Church Journey
When Will Koonce (this site’s progenitor and all-around great guy) asked me to write a recurring column about “The Church,” a single thought went through my mind: “I’m probably the LAST guy in the world who should bloviate about the state of the church these days.” Why? I was raised in the church. I’ve consistently attended church services my entire life. Long before I was saved, I enjoyed the reliable immutability of church life.
And yet. Those are two dangerous words: “and yet.” “And yet” can send us down some unfamiliar paths. That’s exactly what happened to me. I enjoyed church, and yet I had a growing, nagging feeling that something in church life was not as it should be. The incredible thing is that as I was growing in Christ—maturing as a Christian—I felt more and more of a disconnect between the church in the Bible and the church of which I was a part.
Here’s the rub: my church was not a single church. As a career military member, I was required to move from location to location. As our family moved, we sought out new churches, different expressions of God’s community of chosen people. And yet, for all the differences in the congregational makeup, the music, the preaching styles, the basic operations… there still seemed to me to be something a little out of kilter. What’s worse, the more I delved into the Bible and studied early church history, the wider the divide seemed between biblical church and what we call church today.
So, I agreed to write this column and share my discoveries and perspectives on “The Church.” But I’ll tell you this up front: I probably still have more questions than answers, so instead of feeding you formulas for how to “do church,” I hope instead to raise questions on how we can make church look even more biblical than what we find at the corner church downtown.