Church and i

Hello Everybody, i just wanted to share some thoughts with you about what's been going on in my life and just my thoughts about them. As you might have realized i did not capitalize the "i" in the last sentence. It is not a typo, i repeat it is not a typo. i have realized that i am going to do something in every blog until i forget. it is a way for me to remember who i am. That God is so amazing and holy and i am not. It's a way for me to remind myself of my pride and try to remain humble. As David Crowder said, " i am full of earth, You are heaven’s worth, i am stained with dirt, prone to depravity, You are everything that is bright and clean, The antonym of me, You are divinity". So hopefully i will continuing to be posting on different aspects of God. Coming soon to a blog near you ... the holiness of God.

Also personally, while i was on tour this past weekend we visited several churches. They were all wonderfully beautiful and one had the most amazing stained glass windows i think i have ever seen. But while visiting them i began to ask myself some questions about church(hence the title of this post). One of the churches that we visited had amazing historical references about how during the civil war they had kept troops and livestock in the church and how they had to rebuild the church from practically nothing. It was an amazing story that was told again later during the service to celebrate it's 150th anniversary. The thing that was thought provoking for me was the sermon that was preached. It was begun with a statistic that was like"in 2020 the church as we know it will be nonexistent". As the sermon followed he began to refer to all the things or "buildings" that they needed to obtain to be ready for this influx of people that they were going to get to come so that the church would remain a growing community. But what astonished me was the fact that he always referred to the church as buildings and programs rather than the living breathing body of Christ. To him (at least in that day's sermon) the church was being conveyed as a building not the people in the building. Not the people who go beyond that building and become a representation of who God is to the world. So i began to think of what the church is supposed to be, but all i thought of is what it is not. Like church is not: a weekend place to be completely different than what you are during the week; it's not a place to feel better about yourself; it's not a place to beat people over the head about of bunch of rules and policies. It was created to be a place of love, a place of fellowship between the saints, a place for God's people to come together and praise him. Then the thought of a relevant type of church, you know the kind where everyone is casually dressed and there is a "praise rock band" (seriously someone called it that last week) and just a community where everyone is shown the love of Christ and their hearts are following hard after Him, you know that kind, was placed in a beautiful stone building and the Sunday morning light shown through some amazing stained glass windows upon a generation focusing on the cross. That's what i wish to see. My generation and those following being wholly devoted to Christ and what he wants for our lives. So I guess all I have to say is that there's a difference between "a church" and "The Church".