Jonathots Daily Blog
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Name tags hanging from a peg board
Coffee awaiting the faithful
Beautiful mahogany walls with colored glass
An old-fashioned radiator, 
reminding us how long the church has been established
A skylight, welcoming the sunshine from the heavens
Another Sunday morning in America.
This time, it is Baughman United Methodist Church in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania.
Busy folks.
The morning announcements took ten minutes–just to cover the expanse of activity and planned events.
Matter of fact, if I were evaluating the church in America as a whole, I would conclude that it is an extremely proficient organization.
Here’s the problem: the church that Jesus came to “build on the rock” through his words and the essence of his life was never meant to be an organization. He punctuated this by saying, “My kingdom is not of this world.”
The Jesonian church is meant to be an organism.
Here’s the difference:
- An organization needs plans.
- An organism needs food.
And although we are meticulous in the religious system to organize, put in place and promote a series of determinations, these plans themselves offer no nourishment to the starving souls trying to find their best-seated positions in the back of the sanctuary.
The church is an organism because it’s filled with people, and people need:
1. Emotional food
Yes, we require a diet of “love one another”–and all the awkward situations that produces.
2. Spiritual food
Living our lives out, finding what is real and then discovering where Jesus dealt with it in his earthly time, and studying his insights on the matter
3. Mental food
Challenging all the opinions of our youth and renewing our file with ideas that are edifying to the people around us instead of alienating them.
4. Physical food
Honest to God, we need to eat together. Jesus said “as oft as you do eat together, remember me.”
We’re better people when we’re eating. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of having a restaurant on site at every church, so on Sunday we could file out of the service to a dinner table, where we could discuss what had warmed our hearts as we fill our tummies.
The good news is that the Baughman church was filled with delightful, enterprising and searching human beings.
The better news is that if we stop approaching Christianity as an organization, we might be able to feed the organism of faith … and change the world.
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