Lovin' Church...

I took a class this past week at Asbury on "Christology."  Going in all I knew was: I had a lot of reading to do by guys who were so smart it made head hurt just trying to read their names!! As the class began and my professor started to speak something amazing happened...my doors were completely blown off as we delved deep into the reality of Jesus the Son and Jesus the man and grabbed hold of the implication of what His life here meant for us today.  (Now for those of you out there who are "haters " of higher learning and believe it to be one of the seeds the mean old devil uses to subvert a real move of God, let me say this was not one of those classes.  Instead I had a Spirit filled, Scottish (cool accent...I literally heard his voice in my head when reading....kind of strange), New Testament theologian who had spent the weekend before our class partaking of the Lakeland Outpouring.  This class was an intentional move of God in my life.)

Not to go too far into the class and bore you with things that you may not care about (but probably should...but not here in this blog,) let me just say that one of the things we talked about in class was the reality of the church being the agent through whom God wants to move to reach a broken world.   However, too often we are more of a distraction to an authentic move of God than an asset.  One of these reasons is the unfortunate reality that we focus on things many times that just aren't all that important.

So here is the thought I would like for you to consider and weigh in on:

Realizing we have a clean slate of a new church plant to work with...what are the top 5 things you think are most vital to a church being used to affect positive change in a community? There are no right or wrong answers here but, the ones in which you can provide historical or biblical precedent for might just get you some bonus points with Jesus or maybe even an extra room in your mansion in heaven...I'll have to see what I can do about that.  

What are your thoughts???