What Is the Purpose of Church?
Richard Stephens September 24, 2022 2774 words (9 minutes) + notes *** What Is the Purpose of Church? *** It is not my intention in this essay to engage in theology, strictly speaking. Instead, I am merely attempting to focus on practical doing, taking the commands of Jesus as the guide. I address the question, “What is the purpose of church?” offering an answer that I find most consistent with Jesus’s commands and also his warnings – as in “Lord, Lord” (Mat. 7:21) and “the sheep and the goats” (Mat. 25:31-46). The perspective that stands behind the inquiry is that of one who, coming from outside the religion, who is searching for a way to alter character and mind in order to learn how to reject self-centeredness and embrace and learn the means and, in actuality, acquire the means by which by which to obey the astonishing, seemingly impossible, Great Commandment. 1) Three Views I can easily come up with three purposes for the church that are commonly discus