tuesday reflection for week 6

Today in our small group discussion we talked more about Jesus coming as a prophet subverting assumptions and presuppositions that the Israelites had about the kingdom of God. One of the questions for discussion focused on how we could take the practice of Jesus as a prophet and apply it to the church setting. The first thing that came to my mind was the story in the Gospel of John where Jesus shifts the focus from the Temple in Jerusalem to the people worshiping in spirit and in truth (John 4).

Applying this story to the church, if church goers are spending the majority of their time at church—by majority of their time, I mean spending multiple nights of their week at the church—then something should change. The church can become the Temple in such a way that we do not see the presence of God outside of it, and feel foreign to the world outside of the church. Pastors and workers at churches should encourage their communities to invest in places outside of the church in order to be the light of the world that Jesus told Christians to be. Perhaps, this means not having activities every day or night during the week at the church. Without this going out to other people in non-church settings, our focus could reside solely on the structure of the church as opposed to God's people in the world.