The Mission of The Vineyard Church BCS

"What does it mean to be a church?"

This is the question that kept me up almost every night a year ago. Erin and I had moved to Bryan, certain that God had asked us to begin a Church here. And if we were supposed to start a church, I wanted to know what that REALLY meant.

I was not asking about the Church Universal--the Body and Bride of Christ, which has stretched throughout time and spread across the globe--but the Church Local, the particular instantiations of The Church.

What did it look like for the Church Universal to live in Bryan/College Station.

We prayed and waited and eventually God was faithful to lead us to some answers. Not all the answers--what this church needs to look like is an ever growing vision--but a foundation out of which we can build.

God brought us to Matthew chapter 28. Here Christ is at the very end of His physical ministry on earth, he is about to be lifted off the ground and brought back to The Father. The people around Him at this moment are ALL those who believe in Him, so in a real sense it is as if the whole church is standing around Him. The bottom line is, this is a very important moment... and He says these things:

"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

As we sought God and asked Him to show us what His vision was for the particular church He wanted us to start, He began taking these words and showing us what these general commands might look like in the specific surroundings we found ourselves in.

I would like to spend the next few blog post which I write on this passage. The basic commands are simple, and the passage is finite, but its content is complex and its applications are infinite.

I hope you are as excited as I am to see what living these commands might look like in Bryan/College Station!