What is the CHURCH?? Reinhard Bonnke

WHAT IS THE CHURCH? (Tell me, if you are challenged!)

It is an extension of the compassion of the Lord Jesus, an extension of His comfort, an extension of His healing, an extension of His goodness. Jesus went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed of the devil. So should we.

It is His body. God has no arms but our arms to wrap around this pitiable world. Love was His supreme characteristic. I feel we are only His body to the degree or level that we show His compassion. A loveless church is no church at all. The love of God personified in Jesus needs to be personified in the church. "Let this mind be in you which was in Christ". The church is the current evidence of what we read of Jesus in the Gospels. If I dare say it: the church is His love child, the embodiment of His Spirit of son-ship.

The church is to be an extension of the Day of Pentecost. Evangelism is not to turn the church into an ecclesiastical advertising agency or a society for propagating its own existence. It burst into view on the day of Pentecost speaking with tongues, with prophecy and fire. If the church isn't like that- no fire, no tongues, no prophecies, no evangelism, no bold preaching of Christ and the Resurrection, no triumphant certainty and promise, how can any rational person identify it as the same church? Who would recognize its features as those of the church in Jerusalem in AD 30 without the power and manifestation of the Holy Spirit? We are left with the natural processes of success, organization, intellectual abilities, wisdom, prowess and energies. Those assets, relied upon alone, leave the church an empty shell.