All too often, people wonder why our biggest problem as Christians sometimes seems to be church logistics: where to go and what to settle on as our church. Because we in America are free to roam around from church to church, not confined to a tighter authority or a state-church with legal regulations as in places like Europe and Great Britain, or as in our former days of Puritan controls and legal regulations, we miss the point of how important church should be to our faith. In these modern days, we are allowed to free-range from our father’s church, the one in which family tradition and morals held sway and demanded that we stay bound to tradition.

The latest generation of American churchgoers and born-again believers have no consideration for the way things used to be done. People today have the freedom to choose and wander about from church to church at their whim. As soon as they are criticized or challenged, as soon as they are offended or meet with an unfriendly teaching they are at their own discretion to bolt, to find something more amenable to their social mobility, their free-style way of life. It can only be that people are not obliged to objectively ask themselves the fundamental questions of Who, What, Where and Why, concerning the church and their place in the body of Christ. They think the church is like a spring suit to be purchased, worn and left off when another season arrives.

It has become all too convenient to search out and find a place more pleasant, with ‘good’ people, a place more convenient all around. But is that the who, what and wherefore of the Church? Where one should be for their personal spiritual health? Is it not supposed to be about Jesus Christ, salvation of the soul, the personal war of good over sin, and finding the help we need for loving God and our neighbor without hypocrisy or deceit.

So our generation has listened to the lure of the prosperity preacher. Most have drifted into the halls and new temples where they have their ears tickled and their fancy rubbed; where men with diamond rings promise them a Santy Claus God who will fill their pockets with goodies. The modern believer is encouraged to be downright lazy and self-indulgent. They have been handed salvation on a silver platter. Why should they do anything to expend energy or concern over God’s true will and the necessities of a healthy diet of spiritual things that will build them into a mature Christian with fortitude and stamina for the long haul and deliver them from their personal sinfulness.

Just as we all must come to know Christ individually and cannot come to a saving, personal knowledge of Jesus by our association with a group or organization, so we must also seek out for ourselves the raw and general truth concerning the Christian Church itself, as well as our rightful place in it. If one does they will find themselves within the spiritual walls of what is called The Philadelphia Church.Every person, whether called by God, or just honestly curious, or living an actual reborn life in Christ who honestly finds the answers to the following four questions will discover the ‘place’ of Philadelphia and the true meaning and reality of what Church could actually be in the highest spiritual sense.

1. Who is the Church?
2. What is the Church?
3. Where can the Church be found?
4. How does God want me to fit into the Church
   once I find it?

Finding the answers could be difficult if our only experience with Christianity is through hearsay of by way of distrust that was acquired through some charlatan that has been encountered on Tv or in person. It can be a great struggle to find the true answers to these four rudimentary things, to cut through the effects of bogus Christianity and cast off the effects which may require supernatural actions by God to free us. They are not always pleasant or easy to understand. God’s application of an heavenly psychotherapy can require drastic life-changing moments and difficult disasters used to turn us around and look to him for healing and forgiveness. Spiritual gifts such as words of knowledge, words of wisdom, and prophecy, as well as the others enumerated in the epistle of 1 Corinthians chapter 12 can be employed by the Master’s touch through the power of the Holy Spirit in order to minister these enlightening and very potent remedies.

The complexities of this vast realm of God’s Church, with its good and bad, wicked and righteous, thorns and fruits, idolatry and true worship, is an entire world into which step when we consider coming to Christ. Like it or not this whirlwind is swirling about in the Church, nevertheless they are powerfully real and vital to our welfare. This is why we may have, as many Christians have, since the second half of the 20th Century, numerous encounters with believers, fellowships and churches, all with mixed results.

Who is the church?
The word ‘Church’ is from the Greek, EKKLESIA, meaning a calling out, or the called-out ones, or the separated ones. God’s call in 2 Corinthians 6:17 to “come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing: and I will receive you” is a call to become a member of the true Church of God without reservation, without worldly allegiances.

Even more alarming we may discover that the fundamental questions about the Church have never even been asked by those assembled together in the name of Christ. In its simplest form the Church can be defined as those who are separated from out of the world and assembled under the banner of Jesus Christ. Christians say we should accept anyone who calls himself a brother. We should trust the motives of everyone who has answered an altar call or come forth at a convention. They think that where church is mentioned in Scriptures (77 times) that it automatically means ‘perfect’ and saved. But that does not conform with 1 Corinthians 5 where we are told to separate ourselves from wanton sinners in the Church. It does not consider the great criticism leveled at believers in the letters to the churches in Revelation 2 & 3. It does not consider Paul’s words to those churches throughout the Roman Province of Galatia when he stood up and told them “I stand in doubt of you.” In turn we are scolded by misguided ones to ‘judge not lest we be judged’. But that does not hold fast with Jesus’ statement that we judge not by appearance but judge righteous judgment, or that we shall know them by their fruits, or that the Church is duty-bound to judge when a stumbling block has been cast by one brother in the way of another. We do not have to judge the sinner per se’ but we must make a judgment on the stumbling block and its effects. Take a look at 1 Corinthians 5. 

It may take time to find out about the vast expanses of God’s Church and where we fit into it. Along the way, we are certain to have bad teachings about the Church. In fact, wrong ideas about the Church abound from Evangelical doctrine to mainstream Christian conventions. All too often the platitudes of accepted, popular born-again doctrine fill the believer with man’s ideas about the Church and the way man thinks God ‘ought to be’ rather than the way God and the Church really are. The Church can all too easily feed the sheep baloney rather than the sincere milk of God’s Word, especially when it comes to the subject of itself. Teaching the straight and clear reality, which God Himself has declared about the Church comes from the Bible only.

“But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour, and some to dishonor.
   If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master’s use, and prepared unto every good work.
   Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart.” 2 Tim 2:20-22

What Is The Church?
We are here counseled by the Word of God that we should follow Christ with “those who call on the Lord out of pure heart”. This is who the Church is supposed to be. The body of faithful believers who flee youthful lusts and follow after righteousness, faith and love. The reason for the advice is that in God’s house not all believers actually believe or act like they believe. Some are in it only for what they can get out of it. Some are very dishonorable. It is taken for granted all too often that every professing believer is ‘saved’ and being saved, that the four questions above have all been asked and settled by our pastors and the teachings of their denominational affiliation. Upon deep scrutiny (mostly not so deep) we are shocked to find out that these questions have been answered with trite clichés or broad sweeping generalities or things no longer pertinent. They sound all fine and dandy but don’t really conform to the Truth which is revealed by the Word of God as Christ Himself. If so, conscientious believers discover that God is there in name only and that another spirit resides there in spite of the fang-dangles, bells and whistles and glib sermons. Sometimes we find out that the enemy, just as the parable depicts, has sown many weeds among the wheat and they are in danger of being smothered in a skunkweed patch. This is all part of who the Church is and isn’t. It is wise to purge ourselves from fellowship with such vessels of dishonor. Even more, we are strongly counseled to do so. Just who is The Philadelphia Church?

The Philadelphia Faith teaches that the Church is a spiritual body made up of individuals here, there and everywhere that cannot be contained in a building, place, denomination, or teaching. (Though there can be groups, ‘bodies’ here and there communing in the Lord in friendship and faith as the Philadelphian Church of old apparently had). It is not a place rolling in dough or full of holy-rollers. The Church is consumed by one person – Jesus Christ. By the power of His shed blood on the cross at Calvary, these people have been given new birth through the conversion of repentance, so that they actually have been made new creatures in Him? Within this greater body provision has been made to give us increase and speed us along the way to a mature and healthy relationship with Christ and the Father by way of the Spirit and the Word of God. This is what the Church is. The body of faithful believers inhabiting a spiritual place where they are ‘assembled’ in His name. This is what she is, including all her imperfections, weeds and acquired spirits of error, and such. We have to pick our way through briars and brambles to find a place, a body, genuinely seeking after the purer form of church. The apostle Peter described this body, this Church like this:

“Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ….
   But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light:…
   Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.” 1 Pet 2

Where Might We Find The Church of Philadelphia?
This is the picture painted in God’s Word of the part of the Church, which pleases Him. God is building up a place for His own habitation, one of “lively stones”, “fitly framed together” Eph 2:19-22 that has come ‘out from among the unclean thing and become separate’ from the world and all idolatry. But this is only a corner of the vast expanses of the Church. The letters to the seven churches in Revelation, the parables told by Christ to His disciples in the Gospels and the teachings and doctrines of the Epistles shine forth the truth and reality of what God’s overall Church is really like. These words uncover great mysteries unknown since the world began about where the Church is to be found and what her condition truly is. They coax us, encourage us, and instruct us so that we can find that good portion of the Church, where we should reside and where our spirits can best thrive in Christ.

It is our hope that we have described a little about who and ­what the church is, where it is and how we should live and move within her. It is the belief of The Outcast Eagles that we can find the truest, most correct church wherever we find those with what the scripture of Revelation 3 describes a Philadelphia. Philadelphia fellowships do exist but they may be only as little arks here in there, mostly in homes, but definitely existing in the hearts of lowly and religiously unimpressive people, They may be difficult to find but they can be identified by their fruits and by their faith. They, generally, off the beaten path, because they are looking for a heavenly home, a heavenly Mt. Sion of faith as the scriptures call it. There be a high calling of God in Christ Jesus, a crown of righteousness that is attained by obedience that most believers are unaware of because they are looking at earthbound things to provide them with glory and safety. Not all believers care to look for their redemption from ‘on high’.

We can find Philadelphia in Jesus, in the Bible, in prophecy, in the letter written to it in Revelation chapter 3, in the prophetic promises throughout the Old and New Testament to the Bride of Christ, in carrying our own Cross, at the foot of the cross on Calvary. This and more is where Philadelphia lay, where its congregants have fellowship, the ethereal place where they meet and assemble at the throne of God, and not so much, as they say, at the altars and fonts of actual temples and church buildings.

There are wheat and tares in the Church. There are vessels of gold and silver, which by purging themselves from vessels of dishonor become “sanctified and meet for the Master’s use and prepared unto every good work.” We believe there are faithful and slothful servants and wise and unwise virgins. All these are in God’s house. The Church is a conglomerate body of both faithful and struggling souls. Hypocrites and people who have departed from the faith with seducing spirits, those whose God is their belly and walk as the enemies of the cross of Christ, walk imperiously in her halls and sit in her chairs of authority. Our question must be how should the believer who seeks to be called and chosen and faithful move in this vast and great household of God? Should one settle for the first seat they find, or ought they to seek their proper place in the body of Christ? Though it may be a hard quest it should be part of our Christian journey to find our place in the body of Christ and that includes seeking for a fellowship of faithful believers who seek the Lord out of a pure heart.

“For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit;
   To another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit;
   To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues:
   All these work that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he the Spirit will.” 1 Cor 12:8-11

How Does One Fit In To The Church of Philadelphia?
One must read the letter to Philadelphia and pray that God makes one that kind of spiritual believer. Pray to be led to find out about the who, what and where so that one can be fitted out with the proper faith so that one can be brought into Philadelphia’s ethereal halls. By loving God and Christ, by listening to the Spirit rather than the other churches, by keeping the patience of Christ’s Word, by trusting in Him to be the one to open doors and to close doors, by being kept on the solitary way, that way which keeps one on course and zeroed in on the heavenly path, that helps one not stray back upon the worldly way from which they came. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.”