When you visit a church in America, you can usually spot something within the first few minutes that seems a little out of whack. Something that’s overgrown, kind of like an ear that’s two inches longer than the other.

• Some churches are very strong on repentance. They’re always telling you that you’re doing something wrong and you’re probably going to hell.
• Some churches are dripping with grace. They don’t want to tell you you’re doing anything wrong. You’re OK just the way you are!
• Some churches are driven by holiness. They know all the rules in the Bible and they’ve established two or three rules around each one to make sure you never come close to violating the original rule.
• Some churches are all about the Word. You get a bulletin as thick as your thumb when you walk in the door, with a 7-page outline for the sermon, along with 10 pages of footnotes.
• Some churches live for fellowship. They love the warm fuzzy feeling of being together, and so they plan twenty activities every week so they can be together all the time!
• Some churches do nothing but worship and prayer. They sing every song seven or eight times. They have a prayer room with windows going 360 degrees around so you can pray over the whole city.
• Some churches are all about evangelism. When you go to church, you’re going to see the best laser light show you’ve ever experienced in your life, and you’ll make sure to bring all your friends next week.

Few of these things are necessarily wrong, and many of them are attractive to us because they emphasize an implication of the gospel. God calls us to study his Word, to experience him through worship and prayer, and to reach unbelievers. The problem comes when we reduce the gospel to any of these things. Then our church becomes the Bible and theology church down the street from the fellowship church, rather than simply being a gospel church.

When the church was first established in Acts 2, it was a group of people who were cut to the heart by their sin of killing the Messiah, who were blessed by the radical grace and forgiveness of the one they killed, and who were empowered toward holiness by the gift of the Holy Spirit. They were transformed by the gospel, and this led them to a wonderfully holistic devotion to repentance, grace, holiness, learning, fellowship, worship, and evangelism.

When we reduce the gospel to just one of those things, we quickly become deformed.

Here at Harbor, we have a strong devotion to the Word. There are lots of people in our church who are always itching to learn more. That’s awesome! But we can fall into the rut of believing that all we need to grow as a Christian is just to learn more Bible. Just learn more theology. Just learn more apologetics. It’s easy for information to become a substitute for transformation. It’s easy for us to say to ourselves, “I have more knowledge, so I must be more holy!”

We also have a strong devotion to fellowship, especially in our community groups. Many people tell me that when they joined a community group, it was the first time they experienced true community in their lives. We have many people who are very generous — people who see someone in need and really want to help. Not just with money, but with help finding a job, help finding a home, and on and on!

But it’s easy for us to be so focused on loving each other that we forget to love the world around us! When a church is growing (as ours has been lately), it’s easy to think that people are being saved. We assume that lots of these new people must be new believers, and that makes us complacent. We don’t feel like we need to display the gospel and proclaim the gospel if so many other people seem to be getting the job done already.

When the gospel takes hold in our lives, it naturally produces all kinds of effects. We can’t be satisfied with just a few. Because we want the same thing said of us that was said of the early believers: “These people who have turned the world upside down have come here also!”