I love the church. 

And I love thinking and talking about our responsibilities as a church. 

Because though we look pretty ordinary, the fact is, when we talk about a church, we are talking about something that is pretty extraordinary.   

Just think about all God’s done to put the church together. 

He chose us before He created the world.

He sent His Son to die for us.

He raised up men to preach the gospel to us.

He opened our eyes through the Spirit to what Jesus did for us.

He united us together as a family.

He has even done a great work to join us specifically to our own particular local church, and so it’s obvious we need to think about what we are here for, or, to say it another way, what does God want from us as a church? 

One thing we need to do of course is gather.   

I know that’s a challenge right now given this particular pandemic.

But, regardless of where you land on what a church needs to do during the middle of a lockdown, we all should agree, what does the church do?  Normally, the church gets together every week at least once a week to do things like hear God’s Word, to worship God, to remember Jesus’ death through the Lord Supper, to honor Him through baptism and to build each other up. 

Just doing that is huge.

But our responsibility of course doesn’t end there.  We don’t simply gather. 

We also go. 

One of the reasons we join together as a church in this place is to partner together in each other’s spiritual growth. 

That’s one of the big reasons we have local churches. 

Another reason though is so that we can go together and make disciples of all the nations. 

And over the next few posts, I want to talk with you a little about exactly how we can go about doing that, because, I’ve found while many of us agree about the importance of making disciples, we sometimes haven’t thought very carefully about how.