This is so simple, and yet millions of professing Christians don’t see it. Ask any of them what church is really all about and you’ll get a lot of answers. One of the most common answers will be some mixture of getting more bodies, budgets and buildings. That’s fine for a business, but it’s not what the New Testament says churches do.
The single greatest mission objective for churches is learning to live with each other.
Go ahead; read that again. The whole point of a church family is to love and care for people for whom you might have no human reason to even notice in the first place. This is the core of what a church is in the New Testament. It’s people learning to accept each other as God’s gift.
Yes, we must have boundaries, but the boundaries point to the pragmatic issue of working together. It’s not the matter of what you accomplish, but the a matter of communion and fellowship. It’s whether you can learn to put up with each other in day to day living. So right away, we realize that coming to a common meeting place for an hour or two each week does not promote this goal. This isn’t a social club, but a family household. You should be in each other’s armpits every day, just like a real family living in one household.
So, all that building effort to construct facilities specifically designed for short hours of purposeful occupation and long periods empty is very much not a New Testament plan. The building plan should be housing and care facilities, so that you can all be together. It’s not communism and it’s not encouraging lazy bums to sponge off the system. It’s a family whose primary business is making a life together as family. It’s the ongoing mission of putting out fires and solving conflicts. That’s the primary function of a church — just being together.
Thus, the miniature culture that grows within a church fellowship should be based on the idea of being able to tolerate each other. Your membership should reflect an invitation for folks you can stand to be around. This is where that business of predestination comes into play. Way too many churches are seeking to reach a particular target demographic, a specific audience for corporate planning. They build programs for psychological conversion, and pretend it’s what “spiritual birth” means. In the Bible, it says flatly that God chooses whom they will be; your mission is to make a life for them and with them. All the underlying, unspoken planning behind church growth strategies has been based on the flesh, not on the Spirit.
Get what I’m suggesting here: There’s a difference between building a corporate entertainment franchise, and building a tribe that can live together. There will be some superficial similarities at times between those two conflicting visions, but the fundamental choices are different. The kind of rules you build for the two will be entirely different. You aren’t inviting only folks with a nice middle-class income, and trying to teach some artificial accommodating regimen for the sake of keeping a paying audience. You are inviting people as the true treasure of faith on this earth.
So you’re doing two things at once. First, you are fully aware that a significant portion of folks coming into the church won’t stay that long. They’ll become aware of moral and spiritual patterns, and at some point based on that, become aware that they are called to another work somewhere else. Second, you’ll develop a core of permanent family members who will fully embrace the shared identity of faith. They won’t leave until God drags them away.
But the work itself is building a tribe with an otherworldly orientation. The primary interest is in making the faith of each member stronger. A primary manifestation of faith is loving and caring for someone who needs your help, and learning to accept the gifts and talents they supply. The fundamental assumption is that what faith demands in this life is not something any one person can do alone. It always requires the supporting network of weirdos you would likely never choose to be with for any human reason. You build your activities based on what your members can do, not artificially construct a military unit with pre-determined specialties, for which you then recruit folks to match your design. You take what God brings in the door and figure out what He intends you to do based on what you have in the people.
This is why I keep saying that, as elder of a virtual parish, a primary requirement for membership is not that you buy everything I say, but that you can understand where it comes from and can tolerate it provisionally, so that we can continue being a community. Maybe some day it will be your turn to tell it like you believe it, and then you’ll ask folks to tolerate you.
We don’t have to think alike, but we do seek common ground. We draw the boundaries of what we can tolerate based on a vision of unity that is not what humans can do, but what God Himself can do in us. We don’t have to get much done, in human terms, but we do have to stick together and defend each other from demonic interference. God says we need each other, so get rid of the idea of doing it alone. Recognize when a brother or sister does something good for the body better than you do it, and encourage them to find their own blessings that way. Make room for each other. Don’t plan what kind of people you need; plan to accommodate whatever God brings through the door.
