Rediscovering the Church – A Journey Through the Book of Acts
In case you have been wondering more about what we’re covering in the service, Pastor Renjy has given us a glimpse of the service as well as what is in store for it in the future:
Here we are, at the beginning of a new gathering of Village. Over the last several months I have been in tons of conversations about this new service and what we are doing at Village. Through those conversations I learned a lot at how people viewed the “church”.
Village just completed a new building, and as I would talk about the progress of that project, some would ask ““How is the new church coming along?” The implication of this question reduces the church to a place, a location, a building, a lifeless structure. As I talked with others about our vision in this gathering of helping people rediscover the significance of Jesus in our world today, some would say “What you need to do is have a really good band, for that will get people in the seats.” Others would say “Renjy, you better start working on your first message now… it’s got to be really good so that people will come back.” These comments describe the church as a theater, where people come as spectators, sitting and watching a show that happens on the weekend. Now, I am sure that the intentions behind those comments were genuine but each of those comments tells us something about how we tend to view “church”.
The Church is not a lifeless building or a place. Church is the gathering of people who are committed to Jesus. It is a bunch of lives, no matter how clean or messy coming together and engaging with God and each other. The Church cannot be approached as a theater. For we do not gather as mere spectators watching a show, but as participants, where each one of us plays a vital role in pointing each other’s to Christ. What we do as the church, as the community of God, is not limited to the weekend but should impact our whole lives and how we interact with the world around us.
Especially now in these foundational week, as we start a new gathering, a new expression of Village, we need to rediscover the purpose of why we gather and how we are supposed to engage as the community of God. That is why we are going through this series on Rediscovering the Church. We use the word rediscover intentionally. It is not that we look at what we like and dislike about church and makeup or redefine what church is and should be. But we will look to Scripture to see how God set up His church and what His word teaches about His people. So we are going to go through the book of Acts, the book which captures the birth of the church and it early stories of success and struggle. As we look back at their stories, we will see that our story collides with theirs. We will discover what it means for us to be the Church, the community of Christ followers, in our world today.
