Religion clubs: a rose by any other name?

From the Ongoing Debate Department:
Why do you call local churches “religion clubs”? Are you just trying to be insulting?

Well, insult is not the intent, but I fully expect to be heard this way. After all, if you take what is considered a holy thing and decline to recognize it in that way, and you can expect to catch a few stones in the small of the back. Occupational hazard...

I use the term religion club in the interest of rhetorical accuracy. After all, what is a “club”? A group of folks who associate with one another based on a common interest. Nothing wrong there. If the common interest is Christianity, then we have a Christian club. In practical terms, our local clubs can usually be identified in more detail than this. Joe belongs to a local religion club whose main interest is studying the Bible and trying to understand it and follow what they gather from it. Jane’s club is more oriented toward feeding the poor and evangelism. Nice people getting together to do nice things.

So why is my terminology offensive? Because we insist on seeing our local club as a holy thing, as The Body of Christ. But in most cases, it is no more “a church” than a hindquarter is a heifer. The believers are indeed part and parcel of the church, but that organization which they claim, that non-profit corporation, is not.

Jesus has one bride, one church. Granted, the Church appears in many, many places. Paul wrote letters to the church in Philippi, to the church in Corinth, to the church in Ephesus. But it strikes me that he never writes to the plural “churches in Corinth”, or the “churches in Ephesus”. He writes to a single entity in each city. The idea of plural “churches” in a city-- discrete from one another, separate in almost every tangible sense, governed and operated as though the majority of the other believers in the city do not even exist—is an idea foreign to Paul’s writings.

Well, I say “foreign”, but perhaps it is not entirely so. I do find a hint of our tradition of schism in I Corinthians 3:
“You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men? For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not mere men?”

Replace the characters with Luther or Wesley or Calvin or Moody and we find ourselves readily cut-and-pasted into Paul’s discourse, with largely negative consequences. Mere men make organizations of more mere men. The local organizations I find in the burgeoning Yellow Pages listings between “chiropractors” and “cigar stores” are, if I may boldly steal from Lincoln, “…of the people, by the people and for the people”.

The church of Jesus Christ in any city is far greater than the organization who meets at a particular address on a particular day. The local religion clubs are something far less. The everyday members of these groups speak with a prophetic pronoun when they refer to that organization to which they belong as “our church”.

Or in my terminology, “our club”. I don't object at all to such clubs, but it does seem important to me to be able to recognize what they are if we are ever to be able to see the actual church of Jesus Christ in the cities where we live.