A Difference in Wants

Individual Transformation & Corporate Identity

"Try this sentence on for size. A church that understands where its power comes from is a place where individuals are transformed and empowered to join God's corporate family and participate in God's plan to reconcile all things to Himself. Did you see all the pieces there? Individual salvation and transformation leads to a corporate identity., which is then used by God to redeem, restore, and reconcile all things in heaven and on earth by making peace through the blood of the cross.

And all by the gospel."

   -Matt Chandler, Creature of the Word: The Jesus Centered Church,  page 21 (italics in the original)

Avoiding Gospel Amnesia

"...We seem to have developed gospel amnesia, forgetting that the gospel not only creates and sustains the Church but also deeply shapes the Church. Present and future.

All of the Epistles in the New Testament were written to Christians, and they each contain a heavy emphasis on the gospel and its implications for the people of God. This suggests that for churches who believe the gospel, the Spirit of God repeatedly wants to bring them back to the gospel. It means the Church is gospel-centric, in its existence. She must not move on from the gospel, must never graduate from the gospel. The gospel, in fact, provides our ongoing, day-by-day motivation to pursue holiness and to experience the reality of what God claims we already are in Christ: perfect, spotless, and blameless."

   -Matt Chandler, Creature of the Word: The Jesus Centered Church,  page 17 (italics in the original)

A Church-less Gospel?

Is it possible to be "Gospel Centered" and leave out the church, the Body of Christ? Nope, not really. The excerpt below is from A Church-less Gospel? at| SBC Voices:

When we minimize, indeed, even eliminate the local church from Christian living and following Jesus we have missed the Gospel.

Part of this stems, in my opinion, from our over-focus on a “personal relationship with Jesus.” And while undoubtedly the Christian life is very much about a relationship with Jesus (John 17:3), we must remember what the church is in regards to Jesus: his body, the temple of his Holy Spirit, his bride, his flock, and his household.

Several times over, the Bible calls Jesus the head of the church which is his body—and we are the members. A church-less gospel is like the thumb trying to be in a relationship with the head while maintaining no connection to the hand, the wrist, the arm, the shoulder, the torso, etc. A severed thumb really has no relationship to the body at all, let alone the head.

The Gospel is more about Jesus saving a people (Titus 2:14) than a particular individual. Yes, God saves his people by saving individuals but then he takes them and makes them part of something bigger than themselves—part of a flock, a body…a church.

The Gospel produces the church. And no individual Christian can live a Gospel-centered life apart from belonging to and involvement as a member in a local church....

Much more at the link.

No Other Purpose

"The Church exists for no other purpose but to draw men into Christ. . . If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other reason."

 -- C.S. Lewis

Hat Tip: Jared Wilson at The Gospel-Driven Church