Practicing Church

By Matthew Love

“Practice” (noun):
Repeated performance or systematic exercise for the purpose of acquiring skill or proficiency
The exercise or pursuit of a profession or occupation; especially law or medicine. 

The word “practice” brings to mind sports and band. I think of shooting one hundred free throws or repeating scales on my trumpet until my fingers cramped. Later in life I learned that the word also applied to certain jobs, a word lawyers and doctors applied to their professions. So, I learned that the word has multiple meanings. With the example of sports and band, it was something we did to get better, but was itself not the game or concert. For professionals, it meant the totality of their work, including trials and surgeries, their equivalents of “games” and “concerts.”

In this light, church is something we practice. I know that sounds strange. Someone will say, “We don’t practice the church, we are the church.” It’s not as if we “try out” for church, or have an “off season” when we break from being the church to improve praying or serving. Even still, church takes work and growth. It’s like when I was a boy and my mom was always buying me clothes one size too big. (I think she did it out of fear that I would have outgrown them by the time she got home from the store.) What did she tell me? “You’ll grow into it.” Church is like that. As Paul says, we are “to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph 4:15).

Church is something we “practice.” First, this is because church is something we do. “Practice what you preach” is an adage that originates with Jesus’s condemnation of the Pharisees in Matthew 23:3. Knowing the right information isn’t enough. The body of Christ has hands and feet for doing. In all Paul’s language of members of the body, I don’t recall him designating someone as the rear-end of the body of Christ whose job it was to sit in a pew.

Church is something we “practice,” second because it takes great humility. To truly practice means to acknowledge that I have room to grow. Someone might say, “Who are you to tell me I need to practice church? I’m good enough.” That person isn’t correctable or able to grow. To practice is to open ourselves to new ways of doing things, & to suggestions from others. Small groups are a good example because they reflect a way of church that many of us didn’t grow up with. We are used to attending “the main event” on Sundays and feeling like that’s enough God-time. Our leadership has communicated that we want to be more than a Sunday morning-centric church, but that takes work and humility.

Third, church is something we reflect on to improve. You’ve heard it said that “practice makes perfect.” That is not fully true. It is only intentional practice and reflecting on that practice afterward that helps us grow. Some of us have plateaued in our faith and our zeal. We are “going through the motions” but not growing. Practice involves intentional acts of effort, being open to correction, and stepping back to reflect on what we did, whether it went well or how we might do better next time. We may try something new—attending a small group, hosting a 7Ups event, having a new couple for dinner, teaching a Bible class. To truly practice is not just to be willing to do these things, but to learn from them, to think and pray over the question, “How I can get better?”