Topic: Body of Christ ... any 'see also'?

Martin Folley

I was wondering about how resources are tagged by topic, with particular reference to the MacArthur Sermons and their poor proof reading. I wondered how a resource can be tagged so that it appears under topic guides and sermon starter guides if that resource has not been review by a human.

Looking at the index of MacArthur, I noticed a series called 'The Body Dynamic', which happens to be o focus of mine at the moment. To give an initial feel for where MacArthur is going in the series, this is a quick quote:

"Now we showed you last week that the church is presented in the New Testament as an organism. And that organism is called the Body of Christ. Christ is the head, we are the members of his body. He disseminates his thoughts, his impulses, his direction and his power and his life through us, and we operate. We are one body with Christ as the head. And we talked about what that meant last time. As I said this morning, if you didn’t get that message, you weren’t here, be sure you have opportunity to listen to the tape so you understand this most important New Testament concept.

We said then that Christ is the head, the Holy Spirit is the power of the body, and redeemed people make up the members of the body. Now we also showed you from First Corinthians 12 last week, which was our text, that the body has three key features: unity, diversity and mutuality or harmony. The body is one, yet within the Body of Christ there are many, many gifts all ministering to each other, bringing about even a greater oneness, and that there is not only this unity and this diversity, but there’s a mutuality. There must be a harmonizing of all these ministries."

I stumbled across this whilst browsing MacArthur. I decided to do a topic guide on the 'Body of Christ' to see what else was in my library, and the topic guide only gave reference to Eucharist and the literal body of Christ. It does not seem to give any reference to 'the body of Christ .. .the church'. There did not seem to be a see also section, or any clarification in the available topics. Am I missing something (probably)? It concerns me that the list of available topics is both simultaneously broad, yet detailed (judging by some of the terms that auto-complete) .. yet seems to be missing, at least in this case ... broad areas. I find myself wondering (again!) what other areas are missing.

Part of the Topic guide was a link to the sermon started ... but this was also simply linked to eucharist ... in fact more specifically 'Lord's Supper'. 'Body of Christ' in sermon starter is transfigured into 'Union with Christ' ... and gives no sermon results whatsoever. It would appear that Mr MacArthur, Keller, Piper et. al have all not touched the topic of being 'In Christ'.

So back to my question ... 

1. What are the alternative topic titles that I might use so that sermons such as MacArthur's series on the church as the body of Christ might come to the fore?

2. How can i find these alternative titles for any given topic? Is there an index/dictionary/published database of terms that are outlined and can be browsed, or am I left typing into an auto complete and hoping?

Thanks.

Francis

What appear in which report (Factbook, Topic Guide, etc) depends on the kind of resource they are and what they are tagged for (for instance, headwords). 

A couple ideas come to mind that may or may not be useful to you:

1. Using the Sermon Starter Guide, I found that there were quite a few suggestions for alternate titles to "Body of Christ" in the Theme section. These link to factbook, but you can also use the list to try them in the Sermon Starter Guide Box and see what comes up.

2. Another possibility is to conduct your search based on passages rather than topic headings, using the Passage Guide. Say you used 1 Corinthians 12, under the Sermons section, you'd have a list.

Perhaps you've already tried all this? Others may have other suggestions.