What is up? I know some of you are asking. I love you actually asked me. What's up with all the German stuff today?
Where do you come up with an Oktoberfest name for a church service? Well, number one, it's fun. And I'm going to show you in a few minutes why that's actually part of what a biblically functioning church has always been. But secondly, because today we're going to spend some time looking, just like our video talked, at the German word for church, it's the word kircea.
Close, right? That's a close enough. Kircea. Now, if you have been looking at the graphic, you see it on my t-shirt, you see it above.
Actually, that means that we are Mendem Hills, if you want to do the German, gherminesch, gherminesch, kircea, Mendem Hills community, church. Now, there's an Italian proverb, and since I'm butchering one language, why not two, there is an Italian proverb that says, tradupore, tradipora, or tradupore, which means, to translate is to betre. Literally, it literally means the translator is a traitor. What it's referring to is the implicit in precision in the act of translating words.
This is even more true when the translation over time, when that mistranslation becomes fixed or in the case of the Bible when it becomes sacred. People can think that the translation is actually the original. When in certain cases, the translation is not only far from the original, but it's actually distinct and different from the original. And that is what we're going to look at today with this one word in mind, church.
Church. So this kickoff Sunday, since this is what we claim to be Mendem Hills community church. This is who we claim we are. It seems to me that once a year in kickoff is a good time.
We should really ask someone about us. Someone existential questions like, what is a church? Where'd that word come from? Like, who are we?
Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? Here's what's interesting. Since the English word for church didn't even exist until about 500 years after Jesus died, what is it that Jesus actually said about church if there was no such word as church?
So let's jump in. If you were here with us during the Cradle to Grave series, we did this year. I put a map up and we talk about where Jesus was going and what he was doing. And if you remember, a lot of the time, most of the things that Jesus did were done in the region of northern Israel in a place called Galilee.
One day from that region, Jesus takes his disciples on a field trip, a walk. It was a pretty good walk by 25 miles by foot, but it was a world away in terms of culture and faith and worldview. Jesus' disciple, Matthew, was an eyewitness. He was there when Jesus spoke these words and he would write them down for us.
This is what Matthew heard Jesus of Nazareth say. When he came to the region of Caesarea, Caesarea, Philippi, he asked his disciples, who do people say the Son of Man is. Jesus takes them on a 25 mile walk to Caesarea, Philippi. Now, that location is unique because you can see in the picture that's going to get put up here.
At that location stood, it was at the base of a cliff and it was a cliff where spring water was flowing. At one time, the water ran directly into the mouth of a cave that was set into the bottom of the cliff. The city of Caesarea Philippi was dominated by not good stuff, immoral activities, pagan worship. In Old Testament times, this area of Israel became a center for the worship of the Canaanite God, Baal.
Later, Caesarea Philippi became the religious center for the worship of the Greek God named Pan. In that cliff that stood above the city, local people would build and there are signs, you can go and visit this. There are signs there. They would build temples and shrines to Pan.
Years later, when the Romans would conquer the territory, Herod, Phil, after himself. But Caesarea Philippi continued to focus on the worship of the Greek gods. Now to the pagan mind, I want you to understand this community. It's very important because Jesus intentionally takes his disciples out here for this conversation.
To the pagan mind, the cave and the spring water, Caesarea Philippi, it created what they believed was a gate to the underworld where the fertility gods lived during the winter. They believed that the city was literally at the gates of the underworld, the gates of hell. The common belief was that their fertility gods lived in the underworld during the winter and that they would return to earth each spring. But in order to induce the return of their god, Pan, each year the people of Caesarea Philippi would engage in some pretty exerated stuff, prostitution.
It was commonplace because it was believed it would call Pan from the underworld, the sexual intercourse between humans and goats. Caesarea Philippi was like the red light district in the world of the disciples. And so you have to imagine when Jesus takes them to the Bourbon Street of their day, right? These guys, these are devout Jews.
They had to be shocked that they would have gone out of their way to avoid any contact with the despicable people in the despicable acts that were committed here. It was standing at these gates of Hades where Jesus asked his disciples the very uncomfortable question. Who do people say I am? Some of you are familiar with his answer, they replied.
Jesus, some say John the Baptist, others say that you're a lie, just still others. You're a liar, one of the prophets. And then Jesus honed in on his disciples and he said, well, who do you say I am? Many of you know that is where Peter comes up with his famous pronouncement, really his divine revelation.
Peter says to Jesus, you are the Messiah, you are the Son of the living God. And it's at this moment when Jesus very famously says to Simon, and I tell you, Simon, that you are Peter, he changes Simon's name to literally to Petros to stone. And on this rock, Jesus said, I will build my church, my church. And I asked how many of you have heard that verse, 99% of you would raise your hand and say I've heard that before, right?
Jesus is establishing his church. Some 2,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, Jesus was setting up his church. Who we are today is a reflection of his church. You and I have to understand, there's a lot of, there's a lot of wait for us to bear here.
We have the responsibility of being and doing and safeguarding and protecting and handing down Jesus's church to the next generation, especially this church, of this size and this community. But there's only one problem. We're church didn't even exist yet. So what was Jesus establishing that you and I have the solemn responsibility of stewarding and reflecting?
What was Jesus establishing that you and I are supposed to be? Existentially again, who even are we, right? What is a church? So here's where we get to a little history, all right?
Jesus, and I know some of you know what, but maybe not everybody does. Jesus doesn't, didn't speak English. English wasn't a language for another 500 years yet. Jesus spoke Aramaic.
And so Peter and the disciples, Matthew who wrote this down, they did not hear Jesus that they mentioned anything about a church. Jesus used the word Ladoth. Ladoth was an Aramaic word. Jesus said, I will build my Ladoth.
And what Ladoth meant, I don't know if we have these graphics, we can put them up as we go. Ladoth was an assembly, it was a gathering. You would take people and they would gather together and they had a purpose. The purpose was to testify or to instruct in a matter of law or to call a witness to testify.
Jesus is saying to Peter, I have come, I am building my Ladoth and it will have a purpose, it will be a community of people that will testify and instruct in witness. Now when these words were written down and recorded, they were not written down in Aramaic, they were written down in Greek. They faithfully transmitted the Aramaic word Ladoth into the word Ekklesia. Ekklesia.
So Jesus says in Greek, I will build my Ekklesia, Ekklesia in Greek meant an assembly of people, a called out group. Now you need to understand, Ekklesia is a word in the Bible but it is not a religious word, it's not a religious word at all. It had no spiritual meaning, it was common. There were Ekklesias around everywhere.
Ekklesia just simply meant it was a gathering of people that were united by a common identity and purpose. In ordinary Greek, it actually often was used to refer to citizens of a city that gathered to decide political matters. In the New Testament, and you'll see why in a minute, in the New Testament almost everywhere that word, Ekklesia is, every time that Jesus mentions the Ekklesia, Paul mentions the Ekklesia, that word for assembly, this people group, this movement, almost everywhere in Greek, the translator in English changed the word to church, but that was not what Jesus said. Or is it in our traditional way of thinking what a church is?
You can do this and I've done it all week. You can look up, you can look it up in German, you can look it up in English, you can look it up in every dictionary. Church is usually defined as either a building or a formalized religious structure. This is not what Jesus was starting.
In fact, there are actually three places in the New Testament where the word Ekklesia appears but it's translated the way it should have been translated, translated as assembly. They all take place in the book of Acts, I'm going to give you one to prove the point. Luke writes a story about Paul, the apostle Paul being in the town of Ephes. And Paul, preaching the gospel of Jesus was causing a lot of problems for the idol makers of the city.
And so the idol makers form a mob and they begin to chase Paul out of town. Here's what the verse says. The assembly, which is the way it was translated in English, the word Ekklesia was there, the assembly was in confusing. Some were shouting one thing and some another.
Most of the people did not even know why they were there. Now that might describe you this morning in church, right? But that was not the church. It was translated faithfully in the New Testament only three times in the Ekklesia in Acts, chapter 19.
I think the word of cleasiness shows up 115 times. It was translated correctly three. So now let me make this modern day impractical for you. Why is this an issue?
Well, let's see. Put our first picture up. What do we have in this picture? It's a building.
That's a building. That is not a church. It is not an Ekklesia. Okay?
Let's put the next picture up. Well, do you have the menu order I gave you? What is that? We'll go with the order they're coming up.
That's the Ekklesia, right? Excuse me. It's not. That's a church.
That's a building. That's a building that seems to kind of emit because it's grandeur and it's familiarity. It speaks of kind of a formalized controlled, regulated, centralized, state-sanctioned, often religion, right? But that is not an Ekklesia.
You see it and you think that that's what Jesus said He came to build. That is not what Jesus said He came to build. Now, let's put up the next one. What is that?
That's an Ekklesia. That's an Ekklesia. We just had several of them this summer, right? It is a gathering of people committed to a common cause.
That's an Ekklesia. That's the word Jesus said I'm coming to build, my Ekklesia. As Christians we should understand, that is not, and we get confused. Jesus is Ekklesia.
Please keep that in mind over these next few months. I think we have one final picture of Ekklesia. It's going to be put that up. There you have it.
That, you know what that is right there? Those are patriotic Americans getting ready to root on America's team. The Dallas Cowboys do their sixth Super Bowl title this year. Just to show you how unholy, how common, how pedestrian the word is, Ekklesia is.
You may not like it, but that is an Ekklesia. Why? It is a people group that are called out, I would argue, from reality and united by the common identity of being, as one of you shouted out, losers with the shared purpose of pain. Back to our story.
Jesus came to start an Ekklesia, not a church. So for the first 300 years after Jesus was resurrected, his Ekklesia, these assemblies of people, these gatherings of people with a purpose, in some sense a political one, remember that's what the Greeks used to work for. They were an assembly of people that were declaring and testifying and instructing and witnessing to a political truth that Jesus was King not Caesar, that he was the one and only Lord, the son of the one God, the most high God, who proved by his resurrection, which they had witnessed, that he was who he said he was, the way, the truth and the life, and that no one came to the Father except by him. They testified to the truth that Jesus had taught them that God so loved the world, he said to his one and only son, that whoever believes in him and trusts their lives to him, they will not die, but they will have eternal life.
And though it was oppressed and persecuted, the Ekklesia Jesus established was the most powerful movement on earth. For 300 years it could not be stopped. The Ekklesia with no buildings, with no formalized religious structure. The Ekklesia, the assembly was so influential in reaching cities and regions, that in 325 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity.
And in unbelievable, it's only something that could have happened if God was involved in it. In unbelievable term events, the empire that had killed Jesus and persecuted his Ekklesia in 380 AD, Roman emperor, theodosius, the great, makes Christianity the state religion of the entire Roman Empire, which would seem like a huge win for the assembly. But as I'm going to show you, it actually began its unraveling. And the purpose and the identity of the assembly became the state religion in Rome, right?
It began, it became safe for the people to begin to gather. They no longer, we read about the church if you're familiar with churches or in Acts chapter 2, they were meeting at homes. They no longer had to do that. They could be out, anywhere.
It was encouraged by the state. So they began to meet in public, in buildings, in some cases they were taking over the temples of these deposed, outlawed gods. So when the writers of the New Testament tried to describe in the Greek language, where the assembly that Jesus started was meeting, they used the Greek word kurea con, kurea con. Again, just like echosia, it was not a religious word.
They were simply describing where the echosia, the movement, met. In Greek, kurea con meant belonging to the Lord or the Lord's house. But it did not mean the Lord Jesus. It just meant like the owner's house.
It could be the landlord's house. It could be the land owner's house. If he had slaves, it could be the slave master's house. It was simply where the echosia of the Lord Jesus was meeting.
Nothing religious about the word again. Now Rome, who's official language is Latin, when the state of Rome gets involved in ruling and controlling this church that they're now establishing, the Bible, of course, needs to be translated from Greek into the language of the empire. How do you translate the word echosia? There was no clear Latin word for it.
So various terms were proposed. This is fascinating. Tertullian, who was an early church father, he used the word kurea, court. Augustine famously described echosia as the civitas de, the city of God.
One surprisingly common term used by various Greek writers to describe Jesus's echosia was the ossos, or party. It was actually generally used to refer to a group of revelers marching through the city streets with dance and song. The point is that many of the early writers did not know how to translate or describe the term echosia, but the terms they proposed kind of offer some tantalizing clues as how the church functioned and how it was viewed in its early days. If you're wondering why we're having an october fest party, this should be what we're known for, at least one of the things, right?
It's historical. It was what they were described as being. All right, I'm going to land this history lesson at a moment, but this is super important to understand Rome. You have to understand now that church is intermingled with the empire.
You have now formalized religious structures that are put in place, the Bible, because there's no printing press. Many of them, the only ones that existed are handwritten and written in Latin. Only 15% of the Roman Empire is littered. So you have a movement, you have an assembly that's now becoming something quite different.
It's becoming structured, it's becoming controlled, it's becoming formalized, overseen, and with hardly any scripture copies available on the ones that were in Latin, the people ended up being controlled by the men and it was always men that were in charge of the building. And these were grand buildings, right? We just looked at one huge colossal, yes awe-inspiring, but also fear-inducing intimidating buildings. And the state church squeezed the ecclesia into its mold, it gained control of its leadership for its own personal gain.
And for, listen up, church is interesting. For the next 1,000 years, formalized religion slowly takes over the ecclesia like yeast in the jungle. This all began in the fourth century. In the 16th century, some 1,200 years later, something happened that unbound this now neutered ecclesia.
As Christianity was beginning to spread around the world, fewer and fewer people spoke Latin. All they knew of Jesus was what they read in their Bibles because they didn't have a Bible. The only thing they knew about Jesus and what he had taught and what he said was what the leaders of the religious movement told them, what the rulers of the building told them, and it was all in Latin. All of the services were in Latin, and most people couldn't understand them.
Until about a man by the name of Walter Tyndale, he lived in England, Walter Tyndale became so passionate about translating the Bible into English for the common people to read, it overtook his mission, overtook his life. That translation is now referred to as the Tyndale translation, but Tyndale did something that the religious leaders didn't like. Tyndale did not take the approved Latin version of the scriptures. Tyndale went back to the Greek for the New Testament.
Tyndale went back to the Hebrew for the Old Testament. He runs into real problems when he reads what Matthew had heard in Greek that Jesus said in Caesarea Philippi, and he translates it correctly. He translates the Greek word echosia as congregation as opposed to the word church. This word church had been used for centuries.
Remember the Greek word for the place where the assembly had met? Churea Khan? When Christianity got to Germany, that word was translating it to German, and the word was kirsiah, meaning house of the Lord, and slowly over time it became to be known as a building where Christians worship. English which is a language from Germanic derivation, they translated that word kirsiah phonetically into church.
And around the world, now for centuries the echosia of Jesus winds up becoming, well at least in English, church, and the meaning becomes a formalized religion or a building. Tyndale, in a move that would cost him his life, Tyndale dies for the accurate translation of the Greek Bible into English. Tyndale begins to inform people he didn't come to start this. They're lying to you.
They're controlling you. Jesus came to start a movement. Jesus came to start an assembly, not a formalized structure, not a state-influenced religion. Jesus did not come to start cathedrals.
Jesus didn't come to build buildings. Tyndale insists that Jesus came to start assemblies and movements of people, and this accurate translation of this one word put the entire religious empire, especially back in Rome in jeopardy. I want you to understand how important this is, because Tyndale's translation would become public, and the correct translation of Matthew 1618 would begin to be read by the masses, and it presents a real clear and present danger to the structure of the religious institutions, and Tyndale was threatened to change it back to church. He wouldn't do it.
He winds up from England fleeing to Germany, fleeing for his life, where the printing press is just being invented, the famous Gutenberg press. Some of you know the first thing that was printed from the Gutenberg press was the Bible, but guess what language it was printed in? Latin. No one could read it, except the ruling and controlling authorities of the dead.
In Germany, Tyndale begins to print English copies of some of his scriptures, and he's having them smuggled back to his country, back to his people. The people of England begin to read the words of Jesus, their Lord, in their own language for the very first time. But again, this isn't just controversial. If his was like divisive, this was religious shattering, Tyndale had two great quotes I came across this week.
I want to share them with you. One is a direct quote. He was being confronted by a religious leader about what he was doing, his mission to get the Bible out to the people in their own language. Here's what he said.
Listen to this. Tyndale said, if God spares my life, air many years, I will cause a boy who drives a plow to know more of the scriptures than you do. I mean, something like that, saying something like that to the guys in charge, good guy, good guy, good guy, and he did. The king and the state conspired.
Tyndale was betrayed by a friend. He was turned over to the authorities. He was tied to a pole, a rope was placed around his neck, and he was strangled to death. And upon his death, his body was burned to the state for being what the church labeled a heretic, because he wanted you to know the words of Jesus.
These were his dying words. Lord, open the king of England's eyes. The accurate translation of Jesus' words put into the language of the common man. You and I are in this room today because of Walter Tyndale.
And yet, religion, and I know many of us have experienced this. Some of you are wrestling with it right now. Religion does not die easy. Back in England, again, where the church and the state now are intertwined again, this time in England, the king demands that there be an official English translation of the Bible.
So in 1604, a new translation project is started. It was called the King James' Authorized Version of the Bible. The KJ, the old, give me just a minute, the old KJ, the king authorized, King James, deploys 47 translators for the project. And there are 15 rules for translation.
The 15 rules of translation, Article 3 says this, the word church may not be translated to congregation. Why? Because by translating Ekklesi as church instead of assembly or congregation, King James and the state, they could accomplish their goal of maintaining power by defining Christ's body as the Lord's house instead of assembly. The King James' Authorized Version was published in 1611.
It grew in popularity. The word church is in there 115 times instead of assembly. And it is now the best selling. It has been the most popular number one selling translation of the Bible for 500 years.
This is why almost all of us grew up thinking Jesus came to start a church. Even this morning. That's what most of us think is that Jesus came to start a religion. Some of you this morning, and I understand why.
Some of us have had such bad tastes in our mouths about church and about religion. And a lot of times it's with good cause. Because when a church gets mixed up with the state, it appeared the Ekklesi, I had one, but it had the movement, got neutered, it got weak, it got twisted, it got used for personal gain and power and control. And that's what happened when the assembly, when the gathering became the church.
And here's why it matters. Here's why Tyndale dies. Here's why Tyndale was killed. Because you can control a church if it's a place, if it's a building, if it's state run, if it's centralized, if it's a controlled religion with a hierarchy of rulers.
You can get it to do what you can get the common man to do what you want them to do. It can run for the benefit of a few. But that is not what Jesus came to start. If it's a church and not an assembly, what is the church concerned about?
The church is concerned about the church. It begins to think primarily about its own survival, about its own edification and gratification and grandeur. But that is not what Jesus came for. I want you to go back when you think about what Jesus is doing, where he is when he's having this conversation.
Jesus takes his disciples on a 25 mile walk from gallery to the worst place he could have taken. And says the Rio Felpi. They're totally uncomfortable. The church never would go to a place like this.
And it's in that spot. At the gates of hell. That Jesus explains what he's starting. He tells Peter, I tell you you you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church.
And the gates of Hades will not overcome it. Jesus stands at the literal gates of hell and he commissions his assembly. He commissions the called out ones. He commissions his community of followers with a clear challenge.
He does not want his followers to hide from evil. He wants them to storm the gates of hell. We hear those words and we internalize them and we think about them the wrong way. We think we're supposed to stand against evil as if evil's coming for us.
Not to let it in, whatever you do, build a wall's higher. Don't let it corrupt you, have your gates up. But that's not what Jesus was saying nor was it what he was starting. Jesus was pointing out that the gates of hell are defensive in nature.
But that his assembly would be on offense against them. So strong would the assembly of believers be, so strong with the movement of Jesus be that the gates of hell would not withstand them. His assembly was supposed to be storming the gates of hell and not sitting in pews in buildings. Of course they were to gather.
Don't get me wrong, we are to gather. That's very clear from the Scriptures. But the point of the church was not the gathering. It was the going.
He made it quite clear, right? We all march real in the same mission statement. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach them know they have everything I've commanded you.
And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. We get tripped up by this all the time. Because if the church is a building then the church is, well it's open to close. You know how we got tripped up by this?
We just got tripped up by this recently. So many Christians went crazy when the church doors were closed by COVID mandates. Because we don't understand what we are. We have a misunderstanding what the church is.
You can close a church. You can't close an ecclesia. It's always open. It's always on the move.
In fact, it actually tends to do better under oppression anyway. We were more worried just a couple of years ago about the church doors being closed than our hearts being opened. We were more worried about the building and the gathering than we were about being a living, breathing reflection of our Lord, looking like Him, reflecting Him well to our neighbors. If Jesus came to start a church, then this is the house of the Lord, but that is not what this is.
You and I are in a building. But can I tell you something? Do you know who you are? Do you know what you are?
Paul told the church in Corinth, do you not know that your body is our temple is the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You are the church. You are the Christ.
Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Honor God. You are the church. You are the ecclesia.
You know, some people come to church and they're like, oh, I would never say a curse word in church. It's church. But once I get in the parking lot, I'm going to let them fly. Right?
It's a total misunderstanding. This building is not holy. You are. You are.
There are, and I say it most weeks, 96,176 people who live within one town of our church that don't know have no relationship with the living God. Jesus stood at the gates of hell and he told his assembly, go and find them, go and love them, go bring them to me. Jesus never commissioned us to sit within the walls of our church. Jesus commissioned us to engage the culture.
And I want to thank you, Mendem Hill's community church, for being his church. You're unbelievable. You're unbelievable. I see it everywhere I look.
I see it in what you've done in Guatemala. There are no more houses to build in the Guatemala City garbage dump, primarily because of Mendem Hill's ecclesia. You did that. This, I became aware of this just a couple weeks ago.
We have a little video here. It's just a couple seconds. Check this out and I'll explain this. So somebody texted me that.
It wasn't sent to Mendem Hill's community church. You want to know why? Mendem Hill's didn't do that. There was a group of people that went down there on those couple weeks we went this summer and they heard that those children were only getting maybe one or two meals a day.
I don't even know the details of this because nobody brought it back to the church and said, hey John could you run this through all of the committees here and maybe if you took some money away from something else we'd give somebody here. I didn't even become aware of this until the other day. But a group of you decided that it was not enough for these children to only have a couple of meals a week. They went to the leaders of the ministry we partnered with and said what would it take so we could give them five meals a week.
And they said it would take a lot of money. And a group of you have already raised and given to Potters House over $90,000 to provide food for those kids. That's unbelievable. The church did not do that.
The ecclesia did that. It's happening over and over again. I had my friend Bernie Katzie just became passionate about feeding the homeless in Newark and he came to me with the idea and he's like I think the church should do this. And I said I don't think the church should do this.
I said I think you should do this. And Bernie and his friends, many of you are part of his team now. You started a nonprofit called Sparrow House. You're now feeding a thousand people a week in Newark.
Do you know what the church had to do with that? Nothing. Do you know what the ecclesia had to do with it? Everything.
Do you see the difference? I have a friend, Sarah Kuken, several years ago she came to me and she said there's a lot of us that run here and I was thinking maybe I could start a running club and we could kind of promote it through the church. And I said I don't think you should do that. I think you should go and start something and just see what God does.
And she started something called Grace and Pace. And this thing has just been exploding. And now people around town are running with Sarah and praying before their races. Church didn't do anything there.
The ecclesia did though. This is who we are. This is who we've been. And this year as we kick off it is increasingly who the Lord is calling us to be.
And so today, today we're going to walk out of here and we're going to celebrate and party and have fun because that is one of the things we should be known for. But today, I want you to get into a group. Please hear me on this subgroup. Any group, maybe many groups.
Why? Because ecclesia, do you remember what it means? It means the called out ones. Jesus is called out followers.
People who are no longer conforming to the image of the world but are being conformed to the image of Jesus. They are called out of the world to look like him, to demonstrate him, to declare him. And there is no better way. Please hear me.
There is no better way for you to be conformed to the image of Christ than through community. It is the tool through which God works. You grow in circles much more than you will ever grow in rows. Please, if you are not in a group, please play the part in the ecclesia.
Be the called out ones. Go see, Janice. And friends, this ecclesia, this gathering, we do not function without everyone in the body functioning as part of the body. If you believe in the power of this assembly, if this movement is important to you, I have to ask you, are you playing a part in it?
There are only four full-time employees at this church, which is hard to believe when you look around. To be fair, we have a couple of part-timers who are doing more than full-time. But if you believe in the power of the assembly, there are tables out there. There is a serve table.
There is a children's ministry table. Play your part in the assembly. If you are not serving, you are simply consuming. This is not the vision for Jesus' assembly.
Please play your part. So today we celebrate for that is what we should be known for. I hope everybody drives by, sees the cop outside and goes, what the heck is going on here? But tomorrow, let the gates of hell tremble for the ecclesia of Menom Hill's community church is on the move.
Let's stand in close.