like taming a hurricane…

Tarab is an Arabic word that doesn’t have a direct English translation. The closest word in the English language is ecstasy. Tarab is essentially an ecstatic, enraptured, almost spiritual feeling that a powerfully emotional performance can create. (I did pay attention sometimes in my music cultures of the world class.) If this isn’t what I experience at nearly every show I go to, I have no idea what ecstasy is and I don’t think that I’m able to handle it. I love going to shows. I love seeing the bands I listen to perform the music I know so well. It’s like going to see an author you love speak, or being on the set of your favorite television show. There’s something about being there while it’s happening right in front of you—something you love is being created right in front of your eyes! I know the music has already been written and played hundreds of times, and I may know the songs forwards and backwards. But knowing something happens and being a part of something happening are so vastly different. (There is a spiritual application here that I will probably write about later, but that’s not the purpose of this little anecdote.)

So you can only imagine what joy I experienced when I went to Cornerstone Festival 2005 in Illinois with my dad and five or six of my best friends. Four days, at least six stages, hundreds and hundreds of vendors, and eight thousand people, all gathered together on 500-some acres of land dedicated to presenting one of the biggest Christian festivals in the country. There are art galleries, seminars, dances, basketball courts, sand volleyball courts, tug-of-war competitions, a skate park, and countless other things to keep pre-teenagers to the elderly occupied from dawn to dusk. And of course, tons of music, from ridiculously heavy bands like Norma Jean to worship groups like Chris Tomlin to rock groups like Relient K, and everything in between.

I saw a total of thirty-one shows in those four days. It was absolutely incredible, and I don’t hesitate to say that it was one of the best experiences in my life so far.

One day in between shows I was walking through one of the vendor tents with one of my friends, and we stopped at a table covered with shirts and stickers and other apparel and accessories. I got a free carabiner, and despite how awesome that is, there was something here that impacted me even more than that. There were two matching green shirts on the table to display the front and back. On the front, it said “Don’t go to church.” The back said “Be the church.”

Don’t go to church, be the church.

I don’t know about you, but that blows my mind. It still does, two years later. It still does, even though I know what it means. I have that written in the front of my Bible, and at the top of one of the pages in my journal.

The church is an idea first presented by Jesus in Matthew 16:18. It did not exist before Jesus introduced the idea. Not once in the entire Bible is the word “church” referred to as a building—on the contrary, the church is to be spoken to (Matt. 18:17), to feel fear (Acts 5:11), to enter into partnership with Paul (Phil. 4:15), and to not be burdened (1 Tim. 5:16). These are all things that cannot be done to or by a building or place; they are things that people do. Because there was no church before Jesus, it is safe to say that it is solely a Christian idea, and not the same thing at all as a Jewish temple—I think Jesus would have said so otherwise.

Like worship, church is not a situation or occasion or place. One of the definitions of “church” in the trusty Merriam-Webster dictionary is “a body or organization of religious believers.” And it most definitely is a body of believers, with Christ as the head (Eph. 5:23). We are the church. If you go to church on Sunday morning, you go to the body of believers in Christ.

The thing is, I don’t ever want to leave the body of Christ. I don’t want to go to church on Sunday morning, because I want to be there already. I want to be there before Sunday morning, and before Saturday night, and before that. I never want to have left.

Of course it’s good to go to a church service or worship service (after these two blogs, both of those terms have become difficult for me to use, but I don’t know what else Sunday morning fellowship and praise could be called…besides Sunday morning fellowship and praise). We’re even called to do so on many occasions, such as in Hebrews 10:24-25, “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another…” But going to a church building to on Sunday morning should be just that—going to a building for fellowship and encouragement and praise. Going to church is like becoming part of a family. I don’t want to have to become part of a family more than once; I want to be a part of that family forever. Even if we only eat dinner together once a week.

I never want to go to church again.