“The whole assembly of the Israelites gathered at Shiloh and set up the tent of meeting there.”
Joshua 18:1a
Bonjour! I am writing from beautiful Paris! Last week I wrote from the United Kingdom where I was finishing up a ministry fellowship in Cambridge and enjoying the sites in London with my wife Becky and daughter Emily. Now my ladies and I are enjoying the sites in Paris. On Tuesday, we got to go on a bike tour of Paris and stopped by one of the most famous church buildings in the world... the Notre Dame. Unfortunately, it was still being repaired due to the fire from a few months ago. It was a poignant reminder to me that the church was never meant to be defined by a particular building. While there were times in the Old Testament where God instructed the Israelites to build a more permanent structure for the tabernacle, for most of the Old Testament, the Israelites were constantly on the move. In the New Testament, the Early Church never situated themselves to a physical building. They met in people’s homes, pagan and Jewish temples, and public meeting spaces. As our church plant enters into a new season of worshipping together, meeting as small groups, visiting different churches, and serving in various places, my prayer is that we remember that the church was never a building but a people of God.
View of Notre Dame under repair during our Paris bike tour.
