Defining the Church (i)

The Mars Hill Church, a Seattle-based megachurch founded by Mark Driscoll in 1996, has recently decided to stop calling its several branch congregations "campuses" and to call them "churches" instead.  In a posting on the Mars Hill Church blog (here), one of the church's pastors explained that the word campus may convey the wrong image of the satellite congregations, which in fact fit the biblical description of the church.  Drawing on a book co-authored by Driscoll, the posting lists eight "biblical criteria" for being a church.  They are:

FPC, Lowville, NY

1. The church is made up of regenerated believers in Jesus.
2. The church is organized under qualified and competent leadership.
3. The church regularly gathers to hear God’s Word rightly preached and to respond in worshipful ways.
4. The church is where the biblical sacraments of baptism and Communion are performed regularly.
5. The church is unified by God the Holy Spirit.
6. The church is a holy people. When they sin, they repent of their sin. If [a professing Christian] should fail to repent, the church and its leaders lovingly enact biblical church discipline in hopes of bringing the sinner to repentance and to a reconciled relationship with God and his people.
7. The church is a loving community that devotes itself to fellowship.
8. The church is an evangelistic community where the gospel of Jesus is constantly made visible by its preaching, its witness of the members, and its Spirit-empowered life of love.

In some 22 more postings to follow, I'd like to play with this description.  I'm not sure that all eight are precisely "biblical" criteria, but they do present a good way to get at what it means to be a church whatever the background or denomination.  Stay tuned.