A building or a community?

What is a church?  Is it a building?  Is it a group of people with similar beliefs?  Is it a community?  What is a church?

For so many the word "church" means a building.  A place where people go for an hour or so on a Sunday morning (or maybe a Saturday night).  They sit, they listen, the sing, they go home, they drink bad coffee, they go home.  Many times when I say the word "church" I mean the building.

When the Bible talks about the early "church" it doesn't mean a building.  The word is used in relation to the group of people that gathered together, that group was the "church".  They may have met in a building but it is the body of believers that the Bible refers to as the church, not the place they met.

Modern day Christian culture, though, puts a lot more emphasis on the building being church, rather than the people.  Sometimes there is a push to remember church is the people, not a building, but most of the time that point is lost.  Why does any of this matter?  Good question.

Recently I was talking with a friend about the community of believers and the building of the church.  We talked about going to church, going through the rituals and liturgy church services have come to be versus gathering as a community of believers and allowing the Spirit of God to move and lead the time together.  Is one church and the other not?

We talked about what a community of believers looks like, rather than a legalistic church which holds on to its rules and regulations for the sake of the rules and regulations (the Sanctuary is to be used solely for the purpose of worship on Sunday morning, nothing else).  Is one a church and the other not?

I'm still working this through, obviously, and I definitely have my ideas.  Niggling at the back of my mind is the knowledge that while church can be a building, more importantly church is a community of believers, it is the people.