it as gift, we start treating it as something else — a possession. And when the Church becomes a possession, it becomes something to defend, manage, or shape in our own image.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who knew the dangers of this better than most, put this with characteristic clarity:

“Christian community is not an ideal which we must realise; it is a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.”

Bonhoeffer wrote those words in 1930s Germany, as the Church around him was being co-opted by nationalist ideology. He despaired as the Church forgot it was a gift — and turned itself into a possession.

There is a warning there for every generation. Christ will not be co-opted for our causes. He will only ever invite us to participate in his.

Receiving Before Doing

The New Testament’s earliest picture of church life makes this point quietly but unmistakably.

In Acts 2, the first Christians do not begin by organising structures or launching programmes. Their first response is devotion — devotion to teaching, to fellowship, to prayer, and to shared life.

The result is that awe comes upon them and the Lord adds to their number. God is the active subject here. The Church is receiving before it is doing.

Paul makes the same point writing to the church in Ephesus. He doesn’t say, You have built this community together. He says:

“You are being built together into a dwelling place for God.”

So the New Testament is clear: the Church is God’s project, not ours.

That matters deeply for local congregations — including my own. Communities made up of long-standing members and recent arrivals, people from different backgrounds, traditions, cultures, and stories.

None of us owns the Church. None of us has more claim than another. We are guests in a house God is building.

Keeping the Gift a Gift

The question I am thinking about with my congregation is this: If the Church is a gift, how do we keep the Church from becoming a possession?

The theologian Mike Moynagh offers a deceptively simple insight: a gift remains a gift only when it is given away.

Think of that box of chocolates you received at Christmas. Kept entirely to yourself, it quickly becomes a possession. Shared, it remains a gift.

The same is true of church. When we cling to it — protecting our preferences, defending our image, managing who belongs — it hardens. When we share it, it thrives.

Because when the Church forgets it is a gift, it becomes anxious, defensive, and exclusionary. When it remembers it is a gift, it becomes generous, spacious, and hospitable.

Acts 2 doesn’t describe a perfect community, nor does Paul in Ephesians. But the New Testament describes communities shaped by grace — a shared lives beings shaped by receiving Christ’s gift, not controlling it.

Living With What We Didn’t Make

In Life Together, Bonhoeffer offered a warning that should be heeded by the Church in every age:

“He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter.”

That is a hard word, but it is also a hopeful one. Because it reminds us that even when we forget the gift, God does not withdraw it.

The Church is God’s. And God does not give up on his Church, which — for all its wounds — is still held by grace.

So, the invitation is as clear as it is simple:

Open your hands and receive that which you did not make.

Because without this gift that is given, we would all be so much poorer than we know.

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You can listen to the sermon this reflection was based on here.