People Are The Church

I have been a believer since I was 10 years old. However, I have been a part of the church culture since the age of 6. That was when my dad became a pastor. I have been involved in 16 churches in the past 51 years. Granted, they have all been in the same denomination. Seventeen years was spent in one church, so most of those churches were short stays. I served as a minster in eight of those churches.

I just got mentally exhausted writing the first paragraph! Many of you have had a similar experience, and many of you have only known a few churches in your lifetime. Over the past eight years, God has been redirecting my understanding of His desire for His church. I was guilty of seeing a building with a name on it and identifying that building as a church. I’ll bet many of you have done the same. The problem with that view is a building has never been and never will be a church. The church is the people.

Having served in eight churches, I have made some general observations about the people of God. First of all, God’s children really love God with all their hearts. That doesn’t mean we express that love fully or clearly in every situation, but at our core, we really do love God. Secondly, God’s children love people and they want people to know about God’s love. Finally, I’ve seen God’s children make heart-felt commitments to follow and serve God to the best of their ability. We want to do God’s will. Again, that doesn’t mean those commitments have been fully expressed.

Those three observations are true because of God. John said, “We love, because He (God) first loved us.” (1 John 4:19, NASB) These are signs of God’s children. However, our church cultures are not always healthy environments to experience or express this love in the manner in which God intended.

Since I have been at Christian Families Today, I have experienced something that is consistent here. We talk about spiritual matters constantly. We share with each other what God is teaching us, whether through scripture or experience. We don’t do this because it is office policy or a mandate from the leaders, we do this because we want to. We occasionally talk about ministry, but I’ve learned that lasting ministry flows out of God’s children when they know and believe truth. We cannot be immersed in truth if we are not thinking and talking about it.

From my experience (hopefully not yours), most of my time serving a local church as a minister was spent talking about and doing ministry. Any spiritual learning was reserved for personal time or designated group devotional time. As a result, I floundered in my personal time with God and that affected how I ministered. Granted, the leaders encouraged me to maintain a healthy alone time with God, but because we never talked about it, it was too easy to spend my alone time trying to measure up to the expectations of the church and the senior pastor. I perceived that I didn’t have time to spend with God!

God has shifted my perspective on the church. Instead of viewing the church as an organization to attend and serve, I see her as an organism that is the body of Christ. The church is living and breathing. She is the beautiful bride of Christ. Now that my perception has changed, I see the function of the church as something different than what I grew up experiencing.

As God’s people, we need truth to sustain us. His truth feeds us. His truth reminds us constantly of who we are to Him. If I’m operating from a sense of who I am to God, I will never burn-out. When the people of God come together, their time would be well spent encouraging one another, speaking the truth in love, feeding on God’s Word, and ultimately, connecting with God’s presence in corporate worship (not just music). When the church goes out from this kind of gathering, they are equipped to serve their communities and to give sacrificially of themselves. This activity will change the world.

Now that we are needing to practice social isolation due to the Covid-19 virus, it is more difficult to connect in one place. Does this stop us from being the church? I don't think so. God is using this time to deepen the truth that we are an organism of living people, not an address. As we listen to the Holy Spirit, He will show us how to connect with each other during this time and how to minister to the world around us.