Have you considered what the church is?
The more I consider the meaning and the significance of what it means to be included in both the invisible church of God and the visible church the more important it has become to belong to church that does church the right way. As a Protestant, we of course would draw a distinction between the edifice we call the church and the people we call the church. I remember a conversation I had close to fifteen years ago with a gentleman who had been nearly ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, he said:
“You Christians do not even have a proper church… you don’t even need a building to have a church service, yet you call yourselves a church? We have churches. We have the buildings in which we perform the mass. All you need is a tent and some chairs and you call that a church”.
Even though I was a very young Christian at the time, all that I remember saying was, “Amen”.
Of course the church is more than building it is the people. But what is the purpose and the reason to have a church service? Why do we as believers of the one true God need to assemble? It is now possible to sit at my desk in pajamas with a cup of coffee while listening to the morning service at the mega-church of my choice. That somehow doesn’t seem to fit in with what the Bible tells us of these assemblies and what they were for.
I seem to have more questions than answers…
Is the church service only meant for the believer?
Should a non-believer participate in singing worship songs?
Is the service meant to evangelize to the lost or teach the sheep?
How should we dress?
How often to have communion?
How should the pastor present the word of God, through stories and jokes?
Should the message be dumbed down?
Should offensive or hard passages no longer be read from the pulpit?
Should we have a pulpit?
Should the worship music be about a great performance rather leading the people in the worship of God?
How loud is too loud when it comes to worship?
Can the pastor really know all of his flock?
Is a big church bad for true believer?
Is it really possible for a church to start in the shallow end and more than ten years later be even shallower than when it first started?
All comments and additional questions welcome.