I hate church vocabulary. As I’ve grown up on the pew, I’ve become familiar with the niche lingo, words, and phrases that you’ll only hear inside the church or by churchy people. Then you here common phrases that are well known outside of church, but used inside. For example: “let’s corporately pray together” or “lets have another corporate meeting.” If you’re in church for the first time, your immediate thought may be, “Now what about business? Let’s have a business meeting? Let’s pray for the businesses and economy?” “Corporate?”

What does corporate mean in the context of the church? As a church, we are “corporate”, as in a bunch of people making up an organization for a cause – God’s Kingdom. In modern economics, people depend on corporations and work together in corporations to produce. As a church, God has not called us to assemble so we can sit on our butts and eventually get offended at meaningless crap, He has commanded us to assemble to produce disciples. Not for numbers sake, but for LOVE’S sake.

I’ve heard some say that they want to come to church so they can experience the presence of God. They “just want to feel the Spirit move.” That is great and all, but if you really experienced the presence of God, your heart would become more like His, and you would be compelled to bring people into the loop and show them God’s love (2 Corinthians 5:14-20). The Holy Spirit doesn’t exist so you can get goosebumps, faint, or talk in another language. The Holy Spirit exist to teach you (1 Corinthians 2:9-14, John 16:13), and more importantly, empower you to tell the world that Jesus is their only hope (Acts 1:8).

More on this tomorrow. I’ll share why it’s important that we corporately meet.

(I’m interested in knowing how this differs from your traditional perspective of church. And if you go to Gateway, how can we craft Sunday to be MORE about this?)