Hope of the Church

What is the purpose of the Church? What we believe our end goal is determines our answer. When the focus is keeping people out of hell, we lean toward sin management. When we focus on souls going to heaven, we tend toward hard sell tactics for quick conversions and largely ignore other issues going on in their lives. Each of these focuses (while simplified for the sake of my point) has a point in the larger discussion but standing alone the points are too narrow. The church sometimes gets viewed as a kind of holy holding station where God’s people bide their time till we can escape this place. This view of Christianity has brought the often-quoted critique from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.” In this episode, we will explore what the purpose of the church is in view of what God is doing to bring about his New Creation.