Organic Life of a Church

Churches aren’t built; they grow.

organic — having properties characteristic of living organisms; constitutional in the structure of something, the nature of the thing

One of the most evil trends in modern church life has been convincing churches that they need an objective statement. Brothers and sisters, the church has no objective. You can probably find words in the New Testament indicating the contrary to what I say, but you won’t find the Bible teaching what we commonly see today. Evangelism was never solicitation; it was simply getting the message out. In the Mediterranean Basin of the First Century, there were certain ways one did that; those ways don’t fit our world today. There was nothing particularly holy in their methods. The current business style and corporate structure of churches is damned, though. You can call your church nice words like “vibrant” but that doesn’t mean anything outside our peculiar cultural biases, and hardly means what the early churches did.
When church obeys the leadership of the Holy Spirit, it is an extended family household which suffers few of the limitations of shared DNA. Sure, it’s nice if your kinfolks all heed the call to join together as a single church body, but it’s hardly necessary, nor even ideal. The church is a living thing; it lives. It needs no objective but to live. It’s the place where people with a shared calling to repentance strive to keep themselves all on the mission. Objective is not equivalent to mission; there is nothing to accomplish. We each as members struggle to avoid the very idea of accomplishment. We strive to change and lose our interest in accomplishment, because that’s a part of this fallen existence we hope to leave behind as we transition to eternity.
We strive to keep alive a totally personal connection between us and the Spirit of God. It’s the same Spirit Who decides how we relate to each other. Even when we list shared characteristics, it is merely a personal expression of what we perceive at the moment. It remains utterly dynamic; my list might change next week. The single constant is flux. We are living eternal certainty in a world which cannot comprehend certainty. Never forget: This world is broken and slated for complete destruction. The Bible says all Creation is looking forward to it.
So a church is an atmosphere. It is by far the single most flexible and mixed up bunch of people ever to hang together. It remains ad hoc by its nature. Every moment of every day each member remains surrendered voluntarily to the welfare of the whole because that is their own welfare. At the moment of disjuncture between individual and church welfare, we work at reducing the conflict. We might miss you if that requires departure, but we don’t grieve at the fact itself. We rejoice because it means you are moving forward, and so are we. There is no separation of benefits between the individual and the body, so long as we keep the otherworldly perspective. Only in the fallen flesh is this broken. The less fleshly, the better.
The mission is not being, nor particularly doing; the mission is living.