Why Rediscovering the Church?

I thought long and hard about the title of this blog – and when I say long and hard I do mean 30, maybe 40 seconds. I thought through quite a few possibilities but eventually ‘Rediscovering the Church’ just popped into my head and fit perfectly with where God has brought me in life.

If you were to take the time to read back through my archived blog posts, you would see that back in March ‘07, God led me, my wife and 3 other couples to plant a church in our home. It was not long after that founding event that I stopped blogging as life and other things got in the way. I now feel it is time to started blogging again and, when I look at what God is doing in my life and in my thoughts and understanding, much of what He’s doing is showing me this:

• The Church is not an institution. It is not a building. It is not a denomination. It is not something you go to. It is not something you do. The Church is a group of people who have one thing in common. We are all saved by the grace of God.

This realisation completely changes the way I live my life. I have been brought up to ‘go to church’ every Sunday. I have been brought up know how church should be ‘done’. I have been brought up knowing there are different churches who do different things different ways. I’ve been brought up in a temporal reality which is far, far distant from God’s truth.

I have realized that I can no longer ‘do’ church or ‘go to’ church since the Church is a family, a group of people. It is really nothing to do with some guy (or gal) preaching on a Sunday morning. It’s really nothing to do with services and rituals. It’s a family – and it’s a family that I need to get to know.

So rather than rediscovering how to be the church or do church, I need to rediscover THE Church. The people. My family. God’s children.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there are not things that it is appropriate for the Church to do together. Prayer, worship, the breaking of bread, fellowship, teaching – these things are all important things for the Church to do together but that is precisely the point. We should be discovering each other and our expression of what the Church does together should come from being together, not the other way around.

Many people are trapped by the belief that the Church should do certain things so they arrange for those things to happen and hope that ‘the Church’ will come and do them. That seems so backward to me. In that system you can be ‘in’ the church without ever meeting the church, without ever discovering who the church are.

I want to rediscover the Church.

Church, I want to know you.

When we know each other, I am sure we will worship together because we will see God at work and will want to praise and glorify Him for the things we see with our eyes in our brothers and sister.

Let’s rediscover this family called the Church together.