Hey folks, my name is Johnny Art of Annis and this is Dialin. In this episode, I want to begin a short

series on the nature and purpose of the church. I want to define what a church even is, how a church is

structured with pastors and elders in the weeks to come. I want to look at your spiritual gift and how

to ascertain that because if you're a Christian, you've been given by the

Holy Spirit, a spiritual gift that you are to employ in the service of the body of Christ. And I want to

talk even in the weeks to come about the priority of loving one another within the church. There is today,

I fear, amongst many professing evangelicals an idea that you can love God

and belong to God, but not love or belong to the church. This, however, is a wildly unbiblical idea

and one that will be fleshed out over the weeks to come. But I want to ask you even as we

begin this episode and begin this new series, do you love

the local church?

Are you passionate about the church?

I hope you are.

And I'm going to detail for you in this episode what the church even is and why in fact

you should as a Christian commit your life to that which Christ Jesus died to purchase.

Let's dial in.

Growing up every Friday night or so, my family would pile in the van with my dad

and go to a store that you may be

familiar with, a store called Blockbuster. It was almost like a Friday night tradition. We didn't have

cable growing up, nor did we have Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, or Prime. They didn't even exist at that

point, but we would, however, every so often, go and rent a movie.

At one point, this store Blockbuster had 9,000 locations with 84,000 employees and was a company worth over $9 billion.

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