As you go to and return from your church today, think about all the other churches you passed by. Do you think some of them have fellow believers who likewise were worshipping our Lord because of His grace today? Have you ever really thought about the church down the street?
In this age of church-shopping, and church-pew-sitting, we forget that fellowship is to be around the great truths of the Gospel. In New Testament times, there often was just one church in any given city. The church at Ephesus was probably too large to meet in one place, yet it was a single church with many elders. The NT also shows us how much real inter-connectedness and unity existed between the various churches.
Our day is not like that, sadly. We have fragmented so much that there is a Baskin Robins number of church-flavors in even the smallest cities. Now I know we should be connected, intimately with a body of believers. But I want to encourage you to think about a post my friend Nathan Pitchford has written regarding the possibility of purposing to extend Christian fellowship to other fellow Christians outside of our own church.
Nathan’s post is especially relevant for my blog since we’ve been discussing Ken Field’s questions about the label Fundamentalist, and how that label might be adding to schism in the body of Christ. Let me close this post with a quote from Nathan’s post, and one more encouragement to go read it.
It is an interesting observation that, in those areas of the world where the Church is being persecuted, or is significantly in the minority, such manifestations of unity and love among believers of different denominations and doctrinal convictions is much more commonplace — and yet without the compromise of all the particular doctrines which each one holds dear, but rather a labor to understand and be understood, or, in a word, to grow up together to greater doctrinal maturity and unity. Perhaps this is because, to them, the battle is real, the enemy is ferocious, and they feel most poignantly their need for one another. I would contend that, in America, the battle is just as fierce, the enemy is just as deceptive and strong, and our need for one another is just as desperate. If we could have the scales lifted from our eyes but for a moment, even as Elisha prayed for his minister (II Kings 6:15-17), what differences would we see in the attitudes and practices of the American church today?
From “Shopping for the Right Church” by Nathan Pitchford. The post is also posted at Monergism‘s blog Reformation Theology.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a blogspot post. Actually I’ve only done 2 in the past three months, I guess. Well lately (since early January) I’ve been really busy at my job and haven’t kept up on the blogosphere as I’d like to. Then February brought me into the thick of the KJVO Debate. That sapped my blogging time even more! (I’m still working thru a series on that issue, by the way).