The dying / living church

I was reading www.signposts.org.au blog and came across this most elequent comment to a thread “Unity Expressed How?”.

The dying church mate is the one who does not breathe the Spirit. The dying church is the one who doesn’t hear the call of God to be the compassion of Christ, the icon of God’s grace in the community.

The dying church can be a fundamentalist church (of which there are both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’) that spend their days living under legalistic code that they
think is a biblical faith. But, alas has been corrupted by the modernist worldview.

The dying church lives in fear of being corrupted by the sin of others for fear it will affect their own limited view of salvation.

The dying church is like the person who Chesterton referred to as “dead at 25 years old, buried at 75 years old”. The church of modernity is dead, we are just waiting for it to be buried.

The living church is a church that understands that the Gospel is one of hope. The good news that the Kingdom of God is here and that fear has no place.

The living church has discovered that we are blessed by God to be a blessing to all (regardless of what they believe or how they live). We are blessed to bless all of creation. We are sent (apostolic) to carry on with the mission of Christ to bring reconciliation, redemption, and renewal.

The living church knows that the ‘Word of God’ is Jesus Christ - not a book. That to follow Christ means dying to oneself for the sake of the world… not for the sake of if you are going to heaven of not. That discipleship is not about keeping oneself pure or ritual clean. But discipleship is about risking the way of Jesus and touching the person with leprosy and loving the people who have been cast out from the temple because the a considered unclean or have ’sold out’ to the Romans.

The living church knows that to follow the way of Christ is to risk being crucified. A living church knows that it is alive by the grace of God. It knows that without the breath of God it would be no better than the dry bones in the valley, or the
dead at the bottom of the dead marshes. It is God that gives life. Not a persons belief of a doctrinal statement. What separates us from the love of God? Nothing, and thank God that we all walk by the grace of God.