How to BE the Church 1

Philippians 1.1-11

The purpose of studying the letter of Paul to the Christians at Philippi, is to help us understand what our church should be like. It is no mystery what a church should be like – but we don’t find out by copying what we see on the web, or TV or in magazines. You go back to the Bible to find out the sort of churches that the apostles (Jesus’ first messengers) established.

It is really easy to make the mistake of thinking that describing the church is to describe programmes, format, styles of music, personalities, equipment, layout of buildings etc. Actually, to describe the church you need to describe what it stands for – in other words what the people in it BELIEVE – and how those people BEHAVE. When you describe the church you are describing God’s family – a very different thing to describing an organisation, programmes, resources and strategies.

This is why, my teaching for the next month or so will be focused on what Paul wrote to the Christians at Philippi some years after he established that church there. By paying attention to what Paul tells them, we can find out what it is we should BELIEVE and how we should BEHAVE as the church here in Onehunga! We will learn from Paul’s personal experience and from what he taught those Christians, how to BE a church.

So, let’s get straight into this letter and unpack who these people were as we listen to Paul teaching them. This letter was preserved and circulated far beyond the original recipients, not simply because it was interesting, but because it was accepted as the Word of God, along with the rest of the New Testament. By 150AD, all the components of the New Testament we are using were in use in Christian churches everywhere. They were accepted as genuinely authored by known men who had first hand experience of Jesus’ life and teaching, so they were ‘sealed up’ as the definitive New Testament as we know it - within a generation, following Jesus’ death and resurrection. This letter to the Philippian Christians has been continuously accepted as ‘Bible’ from the day it was written to this day when we are reading it to find out what Jesus expects his Church to believe and how they are to behave.