1 Corinthians 3:10–17
Just before dawn on June 24, 2021, part of the twelve-story Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, Florida, collapsed, killing ninety-eight people. In October 2018, an engineer's report had found major structural damage. About a month later, the town's building official told the condo board that the building appeared to be "in very good shape."
Federal investigators have since concluded that the collapse began in early June 2021, when two column connections beneath the pool deck failed. For the next three weeks, cracks spread and loads shifted while residents slept above. Flaws in design and construction, added loads, and corrosion had left the building with almost no margin, and no one knew.
The residents weren't careless people. They trusted the reports, the inspections, and the look of a well-kept home. What they couldn't see was the difference between a structure that was merely standing and one that was sound.
Paul confronts that same danger in a congregation that felt healthy and gifted. "Let each one take heed how he builds on it," he warns (1 Cor. 3:10), because the real quality of the work won't show until the fire comes. So let's ask the harder question before any fire forces it on us: not whether we're doing fine, but whether we're building well.
Looking Outward and Inward
Paul calls himself "a wise master builder" who laid the only foundation any church can have: "For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (v. 11). His wisdom lay in building on Christ crucified rather than on the polished human wisdom the Corinthians admired.
A small, settled congregation like ours faces its own version of that temptation. Comfort becomes the thing we build on. Fellowship among ourselves starts to feel like faithfulness, while outreach and intentional care for one another quietly fade.
Northampton, Massachusetts, had settled into that kind of comfort by the early 1730s. Under Solomon Stoddard and then his grandson Jonathan Edwards, the church had been orderly and doctrinally sound for decades, yet Edwards grieved that the town's young people had grown careless and worldly. In December 1734 he began preaching pointedly to the town's spiritual condition, and by the spring of 1735 he counted more than three hundred conversions in a town of about two hundred families.
Nothing about Northampton's foundation changed. What changed was a settled congregation's willingness to let that foundation reach people again, both inside the church and beyond it.
So this week, pick one person: a coworker on your shift, a neighbor you wave to but have never really talked with. Ask them to coffee or a meal, and when they ask how you're doing, let your faith be part of an honest answer, not a sales pitch.
Then pick one person in our church you haven't spoken to in a month. Call or text and ask how they're really doing. Comfort loses its grip the moment we make those calls instead of assuming someone else already has.
One Sustainable Ministry, Not Many Built to Impress
Paul names six materials: "gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw" (v. 12). The first three recall the materials of Solomon's temple. Paul isn't assigning a hidden meaning to each one; he draws a single distinction between work that fits the gospel of Christ crucified and work built from merely human wisdom.
A church with few ministries doesn't need more activity to build well. A shepherding group can be gold or straw, depending entirely on what happens inside it: the conversation, the prayer, the accountability. The structure alone proves nothing.
Around 1678, Anthony Horneck, a German-born minister in the Church of England, began gathering young laymen in London into small Religious Societies. They met weekly for prayer, Bible reading, and mutual watchfulness over one another's walk with Christ. They needed no new buildings and no platform, only members committed to one another.
By the end of the century, dozens of these societies met across London, and they became part of the soil from which the Methodist societies later grew. Horneck didn't build anything impressive. He built something that reproduced, because what happened inside each small group was the real material.
Every ministry in this church should exist to do one thing: win people to Christ and disciple them in the Word. Before we plan anything new, we'll ask, "Does this move someone from unbelief to Christ, or from new believer to someone who can teach others?" If we can't answer that about something on our calendar, we'll reshape it until we can.
A church with ten activities pulling in ten directions isn't more faithful than one with three that all point the same way. It's only busier.
Learning What to Build Next
"Each one's work will become clear," Paul says, "for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one's work, of what sort it is" (v. 13). The fire here tests rather than purifies. It reveals the quality of what was already there; it doesn't improve it.
In the twenty-six years I've served here, this church has faced several tests, and some of our ministries didn't survive them. Those losses told us something true about what had been built. Our task now isn't nostalgia for what the fire took, but discernment about what to build with the tools we've been given, including our online teaching ministry, so that it produces disciples rather than merely views.
Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, learned this when the Decian persecution broke out in AD 250 and he went into hiding outside the city. Rather than let separation end his pastoral care, he shepherded his church by letter, naming individual believers and directing clergy and funds to specific needs. His collected correspondence, eighty-one letters in all, still survives.
When plague later swept Carthage, Cyprian organized the church to care for the sick, pagan neighbors included. Testing didn't only take from his church. It taught him to use the tools at hand for real, personal contact.
If you sit under our teaching but have never followed up with anyone about what you heard, or asked anyone to hold you to it, you're consuming, not being discipled, and fixing that is our responsibility as much as yours. So this week, after you hear the Word taught, tell one person what convicted you, and ask them to check on you before we gather again.
A church that measures faithfulness only by who showed up to listen has already failed the test.
Building Well the First Time
Paul describes two outcomes. "If anyone's work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire" (vv. 14–15). The reward is a gift of grace, not wages owed, even as it answers to real work. And "through fire" pictures a narrow escape: the builder is saved, but his life's work is lost.
A church with little already built doesn't face the question of what to close. It faces a more urgent one: how to build what we're starting (shepherding groups and an online teaching ministry) with materials that will survive the next test.
John Wesley's preaching reached tens of thousands across England, yet he refused to let crowds become his measure of success. Beginning in 1742, he placed members of his societies in class meetings, groups of about twelve meeting weekly under a leader who watched over each person's spiritual condition. By his death in 1791, Methodists in Britain and Ireland numbered more than seventy thousand, each one belonging to a class where he or she was known.
We'll be doing something similar after the new year. As we begin, we have to be careful not to confuse starting something with building it well. Doing fine would mean launching quickly, filling a gap, and calling the gap filled.
Building well is slower and harder to see. It means care taken before anything launches, prayer that lasts longer than excitement, and a willingness to wait rather than rush something half-built into existence.
Working people already know this. No one on an hourly wage or a tight budget spends carelessly and expects enough left for a second try. Ministry deserves that same care, not whatever attention is left over.
We don't have the spare time, money, or years to build something, watch it fail the next test, and start over. What we build now has to be gold from the first day.
God's Temple
Paul doesn't let the building picture stay comfortable. "Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?" (v. 16). Then comes the warning few churches expect: "If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are" (v. 17).
This ministry doesn't merely belong to us. It's the dwelling place of God Himself. A shepherding call made without prayer, an online ministry that counts views instead of disciples, a comfortable congregation that has stopped reaching out: none of these are small failures of strategy. They're decisions about God's own temple.
Paul isn't warning believers that they'll lose their salvation. He's warning those who shape a church's direction that carelessness with what God has entrusted to them is never a private matter. It may be tempting to think a small church carries a small responsibility, but however few of us there are, this congregation is still God's dwelling place.
So let's build carefully this coming year, investing what we have as though God Himself will inspect it, because He will. Doing fine has never been the standard for God's temple. Building well is.