The Kingdom and the Church

The New Testament word for church, ekklesia, means "the called-out ones." We don't go to church or have church; we are the church. Buildings and grounds are places where the church gathers, and gathering is precious. Believers strengthen, encourage and lift one another when they come together. But the gathering is not the church, and attending a service neither saves a person nor keeps them saved.

The kingdom of God is the fulfilling of God's original intention for man and the earth, purposed before the foundation of the world. Jesus spoke of the gospel of the kingdom far more often than of anything else. God so loved the world, not just the church; the church is the means by which He reaches His world. Believers were called out not to be taken out of the world, but to be sent back into it for His purpose.

The church should take believers from spiritual kindergarten through graduate school: maturing them, placing them in their ministry, and equipping them. There should be a continual flow, with new believers coming in and those who have matured returning as teachers. Older women teaching younger women, and seasoned believers discipling new ones, is the design. When the church stops maturing people, it produces "eternal babyhood": preachers become babysitters, sanctuaries become cribs, and immature believers fight like siblings over position, preference and control.

The five-fold ministry is given "for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry." That calling comes down to three tasks: mature the saints, growing them out of spiritual infancy; identify them, helping each believer discover who they are and placing them in their ministry; and edify them, building them up so they can go and do it. Above all, leaders lead people to their true Guide, the Holy Spirit, who teaches what no preacher can.

Paul told the Corinthians they had ten thousand instructors but not many fathers. The word for instructor describes a child-attendant, a "boy-teacher." When gifting is valued over character and fruit, gifted but immature people lead, and "babies beget babies." Isaiah describes the same judgment: when wholeness is removed, "children shall be their princes." Corinth, wealthy and gifted, sought identity in famous preachers and spiritual gifts rather than in Christ and His fruit.

Israel's journey pictures the move from institutional religion into the kingdom. The wilderness is the organized institutional church. God was there, feeding, blessing and leading, and the institution has preached truth and done good. But it is an old wineskin that cannot hold the new wine of the kingdom. The Jordan is the line between trying to organize spiritual things and having spiritual things manifested in daily life. Israel crossed at harvest, when the river overflowed its banks, a season of shaking and sorting. Many have left organized religion without knowing what to turn to; the call is not only to come out, but to come in.

Crossing over into kingdom life is not a rejection of everything learned before. Every truth received carries forward, while the system that turned truth into dogma and control is left behind. To be clear, the institutional church is not the devil, and its people are not evil. The issue is that God will not give His kingdom to an institution; it belongs to His people.