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A church is a local gathering of the citizens of Heaven intended to work together as a factory for godly men and women. It is not so much a factory for creating saints, but for them to have some value-added work done on them. They are to be taught and encouraged to live for their King and should be trained to bring new citizens into His Kingdom. It is a factory whose raw material is regenerated, washed men and women, and whose end product is supposed to be godly, motivated citizens of the Kingdom. Well, ideally, at least.
Over the course of time, different designs have been tried for these factories. Some men have confused their local factory with the actual Kingdom that they are citizens of, attempting to convert people into it rather than into the Kingdom. Innovations were made to the factories, sometimes dysfunctional processes were adopted, and ineffective techniques were often used in the effort to produce godly men and women. Ineffective processes didn't always keep men out of the Kingdom, but sometimes kept them from being the best citizens of it they could be.
Results from various experiments in factory designs varied as widely as the techniques tried. Sometimes factory workers would stumble upon innovations that really produced citizens intent on serving their king. Other times, the opposite happened. Innovations crept in to factories that were contrary to the king's wishes and led some away from serving Him. In efforts to avoid this, well-intentioned workers would sometimes place undue restrictions--ones that were not contrary to the king's wishes--upon their factories. Output of devoted citizens would sometimes suffer, as a result.
In an era of great social awakening, a movement came along to restore the primitive design of the first factories recorded in the divine record. It was a noble experiment in the beginning, intending only to unite the citizens produced by the various factories already in existence. But during much of the 20th century, the grand experiment in simplifying the sometimes unwieldy contemporary factories took a bit of a wrong turn. Conscientious men whose aim was to arrive at the ideally designed factory ended up severely crimping the production of godly citizens in their factories while they debated its ideal name, look, feel, and production techniques.
Debates over systems of production, in some cases, shut down production all together. Men became so consumed with how the machinery should best be configured for optimum performance that they forgot that it wasn't performing very well at all in the meantime. In some cases, they didn't realize the switch had been flipped off on the operation while they debated the risks of turning out good citizens using an "incorrect" process. Some actually came to think that the decreased production rate was a sign of faithfulness, and that any factory which actually produced a greater number of active, committed citizen of the Kingdom must have something wrong with it. Sadly, many factories ended up disbanding or split into multiple factories, each generally less productive than the one that spawned it.
Meanwhile, evangelical factories, although imperfect in their operations, were humming along producing citizens motivated to serve the King. Imperfection appeared to be the human condition, but that didn't stop these other factories from trying to improve their manufacturing processes. They had been given citizens to improve, and imperfect or not, they were determined to accomplish that task. Their citizens were encouraged to live godly lives and to go out into the world to bring the lost into the Kingdom and into their factories.
Eventually, after another great awakening, the time came when the saints who were being processed by all of these disparate factories realized that they were, indeed, citizens of the same Kingdom united for the same Purpose: to spread the good news of their King. The great mystery of oneness in Christ had been solved. The angels rejoiced at the multifaceted wisdom of God that was made known through the Lord's saints in His Kingdom.
Despite the occasional corniness of the story, the moral is plain: We're citizens of a Kingdom, not a Factory. Let's stop being fearful of different methods of processing and fire up our factories once again to start turning out more citizens who will serve their King with all their hearts, souls, and minds.
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