Last weekend was the Weekend Away at Home, and it was fantastic. We had good teaching, good praise, good banter, a Scottish rugby win, but one thing I took away from the weekend more than anything was how brilliantly it felt like what church is meant to be.
A few years ago, I was listening to a talk by Francis Chan, a total hero of mine, and in it he posed the question, if you were stranded on a desert island with just the bible and you read it over and over, and then later you were rescued and you were excited because you were going to visit one of these churches, is this what you would expect church to look like. "If all you had was the bible, would you expect this amazing fellowship, this amazing love for one another, supernatural things going on, a caring and sharing of possessions. Would you expect to see a bunch of people totally focused on a mission, like we've got to tell everyone what we believe? Would you really expect to see just a bunch of people sitting in chairs, watching something on stage and then just heading home?" Since hearing this it has really stuck with me, I feel very strongly that churches in general have lost their identity of what they were meant to be, and been hugely challenged that as a member of God’s church I have accepted a pattern of living and created/inherited a view of church that is nothing like the early church in the bible.
Last weekend, for me anyway, felt more like the early church in Acts, meeting regularly, sharing food with each other, supporting each other, having connected fellowship with each other, sharing in love for each other, focusing on a shared mission together. It was a baby step forward for me in feeling like a church together, and we have a mission to share together that I hope goes beyond the ideas we discussed together and shared heart we were forming with each other, but it was good and it filled me with the kind of joy Paul seemed to have for very church he shared in his ministry with.
Tim Holt
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