say something

quick post.

this weekend my sister got married, following a 13 year old chain reaction, gave me a nephew.. life is crazy…

congratulations to cheri and gerry B. God bless your life together.

            The differences between the First Presbyterian Church, where we slept this weekend, and Ecclesia were highly evident to me. The Presbyterian church was huge and they were still hiring outside people to do things that I think a church that size should have many people volunteering to do. Consider also that a church that size has to have many members who drive longer than fifteen minutes to go to church, maybe even longer than thirty minutes. Normally, I wouldn’t think that a bad thing, but after this weekend I realized that a church that big is probably building oriented. They have a huge building full of people who don’t volunteer to help with the youth or the maintenance, so they hire the jobs out to people who believe that this church is teaching a false doctrine: i.e. infant baptism. To me this says that this huge church is filled with people, who go to church and sing songs, but they do not even take care of their church; how can they be serving the community? What is this church preaching about Christianity, what are they saying about Christ?

            At Ecclesia they were almost overflowing the building where they worshiped. What preached the most words to me was the idea to plant another church instead of building a bigger building. This tells me that the Church is by no means building oriented, but people oriented. The Church is not the building, but the people who God has called to redemption. What surprised me more was how they wanted to plant a Church, “I’m thinking about maybe starting a bike shop.” I would have probably had one of the small groups that broke out from Ecclesia start a church somewhere. The problem with that (that I didn’t see until I heard the bike shop idea) is that the new church would have been directly tied to Ecclesia, it would have brought in the same culture and it would have made the Church at Ecclesia more important than the Kingdom that God has established. Ecclesia and the new church would have fallen into the same problem as the modern churches today who mainly draw in middle aged, middle classed, white people. Every other culture is left out of a lot of churches. A bike shop would not interest the same culture as the coffee shop and art gallery does. These two buildings would not be interlinked; they would not be the same congregation. This tells me that the Church at Ecclesia is not interested in seeing their church grow, but seeing God’s Church grow. Once again this shows that they are not building oriented. They are not family with only the people inside their walls. Their building is not the only way to get to heaven, or even the best way. They want only to see people saved and added to God’s number of redeemed, and then to see those people go out and seek the same goal they have: serve the community, and show God to people.

            To me the First Presbyterian Church only preached that we should meet and sing, but they did not inspire me to do anything about this hurting world. Ecclesia, however, preached loudly that the church is to serve the community, care for the poor, comfort the hurting, and preach Jesus Christ and him crucified(1 Cor. 2:2), and that this is (y)our spiritual act of worship (Romans 12:1).