Four of Four
ISTOCK
Convention 2019
The Church Wide and the Church Narrow by Layton Friesen
T
o be simply Christian is to belong to the Church of Jesus Christ. This is a great mystery. Your congregation is the Church. The EMC is the Church. The Church is the global body of believers. The Church includes both the earthly Church and the heavenly Church worshipping God as one in Christ. Let’s look at the Church from two views: the Church wide and the Church narrow.
The Church Wide
For the Church wide we come to Hebrews 12:24. Yes, the Church may look weak and bedraggled right now, “but you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.” There may be few folks in the house church where you meet, “but we have come to innumerable angels in festal gathering.” Sanders snores in the third pew, and we envy him—what with the preaching we get around here—“but we have come to the assembly of the first born who are enrolled in heaven.” Now our pastor has run off and no one knows where he is; maybe in Acapulco with someone he met online. And we feel so beat up and betrayed, “but we have come to God the judge of all.”
This congregation has always been ruled by the Penner family and they are the only ones who get to make important decisions and it’s awful, “but we have come to the spirits of the righteous made perfect.” The praise band pretends to be some California pop band, and no one knows the songs, and the bass drum is messing with my pacemaker, but we here, nonetheless, come “to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant.” So many of our men can’t get seem to give up porn, but “we have come to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the word of Abel.” When we gather to worship Jesus together we sing here with trembling voices, often wrung with pain. Yet the descant soars in from Heaven where vast myriads thunder their hallelujah around the throne of God. It’s one worship happening in real time. In Exodus 20:4-6, in the Ten Commandments, God says, “You shall not make for yourself an idol. . . for the Lord your God is a jealous God punishing the children for the iniquity of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commands.”
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