The Sunday Machine vs. the Kehilla

If our “church” can’t survive without branding, budgets, and a stage, we should ask whether it’s the same thing the apostles built

For most of my life, I assumed the church model I grew up with was simply the model—normal, universal, unquestioned. My family spent decades in one congregation. We showed up. We served. We listened. We gave. We were sincere.

Then two things collided in me.

First, I spent years in marketing—long enough to recognize the mechanics of attention, retention, and emotional pacing. Second, I became convinced the Bible is not a collection of religious vibes. It’s realism. It’s covenant. It’s history. It’s a G-d who speaks, acts, judges, redeems, and keeps His brit.

And once you start reading Scripture like it’s real, you eventually have to ask a dangerous question:

Are we doing “church”… or are we running a Sunday product?

I’m not asking that to insult anyone. I’m asking it because the New Testament forces it.

What marketing teaches you to see

Marketing isn’t evil. It’s a tool. But it has a tell.

It trains you to notice what an organization must do to keep people coming back:

emotion, novelty, packaging, brand clarity, frictionless participation, and a steady stream of “felt need” solutions.

Over time, I started noticing how many churches—often sincerely, often unintentionally—build around those pressures. The service is engineered. The stage becomes the center. The congregation becomes the audience. The metric quietly becomes attendance and giving.

And if you’re honest, you can feel the gravity: the whole system must keep moving, because payroll and buildings don’t wait for spiritual maturity.

That’s not automatically “sin.” But it can become a trap—because systems don’t just serve people. Eventually, people serve the system.

The New Testament picture is stubbornly different

When I went looking for “church” in the New Testament, I didn’t find a weekly spectator event as the default center of gravity. I found a people—a body—learning to live as family under Messiah.

• Believers gathering for mutual strengthening (Hebrews 10:24–25)

• Shared life and shared resources (Acts 2:42–47; Acts 4:32)

• Many voices contributing to build up the whole body (1 Corinthians 14:26)

• Shepherds equipping saints to do the work, not doing all the work for them (Ephesians 4:11–16)

• A priesthood of believers, not a pyramid of spiritual professionals (1 Peter 2:9)

That word “church” in the New Testament is ekklesia—an assembly. In Hebrew terms, what many of us are starving for is kehilla: covenant community. Not a weekly show. A shared life.

And yes—there were leaders. Elders. Teachers. Shepherds. But the pattern is consistently communal and participatory, not a single voice carrying the entire spiritual load while everyone else becomes a consumer of religious content.

The pastor-centered bottleneck

Here’s one of the biggest disconnects in modern church life: we’ve built a structure where one man’s gifting, one man’s study, one man’s emotional capacity, and one man’s interpretation becomes the primary diet of the entire body.

That’s a bottleneck. And it often produces two predictable outcomes:

• The pastor becomes exhausted, inflated, or both.

• The people become dependent—trained to receive rather than trained to discern.

That’s not the apostolic aim.

The biblical aim is a body where the saints are equipped, where gifts are activated, where truth is tested in community, where love and accountability are real—not outsourced.

Denominations and the quiet normalization of division

I’m not pretending doctrinal differences are imaginary. They’re not. But the New Testament has very strong language for factional identity becoming a badge of belonging.

Paul’s rebuke in 1 Corinthians 1 isn’t subtle: “I follow Paul… I follow Apollos…” He treats that spirit as a threat to the unity Messiah purchased.

So when “Baptist,” “Presbyterian,” “Calvinist,” or any other label becomes the identity marker—when it becomes the tribe you defend, the filter you refuse to challenge, the reason you dismiss other believers—you should feel the tension.

Not because labels are always sinful, but because factionalism is always corrosive.

A covenant people should be recognizable by allegiance to Messiah and faithfulness to Scripture—not by brand loyalty.

The Jewish foundations we’ve misplaced

There’s another layer that troubled me deeply as I kept reading: the gradual erosion of Scripture’s Jewish foundation in modern Christianity.

The Bible is not “a Christian book with a Jewish introduction.” It is a Jewish storyline that culminates in the Jewish Messiah—Yeshua—who brings Gentiles into Israel’s hope, not into a replacement narrative.

When churches minimize Torah, ignore the prophets, and treat Israel as a footnote, the results aren’t neutral:

• The New Testament becomes harder to understand.

• The covenant storyline gets flattened into generic spirituality.

• And in worst cases, Israel-blind theology can drift into contempt—sometimes even into antisemitic instincts—because the roots are no longer honored.

You don’t have to be obsessed with Israel to be faithful. But you do have to be honest about the text. And the text will not let Israel disappear without consequences.

A simple diagnostic: is your church forming disciples or managing attenders?

Here are questions every believer should be willing to ask—not with arrogance, but with biblical sobriety:

• Where does the money go, and who can explain it plainly?

• Are the saints being equipped to read Scripture, test claims, and grow in discernment?

• Do members have real roles—or only volunteer slots that keep the machine running?

• Is there meaningful community life beyond a weekly service?

• Is accountability real, or is everyone anonymous in a crowd?

• Is Scripture taught as a whole covenant story—from Torah to Messiah—or as scattered verses supporting preselected themes?

• If the stage disappeared tomorrow, would the community still function as a body?

These aren’t “anti-church” questions. They’re pro-biblical questions.

What I’m calling for is biblical realism

I’m not claiming every modern church is fake. I’ve met sincere pastors and sincere communities. I’m not denying the good G-d has done in imperfect systems.

I’m saying the default model many of us inherited is not as obviously “biblical” as we were told.

And if we love truth, we shouldn’t fear that realization. We should let it purify us.

Because the ekklesia was never meant to be a weekly product. It was meant to be a people—mishpacha—living under the Kingship of Messiah, practicing covenant faithfulness together, sharpening each other, carrying each other, and proclaiming the Kingdom with integrity.

An invitation

Are we willing to question the status quo?

Are we willing to rebuild community that actually looks like the Scriptures—shared life, shared responsibility, shared discernment, shared obedience?

If you’ve felt the dissonance, you’re not crazy. You’re hearing the text.

And maybe the path forward isn’t cynicism. Maybe it’s teshuvah—a return. Not to a fantasy of the first century, but to the principles the apostles actually gave us.

May the shalom of our Abba guard you —