# “Rethink your thoughts about the church” by David F. Wells

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2009/07/16/rethink-your-thoughts-about-the-church-by-david-f-wells/
- Published: 2009-07-16T12:54:28-05:00
- Author: tollelege

“The church is not our creation. It is not our business. We are not called upon 
to manage it. It is not there for us to advance our careers in it. It is not there
for our own success. It is not a business. The church, in fact, was never our idea
in the first place. No, it is not the church we need to rethink.

Rather, it is our thoughts about the church that need to be re-thought. It is the
church’s faithfulness that needs to be reexamined. It is its faithfulness to who
it is in Christ, its faithfulness in living out its life in the world, that should
be occupying us.

The church, after all, is not under our management but under God’s sovereign care,
and what He sees as health is very often different from what we imagine its health
to be. The church, let us remember, is called the ‘church of God’ (Gal. 1:13; 1 
Cor. 15:9).

Churches are ‘the churches of Christ’ (Rom. 16:16) because they are His, bought 
by His precious blood. Christ not only constituted the church (Matt. 16:18), but
God has given us the blueprint for its life in Scripture.

What we need to do, then, first and foremost, is to think God’s thoughts after Him,
think about the church in a way that replicates His thoughts about it. We need to
ask ourselves how well, or how badly, we are realizing our life in Christ in the
church, how far and how well churches stand as the outposts of the kingdom of God
in our particular culture.”

–David F. Wells, _[The Courage to Be Protestant](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802875246?tag=toletaupanre-20)_(
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 222-223.

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on [The Church](https://tollelege.net/category/the-church/)