One of the books I read during my recent vacation was Life After Church: God's Call to Disillusioned Christians by Brian Sanders. I'd started the book prior to leaving on vacation, and had shared some of my initial impressions of it in an earlier post.If you were to pick up my copy of Life After Church, you'd notice the passages I'd highlighted. This post will serve the same purpose as your reading over my shoulder, and seeing what me and my highlighter found meaningful in the chapter titled "Our Building Project."
Acts 9 tells the story of the conversion of a religious zealot named Saul. Saul spearheaded a wave of persecution against those who would later be called Christians. All that changed the day Saul had a blinding vision of the resurrected Jesus calling him to worship, community and mission.
Saul was being called into the church. These three things (worship, community and mission) are what Jesus calls all of his people into, and they are the three essentials of what it means to be church.
Worship. This is the first element of the minimum for church: the worship and acknowledgement of the one true God and his incarnation Jesus Christ. I don't mean worship in the sense that we commonly understand it, as a time of thinking about God and his worth, but rather the offering of one's life to God in total surrender in proportion to the revelation of his worth. This is worship.
Unconsciously we have thought of church more as a building or weekly gathering than as a living, breathing being known to God. Gathering just to worship, while important and good, isn't enough to be called church. It is worship. Just as gathering believers to worship and even for deep relationships, while important, is not church if those same people don't participate in some way in the Great Commission.
