Building on this (as well as 1 Cor 12, Eph 1.22-23; 4.1-16), Frank Viola states, "From man's perspective, the purpose of the church meeting is mutual edification. But from God's perspective, the purpose of the gathering is to express His Son. We gather together so that the Lord Jesus can manifest Himself in His fulness. When this happens, the Body is edified."
Again, Viola demonstrates both perceptiveness and lack of perceptiveness. I like his point that too often we think about spiritual things backwards. If we would focus, as he suggests, on expressing Jesus, then by definition the body would be edified. We wouldn't then get into the trap of trying to create programs to pump up the body when the real issue is the absence of the Holy Spirit. Too many "churches" are simply corpses propped up by programs of men.
On the other hand, Viola missed it by using the word "meeting". He continues to talk about the Church as a meeting and then compounds his frustration by limiting the meeting to the Sunday morning liturgy.
Yesterday I had "church" several times. I started the day with my wife discussing what our future in Christ looks like. We then joined some friends to go to low income housing to give out Tuna Helper. Before going out we prayed, we discussed what the Kingdom of God looks like, we talked about why Ambassadors of the King were gathering in the cold rain to do what we were doing. While we gave out this Tuna Helper we prayed for a few of the families/individuals and we offered some other simple forms of help. Later in the day some friends gathered at Quiznos to "break bread", talk about what God was doing in our lives, and discuss things we might do in the future to share His love. That evening we had a beautiful couple and their children to our home. We shared our dinner table with them, shared stories of our lives, and discussed our love for Christ and how he is leading us to begin a new small group together. We talked about our value for worship and the Word of God - how we want to include these values in this new group and how we want to ensure that whenever we gather together, that all members participate and share with the group out of their own gifting.
So when I went to bed last night, I thanked God that I was able to "have Church" all day long. Frank Viola should continue to challenge us to not get comfortable with what most are doing on Sunday morning but he would do better to remind us that the key reason for that is that that is not "Church".
Technorati Tags: Christian living, community, ecclesiology, Kingdom of God, missional, outreach
1 comment:
See my blog http://orglib.blogspot.com for the idea about recycling and how our sins can be transformed into something better! Of course being the Church means living a life of faith in the world. How often does the Church send us out to do this? We should feel empowered by our celebrations to go out and tell others but this is the hard bit! The Lent group booklet this year suggested not telling people about the services we attended in Holy Week but about the story of the death and rising of Christ.
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