"Church": A thing of the past?

Something that's been on my mind for probably a year now is the state of the church. When we think of church, we think of at least a weekly assembling together of ourselves. This may include Sunday School, Sunday Evening Services, Discipleship Training, Wednesday Evening services, etc. This is all in a traditional sense. For my church it's a Sunday morning assembly where we come together, worship, fellowship, get a good word, and go home. This also includes various lifegroups throughout the week, etc.

Despite all of this to describe what church is, however, I've left out what the church is - the body of Christ. Strip away the traditional/non-traditional methodologies of "doing church" and - I hope - the body still remains. The body is not what I consider to be the "thing of the past"; it is all of the decor and frills and traditional/non-traditional things surrounding the body that act as a glue to make it all work together.

My concern with the church begins with the lost person's perspective. If I invite a person that does not know Christ and has absolutely no knowledge of Jesus to a church service, I think it's a pretty safe assumption to say they're going to be a no-show. We're inviting them out of their comfort zone into a completely unfamiliar place where we will do completely unfamiliar things, and place them into a state of complete awkwardness. Furthermore, let's be honest - these freak-show Christian programs on channels like TBN don't do anything to quell the awkward level. To make matters worse, we'll provide them with a self-fulfilling prophecy of the hypocrite stigma: that the church is filled with hypocrites. Everyone brings their Sunday morning faces to church, nobody brings their "I'm hurt", "I'm alone", "I'm desperate", "I'm lacking", "I'm sorry" faces, because we have learned that church is not the socially acceptable place to bring these faces. Not only that, but there will undoubtedly be people there that at some point in their week have not lived up Christ's expectation and have fallen. Showing this environment to a person I would like to introduce to the love of Christ is not where I would want to start off.

Where did Jesus start? He went to them. He didn't bring the tax collectors and thieves and beggars and whores to the synagogue. He confronted them where real life happened, and I think that's what the body of Christ needs to start migrating toward, is where real life happens. Real life doesn't happen in church. Real life happens in the safety of a few brothers or sisters sharing that they're hurt, alone, desperate, lacking, whatever the case may be, and coming to Christ to give those things to Him. That is what the world needs to see, that there is a real solution apart from all of the flair. They don't need to see another steeple or choir or dude in a funny robe and wonder, "what is all that for?"

So how can we show the world real Christian life? Not the "Happy Sunday" face paint, but the war paint on our faces from being faced with battles of insecurity, temptation, insufficiency, and loneliness, and seeing Christ conquer all as He is glorified above it all.