Why read God’s Blueprint for His Church?
Maybe you can relate to Andy, as he shares in the introduction:
It was a Sunday morning, and I was sitting looking at the healthy-sized crowd we had attracted over the last 14 years of “doing church”. We had started with twelve people, and now we represented a crowd across our congregations of well over a thousand. I should have been the happiest man in the world, right? I was happy, but something inside of me was aggravated. I looked across the crowd of good people and started to ask myself certain questions to locate the reason for my discomfort:
- I have a crowd, but is a crowd what I want?
- Who is in the crowd?
- What difference is the crowd having on my city and beyond?
- Is the crowd consumer-based – only coming when we make it convenient, eating spoon-fed truth but leaving unchanged?
- Is this what God wants the Church to look like?
- Are we empowering and mobilising God’s people to be effective ministers in their world, or have we resorted to mere ‘people storage’?
With these questions, a journey of rediscovery began that caused me to rethink the purpose of the Church on the earth. This journey would cause me to question how I was leading and what I was actually building. Was it the Church that Jesus wanted? Many months were spent thinking, asking questions, getting answers, and developing convictions and new persuasions. In the process I joyfully rediscovered the original blueprint for the Church Jesus wants and have recommitted my life to building that. The amazing thing is that the answer was there all the time.