Do you separate yourself from traditional church when you do Body Church?

We certainly do not want to separate ourselves from the institutional church. Many of us go to worship services weekly, participate in children’s ministry, do outreach to the poor through institutional churches etc. We would have even built our home churches inside of an institutional church if they let us but the one we were attending needed us to build groups consistent with their vision of church which is understandable, so we needed to plant.

Where we really differ is deciphering the biblical definition of the word “church”. We believe the Bible clearly defines the church as a Body and describes it in 1 Corinthians 12 as an interdependent organism where all parts are equal and are emotionally bonded (rejoice with those who rejoice, mourn with those who mourn). You cannot form a body of this type through a weekly worship service. You can through small groups in an institutional church but what we’ve seen is typical institutional church leaders don’t want to define what happens at the small group level as church and will often disallow a small group that is forming into a body the freedom to go deeper if it could negatively effect the vision of church being presented during the worship services.

So we seek greater cooperation with institutional churches because we believe they offer a number of para-church ministries that are vital to Christian growth – cooperate worship, excellent teaching, strategic outreach, age-appropriate children’s ministry etc. But we don’t tell our kids that we are going to church. We tell them we are going to a worship service. We also don’t tell our kids our weekly body gathering is church. We tell them our church is the relationships we have with the people in our body who we gather with weekly and live life with the rest of the week.