Building on the Foundation
I know nothing about construction. If you’re building a house and coming to me for advice, something has gone terribly wrong.
However, even with my limited knowledge regarding construction, I have learned one essential truth about buildings: the foundation matters. The quality of the construction is heavily dependent upon the sturdiness of the foundation. If I ask you for information about your home’s foundation and you respond with, “We skipped that step,” then don’t be surprised when I decline every future dinner invitation. A flimsy foundation renders a building uninhabitable, and we should not be surprised when the structure crumbles to the ground.
Similarly, a church that does not take the time to center its entire operation on a firm foundation is destined to fail. We can enlarge the building, expand the programs, and engage the masses, but if we organize our church on shaky ground, then the entire edifice will collapse.
Many foundations seem stable. We can build our church on the foundation of relevance. We can organize ourselves to be as culturally engaging as possible. But when the winds of culture change and society rejects the core tenets of our faith, we will have to choose between the gospel and our relevancy. If we choose to abandon the gospel and remain firmly planted on the foundation of relevance, then we will be left with a popular but powerless church.
We can build our church on the foundation of social progress. We can strive to meet the needs of the people around us and to create a more just society for our neighbors. But when we maximize our efforts to help the poor, the oppressed, and the hurting, we could actually achieve every goal we set—and the people around us would still be lost and without hope.
We can build our church on the foundation of tradition. We can attach ourselves to the past, clinging to “the way we used to do things.” But when the decades pass and the community changes, we could find ourselves as members of a dying church with a glorious past and a non-existent future.
Rather than building our church on these flimsy foundations, Ephesians teaches us that the church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Eph 2:20). We must build our church on the Word of God, centered ultimately around the good news of salvation in Jesus. Our only hope to thrive as a body of believers is to be a church in which Christ remains at the core of all we do and our thoughts and actions are filtered through the lens of Scripture. That is a foundation upon which we can confidently build.
In Christ,
Britton