What Should Churches Be Being?
Please forgive the ungrammatical title.
I love sequels. I’m sure that most of the movies that I want to see this year will have a sequel in a couple of years. Today’s post is a sequel to yesterday’s. If you remember, yesterday’s post was What Are Churches Doing. I discussed what David Platt’s church has been doing that seems to have resulted in the book Radical. I can’t argue with what Pastor Platt is leading his church to do. They are simple things like prayer, attention to God’s word, the sacrifice of time and money and building a multiplying faith community. I trust that Platt is following the Lord and leading his people in the direction that Christ wants them to go. In fact, I just have faith and assume it at this point.
There is something else I hope is taking place. I hope that besides what this church is “doing” is that they are “being”. Stop and think about it for a minute. We can do a lot of things. We can “pray”. We can read the Bible. We can give some money and some time. We can work hard to build our faith communities. The problem is that all of it may not mean a thing. We can get caught up in all of this “Doing for the Lord” and really miss what should be happening. And that is “Being”.
Are our churches being what they should be? Are we being who we should be? Why ask this question? Because the doing is pointless without the being. If I am not being who I need to be, it really doesn’t matter what I do. If my brothers and sisters are not being who they need to be, it doesn’t really matter what they do.
Yesterday I asked why churches aren’t doing what they should be doing? Let me first say that they should not be copying Platt’s church anymore than they needed to copy Warren’s church a few years back or any other church. Churches are doing a lot of things and churches are doing nothing. Either way, churches are doing. Why aren’t they doing what they should be doing?
The answer lies in that churches aren’t doing what they should be doing because they aren’t being what they should be. I think it’s that simple. Maybe they don’t know what they should be, but they still don’t know what they should be. And that will start with you and me not being what we
should be.
What does it take for you and me to be what we should be? What about churches? I’ll let you explore that on your own for now.
