“I don’t go to church. I am the church.”

Those who attend Tri-County Church in DuBois, Pennsylvania, wear purple t-shirts for various church activities that have emblazoned across them the phrase: “I don’t go to church. I am the church.” When the people in a church adopt such an attitude, they create ownership.

In their book Move, Greg L. Hawkins and Cally Parkinson comment on the difference between “belonging” to the church and “being” the church: “Too many churches are satisfied to have congregations filled with people who say they ‘belong’ to their church— who attend faithfully and are willing to serve or make a donation now and then. But that belonging bar is not high enough; simply belonging doesn’t get the job done for Jesus. The people who get the job done are those willing to embrace a value— and maybe even wear t-shirts stating I am the church.”

Hawkins and Parkinson say that churches in which people have this sense of “being” the church “are living breathing organisms. They are filled with people who gather together and then disperse into their communities to live out the commitment to Christ that binds them together.”

The early disciples of Jesus learned this sense of “being” the church from Jesus himself and then they lived it out as can be seen in the Book of Acts as they literally changed the world. If we will “be” the church, we too can change the world around us — one person at a time as we bring people in touch with Jesus, our Savior, the Son of God. Can you say, “I am the church”?