The Church: A Place to BUILD — Part IV

The View From Above: Thoughts to Help With Everyday Life

August 25, 2026

Guest Contributor: Pastor Harold Warner — Part 9

Pastor Warner continues his VFA series on The Church. Today, before leaving the building site, he gives us one final reminder about keeping the mission of the church at the center of everything we do.

The Church: A Place to BUILD — Part IV

Before we leave the building site, let’s take with us a final reminder. On our final night of the June Bible Conference, I preached on “Keep Them Near the Vision.” The vision is keeping Jesus’ last command our first priority. It has everything to do with the church as a place to build—remembering our God-given mission.

Our theme for 2026 of “Bringing the Good News” is summed up: go everywhere, telling everyone about the Someone who can save anyone.

We are all familiar with Jesus’ Great Commission in (Matthew 28:18-20) “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

This surely includes but goes beyond the call to evangelism. It is more than having church services, outreaches, liturgy, or supporting various programs. It is the call to make disciples.

This is central to our understanding of a biblical ecclesiology. Simply put, a disciple is a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ. This is what we are all called both to be and to make.

We must all strive to stay near the vision because the danger we face is mission drift. A church can become so focused on programs, traditions, buildings, finances, or even good community activities that it forgets the central task assigned to it, of making disciples. The signs can still say “church,” but the mission has slowly changed.

Charles Swindoll illustrated this in his book The Church Awakening. He told about a man in Atlanta who was looking through the Yellow Pages for a restaurant and found one called “Church of God Grill.” Curious about the unusual name, he called and was greeted by a friendly voice, “Church of God Grill.”

He asked the person on the line how this name came about. The owner explained:

“We started as a small mission church. To help pay the bills, we began selling chicken dinners after the Sunday services. The chicken was so good and became very popular with people in the area, that before long we were doing more business with the dinners than with the church. Eventually, we shortened the church services so we could prepare more meals to meet the demand. After a while we closed the church altogether and just kept serving chicken dinners. We kept the original name: Church of God Grill.”

The punch line is obvious: The ministry became a means to support the chicken dinners rather than the chicken dinners being a means to support the ministry. They forgot why they existed.

Swindoll used the illustration to show that churches can gradually lose their raison d’être without ever intending to do so.

The lesson to close this segment of the church with is, God, keep us near your vision.

Help us to heed (Hebrews 2:1) “We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.”

Let us keep working on the building, which is the church Jesus died and rose again to purchase; and our ministry of making disciples.