Building a Great Church

A man is rescued off an island after five years alone. Three huts on the beach. The captain counts them and asks who else is here. Nobody, the man says. Just me. The first hut is my home. The second is my church. And the third? That was the church I used to worship in.

Alone on an island, and he still found a reason to walk out of one.

You have a third hut. Everybody does. Protestant means protest, so we are going to find something — the worship, the preacher, what they did with the money, the scandal. Or maybe they named your sin out loud and you did not care for it, so you moved on.

Some of you are carrying real church hurt, and that is legitimate. Nobody in this church wants to talk you out of what happened to you. What may be less legitimate is what came after it: that you never went back.

Read the verse again and notice what it does not say. It does not say attend. It says consider how to stir up one another — go looking for how to provoke somebody toward love. You cannot do that from the parking lot, and you cannot do it from a livestream you half-watch while making breakfast.

The habit the writer warns about is not dramatic. Nobody storms out. People just stop showing up, one reasonable week at a time.

Which hut are you sitting in today? The one you are building, or the one you walked out of? And if it is the third one, what would it actually cost you to walk back in?

Devoted themselves. In the Greek that is a complete, intentional commitment. Not convenience. Not when I have time. Not a definite maybe.

Here is what devotion looks like. You stand at the open ramp of a perfectly good aircraft with a chute on your back, and you send it. You do question a few life choices standing at that threshold — how did I get here, please let this work — and then you go anyway. You do not test the waters on a jump. There is no partial version of stepping out of a helicopter.

Now set that beside the numbers. Ask Americans how often they attend church and about a third will say weekly. Then somebody tracked cell phones on Sunday mornings and found that one in five self-reported weekly attenders actually shows up about five percent of the time.

What we say and what we do are not the same thing.

This is not shame. It is a question about values, and it works the way a budget works. Sit down with someone in debt who cannot imagine where the money goes, and you do not stop the bleeding until you look at what they are actually spending. What we value, we make time for. The calendar is the honest document.

So do not ask yourself whether you feel devoted. Feelings are not evidence. Ask what your last eight Sundays actually say, and what your last eight Wednesdays say, and whether anyone in this church would notice if you quietly stopped coming.

Would they? That answer is worth more than an intention.

Before you tell me the early church nailed it, keep reading the New Testament. The church gets rebuked in there over a hundred and fifty times. Not for getting it right. For being exactly as imperfect as we are — divided, petty, proud, confused about the resurrection, suing each other, playing favorites at dinner.

And in the middle of all that, Jesus says he will build his church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Read that carefully, because there are two claims in it and we usually only hear the second. The first is whose project this is. He says I will build. Not you. Not the staff. Not the person you are frustrated with. If the church were held up by the competence of the people in it, it would have fallen in the first century and nobody would have needed a second chapter.

The second claim is the one we quote, and it is stranger than it sounds. Gates do not attack. Gates defend. He is not describing a church hunkered down hoping to survive; he is describing hell on the back foot, holding a door shut against people who are advancing.

This beautiful mess is God's plan A for changing the world. There is no plan B waiting in a drawer for when we finally disappoint him enough.

And it is not the building. The building is a facility — a roof, a parking lot, a sound system. The local church is you and the person sitting three seats down whose name you have not learned yet.

So what are you building, and who is it for?

Fellowship is one of those words the church has worn smooth. Say it now and people picture a Sunday high five and a name you cannot quite remember. Koinonia is not that. It is life on life.

Years ago James was in a health scare with an autoimmune disease, getting different answers from different doctors, no idea what the future held. The doorbell rang. His community group leader was standing there with an envelope. He said, James and Heidi, we are praying for you, and everybody wanted to help with the medical bills. There were thousands of dollars inside.

That is what this verse looks like when it stops being a paragraph in Acts and shows up on a porch.

Notice what the verse says they sold: possessions and belongings, as any had need. Not everything, all at once, in a spasm of enthusiasm. As any had need. Which means somebody was close enough to know what the need was. You cannot distribute to a need you have not heard about, and people do not tell their needs to a room they only visit.

Here is the hard turn. Some of us say we do not get much out of church. We are also not giving much to church, and we are barely showing up. Consumers grade the service. Contributors carry each other.

Think about the jump again. One person stands in the door, but a jumpmaster inspected the chute, a packing team packed it, and pilots got the aircraft off the ground. Somebody is always packing your chute.

Whose chute are you packing? Name one person, and do something about it before Sunday.

Awe and wonder came first. Miracles, yes — and if we could pick a gift, most of us would take healing in a heartbeat. But the miracles were never the point. The greatest miracle is a person carried from death to life, and for that one Christ had to go to the cross. The miracles got their attention. The message changed their hearts.

Then look at what the text says came out the other side: glad and generous hearts, and having favor with all the people.

They were good to be around.

That is a strange thing to find in a list of a church's achievements, and it might be the most convicting one. You can be right and be exhausting. You can be doctrinally careful and still be the person nobody wants to sit next to at a wedding. The early church was neither. Outsiders liked them, and then outsiders joined them, in that order.

Notice the two rooms in the verse, too. The temple courts and their homes. Big church and little church. They needed both, and so do we — the room where you are taught alongside three hundred people, and the table where somebody notices you are quiet tonight.

Look around this weekend. Different ages, different backgrounds, different languages spoken at home. What unites us is Christ. That is a faith family on mission.

There is an old poem that says if you ever find the perfect church, do not join it — you would spoil it. No perfect church exists. So stop hunting and love the one you are in.

Who will be glad you were there on Sunday?