Too many times I’ve been asked the question, “Do you have to go to church to be a Christian?”<\/p>\n
The technical answer is, of course, no.\u00a0 Going to church does not make one a Christian.\u00a0 There are plenty of non-Christians who go to church all the time.\u00a0 They might even think they’re Christian because they go to church.\u00a0 But going to church doesn’t make you a Christian anymore than going to Washington makes you the President.\u00a0 And going home again doesn’t remove any of your Christianity.\u00a0 Proximity to a church building, is not how one determines whether or not they belong to Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n
However, the question itself reveals a flawed view of Christianity.\u00a0 A Christian IS the church.\u00a0 All true believers are part of the body of Christ.\u00a0 You can’t help it.\u00a0 And the body has to work together.\u00a0 You simply can’t work as part of an integrated body of believers if you disconnect yourself from it.\u00a0 So real Christians seek out the opportunity to worship in unison with other believers, to serve and encourage each other in community, to carry out their mission to preach the Good News of the Gospel to the world as a team.<\/p>\n
So you can become a Christian without ever having darkened the doors of a church building.\u00a0 But you can’t live as part of the body of Christ while keeping yourself removed from the fellowship of the church.<\/p>\n
In other words, don’t just go to church…BE the church.<\/p>\n
Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a> (Duration: 47:20 — 21.7MB)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Too many times I’ve been asked the question, “Do you have to go to church to be a Christian?” The technical answer is, of course, no.\u00a0 Going to church does not make one a Christian.\u00a0 There are plenty of non-Christians who go to church all the time.\u00a0 They might even think they’re Christian because they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[29,12,212,102,48,30,211],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons","tag-body-of-christ","tag-church","tag-fellowship","tag-friendship","tag-love","tag-relationships","tag-worship"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":889,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions\/889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pastorfrog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}