true community
I had a friend who I traveled with to Africa several years ago. He said two things to me that I will always remember on that trip. One of them has been on my mind a lot lately. He said, “The Church is the only organization that exists for the benefit of its nonmembers.” When I begin to contemplate that, the thought that creeps up is, “What on earth is the Church doing?”
Lately the newest buzzword in the Evangelical world is “community.” This beautiful idea is that we can be in a place where we can know and be known. This is the idea that we can finally be vulnerable with one another. We can tell about our secret sins, our struggles, our financial woes, our lack of strength faith, and our _________________ (you fill in the blank). More recently I began to realize that the record of the early church in the Text never urges the people to be more and more intimate with one another. It speaks toward a lot of things … truth, purity, faith, how to order the community … but never this high idea of intimacy. It does speak toward caring for one another, to carry each other’s burdens and praying for each other, but never moves toward this intrinsic focus we find so much focus on.
No, the Bible from cover to cover speaks about life. Life for the world. Not just barely getting by either, no, life to the full for every woman, child and man who has ever lived. How are we missing this? How do we read the gospels (the account of Jesus’ life) and not realize that he was all about the poor, the disenfranchised, the weak, those without a societal voice? He was not wrapped up in making sure he had someone to talk to about his stuff with.
If you want to know and be known closely you go to a church building, sign your name on a card with a little demographic information, and someone connects your demographic information with someone else’s demographic information. Then they contact all of you and tell you that you can be close and intimate with your feelings. So then you get together and sit in a room and decide when you will meet and how you will become friends. Is this weird or is it me?
How would you feel if someone your age walked up to you at a bar that you both go to a lot, and said, “Hello, I am Ryan, and I know we both come here a lot, so I thought it would be cool if you and I and a few others started meeting at your house on Tuesdays and tried to become really close best friends.” Is this scenario really that different with churches and small groups?
How have we come to this? We have become people that are so focused on ourselves that we are doing weird things like this. It seems so innocent at first. Come and get connected into a small group at a church. People will pray for you, they want to know your struggles, your concerns, your dreams, everything about you … sometimes you may feel bad because nothing is wrong with you so there is not much to talk about. Over time however, that is the focus … you and your problems and the problems of the group, we become an organization like all the others, existing for the benefit of our members.
Those who are closest to me are the ones with whom I am working side-by-side. They do not need to tell me their pains, struggles, hopes, or fears, I can see them plainly, and mine are there for them to see too. If we want to get back to the essence of being the church we must begin by serving others, not fattening ourselves. We need to come together not in one another’s homes, but come together to restore homes for those in need, come together to cook a meal for a single mother, come together to assist the sick, come together to provide food for the hungry … this must be our focus, not ourselves, others. It is in this, that we will truly find one another and ourselves.