Church Buildings Are Important #9

A beautiful corporate worship space was not the idea of mere men. The Great Commission taken in comprehensive context places explicit responsibility upon believers to own physical property and build appropriate buildings where disciples can continue to honor God by gathering weekly for corporate worship and declare the Gospel of His kingdom to the whole world from those strategic, decentralized, sanctified, set-apart, and holy locations. Moses was entrusted with blueprints explaining exactly how to construct a worship space for the Hebrew people under their particular covenant, and it cost everyone involved treasure and sacrifice given out of respect for God’s command that a proper place of worship be built. While we acknowledge that our new covenant does not necessarily require us to construct an exact replica of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, it does extend the same principles to our present-day pursuit of an honorable gathering space for worshiping God as a body of believers on the first day of the week. Ironically, a single lonely verse (1 Corinthians 6:19), where the Apostle Paul rebukes believers who are sinning sexually and makes a point to illustrate how tremendous the price was for Christ to save our lives, is used by people in our time to erringly suggest we "don’t need church buildings." This is, at best, very poor interpretation of the Bible, and at worst, denigrating to the price Jesus truly paid to establish His kingdom via the church.