Continuous Church

“Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us” – Hebrews 12:1

Do you feel like your church needs to be more relevant? Guess what. It ain’t gonna happen. At least not how we do church in the 21st century. Why?

Because life is a race.

It’s a physically and mentally grueling test; a cyclist’s Tour de France. We’re responsible for our own results but allowed to have a support team who helps us keep winning within our grasp. We have coaches pushing us to go further and faster. We have teammates encouraging us when we’re tired. We have guides showing us the right path. We have those who break the wind for us, making our trials easier to bear. We have others who make sure we don’t fall behind. Lance Armstrong couldn’t have won all those Tours without a great team and we are no different.

Well, that sounds like a powerful way to live. Church is the perfect place to find a team and ought to have loads of relevance. So why doesn’t it?

Because life is not like a race.

The fact is we don’t always have our team with us. When we leave the doors of our church Sunday morning or the coffee shop bible study or the living room of our home group we head out into life alone. Sure, we can call a friend or meet with a pastor in time of need, but most of the time we let our high-octane support team idle in the garage while we tackle our daily trials and to-dos all by our lonesome.

But life was not always as it is now.

In the early church, life moved at a slower pace. The church could be together more, supporting each other. Their team was never far when needed. Pastors have been calling us to live in this kind of community ever since the ink first dried on Acts 2:42, but our culture has been irreversibly changed. Busyness is here to stay; there is no use denying that we must go our separate ways each week, that we must leave our team and race on alone.

But something powerful is brewing. Through technology and the internet God is starting to provide unique new ways for us to be apart Monday through Saturday and still have our team by our side; to stay connected in community after we leave the doors of our church and the living rooms of our home groups.

Twitter, Facebook and even… email (do people still use email?) give us the chance to be together even when we are not. But these can only go so far. We can only be so open with when we’re broadcasting every whispered word to the world and email has been long been relegated to the stigma of business—unable to pack the community punch of Web 3.0.

Enter The City. Taking over where Facebook, Twitter and email leave off, The City leaves everything we know about how to do church in the dust. It’s like a Gorilla Glue that binds us together in a way that hasn’t been possible since Pete and the Apostles were throwing revival festivals in downtown Jerusalem. Now instead of having our team with us for only a few hours a week, we can have continuous church. 24/7 community. True team living.

And what is the result of this team living?

One of Jesus’ last recorded prayers was, “May (all who believe in me) be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one is Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.”

The church is called a city on a hill, but even a city on a hill is not visible without light. Through the fusion of continuous church the Holy Spirit creates an atomic reaction that is visible for the whole world to see. This kind of atomic reaction has happened before. We read about it in Acts when thousands of souls were saved because of the work God was doing, not through a single man or women, but through the entire church living as a team.

I believe God will use The City and other great ideas to come that build upon The City to turbo charge the church and through the resulting fusion reaction, cause a revival bigger than we can imagine.

May we use these God-given gifts of technology to live continuously as a single body of Christ giving Him glory through the testimony of our oneness so that this can soon be said of us:

“Now all the believers of our time are together, and have all things in common. We all give so generously that no one has any needs. We’re constantly together with one mind and purpose, praising God and sharing our lives freely. And the Lord adds daily to the church those who are being saved.”

Don’t stop with mere relevance. Blow way past it and go straight to pure transformation. Give the world a does of Continuous Church; of Holy Spirit Powered Team Living. Once someone get’s a taste of that, they’ll never want to live without it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at 8:18 pm. It is filed under Innovate4Jesus, Most Popular and tagged with church relevance, community, family, relationships, team living, testimony, witness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.