Is your church an instrument of God?
By PASTOR MIKE WENTZ Living Hope Community Church State Line, Pa.

Ephesians 3:10, "His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms."

How should humanity be organized and ruled?

Through the ages the rulers and authorities have had their ideas of how this should look and function. You don't have to have a great memory to remember the promises and visions of communism, socialism, and fascism. We still get sucked into thinking and believing moral progress and technologies are the answer to humanities woes. The Enlightenment (an extremely arrogant title), Modernity, and now Post modernity all continue to tempt us to worship at the feet of their idols. And now in the midst of all this, we are given the church through the Gospel of Jesus the Messiah.

The church, the instrument of God's wisdom, is to be the hope of the world. The body of Christ, the church, is to be not just an alternative, but also the place that calls into question all the godless practices of humanity. The church is called to be a place where race and gender are blessings to the community of believers, not a point of division. Of course our history is not unstained in these areas.

I'm convinced that the church walking according to its vocation can still be a light unto a world torn apart by conflict. Jesus tore down the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile to make them into one new body, one new community. Those racial divisions are not meant to be divisive, but complimentary. Through mutual sinfulness, forgiveness, and reconciliation we can come to the same table and eat the same food and drink the same drink. When will the church be an instrument of unity in God's hands and thus a very loud answer to the rulers and authorities that continue to manipulate us?