challenge of church

When Christians gather in communities on a regular basis to worship Jesus, walk with Jesus, work with Jesus, and witness to Jesus, we call this, “church,” or “fellowship.” The biggest challenge of living in a church community has to do with commitment to the mission of Jesus to be disciples and make disciples. Metaphors are helpful in considering what is a healthy church and what is not.

Healthy
A school of life with Jesus the Master Teacher where you learn from Jesus as much as you can how to live life as he would live it if he were you in any given situation.

A training camp where you learn the plays, get strong, work as a team, and scrimmage, all for the sake of getting into the real game of life and thriving.

A hospital where you go to be healed so that you can get out into the community and serve once more.

Not so healthy
A country club where you go to relax, socialize, connect with your friends, and you are catered to by the staff and leaders of the church.

A museum where you admire worship done “correctly” (meaning what you are used to growing up), admire “real” church music (what you are used to growing up), and where you are looking to connect with experiences you remember when the church was “really” faithful.

A political action group where you decide to let society tell you what cause is important and you work for that cause rather than grow as a disciple and become the kind of person who can make a difference and bring benefit to others in the natural flow of discipleship.

You get the idea about the meaning of church. Now you can see where conflict can arise. Groups of people connected together for different reasons. With healthy churches the agenda is making disciples. With unhealthy churches the agenda is having your needs met. With unhealthy churches the challenge is all of those metaphors can appear important if you want them to be. Good fellowship, upholding our rich heritage, and working for peace and justice, who can argue with these?