I hear a lot of talk from Christians about how, "The Church is more than just a building," and how, "The Church is a group of people." Also known as, the Body of Christ. Just by reading these two statements we can learn two things. 1) The church can be outside of the building you go to on Sunday mornings. 2) Godly things can happen outside of a church or church organization.
Let's start with the first point I made by saying the church can be outside of your typical Sunday morning building. I feel like this statement is pretty self-explanatory, and I'm sure a lot of you agree with this statement as well. But sometimes I feel like we don't actually live that way. I'm definitely not going to lecture about how you should do good things outside of the church, because we've all heard that, but I do think we need to realize that God is bigger than a building. The Body of Christ can definitely be seen outside of the buildings we enter on the weekend. I was watching the rain today and thinking about God's creation. News flash- God didn't create the world with little buildings where a bunch of people went to talk about Him. He created the world for us to worship Him wherever, and whenever.
In Acts 2 it talks about community and how the people shared everything they had. They were all happy. It seemed perfect the way it was described in the book. Funny thing is, the people weren't in a church.
The other day, Bryan Kemper, the leader of standtrue ministries, posted on his blog that he was converting from Christianity back to Catholicism where he began. It was interesting because I was reading comments on the post and somebody said, "The greatest difference between the Catholic and Christian Church is that the Christian church was created by men, the Catholic Church was created by Jesus." Uhm, excuse me, what?! Jesus created the Catholic Church? Jesus created a church? Hmmm... I definitely don't remember reading "and Jesus built a church." Jesus didn't create the Christian Church. Jesus didn't create the Catholic Church. Jesus actually spent His time with the losers that weren't cool enough to be important in a church. He spoke out against the Pharisees, who were the leaders of the Jewish Church. I'm not saying Jesus doesn't like church, I'm just pointing out that there's more to it than the Church. The Church does not save us. Jesus does.
Enough babble about that, how bout we move one to the second point? My second point was that Godly things can happen outside of a church or church organization. I think I'll start with a few personal examples before I hit the Bible.
I went on a missions trip to Chicago, Illinois this January. The trip was life-changing. One of my favorite experiences was when we went to a soup kitchen and served with a Buddhist group. It was crazy! Christians and Buddhists working together to feed homeless, broken people. They kept telling us about their religion, and it was really interesting. I didn't agree with most of it, but there has to be something Godly about what they were doing, right? I mean, Jesus says in Mark 14 to give a banquet to the poor and the needy. I feel like they did exactly what this verse said to do. They were doing the right thing for the wrong reason. This seems to happen all the time. The Bible says we were created in the image of God. We always seem to know whats right, kindness, goodness, love, compassion, everybody knows that. Sometimes I like to think if we're working towards those things, we're working towards being more like God, even if we don't believe in Him. I'm not saying we're saved by works, I'm just saying we're giving Him a hand we may not even know it. Bottom line, there are people who do Godly things and aren't Christians. It may seem a little off track from Christianity, but I thought it important to bring up.
Another Godly experience I had once was at a Jonsi concert I went to in Columbus. Let me preface with this, Jonsi is a homosexual and he's a naturalist. A naturalist is a person who worships the earth and nature. Obviously those two things don't really line up with the Bible. But his music is so so good. I remember at the concert just thinking, "God did good with this one!" In a joking tone of course ;) Point is, his music gets to me. Especially his song "Grow Til Tall" which is quite possibly my favorite song of all time. In concert, he repeats this vocal line and the music progressively gets louder for probably 5 or 6 minutes. It's crazy. He wears an Native-American headdress and walks around the stage shaking his body in a really weird, dance-y way. While this was happening, I started to think of God. That sounds dumb, but it's true. When I started thinking of God I started to feel the Spirit in me in an unusual way. What I'm trying to point out is that although Jonsi doesn't love Jesus and isn't really in the right place, his music still makes me want to worship. It's like the preference of contemporary worship music or Hymns, some people prefer one or the other. Sometimes we aren't looking hard enough in the broken places for God. We think the only place we can find Him is in the clean churches and the clean Christians. One of the beatitudes in Matthew 5 is, "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." The word meek means humble. Trust me, I looked it up on dictionary.com ;) So Jesus says that if we're humble, we will inherit the earth. Wow. That sounds nice. What I personally take this to mean is that if we are humble, God will show us things that we wouldn't regularly see on the earth. An example of not being humble is thinking that because you're a Christian you're better than everybody and you can't have a spiritual moment around them. It seems like if we do things and are open to seeing God anywhere, no matter how screwed up the place is, we'll find Him.
I feel like this post is getting to be too long! So I'll close with this. Look for God everywhere. Be open to seeing God in places you wouldn't expect. And don't forget, God loves everyone.
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