Is church membership biblical? That's the question this series will attempt to answer. In this message, we look in the Bible at how God’s people have always practiced formal membership. It was practiced when it came to belonging to Israel in the Old Testament and it was practiced when it came to belonging to the Church in the New Testament. When we observe this pattern, it should lead us to ask the question: Can a practice be unbiblical if it is practiced all throughout the Bible?
Transcription (automatically-generated):
In our previous message, I addressed one of the main pushbacks I hear to the idea of formal church membership being practiced in a local church. There are those who say that it's too rigid for a church to draw a line around a group of people that belongs to the church and distinguishes them from everyone else who isn't. I showed from scripture how God has always made rigid distinction between those who are his people and those who are not. He always has and he always will.
And we saw examples of this all the way from Genesis to Revelation. And at the end of that message I asked this question, how do we know? Or how can we know who has crossed over the line into belonging to God's distinct people and who hasn't? And without explaining myself at the time, I simply said that the answer to that question is found in the practice of local church membership. When a local church practices church membership, that is the way that everyone in the congregation knows who belongs to Jesus and is a part of his people and who isn't.
I'm going to use the rest of this series to show you why that statement is true, and I'm going to do that by taking the rest of this message and all of the next two messages to answer one big overarching question. And the question is, this. Is the practice of church membership biblical? For the Christian, this should be the only question that matters. For the Christian, it shouldn't matter how the idea of church membership makes them feel.
For the Christian, it shouldn't matter what their previous experience with church membership has been like, either good or bad. For the Christian, all that should matter is whether they can see the concept of church membership is rooted in the scriptures. If it's not, then the Christian is free to dismiss it. But if it is, then it's something that God expects his people to do at the local church level. If I can show you that church membership is biblical, that should lead you to at least three powerful conclusions.
Number one, if I can show you that church membership is biblical, then that means that practicing church membership is good because God is good. Anything that he tells us to do in the Bible is good for us. And since God is the ultimate supreme source of all goodness, if he is telling us in his word to practice church membership, then we should get excited about the idea of practicing it because it would be good for us to do so. Two, if I can show you that church membership is biblical, that means that those of you who are watching this video who aren't Christians yet, you will know what you need to do after you become a Christian? When you finally stop resisting God's pursuit of you, and you make the decision to turn your life over to Christ, to trust him, and to follow him, then you will know that pursuing membership in a local church is the next thing you do after you come to Jesus.
And number three, if I can show you that church membership is biblical, then that means that those of you who do know Christ but have not yet come to the conclusion that you should become a member of a local church, you'll have a decision to make. If after watching these videos, you end up realizing that church membership is biblical, then that should make it very difficult for you to remain in an undecided position regarding it. If you are shown the biblical nature of church membership from the scriptures and you are a Christian, there would only be one appropriate next step for you to take to obey Christ and to pursue becoming a member of a local church. And here's the thing I believe God is going to show you. Church membership is biblical.
Now here's my first argument that I'm going to make. I'm going to take the remaining part of this message to unpack it. My first argument for the biblical nature of church membership. We can see a pattern of formal membership practiced by God's people all throughout the Bible in both the Old and the New Testaments. Therefore, church membership is biblical.
Think about this for a second. Wouldn't it be reasonable for us to conclude that church membership is biblical if we saw that the people of God have practiced formal membership throughout the Bible? What if when we looked in the Old Testament, we saw that the Jewish people practiced membership in a formal way as it related to them belonging to Israel? And then what if when we turned our attention to the New Testament, we saw that Christians practiced the same kind of membership that formally included them and identified them as belonging to the church? If we can see a pattern where the people of God in the Old Testament practiced membership for centuries, and then we see those same practices instituted by the early church in the pages of the New Testament.
If we can see that pattern plainly throughout the Bible, would that be enough for us to deem the practice of church membership as being biblical? I think the answer would be yes. So let's take a look at it. I'm going to highlight eight patterns we can see in both the Old and New Testaments where aspects of membership are practiced by God's people. And as we look at these eight patterns, pay attention to how they make God's people distinct from everyone else in the world.
Around them. So here's pattern number one. There has always been a specific one-time event that brings a person into the distinct group of God's people. That's birth and or religious conversion. In the Old Testament, there are two ways in which a person could become an official member of the people of Israel.
The first way was by natural birth, you could be physically born into the people of God. If your dad was a jew and your mom was a jew, then when you came on the scene, you would have been born into the people of God as an Israelite. This was by far the most common way to become a part of Israel. But this wasn't the only way a person could become a part of Israel. You didn't have to be born a jew in order to become a part of the Jewish people.
If you weren't Jewish by birth, you could become a proselyte or a convert to Judaism. You could be grafted to the people of God. There were non-Jews in the Old Testament. They're called Gentiles, who recognized that the God of Israel was the one true God over and above every other God. They wanted to follow him and live for him, and they wanted to become a part of his people in a formal way.
You can read about Gentiles becoming a part of God's people. In Isaiah, chapter 56, verses three through seven, gentiles were religiously converted, and they became a part of God's people by choice. They weren't born into Israel. They chose to become a part of Israel by way of their conversion. So in the Old Testament, there were two different ways a person could become a part of God's special people.
Natural birth, which a person doesn't choose, or religious conversion, which a person does choose. And then when we get to the New Testament, we see that both of these birth and religious conversion are true of every single person who becomes a part of Jesus's church. Both the decision to convert to Christ and the need to be born into God's family are at play. Every single person who has become a Christian over the past 2000 years has had to make the choice to become one. You have to choose to become a follower of Jesus.
No one's going to make that choice for you. No one is physically, naturally born a Christian the way a person was born an Israelite. It doesn't matter if both your parents are Christians, doesn't matter if both your parents parents are Christians. It doesn't matter if you come from a lineage where everyone in your family has been a Christian dating back 2000 years ago. To the time of Christ.
Christianity isn't an ethnicity that you can be born into. Everyone who becomes a Christian has to make the choice for themselves to become one, to repent of their sin, to believe in Jesus, and to follow him with their entire life. It's called conversion or repentance and faith or just belief. You believe Jesus died on the cross to pay for your sins, to make a way for you to gain entrance into his family. You acknowledge your sinfulness before God, and you turn from that sin in your life, and you turn your life towards Christ.
You receive forgiveness for your sins by faith. You choose that. And when you do, you have become a Christian and a part of God's family. That's the conversion part of being incorporated into the church. When a person makes this choice, they are in.
But it's more than just a choice. There is a birth aspect to this process, too, but it's not a physical birth. The birth I'm talking about is a spiritual one. Jesus says in John, chapter three that to enter the kingdom of God, one must be born again. And that's because we are all born naturally or physically into this world.
But when we were, we came into this world spiritually stillborn. We had physical life when we were born, but all of us were born spiritually dead. We can thank our first parents, Adam and Eve, for that. We inherited our dead spiritual condition from them after they sinned against God in the garden of Eden. Therefore, we need to be spiritually born.
We need to be born a second time or in a second way or born again. As Jesus said, this is the spiritual birth that brings you into God's spiritual family as a spiritual child of his. And this event of your spiritual birth, get this. Happens the moment you choose to become a Christian. It happens at your conversion in the twinkling of an eye.
When you place your faith in Christ, your sins are forgiven and removed, and God causes your dead spirit to come alive within you, and he places his own loving spirit inside of you. When this happens, you have become spiritually born, spiritually alive to God for the very first time. You are now a child of God. You are now a part of his family. New birth and conversion conversion and new birth.
Only one of these two is necessary to be brought into the people of Israel, but both are in play when a person is brought into the church. Today, part of the practice of church membership recognizes and distinguishes those who have been born again from those who have not, because only those who are born again are a part of Jesus' church. So the church can only affirm those who have actually experienced this new life in Jesus. A local church can only bring actual Christians into the membership of the church. These one-time special events are the first pattern that we see in the Bible when it comes to a form of membership being practiced by God's people.
Now here's something to think about. When a person became an official part of Israel, either by birth or conversion, how did the rest of Israel recognize that they had been brought into the people of God? And when a person becomes a Christian today and officially becomes a part of his church by both their conversion and their new spiritual birth, how do the existing members of the local church recognize that this new Christian has been added to the people of God? This brings us to the second pattern that we can observe about church membership in the Bible. And it's this.
There has always been a specific, one-time mandatory ritual that officially identified you as a member of God's people. Circumcision in the Old Testament, baptism in the new, being a part of God's people has never been a secret. When we cross that line, we do so publicly. In the Old Testament, it was the same ritual. Whether you were brought into the people of Israel through natural birth or by religious conversion, whatever way you came in, you got the snip.
If you were a male, this was the way that you were identified as belonging to God's special, distinct people. You can read how God gave Abraham the instructions for circumcision for all natural-born Israelites in Genesis, chapter 17, verses nine through 14. And you can read how God gave the same command to Moses as it would pertain to the foreigner among God's people. In Exodus chapter twelve, verses 48 and 49 appraise God. The Bible is clear that circumcision has absolutely no value for the person united to Christ under the new covenant today.
Those who are inaugurated into Jesus' church today go through the waters of baptism instead. The act of baptism publicly identifies anyone who has become a Christian, both men and women, that they have trusted in Christ and are now a part of his family, the church. This is what Jesus commanded us to do in the great commission. When we preach the gospel and someone responds to our message in faith by believing in Jesus, the next thing we are to do according to Jesus is baptize them. When a professional athlete gets traded to a new team and they put their new jersey on for the first time, that change of Jersey identifies them as having changed teams.
When a man and woman get married and they put their rings on their fingers for the first time. That ring is a symbol identifying that their identities have changed. They are no longer two, but one. When men got the snip in the Old Testament, that was the mark that they were a part of God's special people, the nation of Israel. When Christian men and women are baptized in the New Testament, that is the mark that they are now a part of God's special, distinct people.
The church. Baptism identifies those who have switched over to God's team and are now united with him. It signifies an identity change. You're no longer separate from God. You are now one with him and with his people.
There were and are no exceptions. You could not and you would not be recognized as a part of the people of God without participating in these rituals. So when it comes to the practice of church membership today, a local church has to find out if a Christian has been baptized or not. And if they have been, they don't need to be baptized again. But if they have become born again and they haven't been baptized yet, then the local church has a responsibility to do that before they can be formally brought into the church's membership.
Why? Because that's the pattern that we see throughout the entire New Testament. It's what Jesus tells us to do. So we better figure out a way to do it, and that's why it's a necessary part of the church membership process. Pattern number three.
There have always been smaller, official, recognizable subcommunities that make up the larger communities of God's people, tribes in the Old Testament; local churches in the New. When you look at Israel in the Old Testament, it was to be one single, unified nation under God. And yet it was made up of twelve smaller, individual, separate, distinct tribes. The twelve sons of Jacob formed the basis for the twelve tribes of Israel in order from the oldest to the youngest. They are Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naftali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin.
If you were born an Israelite, you belong to one of these twelve tribes. And if you belong to one of the twelve tribes, you were a part of Israel. There was no scenario where someone was a part of ethnic Israel and did not belong to one of the twelve tribes. This concept didn't exist. And we can see the same pattern play out in the New Testament church.
The big-C universal global church is one single, supposed to be a unified body of believers who belong to God. And this group of people stretches to the four corners of the earth. And yet it too is made up of smaller, individual, separate, and distinct local churches. If you are a part of the big-C church, you will or should belong to a smaller local church. And if you belong to a smaller local church, then that is what identifies you as being a part of the big-C church.
When you read the New Testament, the pattern is clear. If someone was a part of the big-C church, they were a part of a local church. Pattern number four. The smaller sub-communities of God's people have always been distinguished from one another. Geographically, each of the twelve tribes of Israel was given specific boundaries that they would live within.
You can see this both when they came out of Egypt into the wilderness and when they crossed over into the promised land. After the Israelites left Egypt, God commanded Moses to have them set up their wilderness camp in a very specific way. Each individual person and each individual tribe didn't gather willy-nilly in the desert as each one of them thought best. They were given instructions on how to gather. They were told to gather according to the tribe that each was a part of, and each tribe was placed in a specific position around the Tabernacle, which was always in the middle of God's people.
You can read about this organization in numbers, chapter two. Now here I'm going to put on the screen. Here's a picture of what it would have looked like in the wilderness. They maintained this tribal distinction for the 40 years that they wandered in the wilderness. And this distinction between tribes didn't disappear once Israel eventually took possession of the promised land.
These geographical distinctions between the tribes remained. During the conquest of Canaan, Joshua allotted specific parcels of land to each of the tribes of Israel. You can read how Joshua distributed the land to each tribe in the book of Joshua, chapters 13 through 19. Now here's a picture showing us what their allotment looked like. Now, each of the twelve tribes was to live in a geographically distinct area from the other tribes.
I hope you can see that this pattern can be plainly seen in the Old Testament. And when we get to the New Testament, we see that the same pattern of geographical distinction existed between local churches. There is only one church, just like there is only one Israel. But just like Israel was made up of smaller tribes, the church is made up of smaller tribes, too. We call these smaller tribes local churches, and all of the local churches we see in scripture are distinct from one another geographically.
Each local church exists in its own geographical area. Here's a list of all the different local churches we see in the New Testament. The Christians who were a part of the church in Ephesus, for example, weren't also a part of the church in Jerusalem and vice versa. Every believer was a recognized member of one local church. So Jews in the Old Testament didn't jump from tribe to tribe willy-nilly.
They weren't allowed to. And Christians in the New Testament didn't go from church to church willy-nilly either. Tribe hopping wasn't a thing in the Old Testament. Church hopping wasn't a thing and shouldn't be a thing in the new. That's because each tribe and each local church was its own distinct subgroup of God's people, and there was a level of formality involved with belonging to each one.
If this same pattern were to continue today, every Christian would be a part of a particular local church that is unique and distinct from every other local church.
Pattern number five. There have always been specific leaders that oversee the subcommittees of God's people. There have been many men in Israel's history that held a position of leadership over the whole nation. First there were the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then there were the deliverers or the judges, men like Moses, Samuel, and others.
And after them came the long line of kings, beginning with Saul and then David and Solomon and so on. And while these men provided leadership over the entirety of God's people, there were other men under their authority who were appointed to lead the smaller sub-communities of God's people. In Numbers 1:1-16, we see that Moses was the big-L leader over all Israel at that time. And the men mentioned by name in this passage were each heads or leaders of the twelve individual tribes under Moses. In 1 Chronicles 27:16-22, David was king over all Israel.
He was the big l leader. And the men mentioned by name in this passage were leaders over each of the tribes of Israel under David. We can see a pattern of there being one big l leader over the whole group of God's people, with multiple leaders under them providing oversight over the sub-communities of God's people. We can see that pattern plainly in the Old Testament. And we can see it plainly in the New Testament too.
Jesus, he is the chief shepherd over his church. The big l leader in the church in the New Testament. He's the one, the only one. And yet he, like Moses and David, both did appoints under Shepherd's task with providing oversight to the smaller sub-communities of local churches that are under his care. As the church was growing in the first century, we can see that the leadership of each individual church was entrusted to biblically qualified men who were tasked with shepherding the church Jesus is always the chief shepherd, but these men were to be the boots on the ground, so to speak, shepherding Jesus'church.
In a way that would honor Jesus and take care of the ones that he spilled his blood for. The Bible calls these under-shepherds who pastor Jesus's local churches "elders." The apostle Paul says in Acts 14:23 that elders are to be appointed to lead local churches. Jesus's plan for his churches is that each of them have a plurality of elders giving oversight to them. And God gives us the qualifications that these elders must meet if they are to be given the responsibility of shepherding one of God's local churches.
You can read what those qualifications are in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. Jesus is the boss. He calls elders to be the ones who exercise pastoral leadership over each of his local churches. Each local church should have a plurality of elders if it is to be a healthy biblical church. This is the biblical model for leadership in the local church today, and there is no other.
When a local church practices church membership, it identifies those who are called to be elders over the church, to serve it and lead it. And it calls those who are members of the church to submit to the authority that Jesus has given to these men. Church membership does this in a formal way because this is the pattern that we see in the Bible. Pattern number six. Those who are part of the community of God's people have always been numbered.
This is an aspect that some people really don't like about church membership today, the act of counting people and formally numbering those who are a part of the church. And you want to know why I have zero problem with counting our members in gospel city and numbering them? Because God's people are routinely and systematically numbered in both the Old and the New Testaments. Although many people skip reading it, there's actually a book in the Bible called Numbers, and its name kind of gives its purpose away. It numbers people.
That's like why it exists. We see in the Bible the numbering of Israel. From the very inception of the nation onward, the twelve sons of Israel are numbered. 70 is the number of their extended family that went into Egypt. 600,000 men was the count of the nation when they left Egypt 400 years later.
Moses counted the people under his care and divided them up into smaller subunits so that he could care for them better. If you remember, he did this at his father-in-law's advice. Jethro said this to Moses in Exodus, chapter 18, verse two. You should select from all the people able men, God-fearing, trustworthy, and hating dishonest profit placed them over the people as commanders of, get this, thousands, hundreds, fifty s and tens. You have to count people to make these kinds of groups.
We also read in the Bible of censuses being taken of the nation. Now this went sideways one time when King David did it in a dishonorable way, but his sin didn't render the act of counting the number of people in Israel a wrong thing to do in and of itself. The numbering of the people of Israel was so detailed that those in charge could know who belonged to the nation before they were exiled, while they were exiled, and after they came back from being exiled. Read Ezra chapter two, and Nehemiah chapter seven for examples of this detailed numbering. The Old Testament is filled with the detailed numbering of those who not only belong to the nation of Israel but who belong to its individual tribes as well.
And we see this practice of numbering continue on into the New Testament with the church. There were various counts of Jesus's disciples. There was the three, the twelve, the 70, and the 120 at Pentecost. The 3000 who were added to the church at Pentecost were numbered in Act 2:41. In Acts 4:4, we're told that the number of men in the church had come to be 5000.
How did they know it was 5000? They counted them. Every name that is counted and listed in a local church is a name that represents a life that has been radically saved by the grace of God. It's not unbiblical to count such names. And looking at the pattern we see in both the Old and New Testaments, it would be unbiblical not to count them.
So in the practice of church membership at the local church level today, the church needs to number those who belong to it. The church needs to count those who have been born again, been baptized and have been added to their number. And this practice is patterned plainly for us in the Bible, pattern number seven. There have always been clear commands given by God to govern the way his people are to live. God has always called his people to be distinct from the world around them.
This is true of those who lived under the old covenant as a part of Israel, and it's true of those who live under the new covenant as part of the church. But since you couldn't go around back in the day showing everyone that you were circumcised, and you can't go around showing everyone of a video of your baptism today after those one-time events, circumcision or baptism, what is it that distinguishes the people who belong to God and are a part of his special people from everyone else around them who isn't well, it's really a simple concept. Our lives are to be different from those who don't know God. God tells us how to live. He gives us words that we can understand.
He gives us the desire to do what he says. He gives us the ability to do what he says, and he expects us to obey what he says. And it's obedience to his word that makes us stick out as a peculiar people compared to those living in the world around us. God's people don't make up the rules for their own life. It's not a build-your-own-adventure kind of life that God saved us into.
Human beings don't intuitively know how to live the way God wants us to. That's why most of our lives were so jacked up when Christ saved us. We happily turn our lives and our wills and our decision-making over to God. We submit our life to his commands. And Jesus says that his commands are not burdensome, they are life.
They are the pathway to blessing. And they are what defines us and separates us from everyone else in the world who doesn't yet belong to the church. Loving and obeying God's word is what makes us a distinct people from everyone else in the world around us. We see this pattern plainly by observing how Israel was called to live in the Old Testament according to the law that they received from God. And we see it plainly by observing how the church is called to live in the New Testament according to the words we have received from God.
Pattern number eight, there have always been consequences for God's people when they don't live according to God's word. Removal from the community of God's people. This has always been Israel under the old covenant and the church under the new. Israel received parameters from God that were to govern the way that they lived as his people. If they lived within the confines of those parameters, they would have experienced abundant blessing and they did.
When they obeyed, they experienced the fruit of that obedience, and it was so sweet. But there were consequences. When an individual chose to disobey God's commands, they were removed from the gathering of God's people. Sometimes their removal was temporary, and sometimes it was permanent. The law of God went into great detail, outlining the consequences for certain transactions.
In the Old Testament. An individual could be cut off from the people or even put to death for disregarding God's commands on how to live as part of his special people. And when we get to the church in the New Testament, the death penalty is gone when it comes to breaking the law of Christ, but there are still severe ramifications for the one who identifies themselves as a follower of Christ if they outright reject and trespass against God's revealed will in a consistent and ongoing way. It's a process known in the Bible as church discipline. Now, I know that nobody gets excited talking about church discipline, but we have to talk about it because Jesus talked about it and it's something that he instructs his church to practice.
I'm not going to go into much detail about church discipline here. I'm simply going to highlight it because I'll be talking about it later on in this series. But here's the Cole's notes version of it for now. A person who becomes a part of God's special, distinct people does so with the understanding that Jesus is the Lord of their life. That means the person mindfully, willfully, joyfully submits their life to the care and control and authority of Jesus.
Everybody who chooses to follow Jesus chooses to submit their life to trusting and obeying whatever he commands us. Everybody in the church has agreed to this. This isn't a hidden secret that only a few select people know about. We all know it and we all agree to live this way. So what do we do if one of us decides that they aren't going to obey Jesus anymore?
What does the church do if a person who professes to be a Christian decides that they are going to stop living like a Christian? Is the church supposed to ignore their behavior and pretend it's acceptable for a Christian to live like that? No. We're not supposed to turn a blind eye to what they're doing and pretend like everything's okay. Well, what are we supposed to do if this kind of situation ever arises?
We graciously and gently and patiently walk out the process Jesus lays out for us in Matthew, chapter 18, verses 15 through 20. Those who are members of Jesus's church understand this. Those who are members of Jesus's church want this kind of accountability in their life. Well, what if someone doesn't want this kind of accountability in their life? Well, then they don't become members of a local church.
Like I said, we'll talk about this some more in one of our remaining messages in this series, but I can say this about it now. The practice of formal church, sorry. The practice of formal discipline is patterned plainly for us in both testaments, and it would be impossible to practice church discipline the way Jesus instructs his church to without there being a mechanism in place that identifies those who formally belong to a local church. Because when church discipline is walked out all the way to the bitter end in some cases, and a person has to be removed from the church, who or what are they removed from? If there isn't a recognized numbered group of people that they belong to, if a person isn't formally a part of a group, how can they be formally removed from it?
Read Jesus' words for yourself in Matthew, chapter 18, and try to come up with a way that we can obey what Jesus says there without church membership in place at the local church level.
All right, so there we have it. Eight parallels that exist between membership in Israel in the Old Testament and membership in the church in the New Testament. If we put practices like these in place here in Gospel City, where we try to identify whether a person's profession of faith in Christ is genuine, and if we do recognize that someone has heard and received the gospel and we call them to get baptized and expect them to get baptized, and if we call them to formally give themselves to belonging to a local church who has his own elders and is distinct geographically from other faithful local churches, and if we formally number those among us who have not only given themselves to Christ, but have also given themselves to one another to do life together in a meaningful way, and if we teach these people and call these people and expect these people and encourage these people to live their lives according to the word of God, and if these people indicate to us that they welcome the process of biblical discipleship in their lives, even if that means they need to be disciplined, if sin ever becomes a practice in their life, if we shape the way we do life together as Gospel City church according to these eight patterns that we see in scripture, would any of it be unbiblical?
I don't think that we can call any of these things unbiblical because we've just seen in this message how all these things have been patterned for us in the Bible, in both the Old and the New Testaments, by both those who belong to Israel and those who belong to the church. This formality that shapes the identity of God's people is written down for us in the Bible.
And I think the expectation for Christians is that we would continue to observe these same patterns in the church today. At the local church level, these eight things should mark what biblical church membership looks like today. So is the practice of church membership biblical? Well, yes, because we can see membership practiced plainly in the patterns that God's people have observed for the last several thousand years. That's a wrap on this message.
In the next message. In this series, we're going to continue looking at the biblical nature of church membership by taking a look at what Jesus has to say about church membership, and I think you'll be surprised. Make sure you check out that message when you get a chance. Let me pray. Jesus, I just pray as we always pray.
Anytime that we're talking and discussing about your word and your will and your life and your church all the time, Lord, we're just asking that. We just want to know what your will is and we just want to do it. We don't want to just be a part of a church that we make up in our own minds or according to our own image. We want to be a part of a church that you are building, one that you're designing, the one that you've given us instructions for. We want to be a part of that, and we want to experience life in your church to the fullest.
So help all of us continually grow in our knowledge and understanding of what your church is and grow our passion and our desire to be a part of your church that you're building not just around the world what you are, but being a part of the church that you're building in the very community and city and culture that we are a part of. Build your church, Lord Jesus, and make your people passionate about being a part of it in a formal way. Amen.