Today, the Dubai skyline offers an impressive row of towering skyscrapers, world-class hotels, and the world’s tallest building. On the south side of the city sits our humble church home.
While unimpressive by architectural standards, this church building is priceless. It’s the only building licensed by the government for evangelical Christian worship in our city of nearly three million people. Currently, just three other evangelical church buildings exist in the entire country of UAE. Each week, our building in Dubai hosts more than a dozen congregations which speak Arabic, Urdu, Chinese, Korean, Telugu, Tagalog, Hindi, and English, and in so doing it facilitates the gathered worship of thousands of evangelical believers from more than 70 nations.
We often tell our congregations that the church is not a building but a body: a blood-bought community of the redeemed. We stress this because conflating the church with a building is common and yet destructive to the church’s true identity and mission. Buildings can become distractions from the gospel; they can even become idols.
