Hospital Church Review

Getting this one in just under the wire.

It’s been a busy few days, but I have to meet my goal of publishing every day in May, so tonight I’m going to just do a quick review of the finer points from the Hospital Church pieces. It will serve as a kind of pause button, or I may be done with it. Maybe in a few years I’ll come back to it and it will be right where I left off, like an old VHS tape taken out of its VCR in 2004, waiting to be shoved back in and pick up right where its last audience left off.

So, we want our churches to have a certain kind of culture about them. We want people to understand what we’re about as a church, and we want a clear view of how the church should operate. This is where the idea of church being a hospital comes from.

The Doctor of the hospital is Jesus. He is the one who knows all cures and remedies for our sicknesses. The ultimate sickness is sin which brings forth death, and Jesus cures both. He also seeks to ease the burden of living in this world both by the comfort of the Holy Spirit, and those who follow Him and obey His commands.

The patients of the hospital church, or the target patients rather, are any people who suffer from the adverse effects of sin- which is all of us. We will die, as Adam brought death into the world when he sinned, but more than that, every day we suffer the consequences of our sins and the sins of those around us. We need Jesus to heal us when all of these things happen. Everyone needs to be a patient at the hospital church.

Then, though we are life-long patients, once we begin to accept the cures of Jesus, we ourselves become workers at the hospital. We help ease the pain of life by following Jesus commands to love each other more than ourselves and to give everything we have to helping those around us. Just like a real hospital, there are births and deaths and every thing in between happening in the Hospital Church, both physically and spiritually. An example of this is that I have seen the same ladies who throw a baby shower proceed to put together meals for a grieving family. We all have some burden that Jesus works through the workers at the Hospital Church to ease, and in turn, we become the agent through which He eases the burden of others.

That’s the whole thing in a nut-shell. I think very soon I will revisit this idea with another piece or two of the puzzle. I have quite enjoyed it and I’m praying that I have a chance to enact all of these principles in the way I work and interact with my own congregation, and I hope you will, too.