Ecclesiology – What is the church? – Kyle Dingus

https://www.fourthavenue.church/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/09212025-WorshipWEB-1.m4a   Ecclesiology An excerpt of today’s message on Ecclesiology. Good morning church! We are continuing our series on Foundations. Looking at the foundational core truths of the Christian faith. We’ve talked a lot about scripture and how scripture is a great authority, the primary authority for what we know about God and what we know about truth and how we ought to live our lives, good lives and all of that. We talked about the nature of God, who God is. We talked about the nature of human beings and how we relate to God. We talked about Jesus, the one who is fully God and fully man and leads us into salvation. We talked about the work of Jesus on the cross and resurrection. We talked last week about the Holy Spirit and how the spirit fills those who are in Christ and we live empowered by the Holy Spirit. This week we were talking about the Holy Spirit in a communal context, in a corporate context meaning the church. The study of the church is called Ecclesiology coming from the Greek word “ekklesia” which means gathering or assembly. We’re diving into this morning the nature of the church and what’s the purpose, the function of the church. This topic is a really big one both in terms of the breadth and content that’s possible for us to talk about. There’s a lot we could talk about from the New Testament and it’s also important to talk about the practicality of how we operate as a church but also how we live our lives as individuals because we want to lean into Jesus’ vision of the church. And if we don’t lean into Jesus’ vision of the church we are going to drift towards whatever is easy, whatever is trendy in the world, whatever is self gratifying, or whatever makes us feel good about ourselves. Without a good view of the church we will fail to model what a healthy community is and what that can be to the rest of the world and we could actually end up pushing the world further away. Not because of Gospel offense but because of our own self righteousness and in judgement that we show or the other side of the pendulum that we look no different than anybody else in the world.