Today is the second of our days of Prayer and Fasting at CBC - as we seek God’s guidance on our vision as a church. We are going to pray and think about who it is that God calls us to be and what it is that he wants us to do. And over the next three weeks we’re going to reflect on Jesus’ final words to his disciples - which we know today as The Great Commission - which we find in Matthew 28:19-20.
The risen Lord Jesus began by telling his disciples, “all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me … therefore you go”. The baton was being passed. And the call was to go into all the world, with the promise "and surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age".
Our God is a sending God and He has called us to go into the world. When the New Testament talks about the church it is always talking about a group of people and not a building. But often when we think about ‘the church’ those thoughts are accompanied by an image of a building. And there is nothing wrong with a building - unless we start to see it as somewhere safe to retreat to; a place where we are protected from the world.
As we think and pray about God’s vision for CBC, as we think about who we are and what we should be doing, we need to remember that we are called to engage with our community, to be a part of our community, to be looking out rather than looking in. The church is not a place where you go to escape from the world, it is the place you go to to be encouraged and equipped through an encounter with God, and are then sent back out into the world. As William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury (1942-1944) famously said, "The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members."
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