I'm Back, Part 2

So, in "I'm Back, Part 2" I said that one of the changes in my vision of this blog was that it was more about God.  This is because I am more and more convinced that everything that has to do with Church is all about God.

I think that we oftentimes get caught up in "what, when, where, how" questions when we talk about doing Church.  I know I do.

That's exactly what I was doing when I started this blog.  I was convinced that I had found the movement that had, or was at least beginning to have, the answers to these questions right.  These people knew what to do correctly for Church, they knew when to do Church (all the time), they knew where to do Church (everywhere) and they knew how to do Church.  This, for the most part, is what drew me to the Organic Church movement.  I haven't really changed my mind concerning whether the movement has the right answers to these questions, though that's a subject for part 3 of this post.

What has changed is what questions I think are important.

I still think "what, when, where, how" questions are important, but I think that they pale in significance compared to "Who?" and "Why?" as questions we deal with when we talk about Church.  The answer to both of these questions, of course, should be "God."  God is Who the Church is for, Who Church is all about, Who we do Church to get to know better.  God is Who this is all about.

And God is Why.  God is why we can meet with people we don't have anything else in common with and can be united.  God is why we tell other people about Him.  God is why we have the love that is needed to sacrifice our own good for the good of others, from our family to our enemies.

When you boil it all down, when you cut through the fancy words, when you get to what this is all about, there's only one thing left: God.

Church, in fact, is nothing more, nothing less, than God loving me, me loving God back with His love, me being loved by others with God's love, and me loving others with God's love.  That's all there is to it. It's impossible if you take God out of any part of the definition, but it's ridiculously simple if He's there in all of it.  It's all about God.  He's Who this is all about and He's Why we're able to do this.