Sermon Tone Analysis

Prayer

The Church Has Left the Building

Last Sunday we listened to a song called “So will I” by Hillsong Worship that beautifully and incredibly encapsulated the essence of our limited understanding of God’s majesty, and somehow I ended up down the rabbit hole of why some christians are calling for a boycott of the song.

There are dozens of think pieces, that I could see, about a particular line in the song that, in their view, renders the entire song void if not sacrilegious.

And as You speak

A hundred billion creatures catch Your breath

Evolving in pursuit of what You said

If it all reveals Your nature so will I

—So Will I (x Billion) by Hillsong Worship

That one word “evolving” has these people completely shook!

And it was in that moment, that I realized, this is exactly why people are leaving the church.

We’ve become we’ve become so caught up in our “religiousness” that we’ve become gatekeepers for Christ.

See, things get mixed up when we lose our focus on what’s important to the body of Christ.

We go to Church

We meet at the Church

We go out to eat after Church

We don’t talk like that in the Church

You don’t dress like that to go to Church

etc...

But I challenge that philosophy today and submit to you that, whether you like it or not, you are the Church!

You see the Church is not a building, it’s a body.

And we are all appendages that were designed purposefully to perform a function.

From the eldest, to the youngest.

From the most seasoned saint, to the babe in Christ fresh out the water

We all have a role to play in God’s kingdom and in Jesus’ command to

Go!

When the church is a building, the property becomes more important than the people

Jesus didn’t die for bricks and morter, He died for the sinners inside.

I say all of the time that in most Churches, statistically, 80% of the annual budget goes towards overhead and administrative expenditures.

There’s nothing wrong with having a beautiful sanctuary

But there’s something wrong if the people inside are ignoring the raggedy community surrounding it.

It’s hard to convinces a hungry man that Jesus is real.

When your Church is your people

You can feed the hungry

You can harvest vegetables for hungry families

You can give toys and groceries to displaced children and their foster parents

You can give essential living items to the homeless in the community

When the church is a building, it becomes stationary and still

Joel Hunter, the pastor of Northland Church in Florida, said it best,

“the church happens not so much when we gather, but when we scatter.”

— Joel Hunter

The Church can not be the only place that people experience Jesus

Jesus said that we should “go into all the world” and share all that he had taught us.

Let’s face it, some people will never cross the threshold of a sanctuary.

If the Church is stuck in this building, then all we’re really doing every Sunday, is affirming our own biases.

Ok the message was good, but what did you go do with it?

Yea the song was awesome, but who did you share it with?

The Church can’t just get stuck in these walls because what will end up happening is that we’ll find ourselves breathing recycled air.

Stale and stagnant.

If the building is the Church, then all of the burden of reaching the lost is on Sunday.

And all of the responsibility of reaching the unsaved is on on the Pastor.

For someone, you are the only minister of the Gospel they will ever see!

When the church is a building, it becomes an organization and not an organism.

The church is at its best when people inside the building take Jesus’ message outside the building and serve those they meet.

The church is people, plain and simple.

It’s a living and breathing organism.

Every time someone new joins the congregation the body changes a little.

It absorbs and takes on the new personality of those who are a part of it.

We miss that if we place too much emphasis on the organization and not the organism.

Pastors are often guilty of missing this point.

I’ve said it myself, “I have a church to run.”

You don’t run a church, you run an organization, a business, or an enterprise.

If the church is full of people it should operate more like a family, not an organization.

So let’s remember that we are part of this great thing called “the church.”

It’s a group of people who belong to something amazing, something ancient, something living.