Skip to main content

A People, Not a Place

I'm reading through Mark Dever's What Is a Healthy Church? for assistance with a Bible Study on Wednesday nights at Edgewood and I wanted to share a quote from chapter 2, dealing with the thought that the church is a people, not a place.

Remembering that the church is a people should help us recognize what's important and what's not important.  I know I need the help. 
For example, I have a temptation to let something like the style of music dictate how I feel about a church.  After all, the style of music a church uses is one of the first things we will notice about any church, and we tend to respond to music at a very emotional level.  Music makes us feel a certain way.  Yet what does it say about my love for Christ and for Christ's people if I decide to leave a church because of its music? 
Or if, when pastoring a church, I marginalize a majority of my congregation because I think the style of music needs to be updated?  At the very least, we could say that I've forgotten that the church, fundamentally, is a people and not a place.
I know that this could open up a slew of other thoughts, especially if you've left a church over music, on either end of the spectrum, but I fundamentally believe in what Dever is saying.  The church is a people, not a place.  There is too much leaving going on in our local churches over issues that shouldn't be leaving issues.  There is also not enough cooperation and fellowship between different local gatherings over issues that shouldn't be dividing issues.

Feel free to join us on Wednesday nights at Edgewood Baptist Church, as we ask the question, What is a Healthy Church?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Seed and The Soil of Education (New Learning Project Part 1)

(This is my entry for the first part of my project for my New Learning course that I am taking.) Introduction Corn Fields in Illinois I have lived the majority of my life in the Midwest: mid-state Illinois to be specific. Where I live, farming is everywhere. My grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides of my family were farmers. My dad grew up on a farm and owned farmland, well into my own adulthood. But, even if it wasn’t in the family, I still would have been surrounded by farming. You can’t go more than a mile outside of my city’s limits without encountering miles and miles of fields. Most of our highways, and even interstates, are located between acres of farmland.

This too shall pass...

Gam zeh ya'avor (Hebrew) "This Too Shall Pass" Welcome!  According to Google Analytics, this is by far the most visited post that I have ever written.  If someone comes here from a search engine, most of the time they are looking for " this too shall pass quote " or simply " this too shall pass " on Google or one of the other search engines. I am sure that most of the time visitors are looking for the originations of this quote, but I have to wonder, why is this quote on people's minds? Why are they pondering the passing of events?   Here is my thought: It is probably because most of us have realized that the adult life is much harder than we ever imagined it to be. There is more pain and more sorrow than we had ever imagined as children, but we have learned that time keeps ticking. And as time continues to flow things pass. In fact, even the really big things and the really hard things will still pass. If you are here because you are thinking ...

The Minnesota Crime Commission wrote:

Every baby starts life as a little savage. He is completely selfish and self-centered. He wants what he wants when he wants it: his bottle, his mother's attention, his playmate's toys, his uncle's watch, or whatever. Deny him these and he seethes with rage and aggressiveness which would be murderous were he not so helpless. He's dirty, he has no morals, no knowledge, no developed skills. This means that all children, not just certain children but all children, are born delinquent. If permitted to continue in their self-centered world of infancy, given free reign to their impulsive actions to satisfy each want, every child would grow up a criminal, a thief, a killer, a rapist.