The church is a people, not a place or a statistic. It’s a body, united into him who is the head. It’s a family, joined together by adoption through Christ. I pray that we pastors would increasingly recognize our awesome responsibility for the particular flocks over which God has made us undershepherds.

A Jarring Conversation
During my graduate studies, I remember one conversation with a friend who worked for a Christian ministry that was not affiliated with any one church. He and I did attend the same church for a couple of years. But while I joined the church as a member, my friend didn’t. In fact, he only came for the Sunday morning service and would slip in about halfway through, just in time for the sermon.
One day, I decided to ask him about his half-hearted attendance. “I don’t really get anything out of the rest of the service,” he replied.
“Have you ever thought of joining the church?” I asked.
He appeared genuinely surprised by my question and responded, “Join the church? I honestly don’t know why I would do that. I know what I’m here for, and those people would just slow me down.”
As far as I could tell, he didn’t say those words disdainfully, but with the genuine zeal of a gifted evangelist who did not want to waste one hour of the Lord’s time. He had given some thought to what he was looking for in a church. And on the whole it didn’t involve the other members of the church, at least not that church. He wanted a place where he could hear good preaching from God’s word and get his spiritual jolt for the week.
Yet his words reverberated in my mind—“Those people would just slow me down.” There were a number of things I wanted to say, but all I said was, “Did you ever think that if you linked arms with those people, yes, they may slow you down, but you may help to speed them up? Have you thought that might be a part of God’s plan for them, and for you?”
I, too, wanted a church where I could hear good preaching every Sunday. But the words “body of Christ” mean more than just that, don’t they?
A People, Not a Place
The church is not a place. It’s not a building. It’s not a preaching point. It’s not a spiritual service provider. It’s a people—the new-covenant, blood-bought people of God. That’s why Paul said, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). He didn’t give himself up for a place, but for a people.
That’s why the church I pastor starts its Sunday morning gatherings not by saying, “Welcome to Capitol Hill Baptist Church,” but “Welcome to this gathering of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church.” We are a people who gather. Yes, this is a small thing, but we’re trying to point to a big reality even in the words we use to welcome people.
Remembering that the church is a people should help us recognize what’s important and what’s not important. I know I need the help. For example, I have a temptation to let something like the style of music dictate how I feel about a church. After all, the style of music a church uses is one of the first things we will notice about any church, and we tend to respond to music at a very emotional level. Music makes us feel a certain way. Yet what does it say about my love for Christ and for Christ’s people if I decide to leave a church because of the style of its music? Or if, when pastoring a church, I marginalize a majority of my congregation because I think the style of music needs to be updated?
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Another part of the wonder of this volume is the plain way with which Spurgeon writes even more as a Christian than as a pastor. What I mean is that his wisdom in being a pastor is merely a subset of his greater and deeper experience as a Christian. In one lecture Spurgeon warns “There is even a danger of loving some things which are associated with Christ as much as we love Christ Himself; and we must be on the watch against such a feeling as that.” That simple observation is what a living Christian feels who loves the ministry God has called him to, but who loves God more, and who (rightly) senses the danger in his own soul of loving the Lord’s work more than the Lord Himself. 

Almost a decade after Spurgeon’s death, his publishers (and Tabernacle members) Passmore and Alabaster brought out a book of 367 pages. It was filled with 40 addresses by Spurgeon, almost all of which were given extemporaneously at his church’s Monday evening prayer meeting. When I came to our congregation (originally named Metropolitan Baptist Church, presumably after Spurgeon’s congregation), I soon rearranged our prayer meeting. One of my most enjoyable reading experiences was earlier this year when I first read Mr. Spurgeon’s book Only a Prayer Meeting! I had bought my copy of the 1976 Pilgrim Publications reprint in 1984 in Inverness, Scotland. But it had lain unread among scores of other volumes of Spurgeon’s works, which, for some reason, got more of my attention.
Then I took it with me on a trip and began to read it on the plane flight across the country from San Diego to DC. It captured my attention. I couldn’t put it down. I found Spurgeon describing his own prayer meeting in terms at many points like our own! And I also read accounts of remarkable providences and Biblical wisdom as Spurgeon exhorted his own people to prayer. And regularly, more than a thousand of them would join him on a Monday evening for their prayer meeting.
Pastors, you will enjoy the outspokenness of Spurgeon in his opinions, even if you may not always share his view. In his first lecture, he is decrying the spectacle of street work of The Salvation Army, accompanied by too many passing false conversions. Spurgeon says, ‘Gold, silver and precious stones are scarce material, not easily found; but then they endure the fire. What is the use of religion which comes up in a night, and perishes as soon?’
Other times, you’ll find yourself chuckling in recognition or agreement. Practical wisdom is found on every page.
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