Presence of the King

Overview

In just a few weeks, we’re going to be launching a new church, and I believe it’s fair and right that these last weeks of the summer we would spend our time looking at what the church is, see what it ought to be, and see what it can be. Now what I’d like to do tonight is very simple, and it had better be. There is one central fact, one central principle, one great essence of the church, and when you’re talking about the church, it is so easy to run and immediately begin discussing what the church should do. What does the church do?

When we talk about what the church does, we immediately get into the lists of functions and duties and responsibilities, and that’s all important, but before we talk about what the church does, we have to understand very clearly what it is, because you see, if you look at what it does and not what it is, you can really go astray. If you define a human being in terms of what he or she does, you might come up with an android. You know, an android can do everything a human being does, but it’s not a human being because the android doesn’t have the essence of a human being, whatever that is.

In the same way, it is very possible to have very busy churches; the only thing I can call them is robotic. Robotic churches that have focused in on the functions, and they’ve learned and decided what the church is supposed to do, but they haven’t got a good grip on what it is, and that’s very important. I think we need to be very honest about the condition of the church today, and it’s very easy when a church is brand new or when a church hasn’t even started to throw rocks at the way other churches are, and I don’t want to do that.