Thursday, July 30, 2015

The Genuine Church - Part 2:
Devoted to Fellowship

 

[Photo of a church]


“They devoted themselves to… fellowship…”
—Acts 2:42b

Over the course of the last two blog posts, I began to flesh out my suggestion that some people move from church to church trying to find a church that genuinely fits their ideal of what a church should be.

The trouble is that most people have a hard time defining exactly what qualities the perfect church would display.

We must remember that a genuine church is not a building, nor an institution. It is a group of like-minded believers who gather together in unity and focus.

So, if a group of believers want to form a genuine, Christ-honoring, life-supporting, question-answering church, how do they do that?

Scripture offers us a definition of a genuine church. Dr. Luke records four elements that comprised the early church in Acts 2:42:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

In the last post, I suggested that the believers striving to create a genuine church need to start their quest by laying a super-strong foundation of the apostles’ teaching.

The next step is to work diligently to create a milieu in which heartfelt, soul-refreshing fellowship will occur.

This fellowship will be more than a superficial “church-luncheon-after-the-morning-worship-service” type of gathering. It will be fully inclusive, totally welcoming, completely engaging, and clique-free.

In the next blog post, I will explore the third element of a genuine church.

 

Copyright © 2015 by Dean K. Wilson. All Rights Reserved.