“One
hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organization do not
constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The
first requisite is life, always.” – A. W. Tozer
1.
Church is optional.
Ah,
the lone believer, hell-bent on staying out of a church community for one
reason or another.
They
were burned, chastised or mistreated.
And
I get it. I, too, was a solo “Christian” trying to call a five-minute quiet
time and a snippet of Scripture “church.” I know what it is to be
community-less and long for (but never actually believe it could happen) a
spiritual family, where brethren would lay down their life for one
another—reminiscent of the book of Acts.
Oh
yeah, but then, through a series of painful life-altering events (another post
for another time), I came to see church was not optional because, I was, in
fact, the church.
When
scripture refers to the church as “the house of God,” “the Body of Christ,”
“Christ’s bride,” it is referencing a people. The ekklesia, in Greek. It is not
a place or a building, which leads me to …
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