POST SERIES
0: Church is (____HOPE____)
1: Church is (___DEVOTED___)
2: Church is (__BEDAZZLING__)
3: Church is (___PREPARED___)
4: Church is (_BARRIER-FREE_)
5: Church is (__GRACIOUS & HONEST__)
6: Church is (____GIVING____)
Church is…blank.
How have you filled in the blank? How are you filling in the blank? How do other people—your friends, our culture—fill in the blank?
Maybe you use the same words in the graphic above. Out of touch. Irrelevant. Confusing. Stuffy. Stale Maybe you use other words that many people in our culture use. Hypocritical. Judgmental. Homophobic.
I’ve wrestled with that blank. Wrestled with “What is the Church?”
But what if there were a number of other words that we could use to fill in that blank. Words like devoted and accepting and giving and bedazzeling and loving.
What if Church was this beautiful group of ordinary people who were so devoted to loving God and loving people that they knocked the socks of the world around them?
What if church was that?
Nowadays I think there is a lot of confusion about what the Church is. Which is why for the next 7 Tuesdays I want to paint a picture of how we might fill in the blank using a teaching series from my church to recalibrate our own understanding of the Church using the Book of Acts.
But where do we start to understand who we are as the Church of Jesus Christ?
To get there we need to go back before the Church was birthed in Acts to the end of Jesus ministry on earth. To the very end of Matthew, chapter 28. In it we find that the Church is the hope of the world because Jesus is the hope of the world.
