This may be yet another short post here on the blog. You should know it is being written under the influence of pain killing medication. The twinge in my lower back yesterday is becoming a real pain to handle. Just so you know, it happens from time to time. It may not happen for a few days, weeks or months but chances are it happens sometime. The first part of my day was spent on my back. The middle part of the day was treating the spasms that tend to shut me down. Now there is some relief as I can at least stand straight up. You may not care that much about it but it is just one of the many things that drives me up the wall.

The topic for tonight is the church. Here is the seed of my thinking. It is not uncommon for me to hear or to read someone on a tangent against the local church. The idea is that we really do not need the local church because we can just all be one big happy bunch of believers. And yes, I heard that thought expressed recently. There is only one minor problem with that idea. It may not be as biblical as the writer or speaker makes it out to be. Now in my past there has been more than a few words spoken by me in hopes of a better local church. If anyone knows the highs and lows of church life it is me. But no one gets to just rail against the local church without me getting a tad upset.

Part of who I am is due to the local church. I mean that in the best of ways and not the worst. It was the dear old widowed saints of my home church that encouraged me in the faith. They might also be the ones who pinched the sides of my face but that is another topic for another time. Whenever anything good happens because of my choice of a life's work they get the unmentioned credit for my being here. I am also the product of men whose names will never be known that were teachers, leaders or unknown mentors in life. Some of these guys taught me back in Sunday School. Some of them may not even be aware of the effect they have on me. All of these men and women have one thing in common. I met them in a local church.

The real ministry our world needs will not always come through some other ministry than the local church. My heart and mind will not allow me to write off the local church. There are way too many good pastors, deacons, teachers, and just people to simply dismiss it. Most of the people who will throw stones at a local church cannot or will not invest their time in one. Believe me, I know the local church may be far from perfect. I have enough scars inside and out from conflicts there. But Jesus did not just come to establish some shapeless entity but He led disciples to establish local congregations throughout the book of Acts. The letters of Paul are written to definitive churches in local places. They were not perfect. Yet he did not give up on them.

It is a whole lot easier to just speak down to a local church when you have no emotional or spiritual investment in it. God knows my church now is not perfect. He also knows that I am far from perfect. We both need each other. We need to rub our imperfect shoulders together to discover real grace. We need to join our faulty voices together to sing hymns of praise. We need to display to an imperfect world that there is a way that is better. It may not always be pretty but it is always eternal.

Bro. Trey