Unless you have some familiarity with the Church of God (Anderson), this won't mean much. But if you do have more than a passing interest, this may mean a whole lot. I am attempting to try and answer a question about the Church of God. The question is, "Who are we?" Ever since I started into ministry, I have both been confronted by that question and have struggled with the same. Yesterday, Joanie and I went to a local sandwich shop that just opened. Eager to meet new customers, one of the guys in the shop noticed my notebook and the religious overtones suggested by it. He remarked on it, asked to sit down and struck up a conversation about our relationship to God. Quickly he got to the question about our church affiliation. When I told him Church of God, he asked me the question. THE question: "Church of God? Who are they?" How do you answer that?I tried to give an analogy - we are close to the Nazarene Church or the Wesleyan Church. Of course, unless you know those churches, that doesn't mean much. I could have told him we were out of the Pietistic Movement and had both Arminian and Wesleyan theological roots, but I don't know if that would help most (it didn't help him). I could pull out the old name dropper idea - the church of Bill Gaither and Sandi Patti. But you would have to know them to know what I was talking about and even knowing who they are, how does that define who the Church of God is? Do I give a list of doctrines? Do I explain how a normal service is structured (how is a normal Church of God service structured, anyway?) or talk about what we preach? Does anyone outside of a deep Christian experience understand what it means when we say we are a holiness movement? So, I ask again, who are we?
I know we live in a soundbite era and that the gospel resists being reduced to a soundbite, but what do you say when someone with limited Christian awareness asks who we are? How do you describe the Church to someone who doesn't have an intimate experience with a local church? How do you describe belief to those who don't have a vocabulary of religious terms? Well, I need some help. As a matter of fact, I will be dedicating the next several years of my life to try and figure out how to help this Movement called the Church of God to find some effective way of describing itself or understanding itself.
Will you help me? If you have any insights to give, give them to me. Post them here. If you don't have a strong biblical or local church background, help me understand what you want to know when you ask someone what their church is all about or what you want to know when you ask someone where they go to church. If you are part of the Church of God, how do you answer that question when it gets posed to you? Help me learn. I await your answers, questions, insights, and ramblings.
Sincerely,
A Fellow Struggler
2 comments:
one of the things i find most interesting about the Church of G-d is that it was never really inted at first to be a denomination like it has become because the basic doctrine of the Church of G-d was that there shouldn't be denominations and memberships: the basic belief that we are all one in Christ. i believe that is what sets it apart most simply and fundamentally from its origins. i don't know as much about the history, roots, and doctrines of it, but that is what stands out to me first.
You are absolutely correct micah, and the church of God (there is no reason to extract or leave out the "o" I personally prefer to reference the name as "GOD",as opposed to the humanization of "God". Just as the word Church has been misrepresented, to the point of invisibility.
y2kpastor says follow "God's Church of God"
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