Pastor Kuru started a
discussion on what the church is by quoting French Roman Catholic theologian
Alfred Loisy's most famous saying: "Jesus
came proclaiming the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church".
[Note: Loisy did think that Jesus
intended to form some sort of society or community. It was the aping of civil
government that he doubted Jesus intended].
Members reflected on this
saying and felt that it wasn’t that the Church had hijacked what Jesus started,
but that churches don’t measure up to what Jesus wanted the Church to be.
Kuru interjected with
Scriptures to show that Jesus wanted the Church to exist:
And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will
build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it (Matthew 16:18).
Peter
did not think the Lord meant that he was the rock on which the Church would be
built:
As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but
chosen by God and precious to him—you also, like living stones, are being built
into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering
spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:5)
To the question “what is
the church”, members said that it is
·
the Body of
Christ that must give expression to who Christ is and what He came for so that
the watching world could know Him, and
·
an assembly of
believers.
Kuru picked up on the
fact that the church is supposed to be a fellowship of believers, to ask
whether everyone was a believer. He pointed out that for those who are good
people it is difficult to accept the idea that they need Jesus as their
Saviour. They tend to think that the wicked (robbers, murderers and sex
offenders) are the types that need to do that.
During his summer
vacation Kuru was reading Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God. Keller
refers to a character in Flannery O’Connor’s
novel, Wise Blood
having “a deep, black
wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”
Keller comments, “This is a profound insight. You can avoid Jesus as Saviour by
keeping all the moral laws. If you do that, then you have ‘rights.’ God owes
you answered prayers, and a good life, and a ticket to heaven when you die. You
don’t need a Saviour who pardons you by free grace, for you are your own
Saviour” (Hodder, 2008, pp. 37-38).
Kuru pointed out that
most church folks suffer from the same malady of imagining that they don’t need
Jesus. Kuru shared his testimony of how having grown up in a very devout
Christian family, and having attended church and Sunday School without fail, he
still needed to receive Jesus into his life. He referred to John Wesley having
to do that even though he was a respectable ordained minister of the Church of
England http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/639945/John-Wesley#ref121836, that Martin Luther had to accept justification by
faith even though he was an ordained minister of the Roman Catholic Church http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/351950/Martin-Luther
Kuru urged the members of
Grace Bible Church to become an assembly of believers so that they could be the
Body of Christ expressing all that Christ Jesus wants other people to know
about the saving power of Christ.
