Being the Church

Let me start off by saying that this is not my brain working but someone else's but it spoke to me and made me look at my life and what I complain about. Yes, I do complain about the music at church but it is not the style. I know we have a lot of old school traditional in our midst but, well, I wont go into that. This blog from Pete Wilson of Cross Point in Nashville, Tennessee explains it better than I ever could. I hope God speaks to you the way He spoke to me through these words.

Yesterday someone read a quote from my message on Sunday.
The quote was,
“We need to stop playing church and start being the church.”

This person contacted me and asked me what I really meant. A quote of that nature probably deserves further clarification.
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.
We play church.
I’m done with that.
Be the church.

How do you think we “play church”? How do you think we can “be the church”?