Are We a Pioneering Church? Pt One
07 Jul 2009
Following our recent teaching series on the first 12 chapters of Acts entitled “The Pioneering Church”, we must ask ourselves the question: “Are We a Pioneering Church?”
A few months ago we were informed that the spire at the top of our building is rotten and could at any point give up the fight, so to speak, the sorry consequence of many decades worth of rain, wind and ill-disciplined pigeons and their IBS... not nice!
The UK skyline is littered with spires like ours, of all shapes and sizes and with varying degrees of avian defilement. These spires speak of an age when buildings were filled with worshippers of Jesus, a time when to be a Christian meant something, and to have a Christian worldview was not weird and old fashioned, but exciting and relevant. Many of these classic buildings have their origins in the ‘Great Awakening’, a revival that spread throughout the UK and America, which produced such heroes as John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards (to name a few). Nevertheless, only a few years prior to this revival the church in this country was accused of being irrelevant, of having no future and that Christianity was a waning, dying religion. Today the church is again, allegedly, in a perilous situation with at best a bleak, and at worst, a dire future ahead. The rotten condition of our church spire and the demise of many hundreds of church buildings in the nation today are sadly analogous to the wider and more severe problem, which some have dubbed the ‘divine decline’, and which begs the question... where are the worshippers? Our conviction is that the church is required to once again pioneer, to forge ahead with the same mandate given to the first believers, to make Christ known to all peoples, in a word, we are called to ‘Mission’.
You’ll be relieved to hear that we are going to work on our spire, as it would neither be funny nor clever to render unconscious any unsuspecting church members who might happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time! And yet far and above the problems presented to us by brick and mortar is the urgent battle for souls which the Church must engage in and must not be passive or ignorant of.
Cont. in Pt Two
Tim
 
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