Matt's blog

Below is a letter that the elders of Renewal Church sent to our covenant partners this week describing the ways in which we would encourage our people to prayerfully respond to the destruction over the past weeks in Haiti.  

 Renewal Covenant Partners,   

An excellent place for beginning any discussion on the church is with a basic Scriptural understanding of what the church is created to be.  Rather than asking, “What kind of church are you?” a better question might be “what kind of church did God create?”  

Three passages from Ephesians give us three different, yet essential, images of the church that serve to develop our understanding of what the church is.

Being raised in a church culture that taught me that the fundamental goal of successful church is to get people to a building on Sunday mornings, I simply did not spend much time thinking about all of the people that will not darken the doors of most evangelical churches on our landscape?  Where are they?  What are they doing?  What does it mean to intentionally seek to find ways to engage them with the message of the gospel without them having to come to our church building first.

Incarnating the gospel in a local community starts with intentional effort.  As a leader of a church it must be our desire to teach, train, and provide opportunities for our churches to learn that the mission of God pervades their lives on a regular basis.  It is not simply something you engage in on a weekly basis, but rather an all consuming lifestyle of seeking to model, live, and speak the gospel into the lives of others.