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?

Seriously, talk to me about 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 believe that the Church of Jesus Christ is the hope of the world—but some of us wouldn’t fill in that blank that way. Or we know some people who have had bad experiences with the Church—and they would use a number of other words to fill in the blank.

Like some of you I was born and raised in the church. The church I attended was founded by my grand parents. My mother attended that church growing up. And from birth to—now I have always attended church. Twice on Sunday and on Wednesday. Along the way I did AWANA, church choir, the quiz team where we competed professional using the Bible.

So back then if I were to fill in the blank I would say that Church is a place to go—a place to go and do things and learn things.

I also might have said Church is about not doing things. Because I learned to not drink and dance and work on Sunday and go to movies—though my parents didn’t get the memo on those last two.

After I graduated from a Christian college I moved to Washington D.C.. A year later I worked for a ministry and a few months into that work I began to have a sort of crisis of faith. I heard story after story of young adults who had left the church, and wondered what on earth are we doing that we’re disaffecting an entire generation of people?

From my perch in an evangelistic/discipleship ministry that was part of a larger religious-right ministry, I saw the seedy intersection of the Church and State, or religion and politics. And so I wondered if whoring ourselves to the State was what this Church/Christian thing was all about.

And then the ministry I worked for used a gospel-sharing method that centered around going to heaven when we die. You may have heard of the questions before: 1) Have you come to the place in your spiritual life where you can say you know for certain that if you were to die today you would go to heaven? 2) Suppose that you were to die today and stand before God and he were to say to you, “Why should I let you into my heaven?” what would you say? So I wondered if this was what the gospel and life/death/resurrection of Jesus was all about, escaping earth to go to heaven after death.

After a year in ministry I was left with the question—Is this what the church is all about.

Along the way I began to fill in the blank using the words above. Out of touch, irrelevant, stuffy, stale. During this time I didn’t attend church for 6 months.

So I’ve been there myself. 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 series of teachings I gave in my church to recalibrate our own understanding of the Church. And we are going to walk through the Book of Acts with the hopes of better understanding what it means to be Christ’s ancient Church in our modern world, right here and now.

My goal? That the world around us would fill in that blank differently than they are right now. And that you and your church might, too.