Immanuel Baptist Church

What is your motivation as you serve God through Immanuel Baptist Church? Is your greatest desire for Immanuel that we would be a place where God would be glorified, Christians would be edified and unbelievers would come to Christ? Or is your desire for the church itself, to see our numbers grow, our finances strengthen, our prestige expand? These things are not entirely mutually exclusive. We cannot minister without people and money, and the more people come to know who we are as a church the greater our influence will be. Nonetheless, there is a profound difference between serving the church in order to grow the church and serving the church in order to share Christ with the world.

As we look back on the glory days of Immanuel we know we are not what we once were. We become tempted to think of our work having the goal of restoring those days. But we must always be motivated with the things of God. The church that exists for itself is not a church. The church that looks at people as commodities to expand the financial base is not a God-honoring church and in the end the world will see through this shallow motivation.

In our consumer culture people are looking for the best bargain and companies are looking for the best way to lure people in for the good of the company. May we be a church that loves people not so much because they can do good for us but because God loves people and we love God and we love to see people come to God.