Be The Church

Pete Wilson is the pastor of Cross Point Church in Nashville, Tennessee. Those of you who attend LifeTeams will recognize him as the pastor who was on last semester's DVD's.

Last weekend in his message he had a direct quote saying the following: “We need to stop playing church and start being the church.”

Today on his blog he felt the need to give further clarification to what that quote actually meant. I think what he wrote was dead on...but you can judge for yourself. Here it is:

"It means we need to stop arguing about style of worship and get concerned about the poor and hungry around the world.

It means we need to spend less time gossiping about others and more time allowing God to break our hearts over the people in our cities who are facing an eternity apart from Christ.

It means we need to stop whining about what programs our church has or doesn’t have and we need to learn what it means to abide in Jesus from one moment to the next.

Listen, it’s got to stop. We’ve got to stop showing up on Sunday mornings and playing church. The New testament never calls us to just go to church, but to be the church.

It seems far to often we’ve reduced church down to spiritual masturbation. We’ve made it all about us. We’ve turned it into something we do to stroke our ego-driven, self-centered, materialistic lives. It gives us momentary pleasure, but we’ve failed to give, serve, or sacrifice of ourselves. It leads to false intimacy with our creator God."

I could not agree more with what Pete has to say here.

When did we decide that chruch was all about us and what we wanted?

It's time to knock it off and be the church.