We Don’t Go To Church, We Are the Church!

My friend Adam agrees. He states,

“I want to create a church where people do life together and intentionally live as the church. It’s not an event, it’s a state of being.”

 This is what we want to create as well.

 

Word of the Day: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

What is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism? Listen to this week’s White Horse Inn where they discuss a video about Teenagers and God. We need to get this!

Click for info on Soul Searching Video

 

Mission Statement?

OK, I expect to hear from everyone in the core group on this one. I’m serious! Leave a comment!

 I was thinking about our mission and came up with this statement:

 Our mission at EGF is to glorify God by spreading a passion for Jesus Christ by penetrating Charlotte with the light of the gospel.

 What do you think? If you aren’t in the core group, let us know what you think, too. Thanks!

 

Family Driven Faith

If anyone is looking for a good book to read on what we are all about. Here it is. I haven’t read the book yet, but have followed Voddie Baucham this last year and know where he stands on this issue. Jim Hamilton says of the book (which I will be reading ASAP), “If you care about the next generation being more Christian than American, you should read this book.” This would be a great Connecting Group Study or just for your own personal benefit. If you would like to start a Connecting Group with this book, let me know.

 

The Church is NOT for Religious People

Pastor Troy Maxwell of Freedom House Church writes the following on his blog, it is good advice to us as we are following God’s lead to plant a Christ exalting, Bible-saturated body of believers in the center of Charlotte:

Alright, i will have to be very honest about my frustration with Christians sometimes. Well, let me rephrase that, “religious” people would be a better description. I have come to the conclusion that religion is so ugly, so “all about me to the nth degree”, and the list goes on and on. Religious people when they don’t get their way, they just walk to the next place and try to get their way. They go from church to church and try to manipulate the leadership to try and get what they want, the music they like to hear, the preaching they really don’t need but make their own fears and religiousity feel better but never change. And when the pastor stands up to them they run. Religious people complain about everything. At least to your face they are all sweet and nice. But turn around and walk away, they pull out the knife and start stabbing you in the back. They are critical and judgmental about almost everything. They complain about the music, they complain about the children (even if they have some), they complain about leadership, they complain about the vision and they complain about money. OH they complain about money, and the funny thing is they never give any! Matter of fact they never give anything. Because it’s all about them! Religious people, church is not for you. Church is not about you. Church is about everyone but you. Church is about giving and serving. Church is about loving and sharing. Church is a community of believers in Jesus Christ who lay down their life for each other. They take up the cross of Jesus Christ and reach the world. If you are Religious you are so mad at me right now but what I am saying is so true! Can you get free from a religious spirit? Absolutely! Just ask God to help you and you can. There is hope.

The title of his blog is appropriate: Religious People Suck. If you read the gospels, it seems that Jesus thinks the same thing.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: A recent comment made me want to add: The church is for Truly-Religious people (those saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ). This was assumed, I just wanted to make it clear.

 

Why Do We Put So Much Importance in Preaching the Bible?

The Rev. J. Theodore Helms (my fellow OSJ blogger) writes:

The “sacred desk” has been replaced by “props;” and so has the authorized man of God. Where are the men in the local church who once preached the Word? Seeking to “relate” to the culture has served only to make the church irrelevant to the culture. And here we are. The body of Christ, the most powerful entity on earth, authorized by God Himself, bought by His own blood, and irrelevant.

Read the entire post.

 

The Missional Church:Eliminating Poverty as a Testimony to the Resurrection

In Acts 4:32-37 we read about how the early church eliminated poverty within their own community. From the context we learn that there were several thousand believers in this young fellowship. In verse 33 we read, “And with great power the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.” Why were they so generous? It was because great grace was upon them all. They didn’t cling to their things and in fact viewed them as if their property didn’t even belong to them (4:32). As a result of this generous spirit in the early church their was not a single person among them who had a severe lack of resources to take care of their necessitites (4:34). In the middle of this we have already pointed out that they were giving testimony to the resurrection with great power. How did this “great power” manifest itself? Certainly in the preaching of the word, but also in the way in which the early church successfully erased poverty among those in their group. Keith Green once said that the welfare system wasn’t something that used to be needed because the church was the welfare system. What if our mission statements included a sentence about us seeking to eliminate poverty within our bodies? This would certainly cause unbelievers to take a second glance.

 

Missional: A Heart for All Peoples

Recently, we had a comment about what it means to be a missional Christian that I wanted to revisit. Here is the comment:

“One guideline I would add that is central to what it means to be truly ‘missional’ is a heart for the nations, a passion to see all peoples, tribes, and tongues worshipping Christ for eternity. Without this you’re not really missional in the biblical sense. “

John Piper says in his book Let the Nations Be Glad, “Missions exist because worship doesn’t.” What are your thoughts on this? I think that any attempt to be missional that strips itself of the centrality of the eternal worship of Jesus is not really missional at all. At least not the “of God kind” of missional. How can we as Christians be missional and incarnational in our approaches to ministry without losing our focus on the centrality of worship? I look forward to hearing from you on this one.

 

Are You a Missional Christian?

Bob Pratico from Sojourn Church in Huntsville Alabama offers the following (the post is a couple of months old) guideline to determine if you are in fact Missional in your Christian walk:

1) A significant number of your friends are unbelievers. (Unbelievers like to spend time with you. Jesus seemed to spend a lot of time with unbelievers in the gospels and they were apparently comfortable with Him for the most part. Jesus was the friend of sinners – Luke 7:34. It was the religious hypocrites that felt threatened and couldn’t stand Him.)

2) Many of your Christian friends are from other denominations and churches. (You’re comfortable with the whole Body of Christ, not just your local part. You value the rich diversity in the Kingdom of God – 1 Cor 12:12-26)3) You listen more than you talk. (You want to know where people are coming from and where they’re at. You genuinely seek to understand what people are telling you, not merely use it as an opportunity to mentally formulate what you’re going to say next. Jesus always began interacting with anyone by listening. Luke tells us that at age twelve, Jesus was in the temple with the Doctors of the Law, listening to them and asking questions – Luke 2:46. Before he healed people, Jesus listened to their stories of illness, loneliness, and rejection.)

4) You see no distinction between sacred and secular. (Everything you do in life is enthusiastically for the glory of God – 1 Cor 10:31. You live for and look to Christ in everything you do.)

5) You’re painfully aware of how little you really know and how far you have to go. (You never stop learning. You read a lot. You’re not afraid to say, “I don’t know.” The more you learn, the more you realize just how little you really know. Job learned this hard lesson in Job 38:1 through Job 42:3 – read through all 4 chapters!)

6) You take risk – enough so that you sometimes fail. (You like to push the envelope knowing those that never fail, never live to their full potential. You’re more afraid you won’t use your full potential than you are of failure. The words of Jesus in Matthew 25:28 as translated by “The Message” ring for you: ’Take the thousand and give it to the one who risked the most. And get rid of this “play-it-safe” who won’t go out on a limb. Throw him out into utter darkness.’).

7) You have a long-term perspective. (You understand following and serving Jesus is a marathon, not a sprint. You’re in it for the long haul. You realize evangelization takes time; long-term results are more important than short-term trends. You don’t quit. Heb 12:1 exhorts us to “run with perseverance (endurance) the race marked out for us.”)

You tune in, not dial out, the culture. (Your unbelieving friends see you as a part of their culture – not outside it. You stay abreast of where the culture is and where’s its heading. You know how to connect with the culture without necessarily embracing it. Christ’s words in 1 Cor 9:19-22 as translated in “The Message” apply: “Even though I am free of the demands and expectations of everyone, I have voluntarily become a servant to any and all in order to reach a wide range of people: religious, nonreligious, meticulous moralists, loose-living immoralists, the defeated, the demoralized—whoever. I didn’t take on their way of life. I kept my bearings in Christ—but I entered their world and tried to experience things from their point of view. I’ve become just about every sort of servant there is in my attempts to lead those I meet into a God-saved life. I did all this because of the Message. I didn’t just want to talk about it; I wanted to be in on it!”)

9) You differentiate between essential and nonessential. (You know when to fall on your sword and when not to. Not every battle is climactic; many are small skirmishes best fought with patience and love instead of brute force. In Luke 10:41, Jesus gently reminds Martha that some things are more important than others.)

10) You care for the poor (Your care goes beyond writing a check for a tax deduction. You give, not out of a guilty conscience, but out of loving desire. The wealthy loved Jesus until he started to talk about loving the poor (Luke 18:18-23.) In the gospels, Jesus spent far more time with the poor than with the rich. He exhorts us to give to the poor (Luke 12:33). It’s interesting that Paul records the other apostles only request of him to be that he remember the poor (Gal 2:10)

 

The Man, The Mission, and The Message

Watch this powerful video on church planting by Mark Driscoll.