How to Build a Church, or a Fence, Depending on How You Take This

Technically, that stuff is a gate.

Most of the components are there: screws, wood...no hinges, but the core stuff of a gate is there. Now, you may argue that it is not a gate until it is on its hinges and doing its job. You would be right, that is a functional, useful gate.

But every gate starts somewhere. About a year and a half ago, I built a fence to enclose our backyard. Included in this fence were two gates. When the Lowe's truck dropped off the materials, my fence was there. It would take many hours of constructing the fence: digging post holes, setting posts, waiting for posts to set, putting up cross beams, screwing the planks to the crossbeams. Finally I had to hang the gates. They were bulky, heavy and awkward. But to have a functional fence, they had to go up. After my labor, I had a fence and two gates up. It took some skill, some luck, some blood, sweat, and maybe even a tear or two to make the various boards, screws and hinges (technically a fence) and make it into a functional fence.

About two and a half years ago, we began to build a Gate. We had some pieces, then some other pieces. We kept planning how to build the Gate, how to fit the pieces we had into the most functional and best used form. Over time, the pieces kind of started placing themselves. It took most of that time, but here in the last few months, our 'technically a" Gate has started to look more and more like a functional Gate.

Our Gate, our church, had been like many churches all over the country, technically they are a church- all the pieces are there: People, music, teachers, doctrine. But many churches never achieve that functional church. The pieces just hang around, waiting to be built.

God is, of course, the primary builder. It's His plan we must follow for the church to live. He's the Contractor. We are the subcontractors and the raw materials. We have to learn to listen to what the Contractor is saying, follow His plan, build the way He wants.

Many churches stay in the raw material phase because they don't start doing their sub-contractor job. They assume someone else with do the job, so they sit around technically being a church.

Now, what is wrong with technically being a church? God created the fellowship of believers to not just be a theory, but a practice. Technical Churches talk alot, spend time together, but they go nowhere. They barely do anything of spiritual significance within themselves, let alone in the outside world.

What happened for our church was that people slowly began picking up the tools they were given- prayer, planning, organization, people skills, connections- and putting the Gate together. We were (and are) becoming a functional church.

The beauty of the actual church is that unlike our real life gates, there is always room for new pieces to come in and add to the functionality. But simply having people, large or small numbers of them, does not make a church. They must connect with God, and go forth and build His kingdom, from the inside out.