The church is a community. That is what this church is; today we celebrate the fact that a Christian community has been together here at Clarence Road for 122 years. A church is a distinct community; a group of people who believe in and seek to live by the teaching of Jesus.

Society in general lives by different standards. If you look at the world of Paul’s day when he was writing a letter to the Corinthians, you find that in Greek culture, hero worship was the ethos of the day.

Still today you can read the exploits of their heroes in Greek mythology. There are striking similarities with our British twenty-first century culture. We have our pop stars and celebrities. We have had the big brother house and pop idol and similar reality TV programmes where people compete to become the hero. Every one can vote to choose who will be eliminated.

But the church is different from that. We don’t worship human heroes we worship Jesus. Church life is not a process of eliminating and discarding people; rather it is a matter of welcoming and including more. Not tearing people down, but building them up. In the church at Corinth to whom Paul wrote his letter, they had made a foolish mistake. In their thinking and attitudes, they had made the church leaders into competing heroes. Paul, Apollos and Cephas (who we know better as Peter) all had their competing fan clubs. Paul is writing to try and put things right, to tell them how things should be in the church.

As we look at this chapter, we’ll think about three different pictures. Three illustrations that will help us understand better what a church should be like. First, we’ll thing about a school. That will help us understand verses 1-4. Then we’ll think about a garden, which Paul talks about in verses 5-9. Thirdly we will think about the church as a building, that’s in verses 10-17.

First then, a school. It’s an appropriate picture because Christians are disciples, learners. The church is the place where we learn of Jesus. Paul says to the Corinthians, ‘you are mere infants in Christ.’ I have a very vivid memory from back in 1956 when I started school. I was in the infants. School didn’t seem so bad. You had toys to play with, just like at home. But I have this very clear recollection of a day when the teacher called me to leave the toys I was playing with and to come to the desk to begin to look at the words in a book. I disagreed with her proposal and suggested that Andrew should go in my place while I continued to play. But it was to no avail. Serious learning had to begin.

The Christians at Corinth were just as reluctant to begin their learning. They wanted life to carry on just the same as it had been before they had become Christians. But the Christian life involves change and progress. It involves leaving the old principle of self first, and self-gratification and pride, and learning to live by the principles of love and grace.

Paul was rather disappointed at their slow progress. They were still engaging in childish arguments with each other. There was jealousy and quarrelling. By the way they were dividing up into rival groups around the different leaders they were denying the reality that Jesus had come to reconcile people to God and to each-other. They had believed the gospel, been baptized, received the Holy Spirit, but there was little evidence of change in their attitudes and little advance in their understanding. Their behaviour was still by and large determined by the prevailing culture in which they lived. They needed to get to the point where they were ready for what Paul calls solid food.

They needed to learn to apply the principles of the gospel to the way they related to each other, and to the way they conducted their lives. They had received God’s grace for themselves, but they needed to learn to show grace towards each other.

The church is still like a school. Sometimes we can think we are a lot more advanced in that school than we really are. When there’s jealousy or quarrels that is evidence that there is still a long way to go. The church is also a place where some people learn quickly while other are much slower to learn. But the church is a place where we do learn. We learn the wisdom of God that he revealed in Christ.

Secondly, the church is like a garden. This illustration is used time and again in the bible. The church is the place where the seeds of truth of the gospel are planted. In this illustration Paul is pointing out what the role of leaders should be in the church. Leaders are there, not to be worshipped or admired, but simply to serve in the tasks necessary to enable people to grow in faith. Some preach the gospel, others encourage, and others teach God’s word.

Leaders are not there to compete with one-another, but rather to work as a team towards the same end. It’s a wonderful privilege to serve God by teaching in the Church. To do so is to be a fellow worker with God. There will be a reward for such faithful service. But we are also reminded of the vital reality that life and blessing in the church come from God himself. People may sow, people may water, but God must make the seed grow.

Neither is this sowing or watering limited to leaders. For each one of us, as we share in fellowship, as we witness to our faith, we are sowing seeds. As we come to God in prayer for others we are watering the seeds of the spirit. God makes the seeds grow. It is perhaps the most vital lesson for us to grasp from the passage this morning that above everything else, it is God alone who can make the church grow. He or she who plants is nothing; the one who waters is nothing.

It is God who makes the seed to grow. It is God who makes the church to grow who is worthy of all the glory and praise. May we have the faith to look to God in humble love and dependence.

Thirdly then, the church is a building. Perhaps the most important thing about a building is the part you cannot see, the foundation. If foundations are shoddy, then the whole building will be unstable. Often in these days builders bore down into the ground and put in piles to be sure that they have a foundation that will not move and on which they can erect a building that will be safe and secure.

Paul tells us that there can only be one foundation for the church. Jesus is the churches’ one foundation. The church can be built on nothing else, especially not on personality cults. Our faith rests on Jesus, the son of the living God, crucified, raised from the dead and ascended into heaven.

That was the foundation on which Paul established churches across the Roman Empire. But he was aware that others would be building on that foundation. He was probably worried that at Corinth people were erecting a rather inferior superstructure on his sound foundation. The personality cults that seem to have been emerging in Corinth were an example of this spiritual gerry-building. Paul reminds us that we have to be careful how we build our church. It is possible to use poor materials. Especially when we take the materials from the worldly culture that surrounds us in an endeavour to produce an impressive structure. Dr Billy Kim, president of the Baptist World Alliance reminded us at the Baptist Assembly last week that God calls his church to be a holy people. He commented on the fact that in some churches standards were so low that it was difficult to whether it was actually the church of Jesus Christ or a social club.

Paul reminds us that what we build will be tested. There will come a day when shoddy workmanship will be shown up for what it is. Work that is not up to standard will be destroyed. The workman will not lose his salvation, but his shoddy work will be obvious to all. No doubt this applied to the naïve enthusiasts at Corinth who didn’t know any better that to copy the behaviour of the world around them. But Paul was also aware that there was another type of would-be leader around with malicious intent. The sort of people Jesus referred to as false prophets, or wolves in sheep’s clothing. There were and are people whose object is to destroy the church. Paul reminds us that such people God will destroy. We could cite people from recent history such as Marx with his creed that man is supreme, or Hitler whose creed was ‘I am supreme’. In fact anyone who sets themselves or their opinions up in contradiction to the truth revealed in Jesus comes under God’s judgement.

As we think of the future of our church here, what we should be building here in Southend, we are reminded to use quality materials. Materials such as truthfulness, grace, humility, repentance, and seek to do all in the light of God’s word and with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

And finally, our passage reminds us of the assets, of the blessings we have as the church of Jesus Christ. The Corinthians had been rather impoverishing themselves. They were claiming that they belonged to the church leaders. ‘I belong to Paul’. ‘I belong to Apollos’. Paul says no, it’s the other way round. Paul and Apollos belong to you, they are not your masters, they are the servants who God has given you to bless and help you.

God’s Spirit lives in you. In fact all things are yours, the world, life, death, the future. All are yours. And you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. In Christ you have all the privileges of sons and daughters of God.

The church is like a School. The church is like a garden. The church is like a building.

The church belongs to God, but what privileges and blessings he has give to us in his Son. May we bring him glory by our life together here.

Amen.

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