Whose Church Is This?

Luke 19:10  The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”

Why does the church exist?  Certainly the last few months have caused us to ponder anew this question.

Ask that question to a variety of people, and you will get a spectrum of opinions.  Ask a pastor, and she may say: “It’s the people of God, brought together to worship, to grow, to witness and serve.”  To a lonely elderly person: “It’s my lifeline and the only hug I get in a week.  I don’t know what I would do without my church to hold on to.”  To the parents of a young child: “In our hectic, off-kilter world, we need a good place for our kids to find values, to grow up with something to believe in.”  To a teen: “This is where my friends are.”

Ask the question to a weary lay leader, and you may hear: “I suspect the church is where committees go to spawn subcommittees.”

Why does a church exist?

Consider what Jesus said to his about-to-be church:  “Go make disciples…”  and what Jesus asked the Father in prayer on behalf of the church: “that they may become completely one, so that the world may know” that the Father love them.

God has a plan, and it involves the church and is not about church for church’s sake.  God’s plan is about gathering as many people4 as possible into the kingdom of God, and  the church isd God’s goofy, ungainly, counterintuitive means to that end.  The church, of all things, exists to point the way, to steer the  outside in, to save the lost, to proclaim God’s glorious reign – that more citizens may be naturalized in God’s Kingdom.

God’s Church

Yes, God’s church does provide a place of solace, a home for godly values, a platform for spirited worship, and organism of relationships, and all the bountiful benefits Christ Followers enjoy.  But the church isn’t the church so that Christ Followers can experience those benefits.  The church is the church so that other people can meet Jesus Christ and be captured by the Spirit and be incorporated into the Kingdom for eternity.  A church exists, like Jesus, “to seek out and to save the lost.”  The church is not in the business of coddling the cozy but rather of finding the fallen, and will inconvenience itself in order to reach the other.  The church exists to do what Jesus valued – and did himself.

Questions for you to consider:

•  If someone were to observe our church for a month, what might he or she say about our core values?
•  How do we express our true values?
•  What one thing can we work on in the next three months to give greater value to the work of reaching the unchurched?

Peace,

Pastor Hoyt