Excerpt from bulletin…
The Body Life series
Last Sunday we began a series on the life of church called the Body Life series. We looked at what is church. Here’s the definition I shared. We are going to spend some time in the rest of series looking a some aspects of this definition.
What is ‘church’ and what does it do?
The local church is a community of believers in Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord. They are devoted to Scripture are organised under appointed qualified leadership and gather regularly for preaching, worship, the Lord’s Supper and baptism, and go out into the world to live and speak about Jesus in the world.
Here’s a summary of what we looked at last Sunday.
- Church is a local expression of that universal eternal reality. The church gathered is a visible expression of the invisible eternal reality.
- The Bible assumes people ‘in Jesus’ gather together. It’s what people did straight away after they became Christians as we see from Acts 2. They met together daily. Hebrews 10:25 says:- Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing. Also to keep the ‘one another’ commands that are given in the New Testament you must be together.
- Bonhoeffer says:- “Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate”
