What is ‘church’ really all about?  What does it mean to be part of a ‘local church’?  Why do we bother with church?  What does Jesus want his church to really be like?  What is ‘the Church’ like that God would intend us to be?  These I guess, are some of the questions that are going round my head at the moment…

The more I wrestle with these questions, the more my heart comes back and settles on 2 passages…two passages that have come up so much over the last year or two in my life and ministry…

Jesus stated that The Greatest Commandment (Matthew 22:37-39) is this: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

The Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) commands us to ‘go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.’

If both of these are ‘great’ for Jesus they should be great for us!  For me, when I take these two great passages and fuse them together I kind of picture Jesus pointing out into the world saying ‘GO!’….’Go and make disciples…disciples who love me first…disciples who are loving each other…disciples who are loving the lost…’

I believe that in the context of the local Church, church must be a place that is geared up to make this happen.  It must be a place intentional in it’s mission of making disciples and increasingly seeking to express love for God first and others second. 

I’ve started reading Total Church by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis.  The key principles of doing church that they lay out at the beginning are gospel and community.  They state that in whatever they do ‘the content is consistently the Christian gospel and the context is consistently the Christian community.  What we do is always defined by the gospel, and the context is always our belonging to the church.    Our identity as Christians is defined by the gospel and the community’.

They go on to state that being ‘gospel-centred’ means being word-centred (because the gospel is news, a message) and also mission-centred (because the gospel is a word needing proclaimed).  I like these thoughts…

So being a community, where people feel they belong and where the Truth is proclaimed seem to be big on what these guys are all about.  I’m looking forward to reading on.

I love belonging to ‘the Church’…I love a sense of belonging in a place where radical love should be expressed, I love to hear and proclaim what I have come to know as Truth, I love being ‘on mission’ all the time…

What are your thoughts on church?  Post some comments…