An extract about 'The Local Church' by Dr. Campbell Morgan

Someone shared this extract with me the other day. What a terrific piece of writing, packed with undeniable truth for our day ....and every age!

“The Church of Christ – take a local Church as indicating the great and ideal application – a local Church, so at the disposal of the Spirit as the Spirit through the Church can flash and flame upon the outside world, so as to amaze, perplex, and raise an enquiry; a local Church, one within its borders in fellowship with Christ, and testifying to Christ invariably a Church in favour with the people. Not that we should seek the patronage of the multitude, but that we are so to reveal Christ as to be centres of attraction to the multitude. The moment we depart from Him, we lose the crowd. The Church of Christ, where the Christ Himself is the supreme revelation made – not only through the individual lives of its members, but in its corporate capacity – where the compassion of Christ and the life of Christ are manifest in the mutual inter-relationship of the souls forming the Christian Church, as to the Church to which the weary and woebegone will turn. That is the true influential Church. How we have degraded that word ‘influential’. We call a Church ‘influential’ now because of the kind of people that attend it, because of the money it raises for philanthropic objects. There was a Church in the olden days that said, “I am rich, and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing,” and the Master, walking amid the golden candlesticks said: “Thou ……. knowest not that thou art the wretched one and miserable and poor and blind and naked.” So He would say to day to many Churches which we describe as ‘influential’. The influential Church id the company of loyal souls who “continue steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, and in the breaking of bread and the prayers,” who eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, who manifest in their individual lives and corporate capacity the strength, the beauty, the glory, the compassion of Christ. Wherever there is such a Church you will find the Church has favour with the people”.