It’s been a while since my last post, there is still some discussion going on about biblical inerrancy on the post two before this one, so check it out and participate if you want, its taking some interesting directions. I’m home for Christmas so I’m not in front of my computer (with my beautiful new flat screen, thanks Ron) as much as usual.

With a church plant coming up in my future within the next year, naturally I have been thinking a lot about church. We’ve all heard the sermon by now that we don’t go to church because we are the church. I’ve been constantly trying to rid from my speech the act of talking about church as if it’s a place rather than a people. I find myself still continually saying I’m going to church, or complaining about the church or something that defeats the true meaning of the language. I know that the church isn’t a building; I know that it’s not an institution but rather a living organism that we call the Body of Christ. So why do I and thousands of other still say we are going to church and speak of church as a physical place or a gathering of some sort?

After talking about church for as long as we have as a place we go to on Sunday morning or an organization it gets engrained into our head. Just because we aren’t using the language doesn’t mean that the real Church doesn’t exist. Many times over and over again we would make the mistake of equating this place or this organization with the true church of Christ, and I think this is one of the gravest mistakes that we can make. I found myself constantly criticizing the church (organization, place) but in doing that I found myself just getting confused, because all of sudden now we have one word for two different meanings.

I don’t want to try to change all of culture and try to make everyone use the word church properly. The fact is no matter what I criticize in the church, within this corrupt organizational consumeristic place, exists the true Body of Christ. It looks nothing like our church, but it never ceases to exist within it. I don’t know how many churches that I’ve been too that when I’m looking at the building, staff, ideologies and actions as a whole they look like a cheap entertainment industry, but within that I see people who are part of the Body of Christ carrying out the work of the Church of God. Whether it be in a Catholic, Pentecostal, Baptist, Vineyard, Emergent, Reformed church or no church at all, I think that on the outside they are pretty messed up and look nothing like God intended for his Church to really look like, but when you open them up you see Christ’s body living and active in all these small areas. It’s hard to see sometimes because we want to judge a believer by his denomination or what he pledges himself too; wouldn’t that be so convenient.

All this to say, as frustrated with church as I become I can be confident to know that the true Church (that isn’t organized into labels or denominations) walks around boldly doing the work of the Kingdom and their language is love. I hope we can be confident that God’s Church is growing and getting stronger and it exists not between walls or movements but is connected by the Spirit in ways that we can’t comprehend. Thank-you God for still moving and using the True church despite our failed attempts to organize, categorize and institutionalize your beautiful gift to us.

Growing up with Christian parents you go to church. Fortunately and unfortunately I was blessed and cursed with this habit engrained into my weekly schedule. To wake up on a Sunday morning without going to church never ceased to leave you a little bit empty and needy inside. Even when my parents stopped going to church now almost 5 years ago I kept going, it was a habit as regular as changing my underwear.

Sometimes I find this habit can do more damage than good. It allows people to get into the rut to assuming that church is all you need to do to stay right with God. As long as you can drag your butt out of bed and make it to church, you will be fine. That is quite a load and in our heads we all know it, but to get that into my heart took me a long time. It took a long time to make my relationship with God a personal and meaningful thing. It took a long time for me to separate that relationships status from the status of my church attendance. If I was feeling horrible and somehow I made it to church, for that time I was at church I would feel a little bit better. It’s almost like church had become a shot of some kind of drug to keep me going just a little bit longer.

I don’t know how often people still do this. Even being at Tyndale you will find an abnormal amount of people that just want to go to church, for the sake of going to church and nothing deeper. Just find me a church to go to and find me a ride and I will be there. If anyone goes to church simply for the sake of church, then I think they are missing the vital point of church.

Church as a habit has its good side also. The weekly reminder to show up at a service reminds you and keeps you in tact of your relationship with your community and fellow believers. It should probably never remind you of your relationship with God, that should be something that is kept up all week long. It’s hard for many though to keep Christian relationships moving and church offers an amazing place to do that. It’s a great habit to know that on Sunday mornings, or Saturday nights or whatever day is yours that that time is set apart for your gathering of believers. Going to church out of guilt or out of mundane routine probably won’t do much for you, you my as well stop wasting time.

It comes down to motivation, why do you go to church? Ask yourself this, and see if the reasons hold up, if they do, I’ll see you on Sunday. If not, may as well pay a visit to Bedside Baptist because it will be just as beneficial. I’m not saying God can’t do amazing things to those that are at church for the wrong reasons, but honestly, why waste your time. Figure out why you are doing these things, and then start to do them with all your heart into it, not just a routine. By making it a basic routine we are belittling the gathering of Saints to something as common as taking your morning piss or eating your midnight snack, it has no spiritual significance.

Once you and I start going to church for the right reasons, it won’t matter as much how crappy the music is, or how gross the building is. Your church, yes the boring one you grew up with, will become an entire new concept to you that you will look forward to going to every weekend instead of just going cause that’s just what you do.

Darryl brought this point up last night and it struck me interesting and worthy enough to be posted. Since Darryl doesn’t have his own blog I’ll just get the ideas across. If you think Darryl should get his own blog (because he’s way more insightful and creative than me) e-mail him, caedmon_is_me@hotmail.com.

After I had finished explaining what I had in the previous post to everyone Darryl pointed out that church had become an idol. It makes complete sense. If your entire walk was summed up in a once a week (night and morning service if extra spiritual) service then you start to give a service a standing in your life it never should have. You depend on that service for your growth.

Imagine for a moment, your senior pastor, in his announcements, says that church on Sundays is going to be cancelled. All services are being trashed. What would happen? Well I’ll tell you one of two things. In most churches, the church will either fall apart and slowly disintegrate or it will fire its senior pastor and have a new one hired within a few months. Or try this, go up to anyone at church and get into a serious conversation with them about getting rid of Sunday services. They would obviously disagree, how dare you take something away that belongs to them. Watch how defensive people get over this service. It’s quite interesting how much time and energy goes into planning the service. It’s even more interesting to compare that to the time and energy that goes into the community.

So church becomes this substitute for our Christian walk. Of course we are encouraged to read our Bible and pray everyday to keep things up, but the unwritten rule is that you come to church because that’s the climax of your Christianity. Really nothing can substitute our Christian walk; Christ needs to be that foundation and the glue that holds it all together. So you replace Christ with anything, including church and you have yourself an idol. Don’t let this shock you; I still replace my life with idols everyday, I’m just pointing out one more that we seem to do corporately.

If a service got taken away from a church, the church should be able to run just as effectively without it. Everyone should still know what to do with their time, because let me tell you if the service disappeared there would be a lot of people with nothing to do. When church is made more important than God, we become the Pharisees, and that my friend is not a bandwagon that I am comfortable being on.

My dad has been going to this new church in Sarnia for the past few weeks. It’s a church plant and they have only been together for the two weeks that my dad has been there. The church planter of this church was the assistant pastor of a successful Baptist church in Sarnia. He decided that God was calling him to start another church in the same city. So he did just that.

Most people you tell this story to will quickly frown upon this. “Why does Sarnia need yet another church, we have 102 churches now and they aren’t full at all” they will say. I probably would have said the same thing back in the day and my dad was saying the same two weeks ago. There is more to the story. The assistant pastor is getting paid two months of salary to plant this church. The church he is leaving is paying him to start up a rival church (rival?).

This my friends is the beginning of something beautiful here in Sarnia. Finally, there is a church who is more concerned with the Kingdom of God and not their weekly attendance and success of a building. It is much different from my experience, I’ve been asked not to ‘take’ leaders from a ministry. Or I’ve seen pastors complain that people were undermining ministries when someone would organize something outside the confines of their label. I’ve seen churches split angrily because it makes their church look smaller. Whose leaders are they anyway? Also, when did it become about filling up the church? Is it a fair statistic to say that when ever pew is filled up in this city, then we can start planting new churches, but until then we need to focus on the churches that are already there? I don’t think so at all.

There are a few problems with this. First of all is the use of the word church. Church isn’t the building where we sing; church is the people. When new ‘churches’ are being planted we should rejoice because that means that there is more communities that are being built that will reach more people. Christ preaches the Kingdom of God more than anything else in scripture, he doesn’t preach about filling up churches. Secondly, this response assumes that full churches are successful churches. Not so. Give me a small budget and I bet I can fill up any church here in Sarnia weekly. If pushing people in our doors is our goal, then we’ve missed the point.

Thankfully churches in Sarnia are coming around to the understanding of the Kingdom of God as opposed to cherishing their organization that they call a church that gives them pay cheques. I hope that all the churches in Sarnia can eventually come together to work toward the same goal and if someone leaves the Pentecostal church to go to the Baptist church, who the heck cares. Why do we have such a longing to make our full churches so necessary that we can’t see it any other way? The kingdom is the goal, not full churches.

The longer I sit through services, especially worship services, the more frustrated with myself and the concept of these services I get. The idea of singing songs to our God is amazing; I love that we can use our skills and talents to do this. The idea of teaching is important cause if we are never taught we will never learn. The idea of Christian fellowship is good, because without community we are detaching ourselves from the body of Christ. What bothers me is the lack ‘service’ throughout the week.

Services can encourage you and prepare you for your upcoming week in the world. Services can be a place to rejoice or lament your previous week in the world. Services are not meant to be a hideout or an entity for the good of itself. Services are not meant to be church. The longer I sit in services the more I realize that they have become nothing more than an hour or two concert with boring talking. Services have been something that we have learned to depend on to ‘get us through’ the week or to ‘fill us up’ or to make us feel spiritual for a week or to take the place of church.

This whole term ‘Sunday Christian’ runs rampant through everything we hear, but I don’t even think that’s the problem. It’s not that we aren’t Christians throughout the week. Instead we are Christians but we think that fellowship, worship, teaching, reading, serving and community only happens at church, which it does, but it only begins there. If your not reading and learning on your own time; Sunday won’t be enough. If your not submersed in community outside of Sunday; then you’re not in a true community. If you’re only worshiping God by singing then your singing isn’t worship at all.

Church services should be nothing more than an overflow of your life. Everything that happens there, is simply a communal example of what goes on during the week. We have this mindset that we ‘go to church.’ That is such an unbiblical way of understanding it. None of us go to church. By saying that we are going to church that is making it seem like another even that we can throw in our calendar, once a week on Sundays. The bible says that we are the church. So when you go to a service, you aren’t going to church, you are going as the church.

Services become quite useless if we start pawning off the responsibility of church onto them. By doing that we try and lose the title of church ourselves and pass it on to a two hour time frame where the responsibility lies on the guy up front and a band. How lazy we’ve become. Instead of taking the 24/7 responsibility of living out the church mission, we try to pass it off to a two hour service where we pretty much do nothing but sit in a pew and maybe stand up and sing a song or maybe some of us work in the nursery or teach sunday school. If it is the church’s job to feed the poor, take care of widows, help struggling teens, visit the elderly, give to the needy and help those who are sick then that is our job every day all day long. We can’t expect the two hours on Sunday to do that, because that’s not it’s job.

I’m not calling my service church anymore, because it’s not. We are the church. As the church we create services where we can learn, be encouraged and grow. Through these services we aren’t experiencing ‘great church,’ instead we are empowered to become the church.

trans•sex•u•al (tr ns-s k sh – l)
n.
1. One who wishes to be considered by society as a member of the opposite sex.
2. One who has undergone a sex change.

The church throughout the bible is considered and called the bride of Christ. Christ is the groom. In this allegory we are Christ’s bride meant to serve and worship him in spirit and in truth. All too often I find that we are so busy serving and worshiping ourselves. We entertain ourselves with our programs, worship ourselves with our money and satisfy ourselves with a quick altar call. It’s almost as if we ourselves are trying to become the groom. Everything that we are commanded to be for the groom we become for ourselves. Are we not happy with being the bride?

The transsexuals of today are those that are sexually frustrated with who they were created to be. They are the ones who aren’t happy being male or female and seek to become the opposite. I find much of the church in the salvation. We want to become the opposite of what we are. We want to have the status of creator, God, groom when really we are the creation, human, bride. It’s time that the church stops trying to be a transsexual. We are the bride; we are meant to serve God, not ourselves. We are meant to worship God, not ourselves.