The One Thing the Church Can't Live Without

When you start a church from scratch, you don’t have many amenities to offer. We don’t own land. We don’t serve coffee. We don’t have a lot of programming. We don’t have an LED wall. We meet in a borrowed facility (a very nice borrowed facility). Maybe one day the Lord will entrust us with more, but for now, we will have to live without it.

But there is one thing that we know New City Church can’t live without. If we have it, there is nothing else we need. If we don’t have it, it doesn’t matter how many amenities we have.

What is it? The glory of God.

In Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus, he identified the one thing the church can’t live without. “To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” (Ephesians 3:21) Glory in the church is essential to everything else the church is called to do and be.

The biblical meaning of the word glory is “weighty”. An encounter with the glory of God is a weighty experience. The glory of God is God’s self-disclosed excellence, supremacy, and perfection, beauty, goodness, and awesomeness. When we gather for church, we should have an encounter with the goodness of God that leaves us feeling the weight of God’s glory.

If we want to experience God’s glory in the church, we must come ready to “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name.” (Psalm 96:8) That is a different purpose for coming to church than to enjoy the amenities.

In fact, maybe the amenities have actually distracted us from the glory of God. I know that in the previous church I pastored, the more amenities we added, the harder it became to keep our focus on the glory of God.

What are you looking for in a church? Is it the glory of God or the glory of lesser things? I would like to invite you to our start-up church, which is committed to seeking the glory of God as we glorify Him in worship and contemplate His glory as it is revealed in His Word.

Last week, we were joined by 99 people who did just that. And we do have a few amenities, including children’s workers ready to serve your kids, a great music team to help us sing, and a welcoming environment where we can worship without distraction.

I hope to see you in church this Sunday at 4 pm, but even more, I hope you will see God’s glory in the church.