“There Goes the church of Christ”

BIBLE READING:1 Corinthians 12

A minister was visiting an elderly lady in her home.  She was crippled and couldn't get out.  After a short visit, the minister left.  As he was walking out, he noticed some boys playing in the street.  One of the boys look familiar; he had attended worship services with an aunt. As he passed by he heard the boy, who recognized him, explain to his friend, "There goes the church of Christ."  The minister didn't stop to explain to the boys that he was not "the church of Christ."   

That phrase would not leave the minister’s mind.  It lay there in his brain, as words from the mouths of innocent children tend to do.  If he was not "the church of Christ", who was?  After all, he could have been doing a number of other things when the boys saw him, maybe even something that was wrong.

On this day, when a small boy pointed and said, "There goes the church of Christ," he had shown his friend a man visiting a lonely, ailing Christian woman.  Those impressionable children had observed him trying to add a little cheer to her confined life.  The words of Paul came to his mind: "For even as the body is one and yet many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ." (12:12) The preacher smiled to himself confident that he had been Christ's representative that day.  For good or ill, our actions are always the actions of the church of Christ.