Why we are called "The Church"

Who the Church is called to be and why

by R. Douglass Mahaffey

This weekend, the youth at my church took over the Sunday evening service. They sang in the praise and worship service in place of the usual vocalists that grace the stage. The instrumentalists were the same though. 

After the music service, there was a skit. I don’t even know what name the skit was given, but it was called “A Human Video.” If it were to be given a title, I would have called it, “Why Not Me Too?”

The skit starts out with a drunk husband and father with a beer in one hand and a television remote in the other. His wife is pleading with him to come to church with them to introduce him to a change in heart, a change in the way he thinks and a change in how he lives his life. That change can only come through Jesus. 

Naturally, as usual, what follows is a violent outburst from the husband, who gets up to slap his wife, when his daughter, who is watching from upstairs, runs in the middle of it and is hit as well, before the father finds her heart, tears it in two and walks into his bedroom to be alone. 

The mother takes her daughter to church. The people there ignore them, make them feel unwelcome and basically turns them away. 

NEEDLE SCRATCHES ON THE RECORD! 

What? The church turns her away? Certainly not God’s church, who was called to save the lost and make disciples of them, they wouldn’t do that.

Yep, it happens all the time. Some of us “high and mighty Christians” turn our noses up to anyone that fit the mold of the church goers that we are. God doesn’t call us to be church goers! He has called us to be Christ followers so that in our example, a light might shine in a dark, lost, dying world. A light so bright that it chases the darkness away and shines the way to the glory of the Lord. 

But all too often, God’s people are sometimes too busy to love those that require guidance to help them understand that the path they are on is a destructive one. It takes leadership. It takes reaching out and pulling them out of the pit that they are clawing and scratching to get out of. It takes love. It takes the love that Jesus had on the cross for us when he said, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Are we incapable of that kind of expression and dedication to see the lost saved? Actions speak louder than words. I have even experienced this rejection in the past from churches, simply because I didn’t know all the right scriptures, or sing all the right songs, or because I didn’t know that what I believed or what I had been taught in my early life, didn’t necessarily line up completely with God’s word. 

If it was something that I was taught as a new Christian, then it wasn’t necessarily my fault. I used to make the mistake of putting my faith in what the teacher was teaching me, that I didn’t read it and check it out on my own. Many are being misled by what others are teaching them because they do not check into it further with daily devotions. Differences in doctrine divide believers and this ought not be so. 

If you get one thing from doctrine and it isn’t necessarily what someone else has been taught, do you shirk your duty as a minister (that we are all called to be) by not showing them by love, the true interpretation of scripture? Then why go to church and fellowship with others in the first place. No one’s theology is perfect and no two people’s theology will ever be exactly the same. 

Basically, salvation is found in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Everything else is just details. Don’t sweat the small stuff. There are things that none of us can even fathom about the Kingdom of Heaven. Those are the things that we will have made known unto us on that “Unclouded Day.” 

R. Douglass Mahaffey - Founder and Publisher of The Wise Conservative.