Philadelphia: The Countercultural Church

Being a Christian becomes hard when we feel that certain sectors of social life are cut off for us because we are Christian.  Maybe this is why we are so desperate to find and support parallel media or economies; it betrays that we actually feel ourselves to be missing out.  The church in Philadelphia was missing out.  In fact, they were cast out, removed from the synagogues where early Christians did their worshipping.  But Jesus' message to them is that they have open access to the most important inner circle: the worshipping company of God himself.  If they have the ears to hear it, they will find that they themselves actually are the Temple in which that worship takes place.