Different churches have different styles of worship service. Some really contemporary. Some more traditional. But irrespective of the style, there is something else. Irrespective of the style, people can tell the difference between a worship service that’s inspiring and one that’s not. Sometimes, there’s something missing… 

Over the years one of the questions that I’m asked over and over again is this. Why do people go to Church? In fact, I’ve asked it in a different, far more personal way. Why do I go to Church? Because over the years, in times when I’ve been looking for a church to belong to, I’ve attended say a particular one, week after week, only to discover that’s it’s not having an impact in my life.

Now please don’t get me wrong, I’m not being critical of all churches, I’m not. But I remember one church in particular. For a period of a year or so my wife and I persisted. And at some point, my wife, Jacqui, asked me, “Why are we going there? Is the preaching having an impact and making a difference in our hearts, in our lives?”

Try as we might and I’m a preacher remember, I believe passionately the word of God changes our lives, that’s why I do what I do, but sadly I had to answer, “No”. Technically it was pretty good but there was something missing. Then we asked, “Is the time of praise and worship making a difference in our lives? Is it lifting us up closer to God?”

Now I love God passionately, I worship Him passionately. Again I had to answer, “No”. Is the fellowship with other Christians having an impact in my life? Again, the answer for this particular church was “No”. Try as we might nothing was having an impact. Something was wrong. Something was missing. The question is, what?

My hunch is that there are quite a few people today who know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s not that we don’t approach church with enthusiasm and vigour, it’s just that there seems to be something missing. This particular church of which I was speaking, the pastor is a fantastic guy, really. I have a lot of respect for him.

The people were faithful people, good people. Everyone was doing their best but something was missing. As I looked around week after week during the worship service, what I saw was that many, many people were simply going through the motions. We sang the same songs almost week after week. There were announcements and we’d pray for missionaries and we received solid Bible teaching but people, many, dare I say most, were going through the motions.

And after a while going through the motions isn’t enough. What I hungered to do was ask these people with bored looks on their faces, these people who kept looking at their wrist watches during the sermon, what I hungered to do was to ask them, “Why do you come here each Sunday? I mean, why? You don’t seem to be enthusiastic about it”.

In fact, a few that I came to know reasonably well I did ask. And here’s what they said, the crux of it was this. “Well we’re Christians and we have to belong to some Church and we feel this is the one where God wants us to be.” Now, both of those things are perfectly valid, really they are. But as I talked further with some of these people they too knew that something was missing.

It turns out this is an all too common problem across the Church today. My prayer is that it’s one that you don’t experience. But of course, so many people do. We’re going to talk about it a bit today.

Over the last few weeks we’ve been looking at this whole thing called “Church” and asking ourselves, what should we be looking for in a Church? A man by the name of Christian Schwarz has written about this very subject based on a comprehensive research project of over 1,000 Churches in 32 countries.

And this problem we’ve been talking about, what his research tells him is that one of the absolute essentials in a healthy Church is an inspiring worship service. Now a worship service that lifts us up into the reality that Jesus Christ is our Saviour, into the reality of God our loving Father, into the reality of the presence and the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

But here’s the thing, many people believe that the way that you do that is to tweak the formula of the worship service until you get it just right. The right songs, the right sequence, the right elements in the service, the right lighting. Make sure the preacher doesn’t preach too long. Follow this with that. Include some videos. Make the service seeker-friendly for people who haven’t given their lives over to Jesus yet.

And when we get the formula just right then we’ll have an inspiring worship service. Let’s make it a concert, energy, contemporary music, then it will be inspiring. But here’s the thing, based on this massive body of research that Schwarz and his fellows conducted, he discovered that it was not the formula that made the difference.

This is what he writes about an inspiring service:

The word inspiring is to be understood in the literal sense of the word and means an ‘inspiredness’ which comes from the Spirit of God. Whenever the Holy Spirit is truly at work and His presence is not merely presumed, He will have a concrete effect upon the way that a worship service is conducted including the entire atmosphere of the gathering. People attending a truly inspired service typically indicate that going to Church is fun.

In other words going to Church to please the pastor or to please God or out of some stoic sense of duty is not what leads to inspired worship service. It’s the presence of the Spirit of God in the midst of His people that does that.

So, what are you saying Berni, that God only shows up at Church? No, I’m not saying that at all. So are you saying then that God only shows up at some Churches and not others? Mmm, no I’m not saying that either.

What I’m saying is that when people show up and go through the motions, when their hearts aren’t open to the presence and the influence and the leading of God through His Spirit, when they’re watching their watches and thinking about what they’re going to be doing when the service is over, then the Spirit of God is not going to be at work in the same way as He is amidst a people who hunger after God Himself.

And it has nothing to do with the style of a service. Charismatic, non charismatic, contemporary, traditional, really professional musicians or not. None of that makes a real difference. One of the most inspiring worship services I’ve ever been to was about 20 of us meeting together one day, all about to graduate from the same Bible College and the music was one guy with a scratchy voice on a guitar and the sermon was a few people sharing what was on their heart.

That service stands out in my memory as truly inspiring. So here’s the thing, when I walk into a Church the thing that I’m looking for is not a particular style of worship or music or preaching. It’s not the style so much that matters, different folks different strokes right? No the thing I’m looking for is for a people whose hearts hunger after God. For wherever there is an earnest desire after God Himself, a hungering, a thirsty being, there amongst those people the presence of God will be manifest.

God is at work amidst His people in a special way when they gather together to worship Him. For over and over and over again His Word, the Bible, He tells us of His passion, His desire to be with us and He says:

I will be your God and you will be my people and I’ll walk amongst you and I will be in your midst.

That’s the heart of God.

In a world where so many people are so busy – they feel almost like battery hens. Trudging off to the same job, day after day. Pressures. Deadlines. Performance targets. And what they’re looking for – more than anything else often – is a genuine sense of community. Question is – where do you find that these days?

Just recently a good friend and colleague of mine, together with his family, moved from America to Australia. A missionary family. And this man whom I trust and respect has come to Australia to be part of our ministry, Christianityworks, the ministry that produces these radio programs.

Now once they found a home and managed to get some furniture together and once they’d figured out where the local shopping centre was and where to buy groceries, one of the things that were right up there on their list of priorities was finding a local church to be part of.

And so they started with the closest one, a well-known denomination, respected, just a few minutes walk from their home. They went there the very first Sunday they were in town. And whilst the service was lovely and the sermon was good and the whole thing hung together, there was one thing, no-one said hello to them.

No-one kind of sidled up to them before or after the service to say “Hi, my name’s so and so, what’s your name? Where are you from? Wow, an American accent. What brings you here? Oh, you’ve just arrived in the country, how can we help?” Nothing, not even a friendly conversation. So let me ask you a question, do you think they went back to that church the following Sunday?

Not so much. The following Sunday they decided to try another church. Now they have a couple of teenage kids so they were looking for somewhere with a thriving youth group. So they went to one, just a bit further away, that they’d been told had quite a few young people.

They arrive, in a sense it was similar to the one the Sunday before. Well known, another respected denomination, the service was great, the worship, the message was good but after the service a young man wandered up and started chatting to them. It turned out he was one of the youth pastors. He started chatting with a teenage son. Found out he loves the beach, invited him to come surfing this week since it was school holidays. Guess which church they decided to become part of?

I think sometimes we’re guilty of over spiritualising this whole “Christianity” church thing. I think sometimes we get so carried away with the theology or the spiritual side that we forget that God became a man in the form of Jesus and walked in our midst and healed our diseases and fed the poor and hung out with the needy and the marginalised.

And not only did He do all of those really practical things He also taught His disciples to do them too. Just before He was crucified this is what He said to His disciples, John chapter 13, verse 34:

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I’ve loved you, you also should love one another because by this everyone else will know that you’re my disciples if you have love one for another.

How will other people know that I belong to Jesus? By the love that I show to other people:

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you have love one for another.

And the word Jesus uses here to mean love means a deep unconditional love. The sort of love that Jesus showed for us when He died for us on that cross. That sort of love.

In other words, if you want to know the depth of the relationship that the people in a church have with God, if you want to know whether they’re for real or they’re just going through the religious motions then you don’t have to look at how enthusiastically they sing during the praise and worship; you don’t look at what the church building looks like; you don’t look at how wealthy they are or how well dressed they are. No, you take a look at how they treat one another and how they treat the new people who walk into their midst. Jesus said:

You will know a tree by its fruit, so look at the fruit.

I attended one church for nine months one time before anyone invited me anywhere. And then the invitation was to a newcomer’s luncheon that was programmed rather than some spontaneous act of love.

One of the things that truly sets churches apart is the degree to which they actually are a genuine community. The degree to which love flows between the people. And before you get me wrong, I don’t mean Hollywood movie style love, I don’t mean feelings. I don’t mean “love” the noun, the thing. I mean “love” the verb. A verb is a ‘doing’ word.

I mean the sort of love that puts itself out to invite a young teenager surfing. I mean the sort of love that invites someone out for a coffee the first or the second week they walk into our midst. I mean the sort of love that sees a need and meets the need. I mean the sort of doing love that speaks the love of Christ right into the lives of people more clearly, more profoundly than any words ever could.

The sort of love that’s interested. The sort of love that asks questions. The sort of love that opens up the family of God and puts another seat at the dinner table because in God’s family there’s always room for one more.

Depending on what part of the world you live in, how good churches and people in churches are at this kind of love, it’s going to vary. Some are incredibly good at it but the less affluent a church is the better it tends to be at being a community because the more the people in that church need one another and rely on one another.

On the other hand, the more affluent a church becomes the less we depend on one another physically and the more isolated we tend to become. It’s sad but you know something, it’s true. And yet the cultural love only needs one or two people to create a spark.

I’ve mentioned this man once before but one of my best friends on this planet is a guy by the name of James. When my wife and I first arrived at his church, quite a few years ago now, he was the only one to shake my hand, to smile, to talk with me and have a cup of coffee afterwards.

And you know the following week we went back to that church, you know what you do naturally? You look for that guy again because at least you have one connection point. And he did the same next week. In fact, James is one of those people who’s committed to creating community, most committed that I’ve ever met.

He works hard at it. He organises weekends away. He has people over for meals. He’ll ring me mid-week and say, “Have you got time for a coffee?” I’ve been watching this guy for a good many years now and I’ve learned a lot from him.

Whether it’s a big church or a small church or a contemporary church or a traditional church, whatever it is, either it’s a family and a community or it isn’t. That doesn’t mean that we all have to get on with everyone. No, but there’s a sense of, there’s a family, there’s a commitment. There’s a sense of investment in relationships and being a family and getting together and meeting together and sharing things and helping one another and talking together about what God’s done in our lives and what our challenges are and if someone’s hurting going and hurting with them.

There’s a sense of intimacy and accountability and openness that takes so many different forms. There are so many different shapes and sizes and approaches and cultures around this community thing. But a church, a church isn’t a building, it’s not an institution, it’s not an association or a club or a set of rules.

It’s much more than that. It’s a living organism. The body of Jesus, the body of Christ. Each of us with our part to play. You yours, me mine. And you know each of us too with our needs. Needs that only other people can meet. And if Church is an organism, well it’s either sick or it’s healthy. It’s either dead or it’s living.

That’s the long and the short of it. My friend, one of the things that I really, really look for when I walk into a church is that sense of community. That sense that the people in this place know that they are indeed the body of Jesus Christ in this world.

One of the easiest things in the world is for a church, to become a club. For this God-ordained lifesaving station to turn into an exclusive club for the members. We get so comfortable, we stop seeing the hurts and the needs of the people just outside the front door. Our neighbours. Our work colleagues. Easiest thing in the world actually.

I’d like to share a story with you today. Now I don’t know who wrote it, I don’t know where it came from, it’s a parable about the Church. It moved me incredibly deeply when I first stumbled across it. So please let me share it with you now:

On a dangerous sea-coast where shipwrecks often occurred there was once a crude little life saving station. The building was just a hut and there was only one boat but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea and with no thought of themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for the lost.

Many lives were saved by this wonderful little life station so it became famous. Some of those who were saved and various others in the surrounding area, they wanted to become associated with the station and give some of their time and money and effort for the support of its work.

New boats were purchased, new crews were trained. This little life saving station grew. Some of the members of the life saving station were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea.

So they replaced the emergency cots with beds and they put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now the life saving station became a popular gathering place for the members. They decorated it beautifully and furnished it exquisitely because they used it as a sort of club.

Fewer members were now interested in going to sea and so they hired life boat crews to do the work. The life-saving motif still prevailed in the clubs decorations and there was a liturgical life boat in the room where the clubs medallions were held.

About this time there was a large shipwreck off the coast and the hired crews brought in boat loads of cold and wet and half drowned people. They were dirty and sick and some of them had black skin and some of them had yellow skin. The beautiful new club house was a mess.

So the property committee met and immediately had a smaller house built alongside the club where the victims of the shipwreck could be cleaned up before coming inside. At the next meeting there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the clubs life saving activities because they were unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club.

Some members insisted on life saving as the clubs primary purpose and pointed out they were still called a life saving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save lives, of all those various people who were being shipwrecked in the waters, they could begin their own life saving station down the road. So they did.

As the years went by the new life saving station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old one. It evolved into a club and yet another life saving station was founded. History repeated itself again and again and again and if you visit that coast line today you’ll find a string of exclusive clubs along the shore. Shipwrecks remain frequent in those waters but today most of the people drown.

It’s a powerful story isn’t it? And the reason, the reason it moved me so deeply is this. I realised how easy it is to be one of those people who turns the life saving station into a club for its members. I realised how, perhaps, I carried some of those attitudes around in my head and my heart and in my behaviour over the years.

The first little church I ever wandered into is called The Oyster Bay Community Church. Probably no more than 50 members in a sleepy, leafy little suburb of Sydney. I caught up with my good friend, Pastor Phil, not so long ago. Phil’s one of the giants in my life.

Now let me describe this place to you. It’s a tiny little church building with that distinctive 1960’s church architecture. A handful of people in the service when I wandered in for the first time on a Sunday morning, a decade and a half ago. Nothing impressive to the eye.

But when I wandered in I’d been through some terrible pain in my life, I was hurting behind my confident business man’s facade and without knowing it, in this unimpressive little place, this handful of apparently unremarkable imperfect people, they were the life saving station that refused to become a club.

They would take the cold and the wet and the injured and do for them whatever needed doing to bring them back to health again. Without ever realising it I wandered into this little life saving station and God used the people in that place to save my life, literally.

And not only that but from that time onwards I came to the conclusion that whoever I was and whatever I did it had to be about saving lives. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing right now. Jesus said to His disciples:

I came that you may have life in all its abundance.

He came to bring life. Life here, life now in a deep, intimate relationship with Him. Life eternal exactly the same way.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been exploring this question, “What should we be looking for in a Church?” And here’s the thing, I believe that unless a Church is telling people outside of itself about Jesus, about this Jesus who came to bring them abundant life, unless we’re serious about building new friendships and new relationships with people who don’t yet know Jesus, we’re not a life saving station, we’ve become a club.

To be sure we have to care for own. To be sure we have to encourage them and build them up in their relationship with Jesus. But what sort of Church are we, let me ask you, if we’re not prepared to go out there where people live, where people are dying my friend and share our Jesus with them?

Now I’ve seen churches implement evangelism programs. In a sense I dislike and distrust the word evangelism. It has baggage, it smacks of a program to win souls, it smacks of projects and programs and notches on the belt. I’m not sure that’s necessarily what Jesus had in mind when He called us to be fishers of men and of women.

I see churches with pithy signs hung outside their buildings as part of their evangelism program. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking churches and people for the sake of knocking them. I just remember back, not that many years ago, I have to tell you, when I hadn’t yet met Jesus somewhere along my road.

Now I can’t use the language right now that I used to use about you Christians back then here on the air because they’d throw me off. But suffice to say, you Christians didn’t have a whole bunch of credibility with me. I wasn’t ready to listen to you Christians and what you had to say because, well I just didn’t think you lot did such a good job of running your own lives.

But one day, one day I was in need. Difficult times for the successful, confident, “I’m going places” businessman. And here’s the thing, these Christians, people who had one thing in common, I despised them all. Christians came out of the woodwork and met my needs quietly, unassumingly, sacrificially.

I look back on it now and I realise that I wasn’t such an easy person to help. It wasn’t pleasant work for them but these were people who understood that they weren’t club members, they were life savers. And the way you save a life is by doing what needs to be done.

The experts call it “need oriented evangelism.” I call it common sense. I call it precious love. I call it being Jesus to the lost and to the dying. I will never forget what they did for me and in their doing, in their practical need-oriented love, I discovered all of a sudden that my heart was open and that’s when Jesus walked in.

If there’s one thing I look for in a Church it’s those sorts of people. Not club members – life savers.

In any community – any church for that matter – there are going to be some people that we get on with and others who are more at a distance. That’s pretty natural really. Question is – whether we have that handful of close friends, loving relationships … people we can trust and rely on? That’s the question. 

It’s fabulous to be with you again today on the program. Now over these last few weeks on the program we’ve been talking about this whole “church” thing because there are many, many, many people struggling with church today.

Church isn’t some man-made idea. It’s God’s idea and He calls it the body of Christ. In other words people like me and if you’re involved in a church, people like you, we have a specific role or function to perform and together we operate as the body of Christ, bringing love and life from God into this world.

That’s the theory, that’s God’s plan. It doesn’t always work like that and in fact, right from the beginning you listen to some of the letters that the Apostle Paul in particular writes to the different Churches. Letters which, these days, are books in the New Testament of the Bible.

And what you see is that he’s dealing with all sorts of problems in these different Churches. Arguments, errors in understandings, sexual immorality. Sometimes we lose our historical perspective, we imagine that it’s just in recent times the Church has lost the plot. No, not so. There are plenty of times in the past where there have been errors and mistakes. Some of them tragic with catastrophic consequences.

Nevertheless “church” is God’s idea and not only are we meant to tolerate it, actually we’re meant to flourish in it and thrive in it. And as it turns out there are many, many, many fantastic churches on this planet albeit none of them are perfect.

So over these last few weeks we’ve been exploring what are the sorts of things we should find in a church. We’ve looked at a variety of aspects of church life. The things we should find, firstly the Lordship of Christ. Ministry going on based on people’s gifts. Effective stream lined structures not some bureaucracy. A genuine sense of community. Empowered leadership. People passionate about their spirituality. Inspiring worship services and evangelism, if I can use that word, based on people’s needs.

Today I’d like to have a look at the last one in that list, it’s called loving relationships. Now we started talking about that over the last few days through this whole thing of being a genuine community and reaching out to people based on their needs.

See community is tough these days. We’ve become busy. We don’t have time for community. Community requires commitment to relationships, helping one another, loving one another and reaching out to people, evangelism, as I said it’s not my favourite word. It’s about having a deep desire to share the love of Jesus, the love of God with people who don’t know Him yet, doing that by meeting their needs. Both of those, there’s a human aspect of God’s love. Jesus said that this was the most important thing of all. He said:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind and your neighbour as yourself.

This is the first and the greatest Commandment. It’s a coin that has two sides. Loving God with all we are and in exactly the same way loving our neighbour as ourself.

And generally in a Church what should come out is an overall sense of community. It’s what we talked about the other day on the program. People living together, loving one another and working together to do God’s work here on this earth. And part of that is reaching out to those who don’t yet know God and meeting their needs. Loving them, not just in what we say but in what we do and how we serve them whatever that may cost.

That’s what we’ve been chatting about over these last few days on the program and if you missed any of that you can catch those messages on our website www.christianityworks.com.

But today, today I want to go one step further. Let’s imagine that there are just 50 people in your Church. Now each of those people can’t, in reality, have a deep, close, intimate, loving relationship with each of the other 49 in the Church. I mean it’s just not possible.

There are different age groups, different interests, different personalities, different everything. You and I know that in any group of just 50 people or so, at best we going to have just a handful of really close friendships and relationships, at best.

Now walk into a mega church of thousands or tens of thousands of people and in that place, even if you sit in the same seat every Sunday, you’re not going to meet everyone in the church. And even if you did there might be a hundred or two that you could get on at a closer deeper level with but you just won’t have the time.

So here’s what happens. See any social grouping we tend to gather in smaller more manageable groups. Certainly less than 20 or even less than a dozen. And those groups will forge a really deep close relationship with a handful. Two, three, four maybe five or six.

So there’s a wider circle of people we may know in our church. A smaller circle of people whom we call friends. And still a smaller circle yet whom we categorise as being our closest friends. And those different levels are fine, it’s realistic. Provided that we don’t become cliques or worse than that, warring factions.

I’ve mentioned several times over the last few weeks the book Natural Church Development by a man called Christian Schwarz. And for good reason. Back in the late 1990’s he conducted a huge survey of over 1,000 Churches, 32 countries, 4.2 million individual survey responses to determine empirically what factors or characteristics were associated with healthy growing churches and what characteristics pertained to the more unhealthy decline in churches.

And not surprisingly one of the key factors was the extent and depth of loving relationships. One of the things that the survey measured was how often people who gathered together socially outside the weekly meeting.  And that number was much higher in healthier churches than it was in declining churches. It’s not a surprise is it?

And yet the more affluent society becomes, the more segmented and separated our lives are that we lead. I heard a statistic the other day that in the city where I live, in Sydney Australia, just over one-third of all households are single person’s households. It’s a lot of people living alone.

And yet I’ve been to churches where it takes months, literally months for a newcomer even to receive so much as an invitation to have a cup of coffee let alone an invitation over to lunch or some help in time of need.

The other day I met a friend of mine, James, who years ago when I first walked into his Church, was the only person to shake hands and engage with us and invited us out for coffee. That stood out so much, I found this so rare, in fact to this day James remains one of my deepest, closest friends.

That’s one of the things I’m looking for in a church. Not that everybody is close to everybody, you can’t be friends with everyone. Sure you want people basically to get on but as we’ve seen naturally we only have really close relationships with a handful of people.

No, what I’m looking for is that the majority of the people in a church have close relationships with at least a handful of people because that’s the sign of a healthy church. That’s the sign of the fact that there are loving relationships going on. It’s the sign that the love of Christ is manifest, alive and in action in this church.

Church is a place where lifelong friendships should be forged. Church is a place where those who have no other love in their lives discover the love of Christ through the love of a handful of close friends. It’s a place of laughter and a place of tears. A place where everyone finds someone to laugh with them and someone to cry with them. That’s what love is.

Sometimes, we get the feeling that we don’t belong in this place anymore. It’s true of our job, where we live … and the church that you might be attending. What Church should you belong to? Answer – the one that God wants you at. But how do you figure out where He wants you? 

One of the biggest questions for any Christian to answer for themselves is which church should I belong to? These days there are so many choices. And on the surface, some appear incredibly contemporary and attractive. Of course, some of the people listening to the program today don’t have a choice.

Some live in countries where Christians are persecuted. They meet together in clandestine groups in this person’s home today and tomorrow in that person’s home. Others live in places where they can worship freely but, well there aren’t that many churches. Or the other churches that are available are so far away and they don’t have a means of transport to get themselves there.

But for many, many people these days they have a plethora of churches to choose from. Different denominations, different styles, different tempo’s, different theologies, different sizes, different models. It goes on. And so this question, which church should I belong to is an incredibly relevant one? How do you make the choice?

So over these last few weeks, we’ve looked at a bunch of different factors for each one of us to think through about how we assess and evaluate a church. The Lordship of Christ, leadership that empowers people, ministry based on people’s gifts, people with a passionate spirituality, not a bureaucracy but effective streamlined structures, inspiring worship services, a genuine sense of community, evangelism that’s needs-based and loving relationships.

They’re what we’ve looked at over the last couple of weeks but choosing a church is much more than evaluating the options and picking the best. There’s something else:

The righteous flourish like a palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord and they flourish in the courts of our God. (Psalm 92:12 & 13)

Beautiful psalm, Psalm 92 and it’s definitely worth reading. But those two verses in particular really touch me. They speak of God taking His people, the righteous, and seeing them flourish. Flourish is a word of such abundance isn’t it? You don’t see a plant only just flourishing, a plant that’s only just hanging in there isn’t one to that’s said to be flourishing.

No, it’s the strong, healthy, green growing plant. The one that’s thriving, the one that’s being all that it can be, bearing stunning rich fruit in season. That’s the one that we say is flourishing. And that’s the picture God’s giving us of what He wants for us when we’re planted in His house. The house of the Lord. The thing we call these days church.

And whilst I think that all the things that we’ve talked about over these last couple of weeks, things that we should really be looking for in a church. Whilst I think all of those are incredibly important the danger is that if we focus just on those things the danger is that we approach church like a bunch of consumers.

All that matters is, “What’s in it for me? What can I get out of this church as compared to that one?” Do you understand what I’m saying? You and I, we can approach God’s community with the selfish “what’s in it for me” attitude alone? If we do that we’ll never be satisfied.

There are so many more things that we could have talked about in evaluating a church. I haven’t begun to talk about what sort of teaching and preaching of God’s word is truly life changing and what’s not. What style of worship service or model of church is going to work better for this person or that person?

You see, the list of criteria goes on and on and on and from a human perspective, you and I are prone to look at a church purely in terms of how it suits us, what’s in it for us. “This church, well this church feels a bit dead, you know, there isn’t much sense of a community, there aren’t many loving relationships. Man, that guy who gets up on Sunday and preaches, that just bores your socks off. Nah, couldn’t possibly flourish in that house.”

But what if God wants to bring you into that church or me into that church ’cause He’s up to something new? What if God wants to bring us into that church to be part of the solutions to the problems that He sees and some of which we can see too?

What if God has a plan in that place that no man or no woman yet knows about to do a new work, to reach some different people, to heal some hurts, to confront some evil, to do whatever it is that He plans to do there? And He’s calling us, you and me, to walk into that battle with Him and for Him. Then what?

Just after I became a Christian I became part of a wonderful little church and I joined a home fellowship group. Now those in the group were studying the Book of Hosea at the time I joined them, one of the minor Prophets in the Old Testament.

Here’s the thing about Hosea, God calls him to marry a prostitute who’s had children by other men. And then when she’s unfaithful to him God calls him to take her back. Now I can’t imagine the pain that God’s call placed on Hosea’s life, I can’t begin to imagine and you know something I have to wonder what was God thinking?

I’m sure that went through Hosea’s mind on more than one occasion. But this relationship, this marriage was a symbol of Israel’s unfaithfulness to God and God used it in the Prophets life to help him to speak with conviction to Israel about their unfaithfulness to God.

God had a plan and a purpose for his glory and for His people that went way beyond Hosea’s comfort and needs. He called this man, Hosea, to suffer. To suffer real and terrible pain. The excruciating pain of an unfaithful wife. Not only unfaithful, a prostitute. All for God’s glory. In other words it’s not always about you and me, it’s not always about our comfort, our needs being met. Sometimes God will call us into a place that just doesn’t make sense.

Now, I’ve persevered in Churches, somewhere perhaps I should have left earlier. There was one Church that I was part of where attitudes towards sexual immorality amongst the Church leadership were wrong. There were people in key ministry positions not married but living together. You might call me old-fashioned but that’s one of the things, one of the very few things actually that God says don’t do this.

And you know something, whilst that was going on in the ministry team, whilst it was being tolerated by the leadership there was no way God was going to bless that Church. There was no way that it’s going to honour and glorify God and go forward powerfully. Eventually, even though my heart was to stay in that Church and make a difference, eventually I left. And there have been times in my life where I’ve been in Church wilderness, not knowing precisely where God wants me.

I truly believe that God wants our needs met. That’s one part of flourishing in the house of the Lord. But the flip side of that coin, the side that’s about taking up our cross and following Jesus, well that involves sacrifice and the one thing I’ve discovered in my Christian walk is that in order for me to flourish I need pruning.

We can’t flourish without sacrifice. So whilst all those things we’ve talked about are incredibly important in evaluating what’s going on in a church, the number one reason for me to belong to one particular church rather than all the others I have to choose from is this: I want to be where God wants me to be no matter what the cost. A tree doesn’t plant itself, it’s planted and the one who plants is God. And if He plants you over there in that corner of His house and me over here in another corner of His house, let that be God’s sovereign choice.

And we need to honour that because we love Him and we want His name to be glorified. It won’t always make sense, it may never make sense. I mean, did it ever make sense to Hosea? I don’t know but once God tells us where. Once we know, deep in our hearts, where He wants us, you know something, that’s where we belong.