Church: Do you Attend or Belong?

The following excerpts have been adapted from a blog post written by Jill McIlreavy on the Mustard Seed Blog, entitled “Church: Do you Attend or Belong?” and was written almost three years ago. 

In it she states that; “The Church was not a human idea. It was conceived in the heart of God.“

“Just as our bodies have many parts and each part has a special function, so it is with Christ’s body. We are many parts of one body, and we all belong to each other.” Romans 12:4-5 (New Living Translation)

And goes on to say that; “Church ‘goers’ are in danger of developing a consumeristic approach to the church.“

Even though “God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.” Ephesians 1:5 (New Living Translation)

The thing is, “We don’t go to church, we are the church” and we need to start doing all we can to live our Christian lives in such a way that shows that we are His followers, and that our lives truly are reflective of His Son as referenced in John 13:34-35, for we belong together. It is not just that we need to be doing life together we need to show the same kind of love that Jesus showed us when He adopted us into His family.

“For when we demonstrate the same love I (Jesus) has for us by loving one another, everyone will know that we are His true followers” (The Passion Translation)

This is something that we have been continually exploring as we have looked at the theme of Love in our sermon series’ throughout the past year.

You see, “We are designed to be connected; to belong. We belong to each other.”

God has gifted each member of His the body to serve one another; I will stick my neck out here and say that it is impossible to do that alone. To live a Christian life alone runs counter to everything the Bible teaches us. Proverbs‬ ‭18:1 tells us that the person who “isolates himself seeks his own desire” and that he “breaks out against all sound judgment”.

Therefore, “Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near” Hebrews 10:24-25 (New Living Translation)

See also 1 Corinthians 12:12 (The Living Bible) and 1 Corinthians 12:27 (New Living Translation)

“The New Testament is filled with descriptions of what the followers of Jesus did in the weeks following his resurrection.

It gives us a model of how the experience of being part of the church, could and should be: They shared meals, they were hospitable, they prayed and worshipped together, they learned from their leaders, they didn’t hold too tightly onto possessions, but shared what they had with each other.

Were they perfect? Hardly! The New Testament is not a story of an idealised church where everything worked perfectly all the time. They were no different from you and I; and in many ways life was so much harder for them.“

God created “the church with imperfect people and today it is still filled with imperfect people, like you and I.

It’s only because of God’s incredible grace and mercy that He chooses broken human beings like us, to showcase his grace in a world in need of redemption.

Every single one of us is a work in progress; imperfect but made righteous in God’s sight.“

 

In light of the issues that face us today in a Covid-19 ravaged world, the local church, or as in our case the local Corps, needs to return to God’s intended design for the church and be the “salt and light” in a darkened and frightened time and space, offering ‘Hope and Life‘. So that people will be encouraged, uplifted, and reminded that those things can and should come through our faith in Him.

God uses broken vessels to be his fellow workers in redeeming the world back to Him. Therefore, we cannot merely attend church we need to truly belong, and do all we can to play our part in this awesome faith journey that He has invited us into. We are each a work in progress and need to draw on the abilities, skills and talents of others so that we can all mature in the faith.

We need each other! We belong to each other, we need to set aside those things that stand in the way of us growing together. We need to put off ‘all’ those things that hinder us from being all we can be.

“Through followers of Jesus like yourselves gathered in churches, this extraordinary plan of God is becoming known and talked about even among the angels!“

Ephesians 3:10 (The Message)

So we need to stop thinking of what we can get out of any particular act of service, or worship experience – What we can get out of the church (a consumeritistic mindset).

 

We need to stop wondering if the church is going to do anything for me. And start thinking along the lines of what we can give to the church. For when we determine that for ourselves we not only find our purpose and destiny within God’s plan for our lives, we also discover that we truly belong and have a valuable part to play in God’s redemptive plan for the world.

So, do you ‘attend’ or do you ‘belong’? Only you can answer that question for yourself.

As church leaders we merely invite you on a journey to find out how we can do that in our place – we might not always agree on how to do that. But we need to continue exploring, experimenting, adapting, and changing how we do things so that we can become more effective in reaching out to those in our communities that need the Love of God!

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Thou Shalt Not Return, Thou Shalt Reimagine

The following post featured on Pastor Amy Butler‘s blog, entitled Thou Shalt Not Return, Thou Shalt Reimagine on July 9. And has subsequently been posted numerous times on Facebook, as churches around the globe grapple with the dilemma of reopening their physical locations while the Covid-19 pandemic is still sweeping across the world.

(RNS) — Three questions hang over the last scenes of “Hamilton,” the musical: “Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?”

The answers, for us in the COVID-19 crisis, have come to depend on the political persuasion of the state we live in. That’s a true shame for many reasons. Playing politics with people’s lives is a good way to avoid asking some hard questions about who we are as a country. 

But what about who we are as a church?

Church folks are surely free to make their own careful decisions based on what we believe about who we are as gospel community, right?

Not so, as it turns out. Some leaders in the church are irresponsibly calling for a quick return to church as we knew it, before COVID turned our entire lives upside-down. Overcoming the virus is going to be a long process, they argue. We might as well push ahead toward “getting things back to normal” sooner rather than later.

What a sad and limited view of God’s vast, surprising and relentless work in the world. Those calling for a quick return to the familiar are embodying the tragic lack of imagination that has put the church in a steady spiral of decline.

Instead, we should be asking some difficult questions — ones we should have been asking long before we had to halt in-person worship: 

Who are we as the church, and what are we called to be in the world?

Do we exist to nurture justice and the thriving of all people, to stubbornly model for the world Jesus’ ethic of inescapable mutuality, of loving our neighbors? Or do we want to be … something else?

Those are uncomfortable questions to consider. They ask Christians to imagine our corporate life as prophetic witness rather than a capitalist operation. But recall that following Jesus has never been a safe or easy choice. 

Like many of you, I also miss church as we used to know it — I miss my whole life, too, actually. But anyone insisting on a quick return to life pre-COVID is ignoring a foundational principle of Christian faith: that God is in the business of perpetually creating new life, resurrection, a future based on a faith that is predisposed to innovation and new creation, as Paul would say.

These decisions about when and how to reopen are complex, of course. Church leaders everywhere are watching national trends, following the advice of credible scientists and listening carefully to experts on activities like Communion and congregational singing. We are proceeding with utmost caution, mindful of best practices. But the only true course open to us is the hard work of showing the world a model of radical love of neighbor. 

Madison Reid McClendon, of University of Chicago’s Divinity School, writes:

The most powerful statement the church can make as to the value of human life, the dignity of human persons, and the sacred task we each have to care for our siblings as if we are their keeper, is to stay closed long after all other entities have opened. The most essential business imaginable is the protection of human life, and by staying closed the church pays witness to these values in the world when all others forget and move on and pay the price in blood.

I have to wonder if those among us pushing for a swift return to church as we knew it are forgetting that even though the church building is closed, the work of the church continues: building community, proclaiming truth, working for justice. And we will find a way to do that work, even if it’s not as familiar as sitting in a pew.

And if a lack of imagination will not allow you to innovate new and exciting ways to be the church sans paper bulletin and a pulpit complete with fake flower arrangement, it might be time to think more deeply about whether or not what you really want to return to is, in actual fact, the church after all.

____________________________________

Obviously, we here in New Zealand are in an extremely privileged position as we have all but eliminated the spread of Covid-19 within our community.

But over the past month or so we are seeing positive tests at our border quarantine facilities around the country – so the threat of ‘Community Transmission’ is still very real. Thankfully though the risk is quite low (at least at this stage).

Suffice it to say though, that we cannot remain complacent and we need to be very much aware that in the space of a week or so – entire towns and cities, regions or even one of our islands could be placed in a state of lockdown – as has been seen by our neighbours in Australia.

So, what does this mean for the church? Or as is the case for our setting, what does this mean for the local Corps? We need to do things of a more experimental nature simply to see what happens and allow God to guide and lead us through a monumental shift in the way that we do church – Both now and into the future.

You see, we cannot remain complacent, our previous ‘modus of operandi’ was not doing it for us, many people pre-Covid were leaving church and or attending less regularly. And there are a multitude of reasons why this may have been happening (which I will explore in a future post).

However, more than ever today, we need to be able to adapt quickly, we need to reimagine what church looks like, we need to continue some of the lockdown expressions, ministries, and ways of doing church – utilising whatever means and platforms that we can to ensure that church continues regardless if we are meeting in-house / in-person or not.

For those of us that have embraced the change (refer to my previous post) we need to continue developing our online platforms (including maximising our effectiveness on Social Media) and ensure that systems, people’s preferences, policies etc. don’t get in the way of the ‘New thing‘ that God is doing in these days, to get His message out to the world.

A world that for so long has been starved of God’s preeminence as we have stumbled about trying to control everything ourselves, barely acknowledging Him in the process. A world that is still longing for a Saviour, Hope and Life. A world that has limited God’s provision by stripping itself of its abundant resources for wealth and power. A world that has wrongly attributed rights to a select few, rather than using the gifts that God has provided broadly for all to benefit from. A world that all to often brings into question the very existence of God and therefore doesn’t even recognise when He is at work in its midst.

May we as ‘His hands and feet’ step up boldly and start to reclaim our place as sons & daughters of the Most High, and be the ‘salt and light’ in a world that desperately needs Christian men and women to bring “Life and Hope” to those within our Community and beyond.

May we start doing life together and loving one another as God intended – Bringing about His Kingdom!

Our ‘New Normal‘ is still being created out of the chaos! And we had best leave it to the Master Creator God who created the beautiful world that we have been privileged enough to know as home.

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Word of Encouragement

I shared with you in Yesterdays Word of Encouragement 10 areas in which we can hear from God on a regular basis.

A.W. Tozer said, “It is the nature of God to speak to us.”

Therefore, today we will explore the fact that God is speaking to us each all the time. He wants to have fellowship with us, He longs for us to hear Him and He does this through the Word and the Holy Spirit.

Jesus told us in John 16:13-15 that “the Spirit of truth will come and guide us… He will not speak His own words to us; He will speak what He hears, revealing to us the things to come and bringing glory to God. The Spirit has unlimited access to Me, to all that I possess and know… That is the reason why I am confident He will care for His people and reveal the path to us.” (The Voice)

So, how do we know if we are hearing God’s voice?

 

Firstly, we need to ensure that our spiritual receiver is attuned to God. Are we ready to tune in to the voice of God, are we expecting to hear from Him, and are we truly willing to learn to know His voice.

Jeremiah 29:13 tells us that “when we come looking for God, we will find Him. Yes, when we get serious about finding Him and want it more than anything else, He’ll make sure we won’t be disappointed.” (The Message)

 

Secondly, we must recognise how God communicates to us, individually. Each of us is wired differently – for some they connect with God through nature, others through song, reading, or writing, while for others they connect through silence. There are many ways in which we can connect with God and these are just a few examples, we each need to find out what works best for us each. For then we will become “familiar with his voice.” John 10:4 (The Passion Translation)

Thirdly, we need to then learn to discern His voice. It took God four times to speak directly to Samuel. For Samuel he needed the wise council of Eli to help him to decipher that it was actually God who was speaking to him. You can read about it in 1 Samuel 3.

The thing is, it is often difficult for us to differentiate between the Spirit of God and our own thoughts. Therefore, it is essential that we seek confirmation from other believers, who are journeying with us on our faith path.

Fourthly, we can check The Word to see if it lines up with what we are hearing. For God will never tell you to do, think, or say anything that is contrary to His Word.

The Spirit of God will only ever tell you to do things that will give you a more abundant life. Every change He tells you to make is designed to bring blessing into your life and minister grace towards you.

To live in the confidence that we are hearing from God we need to have a knowledge of His Word continually in our heart. And we do this by drawing near to Him.

James 4:8 says that we are to “move our hearts closer and closer to God,” and when we do “He will come even closer to us. But we need to make sure that we cleanse our lives, keeping our hearts pure and stop doubting.”

(The Passion Translation)

I hope and pray that this has been an encouragement to you as you continue on your journey of faith and seek His will for your lives, and the lives of those that you have been entrusted with.

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Word of Encouragement

Whitney Hopler in an article posted on crosswalk.com said that “God is constantly speaking to people.

But all too often, they miss out on hearing God’s messages because they seek His guidance only occasionally – usually when they’re going through a crisis or facing a major decision.

Then, with a dire need to hear from God, people become confused and frustrated when they don’t clearly hear what they should do.

They start to wonder how to hear from God and why they aren’t.”

She then goes on to outline 10 ways in which we can hear from God on a regular basis.

She has adapted these from Dallas Willard’s book Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God:

1. Recognize that God has created you for a close friendship with Himself.
2. Consider your motives for wanting to hear from God.
3. Make your goal more than just hearing God.
4. Know that you’re important to God, but be humble.
5. Don’t try to force God to tell you something.
6. Recognize that God communicates in many forms, but most often through your mind.
7. Renew your mind.
8. Invite the living Word to help you when you read the written word.
9. Recognize God’s voice above all others.
10. Set aside time regularly to listen for God’s messages.

You can read how she briefly unpacks each of these areas here.

May this be an encouragement to you in these ever changing times and as we seek to understand God’s will for our lives.

Remembering always, that “God knows the plans that He has for us. They are plans for peace and not disaster, plans to give us a future filled with hope.” Jeremiah 29:11 (God’s Word Translation)

The below video is about a young guy who wanted something, and prayed for something that many of us take for granted; he longed for arms and legs. But God did not answer his prayers.

Instead Nick has been enabled to be, the hands and feet of Jesus, in a hurting world.

He has learnt how to hear God’s voice and obediently follow where He leads. He is constantly amazed at the journey that God has him on, and he is able to offer “Hope” to millions of people around the world. Espousing that God loves them and that He has a plan to give us each a future. For “God is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.” Ephesians 3:20 (New Living Translation)

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Word of Encouragement

Today’s Word of Encouragement has been influenced by “The Word for Today“.

Published on Friday 8 May 2020, and written by Bob & Debby Gass.

(You can read the full article here.)

“There’s no joy in life that compares to knowing that you’re walking in the centre of God’s will. Not fame, not riches, not pleasure. Nothing compares to knowing you have the smile of his approval on what you’re doing each day.

Will doing God’s will always be easy? No; it’s enjoyable, but it’s not always easy. Indeed, your God-given assignment in life may bring many levels of resistance and attack. But your joy comes from knowing that God is strengthening you to do – by the power of his Spirit – what you could never do on your own.”

What are you doing today? Are you formulating a new ministry, programme, activity or event? Are you attempting to make sense of the dreams and visions that you have received in the past few days that may help you set the direction of your life going forward? Are you trying to work out your future? Are you wondering what next?

When you start asking these kind of questions, I believe that God through His Holy Spirit is starting a fascinating process in the depths of our very being – He is transforming our thoughts and ideas, and positioning us to receive something that can only be experienced as we struggle to comprehend His leading.

This can be a truly unsettling time, it is unnerving, uncertain and even scary! How do we, how can we navigate these times?

Proverbs 3:5-6 gives us a few pointers;

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.”

(New Living Translation)

 

Firstly, we need to trust Him with our whole being. The psalmist puts it this way; “God you are my strength and my shield from every danger. When I fully trust in you, help is on the way.” Psalm 28:7 (The Passion Translation) And “Everyone who honors your name can trust you, because you are faithful to all who depend on you.” Psalm 9:10 (Contemporary English Version)

Secondly, we need to accept that we cannot depend on our own understanding. We don’t know the full story – and sometimes I think that that is just as well. If I knew 15 years ago what God had in store for me right now I would have ran in the opposite direction. Just like Jonah tried to do when he tried to escape to Tarshish. (Read about his experiences in Jonah)

Thirdly, we need to seek His will. This can sometimes be easier said than done but over the coming weeks I will be posting and creating links to a variety of resources to help us each to discover God’s will for ourselves. For His ways are very different to ours.

Lastly we need to acknowledge Him and obey Him as “He will make our path smooth and straight” Proverbs 3:6

(New International Reader’s Version).

You see only God is perfectly trustworthy and faithful. Yet if we don’t take the time to get to know Him, we will never come to truly trust Him. We can’t afford to rely on our own opinions or they will lead us astray. For as Jesus warns us in Matthew 26:41 “Now maybe you’re learning: the spirit is willing, but the body is weak. Watch and pray and take care that you are not pulled down during a time of testing.” (The Voice)

So, in these days of uncertainty, continually seek after Him and keep your eyes and ears attuned to what He is revealing to you, through prayer, reading His word and confirming what you are sensing God saying to you through wise godly counsel. For we have the promise that God will renew our minds through these times so we can not “allow this world to mold us in its own image. Instead, we are to be transformed from the inside out by the renewing of our mind. And as a result, we will be able to discern what God wills and whatever God finds good, pleasing, and complete.” Romans 12:2 (The Voice)

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God Has a Plan!

I’ve just finished reading Wayne Cordeiro’s book ‘Doing Church as a Team: Launching effective ministries through teamwork’ and I was intrigued by his chapter on God Has a Plan! As often times we wonder “Why!” Why me, why now, why here, couldn’t someone else do what I’m doing these are all questions that we all ask at some stage or another as we live out our lives.

“You could have been born in another place and another time! God doesn’t do things at random… He planned your birth before you were even conceived! He chose you, created you, and then delicately placed you on His sovereign time continuum.” This is how Wayne starts this chapter and then goes on to say: “for some reason, He wanted you born and living in this age, in this century, in this day called ‘today.’ He has a purpose and a plan for you!”

Which is something that Rick Warren also talks about in his book “The Purpose Driven Life” and this year we will be doing the “40 Days of Purpose Church-wide Campaign” so that we can find out what it is that we are here for.

In Ephesians 2:10 we find that we are created by God for good deeds which were prepared beforehand for us to achieve. He has a plan for each and every one of us and it is our responsibility to find out what that is and then do it! He chose you for a specific purpose and He wants you to be fruitful in your life, as it is only for a short time that we are here when we think of the brevity of life.

Therefore, as Christians we need to evaluate our lives asking the question of ourselves what is it that we are living for – is it a self-centred existence or are we living to serve God and others; exalting Him in everything that we do so as not to boast in our own skills and abilities…

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