The Purpose of Church

Welcome to another edition of the Theology Throwdown. This is where all of.

The different podcasters from the Christian podcast community are welcome to come in together where we can discuss our theological differences. Well, there's not always as much differences as we might think.

We usually come to a lot of agreement, but we do it in love and charity. So we're, as we usually do, we'll give you a topic, then we're gonna go around to introduce everyone who's currently here, let you know about them and their podcast, and then we're gonna jump into the topic.

The Purpose of Church and Why Believers Gather

And today's topic is the purpose of church. And so that's what we're gonna be discussing tonight. I'm gonna start with in the order in which people came in, so Mr. A .M. Brewster, if you don't mind introducing.

Yourself and your podcast. I disagree. You're all wrong. My position...oh, I'm sorry. That's later, okay. In a loving way. Yeah, yeah, sorry. My name is Aaron Brewster. I have two podcasts on the Christian podcast community, the first of which is Truth Love Parent, which is, as you can imagine, all about parenting.

And we have over 500 episodes. And the other one is called The Celebration of God, which is about personal discipleship and worship. And that one, I think, has over a hundred episodes. And those are both podcasts that are part of my ministry, Evermind Ministries, and we have an app called the Evermind app.

And if you go to evermindministries .com, you can download that Evermind app for free and get access to all of our stuff, our podcasts, our online courses, all the things that.

We do. All right, next in was Rebecca. She's got to unmute herself. Hi, I am Rebecca,.

And I am the host of One Little Candle podcast. And at One Little Candle, we tackle all kinds of subjects. Subjects that affect our daily Christian lives. And my mission is to help believers, to equip them to be able to be the light that God has called us to be.

And so during, you know, not only do I have, sometimes I have special guests, sometimes it's just me. But actually my latest episode is about He Gets Us, because that movement's kind of back in the news again.

So I did a reboot of that, if you want to check that out. But yes, I want to just equip people to be that light. And so I provide the listener at the end of the show with some practical guidance and suggestions as to how to, you know, apply our Christian principles to their everyday.

Lives. All right, next in was Eve, followed by her co-host Tim. So I'll let you introduce your podcast, Eve, and yourself, and then we'll just hand it over to Tim so people can get used to hearing his voice when he speaks.

Yes, so I am Eve.

Franklin, and I am one of the co-hosts of Are You Just Watching?, in which we talk about movies and other various forms of entertainment from a Christian worldview. That doesn't mean that we're just necessarily reviewing a movie, though we do typically touch on what is good and bad in a movie, but it's also just applying the Christian worldview to the concepts and themes of the movie.

And if you're interested in doing that yourself, you can pick up my book, Are You Just Watching?, which is a very short and easy to use workbook to kind of teach you how to apply your Christian worldview to your entertainment.

And you can find that on Amazon if you are so interested. And my co-host is Tim Martin. You have to.

Unmute yourself, though, Tim. You are a professional after all.

Well, I'm certified, certifiable. Can you guys hear me? Yep. Okay, good deal. I realized this as you were starting the recording that I didn't do any of my podcast rig setup. I was still talking on the speakers and camera mic.

My name is Tim Martin. I am the Ed McMahon to Eve's Johnny Carson for Are You Just Watching? And I am a Christian, a father, a grandfather, and a voice engineer for the Christian Broadcasting Network.

I've been reviewing movies with Eve now for, wow, what is it, eight years? And been having a great time doing it. I appreciate the invite to join you guys tonight.

All right, thanks. And my name is Andrew Rappaport. I'm the host of this podcast along with a couple other podcasts I do, Andrew Rappaport's Rappaport, which is a weekly show where we go into biblical interpretations and applications for the Christian life.

And then I also have a live stream on Thursday nights, which we probably are going to be moving to Sunday nights. But it is, you can go to apologeticslive .com. We always put the times, the topics, you can watch it from there.

And you can join and ask any question. As I tell my audience in that show, I can answer any question you have about God and the Bible. And if you doubt it, feel free to come on in, give me your hardest question.

Just remember, when I say I don't know, that's a perfectly good answer. So with that, I'm going to just give a shout out to Garrett Hampton. He is from Schoolhouse Rocked podcast. He cannot make it tonight.

He's if you're a regular listener to this podcast, you know that name. He's been on many of them. He was dealing with a little bit of an emergency with his family. So he just asked if we could keep his family in prayer.

Don't have any more details than that. So just want to give the shout out if folks could be praying for the Hampton family. So with that, let's talk about church. You know, I think a lot of people, when we think back to what was going on with COVID, when people were having to be at home, having church over Zoom, there's a lot of impacts I think it had to church.

Why go to church? We saw a lot of churches that never recovered, actually. I do think that there were a lot of people who used to go to churches that they knew were bad churches. They never had an opportunity to go somewhere else, and with their church being closed, I know the church that I was at, we used to get a lot of people every week, new people coming in, because we were open.

And I think there were a lot of churches that had that, and some lost a lot of members and some gained a lot of members. But a big question that I remember people discussing, as there was the discussion over should you open the church or not, is why should we gather for church?

Why gather together? And I think that's a good starting point for us, because the word, let me just start with the word for church, and after you guys talk, I'll give a lengthier explanation of what the church, what I say, what I think the church is from my book, What Do We Believe?, where I go through the history of it.

But the word church means, it's from a Greek, ekklesia, to gather together. So, it's kind of in the name of church for us to gather. But I want to ask, you know, I'm going to throw this one out to Eve first, is just ask the question of why should we gather?

I think we should, yeah,.

Sorry, I was looking up Scripture while you were talking, I was like, don't look at me yet, I'm looking up Scripture! So I think we do it because we were told to. I mean, there are several places in the New Testament, and I haven't quite got to one of them yet, but there are several places in the New Testament where they tell us in the epistles from the Apostles and other places that we should not forsake gathering together, and that we are to uphold each other, and love each other, and do good for each other, and all of those things come out of being with each other in person, and being the hand of Christ in the brethren's life, you know, so we're to be together in order to be the church, and that doesn't necessarily mean a building, that doesn't mean a denomination, it doesn't mean anything like that, it just means a fellowship of believers working together, pulling together, I guess, in the work for the Lord, and doing it together, and encouraging one another, upholding one another in prayer, and all of those things that community is.

And I think the passage you were thinking of specifically was Hebrews 10, 25. I'll just read that, but I'll start at verse 23, just so we have the context. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful, and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.

And that's going to bring us to a topic later, I'm going to talk about the one another's, but Aaron, what would you say? Why should the Church gather? I mean, can we just meet over Zoom? I mean, we're using technology for us having this podcast, we're kind of meeting over Zoom, is this Church, is this a good way to gather?

What are your thoughts?

Well, yeah, no, I think the answer to your question is no, but there is still a caveat, I'll hopefully touch on it. I think when most of us, when the average individual thinks Church, the big thing that comes to their mind is the preaching and listening to a sermon.

Okay, now there are other, quote unquote, churches out there that they don't think sermon at all in any way, shape, or form, they think play or concert or whatever else, but I think that's probably the main thing, you invite somebody who's a stranger to Church to come to Church with you, and they're imagining that they're going to go and listen to a pastor.

And that's a big part of it, but I think to a large degree, that has become in our churches, one of the only things that is happening. And again, not that that's bad, that, you know, the pastor is getting up there and preaching, I think that's obviously fantastic, it's a necessary part of it, but it's only one part.

And it's really easy, you know, and you see this in many churches, you know, the pastor is kind of responsible for everything. If there's someone to be visited in the hospital, pastor goes and do it. If there's, you know, back in the day when we used to do door-to-door evangelism, you know, it was expected that the pastor did that, but nobody else did.

And I think that mindset just kind of made Church about what the pastor does. So, but we see in Ephesians 4 .15 that God gave us a pastor specifically for one unique purpose, and that is to equip us for the work of the ministry.

And then the question has to be, well, what is the work of the ministry? And you actually just said that you want to talk about the one another's later, but to oversimplify it, the work of the ministry is the one another's, those 30-some things that we are supposed to do with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

And that is very difficult to do over Zoom. Like all of us meeting together, it's going to be hard for us to truly one another each other to the same degree that we can individually one-on-one. And this is where I kind of gave a little bit of a caveat.

I mean, yes, Andrew, you and I can one another each other to one degree or another individually as you were meeting on Zoom. But no, I don't think that that should be the model of our one another, and that should the model for our work of the ministry and church, because I think we all know well enough that we're too prone to being superficial as it is, and this dynamic definitely allows for us to be super superficial.

Gathering in Person Versus Meeting Online

So let me ask this as a question. I'll toss this one out. We'll give this one to Tim first. What does it mean to gather? Because if you think about this, Tim, 50 years ago, there probably would have been only one thought of what it means to get together, to gather together.

If we go even further back, maybe 200 years ago, there would have been one, right? Maybe if we do 50 years ago, people might say telephone is a way of gathering. But I think that now with the technology we have, we can see people's faces now, even though we're not together.

The idea of getting together kind of in a lot of people's minds is morphing, where they're having more online dialogues and relationships. What do you think it means to gather together?

So I figure that's sort of a two-part answer. The first part is secular. The second part is theological. The secular portion is, you know, we go back to the beginning of the pandemic, and look, my church, like so many others, had to scramble to create an online or remote presence so that we could continue sending the message out, you know, having the sermon, having the worship.

But we never, you know, sitting in the living room and singing along with the worship team when they're on the TV just is not the same as when you're in a congregation and everybody is singing. There is a gestalt that happens when we all worship together and we are among friends.

You might even call it a mob complex, you know. We're all for a singular purpose, and we're building each other up and sharpening each other's iron. And while Aaron was talking, I was actually thinking about James 5, verse 16.

Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is very powerful in its effect. And that really, it goes to show how important it is for us not only to gather together to worship and to learn to study scripture, but to also be intimate with one another.

When we have a men's group at our church, and part of the reason that we do that is because, you know, men in society today, with no apologies to LGBTQ face a very different unique situation from women and from children.

And when we gather together, we're able to understand each other in a way that we can't when we're among a more diverse subsection. So gathering together like that and the intimacy helps to reinforce and build our faith.

It is interesting that you brought up the James passage, because before what you read, and I actually, this may be controversial for some, but I'll just explain my view with it. But when you look at verse 13, there's a context that says, is anyone among you suffering?

Then he must pray. Is anyone cheerful? He must sing. Is anyone among you sick? Now, what a lot of people do is they take this to mean sickness. In the context, and the word here could better be explained weak.

And so I think in the context of suffering, he's saying, are any of you weak? He's talking about prayer, right? They must pray. Then he says, if any of you are weak, then he must call the elders of the church and they'll pray over him.

And it talks about the anointing oil. I think that is for municipal purposes. But I think the way I understand this passage is there's times, I don't know, folks, if you have experienced this, where you're just so spiritually beaten up, you're kind of too weak to pray.

You just don't even know how to pray. And just having another brother or sister just come alongside and pray for you, and all of a sudden that can strengthen you spiritually and help you to be able to pray.

And that's what I think he's talking about here. But could you do that over Zoom? Maybe, like Tim was saying, maybe, but not really.

Can I just speak to this real quick? I agree. I really do. I agree with Andrew. I agree with Tim. I do not believe that we can have real life-on-life, mature, intimate, robust relationships on Zoom.

I do 100 want to make that very clear. However, as a biblical counselor, whose the majority of my counseling is virtual, there is a lot that can happen over a medium like this when both parties are dedicated to having that openness and that intimacy.

I think, though, the key that we're talking about here is the concept of the ecclesia, the church, God's local representative body of believers coming together. And that doesn't work in a Zoom setting.

I mean, for any of us here to really accomplish anything, one person has to be speaking at a time, and we can't really break off and have those intimate relationships. But within the church setting, we can all gather in a room, and we can all be involved in individual conversations that can then move, and we can sharpen somebody else in a much more dynamic way that can happen in a Zoom setting or in a virtual reality type of a setting.

Yeah, and let me get Rebecca's thoughts on this, is during COVID, I know that I experienced because when it first happened, we were in a building that was, we rented a building that was a city-owned building.

So the township shut it down. We had no choice. We gathered as much as we could, but we would meet and do Zoom, like Aaron's saying. And it would be a thing where in Zoom, you can only have one person talking at a time where at church, you and I could be talking while Aaron is talking to Tim, and you have multiple conversations going on and they're all around you.

It's not everyone just sitting listening to one. When we talk about what it means to gather, what do you experience as the differences gathering online versus gathering in person? You know, when you're at church.

I think there's a huge difference. I mean, for me personally, our church was closed for a while during COVID. And so we did the, well, Facebook live or whatever. And we did some Zoom as well, but it's very distracting.

I think when you're at home, you're on Zoom or somewhere, I don't know if your mind and your heart are totally there because you're at home and there's a lot going on around you, but just in all the talking that we've done so far, I keep thinking of 1 Corinthians chapter 12, where it talks about the parts of the body and that for a church to be able to function properly, the parts of the body need to be present in working together.

And I don't believe that we're completely present when it is digital, that there's just so much to be said for actually being there. You know, because part of going to church isn't just receiving, it's also giving.

You know, we're not just consumers, we're contributors above and, you know, more than anything, really contributors.

You know, it's interesting that you say that because I didn't think about that in the context of church, but, you know, one of the things I do is I help a Fortune 500 company with their, they have a software symposium for their employees every year, and I help organize that.

And one of the things I've noticed is that when you get a bunch of people that are just on a call virtually, you always, like anytime I'm on the calls, I hear someone, you'll have to mention their name to wake them up because they're not paying attention.

They're over here typing something, they're doing some other work, and if you ask the question and then give their name, they go, wait, wait, can you repeat that? But what I'll sometimes do is say, okay, everyone's got to be in person.

Like, I have certain meetings that I know are, you know, like the day of event where we have all the volunteers that are going to get together and have to make sure things go flawless for an event that has thousands of people watching online and in an auditorium, and you can't have things go wrong.

So, I make that in person. I say, okay, everyone's got to be here. And it's funny because it's totally different once you do that. I used to try to do that virtually, but what you said is just really, I didn't put that connection in the church.

And it really is a good point because when we're together, we're usually not sitting and, you know, doing other things.

You know, if being virtual and digital was enough, then a lot of these big conferences that went digital during COVID would not have gone back to being in person because the whole issue with conferences is it's extraordinarily expensive to go to them.

You have to pay for a hotel and you have to do all of these travel arrangements and food and all this kind of stuff. But yet, a lot of these big conferences and conventions and stuff went as soon as they could possibly do so, even on the West Coast, which stayed locked down, you know, longer than anywhere else.

They started doing the in-person again because there is just something different about the networking that you can do when you are in a group of like-minded individuals. And that's what a convention or a conference is.

In a way, that's what church is as well. It's a conference of like-minded believers who are coming together in order to equip each other to go back out into the world and spread the gospel. So church is where we are getting equipped and encouraging and learning so that we can then go out with that information.

So if you think of it in a context like that, it just doesn't work as well digitally. And I think even the world has figured that out, that you need to be in person for that kind of equipping.

You know, a lot of the big thing is interesting, Bram, the conferences, because a big thing with conferences is not so much the teaching that people come for, but the fellowship. Aaron and I were just at a conference, the Open Air Theology Conference, this past week.

And one of the things I love about that conference is the way the organizer organizes it is to have very long breaks in between each speaker so that you have fellowship. And he's added an extra day so that the conference ends at six o 'clock every night so everyone can get together for dinner.

And there's a lot of fellowship built into it so that people aren't missing the talks to fellowship. But at a lot of conferences, you know, a lot of the guys are, you know, you go to Shepard's conferences going on this week as we record.

And there's going to be a lot of guys that are not inside. I've been there enough times, you're going to see everyone outside just talking and fellowshiping. And that's a really good point, because that was the one thing that I noticed when we started getting together again after the shutdown was that people missed that in-person fellowship.

I mean, we had to kick people out of the building when we got back together because no one wanted to leave. No one wanted to stop that fellowship because they had missed it. And I think a lot of people, and I heard this from a lot of churches and a lot of people, they didn't know how much they appreciated and wanted that fellowship until it was gone, until it was just on Zoom.

Rebecca, what do you think?

Definitely. Yeah, the fellowship is huge. And I'm just thinking about baptisms and when people become members and everyone is there, and I'm assuming most churches are, this is what our church does after the baptism.

And when the service is done or after someone's become a member, we go through the line and we hug them and congratulate them and we welcome them into the church. We celebrate with them. And if you're not physically there, you know, you can't do those things.

You can't really bring in that warm welcome to a new member or someone newly baptized.

The One Another Commands and Life-on-Life Ministry

So, you know, I mentioned the one and others. Eve, I'll start with you and then I'll ask Aaron. And I'll see if Tim and Rebecca want to touch on this one. But, you know, can we do the one and others? I think there's 31 one and others.

We just read a couple of them in the passage, Eve, that you referred to in Hebrews 10. Just looking at that passage, we see there the idea of the love, you know, to love one another. There was the idea of the encouraging one another.

So can we do these one and others that the Bible talks about without gathering in person? Like what becomes the difference when we're in person?

In person, you're actually having physical contact with a need. It's a lot easier when you're, you know, at home and you hear about a brother in jeopardy of some sort to just say, oh, I'm going to pray for you, which that's not the bad thing to pray for somebody who is hurting or has a need.

But James doesn't say that, you know, that that's enough. He says that when you see a brother or sister in need, you're supposed to do something about that need. And it's a lot easier for us to just assume that someone else is going to take care of it when we're not there in person with that need.

And so being in person with the need, I think, helps that one another take place. And, you know, I think there's just something about physical contact, being able to give somebody a hug and or just take them aside and pray for them with their with your hand on their shoulder, touching them is something that is more personal than trying to find a moment out of your busy schedule to connect with them from your home or your work or whatever.

It's just so easy to be away from the moment when you're not in the moment, I guess, is the point I'm trying to make. It's like when you're at home, you've got other distractions, you've got other things going on.

But when you're at church, whether it be a building, a home or any kind of fellowship, you're in person with those people. And so the distractions are the people that are supposed to be distracting you, not other things going on around you, if that makes any sense.

And the passage that I was actually thinking about, the Hebrews 10 is actually really good. My church has been preaching through Thessalonians and the fifth chapter of First Thessalonians has a lot of stuff about.

Let's see if you start in verse 11, it says, therefore, encourage one another and build one another up just as you are doing. We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work, be at peace among yourselves.

And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the faint hearted, help the weak, be patient with them all and see that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone.

Rejoice, always pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. And it goes on from there. And it took us, I think, probably at least four sermons to get through that short passage.

So there's a lot of stuff in there that's about doing church together, that fellowship of believers and upholding each other and encouraging each other and respecting those who are over us.

And all of that. I would compare, I'm going to use an education, something we've all experienced. It's not good enough to go to school and have your teacher teach you, just talk at you. You actually have to, within the context of the classroom, be putting into practice what you're being taught, asking questions, getting a better understanding, also having an opportunity to fail, but doing the work there in the classroom.

But if we all went to school and all of the information that we were given was only applicable within the context of a classroom and had no application outside of the classroom, we all would have concluded a long time ago that school was pointless.

Of course, I say that and I like to joke that the people who study higher math, like the more advanced maths, only do so so that they can teach it to people who want to study advanced maths, so they can teach it to people who want to study, you get the idea.

But anyway, that aside, the church, the pastor is there to equip us for the work of the ministry. What we do there in the church is kind of like just, I believe, the beginning stages of the one-anothering, which is funny because, again, this isn't so often what we like to avoid within church.

I say that we have this little folder of topics that we're comfortable talking about, and then when we reach the end of that, we kind of just close the folder and move on to somebody else. And oftentimes, those are very superficial things, how was your week, how were you feeling, weather, sports, all the stuff that unsaved people would talk about if they were at a gathering together, right?

Very seldom, sometimes, or I should say often, very seldom are we actually talking about the things that define us as believers within the context of the church. But then I believe the church as a whole, I'm being very broad in general, I'm sure, no doubt, you yourself or other people that you know, you'd be like, no, this isn't true of them.

Yes, obviously there are exceptions, praise God, but I think the church as a whole really stinks when it comes to one anothering outside of the church. So like, yay, we are one anothering in the church for what, an hour, 35 minutes on a Sunday, maybe again for 45 minutes if you take before and after at a Wednesday, you know, really, is that all?

No, we need to be taking that, and we need to be James chapter 5 -ing it, we need to be Ephesians chapter 4 -ing it, we need to be in each other's on a life-on-life type of way, because honestly, I can't do what Ephesians 4 tells me to do.

I cannot really truly equip you to help you genuinely be built up into the body of Christ, to help you to join us together like the joints of the body, so that you are growing up in Christ, unless I really know you, unless we're doing life together, you can see my failures, I can see your failures, where we have that confessing to one another, we have that accountability where we're saying, okay, hey man, what you just said to your kids, let's talk about that, because that's not biblical, or that wasn't done in a Christ-honoring way.

So all of that to say, the purpose of the church, I think in many ways, is a starting place for this concept of one-anothering, and we, the American church, has done a wonderfully, awfully terrible job of creating a culture that disconnects us throughout the week, and I think that is.

The Purpose of Church Is Worship, Equipping, and Sending Believers

Only going to—it's only happening to our detriment. So let me ask this, and I'm going to, as I ask this, we've been really focused on the aspect of the gathering, and I said that's part of the name, we'll get into that a bit more, but that's not the only purpose of church.

So I want to start with Tim, and then this time we'll go Tim, Rebecca, and then Aaron, Eve, I want each of us to discuss this, because there's more than just getting together. I think we appreciate the getting together a lot more now, because of what we experienced with COVID, with churches being shut down, but what, you know, Tim, what is the purpose of church?

What is it? What things do we do? What is it that we would expect to see at a church or go to church for?

So I think that we've already touched on a significant portion of that, but I'd like to point out that there is a civic responsibility in being part of a congregation as well. The church is part of the community, and many of the churches that I've attended in the past, and many more that I know of, they make it a point to be involved in the community, and one of the things that I think that we are lacking in, and this might just be the old, you know, get off my lawn moment, but I think students today are not being taught civic responsibility, and by being an active member of a church, you're actually in support of the community too, and you are a representative of God in your community, doing the simplest things, raking leaves, helping to carry groceries, you know, any number of things.

So it really is, there's not just one reason. If I had to say there was one reason, I would say it's because we're commanded to. We're commanded to gather together in his name, but there are so many benefits and so many responsibilities.

Aaron had mentioned the, you know, church only being one or two hours a week, and in the PCA, what we do is, we have small groups too, and we get together for a couple hours on, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday night.

We do a Bible study, and we basically, you know, take prayer requests, prayer requests and praises, and we go to God in prayer, and we remind each other that we're a family. We are all children of God, and what was that old Newsboys song, Take Me to Your Leader?

You know, we want people from the outside looking in and going, I want what that guy has. So it's, the church is a member of the community it's in, and by being active in the church, you can be active in your community too, and I always love to point back to, and I may be in the minority here, one of my favorite presidents, George W. Bush, he did the faith-based and community initiatives executive order, which I don't know if they still stand.

I think they might have been rescinded by now, but it was just a wonderful way to show that, you know, we shouldn't be depending upon the government to meet all our needs. We should be depending upon one another to do so.

Rebecca, your thoughts. You know, one of the things I think that maybe the church has really forgotten is that, I mean, it's not really, the church isn't for unbelievers. It's for believers to gather, to be equipped to go out into the world with the gospel, and of course, with all the equipping does come the encouragement and the accountability and all those things, but it really is, it's for believers, and we've lost that, you know, in catering to the unsaved, you know, that's where we get our seeker-sensitive churches and things like that, but it's for believers, and I'd say mostly to, like I said, equip us to go out.

Into the world with the gospel. Aaron, Eve, either you want to comment on that?

I would actually very like to congratulate Rebecca on bringing that up, because I think originally this topic, when I put it on our topic list, came out of a discussion that Tim and I had on one of our episodes, and I kind of went on a bit of a rant about how our churches in the West put a little bit too much emphasis on what we look like, you know, to people who are coming into the church on a Sunday morning or whatever, and I was like, you know, church is for the believers, it's for the body, and we're not supposed to be inviting the world into our church to get saved, we're supposed to be going out to the world to take them the gospel, and too much of our churches here in our Western culture are all about feeding milk to the people in the pews Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, and never getting into the meat that is what grows and matures Christians, because we're too busy catering to the unbeliever who might have walked in the door that Sunday, and it's not the purpose of the pastor to preach the gospel and give an altar call every Sunday to get people saved, the purpose of the pastor is to equip and grow in maturity the that he is shepherding so that they can go out and spread the gospel to those who need to hear it, it's not the duty of the pastor to do that, and so I think that was where this topic came from originally, is what is church?