I experienced my first earthquake last week. How cool is that? As long as no one was hurt, I'm glad I can claim it as another life experience that, up until then, I had missed. I've been in everything from tornadoes to typhoons, but never an earthquake. It was a weird feeling to be fully asleep in bed and wake up to the bed shaking for several seconds. At 4:30 in the morning, I knew it wasn't just a nervous leg twitching. When it ended, there were several loud pops from all over the house that sounded like some huge hail had suddenly hit. Neat, but I don't think I'd like to be around a bigger one.
Speaking of earth-shaking, here are some random thoughts about the purpose of the church. I've been jotting down some thoughts in my journal for quite a while and finally decided I had enough to call it a TOP TEN. How would you finish the statement "The church is..."? Here are some of mine.
* Church is a support system, not a system to support.
* Church doesn't define our faith as much as it defines our family.
* Church is not the object of our devotion, but points us to the object of our devotion.
* Church is meeting God through godly people, learning to love Him by loving others, and becoming aware of His presence rather than going to a special location to worship Him.
* Church supports living sacrifies to God, it doesn't define "giving".
* Church is a witness protection program that doesn't hide the witness.
* Since the proof of discipleship is loving one another, the church exists to make that happen.
* Church doesn't exist for outreach, but to build a passion for Jesus in the family members who then can't stop talking about Him.
* As the Body of Christ, the church's only ministry is to imitate the life of Christ.
* A church family should be known by what it does out on the playing field not in its Pep Rally.
2 comments:
I LOVE your list! In fact, I'm going to copy it, paste it to an e-mail, and send it to some people. Don't worry, I'll give credit to the author. :)
"* A church family should be known by what it does out on the playing field not in its Pep Rally."
Your last point reminds me of the gender-role sermon I heard a few years ago. The speaker was using the team metaphor to describe the role of men and women in church. He said, "The men are on the field playing and the women sit the bench. It is important to the success of the team that you have a good bench." -- yeah, that made me feel better! :)
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