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Church...
Richard Dawson, 27 August 2015
One of the confusing things about church is that it looks a lot like many other clubs and organisations. It even acts like quite a few of them and so it seems like it is another version of these but with a bit of a spiritual bent. It’s easy to think that church is just the Rugby Club or the Chess Club with religious stuff instead of Rugby or Chess! And it is true that many of our dynamics work the same as in other human communities or organisations, except for two things…
Firstly the Church is primarily a way of relating to another person, an unseen person, a spiritual person and that person happens to be God. So all the stuff we see is actually only there so that we might achieve something in the unseen realm. Our goal is treasure in heaven and while we take the earthly stuff very seriously we have to keep thinking in terms of the world to come and of the life after death. This sounds gruesome and unhappy but it isn’t really because we know that when we relate to God we become the people we were meant to be—we discover our true selves and we find peace.
The second thing that is so different about church is that our primary imperative is love. The goal of love as defined by Jesus is what defines our ‘win’ as a church. When we love one another and love the world Jesus died for we have completed the ideals of the church. Everything about church must be put through this particular filter and everything we do must have love at its heart. As Carlo Coletto once said, I can only say, “Live love, let love invade you. It will never fail to teach you what you must do.”
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