Legitimate Churches

il⋅le⋅git⋅i⋅mate
/adjective, noun, verb, -mat⋅ed, -mat⋅ing.
–adjective

1.born of parents who are not married to each other; born out of wedlock: an illegitimate child.

2.not legitimate; not sanctioned by law or custom.
3.unlawful; illegal: an illegitimate action.


20Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. 21I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. 22So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. 23I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.
Revelation 2:20-23

The church of Thyatira was a legitimate church work of the Lord whose very existence was being threatened by illegitimate authority and children. Children are legitimate when they are the born of covenant relationship. Many people start churches when they themselves are not in proper relationship with the Lord. Without founding their lives on the rock of Christ’s word put into practice, they will surely fail.

There are four legitimate reasons I can come up with for a church to form, as prompted by the Holy Spirit:

1.) The Lord desires the Gospel to be taken to a people that have never before heard it.

2.) The Lord forms a team with a narrowly focused objective, a college ministry for example and then later expands the mission of the team to include whole families.

3.) The Lord wants to re-introduce a fresh revelation of a biblical truth to an area that has forgotten it and uses the vehicle of a church to do so.

4.) The Lord, in each generation needs to present the gospel in a way that they can relate to it more readily; a new church being a part of becoming ‘all things to all men so that by all possible means’ (I Cor. 9:22) it can save some.

The first reason is so obvious we don’t need to discuss it. The second happens more often than you might think. A case in point is the ‘Church On The Move’ founded by Pastor Willie George in July of 1987 in Tulsa OK with 163 people in attendance. Pastor George had been a Children’s Minister for a number of years before starting Church On The Move. The church was not a church plant but a completely independent work that was born out of the more narrowly defined mission of reaching children for Christ. Today Church On the Move is a mega-church reaching thousands for Christ.

Let’s turn to the third reason for a moment. I have friends whom I believe the Lord is using to start a Mennonite Church in the Kalamazoo, MI area near where I live. Will and Bess Fitzgerald represent all that is best of that tradition. The Body of Christ, if they have ears to hear, will greatly benefit from a fresh revelation of the re-introduced truths presented.

The last reason should be obvious to us as well. While the message of the Gospel has never changed, the vehicle used to bring it must be updated regularly. Post-modern churches are an example. Regardless of how you feel about the Emergent Church movement- they are capturing the attention and imagination of this present younger generation.

These are legitimate reasons for forming a church, yet they must be carried out by legitimate children. In the next blog we will discuss the Lord’s definition in John Chapter 8 of who is and who is not a legitimate child of God.