Virtually Paul

True Christian Community: A Real Life Example

The “Bachelor Pad” that I live in, has taught me some valuable lessons about the personal cost of community.  We live in what you could call a dishes community.  As my housemate Warren once rightly observed:  Dishes are a fact of life.  Dishes, for the purposes of this illustration are the things in life that we collect as we go along- our hopes, our fears, our needs, our opinions, our hurts.  They’re all dishes.  Everyone has dishes.  Every church family is full of people, with dishes.

The first way we tried to deal with our dishes in the bachelor pad, was with a fool-proof system, designed to take care of our every dishwashing need.  We agreed to stack the dishes on the sink as they were used.  Then, every second day, on a rostered basis, we would take turns to deal with the dishes for the entire bachelor pad community.  It worked for about a week and a half.  Eventually it degenerated into petty arguments.

Whose turn was it to do the dishes?
Who made more dishes than someone else?
Who didn’t do a good enough job last time?
Who did their dishes too late?

We each ended up pointing the finger at the others, feeling completely justified that we had contributed and frustrated at the obvious faults of the other two.  We blamed the others in our community for our dishes.  We insisted that before we contributed any further, that the other party live up to our expectations.

When I’m not feeling great about something at church.  I’m not proud to admit that I often have the same response.  I point the finger towards the community and say “It’s the church’s fault.  The church has so much wrong with it!”

Do you ever feel like that?
Have you been unhappy with a decision made by the church?
Are you still feeling a sense of loss or hurt?
Are you disappointed about something?
Do you have any regrets from the past?

The solution came in the form of a new dishes system.  A system that is yet to cause a single argument. We now have 3 separate spots for dishes in the kitchen.  And an amazing thing started to happen.  Once we were able to see which dishes belonged to us personally, we dealt with them ourselves.  We didn’t insist upon our rights or the responsibilities of others to conform to our definition of fair.  In fact, one day I was delighted to come home to find that my other housemate, Nathan, had dealt with his own dishes and then taken care of mine as well.  Community works when we give the best of ourselves to others.  I believe that this is what it means to bear one another’s burdens.  “…and in this way…”, says Galatians 6:2, “…you will fulfil the law of Christ.”

In the same way, Jesus gave up the fair and just result for himself.  Motivated by love for others, he gave his life on the cross.  His blood being shed to cover the price of our rebellion from God.  And allowing us to come back into relationship with our Creator.  Without a Christ-inspired approach to our community, we hurt ourselves and we hurt those around us.  With the love of God the Father as the source of our relationships, as the Holy Spirit unites us in love for one another, together we enter into our promised inheritance, joined as one body with our Jesus Christ our Saviour.

Philippians 2:1-11
If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
   did not regard equality with God
   as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
   taking the form of a slave,
   being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
   he humbled himself
   and became obedient to the point of death—
   even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
   and gave him the name
   that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
   every knee should bend,
   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
   that Jesus Christ is Lord,
   to the glory of God the Father.

True Christian Community: Loving Like A Family

Paul (the apostle) uses a number of different words that describe the relationships between members of the church, as a family. The church family, is called oikeioi (household), while Paul refers to himself as doulos (slave), the lowest member of the household, to the church in Corinth. But by far, Paul’s favourite term when he referred to people in the NT churches, was adelphoi (brethren) - A word that carries with it a deep sense of personal relationship and, in some contrast to the typical literature of the day, includes women and children amongst those it addresses.

From adelphoi, comes the Greek word philadelphia (no cheesy jokes please!). Philadelphia means “to love with a familial affection”. It points towards the underlying motive of some of the practical things that the New Testament asks us to do in the Christian family. Because we are a family, we are to:

• Give honour to one another (Rom. 12:10)
• Live harmoniously with one another (Rom. 12:16)
• Admonish one another (Rom. 15:14)
• Wait for each other (1 Cor. 11:33)
• Demonstrate equal care for one another (1 Cor. 12:25)
• Serve one another (Gal. 5:13)
• Bear burdens of each other (Gal. 6:2)
• Give comfort to one another (1 Thes. 5:11)
• Build up each other (1 Thes. 5:11)
• Maintain peace with each other (1 Thes. 5:13)
• Do good to one another (1 Thes. 5:15)
• Lovingly bear with each other (Eph. 4:2)
• Be subject to each other (Eph. 5:21)
• Forgive one another (Col. 3:13)
• Confess to and pray for each other (James 5:16)
• Exhibit hospitality to each other (1 Peter 4:9)

This stuff isn’t easy to live out because it comes at a personal cost.

True Christian Community: The Church as a body

The concept of the unity that needs to be present in Christian community is best illustrated by the metaphorical use of the Greek word soma (body) in the New Testament, intertwined with references to the church. In “the body”, everyone has a vital role:

1 Corinthians 12:14-20 (NIV)Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

This reminds us of the interdependent connectedness that is necessary for real Christian community. Everyone has a place here as part of it. You have a God-given role to play in the community, if you choose it. But why? What has God got in mind for us as we’re thrown together into this mix? What have we been placed into communities to do? Ephesians 4, has our answer. We are called to be part of a body where Christ is the head - a body that is growing into maturity.

Ephesians 4:11-16 (NRSV)
The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

To experience true Christian community, we must first know Christ and then grow in that knowledge. What happens if we don’t grow in our knowledge of Christ? As richly as Paul’s “body” metaphor tells of our interconnectedness when the parts of the body are not working together
it also exposes our vulnerability.

When I was in high school I had this problem with my knees called Osgood-Schlatters disease. Have a look at the site. Basically, due to different muscles, tendons and bones growing at different rates, there’s a tendon that can start to pull away from the bone below the knee. It absolutely kills. You can’t run because the impact just sends pain shooting up your leg. If you do try to run, it starts hurting when you walk. Because parts of my body weren’t working together properly, my whole body was in a lot of pain. In 1 Corinthians, Paul explains that:

1 Corinthians 12:25-26
there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

True Christian Community: The Real Building

It’s difficult to talk about buildings at my church without making reference to the one that’s being assembled under our noses.

But the metaphor for the church as a “building” in the New Testament, isn’t talking about the products of the construction industry. This is something that we often forget simply because of the way we use the word “church” in modern English.

“I’m going down to the church on Saturday to help with the working bee.”
“Which church is the wedding being held in?”
“That church over there looks very nice.”

The “building” described in the NT is not a physical one. When Paul (not me, the apostle) talks about the “church” he uses the Greek word ekklesia.
According to the commentary I looked at (see my Community Resources page) ekklesia refers to “an actual gathering of people” or “the group gathering for a regularly assembled meeting”.

Biblical commentators qualify the idea of ekklesia, proposing that Paul wasn’t referring to the church in an institutional sense either. The early church was most certainly linked in organic ways between the different gatherings. But here, Paul’s use of the word didn’t intend to carry an undertone of an earth-bound, organisational sense of federation, beyond their shared faith in Christ. When Paul wrote to the ekklesia in Corinth, or the ekklesia in Colossae, I don’t think he had the different gatherings listed on a database as member churches of the BURE (the Baptist Union of the Roman Empire). So, in my context at Essendon, I tried to imagine what it would be like, if we didn’t have our physical building.

I imagined what church would be like, if, at 5am every Sunday morning, Heath and Simon, our music guys, got up and put up a marquee made from about 80 sheets of blue tarp in Lincoln Park, just in case it rained… and we had church there every Sunday with musical instruments that don’t need electricity… Doug, who’s been worship leading for decades, whips out an old broom handle with bottle caps nailed on to it… the drum kit got stolen last week because someone forgot to pack it up… so Gary, my favourite drummer, is unloading a couple of upturned rubbish bins from the back of his car like that guy who busks in the city. Joan, everyone’s favourite little old lady, is getting into it with the tambourine. There’s no overhead projector. Just one of the tallest guys at church, Bruce, with a big whiteboard and a step ladder. When I picture that, the only things that are strikingly similar to the regular gathering I call church, are the smiling familiar faces.

Paul wasn’t writing to buildings, nor to organisations. He was writing to Christians who met together, living out real faith in a community. The community gathering is the building that Paul is referring to in Ephesians 2, as he writes to Gentile believers, extending to them the invitation for all believers, to enter into the church community.

Ephesians 2:19-22 (NRSV)
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

True Christian Community: An Introduction

Stained Glass Masquerade (popup window warning)

Those are the lyrics to a song by a band called Casting Crowns and for me they present a challenge. The song vividly depicts for us the false experience of community that many of us will experience at one time or another.

For me, the words remind me of my brokenness and my aloneness when I put up walls of self-protection that stop me from being real with other people. They bring to life for me the shallow, fake, empty reality that can exist for us in our approach to participating in the church community.

According to Wikipedia:

The word community comes from the Latin communis, meaning “common, public, shared by all or many.”^[1] The Latin term “communitatus” from which the English word “community” comes, is comprised of three elements, “Com-” - a Latin prefix meaning with or togther, “-Munis-” - ultimately Proto-Indo-European in origin, it has been suggested that it means “the changes or exchanges that link” (Both municipal and monetary take their meaning here), and “-tatus” a Latin suffix suggesting diminutive, small, intimate or local.

So, you could probably describe community as “Localised, intimate exchanges that link together”.

The community at my church is something that’s extremely important to me. My strongest memories of being a part of a real community, being cared about, being accepted, and being loved, are all intrinsically connected to Essendon Baptist Community Church. So I guess that makes me living proof that true Christian community can happen in amongst us those of us who chose to gather together on Sunday mornings.

My purpose in writing the upcoming content on this blog, is to examine some of what the bible has to say about the way Christians are to live in community with each other. On its own merits, our community at Essendon Bapts certainly isn’t perfect… but even just in our youth ministry, there are some great things going on. People are investing in each other in some really encouraging ways. We really do have something special. Hopefully, I’ve got a few ideas here that apply universally… things that we can all take onboard as we interact with others in our communities.

Book Review: Preaching to a Postmodern World - Graham Johnston

Graham Johnston does a wonderful job of communicating the framework for postmodern thinking to a target audience of Bible-believing preachers. The text effectively recontextualises the communication of the Gospel message into the ruins of the modern era, where many are no longer willing to believe in the scientific-rationalist independence from faith that was the hallmark of the baby-boomers. Johnston’s analysis of the resulting postmodern culture shows a way forward for Gospel communication, while warning preachers that their listeners will fail to hear the message if it is not communicated in a way that is sympathetic towards their worldview.

This book was a refreshing change in tone from some of the other reading that I’ve done this semester. I felt as though I indentified with the author moreso than in my encounters with the other texts. I could perhaps attribute this to a cultural bias, given that Johnston is a fellow Australian. However, I think this sense of identification was most enhanced by Johnston’s use of illustrations which richly and effectively illustrated his points.

I found another review which made me wonder whether the book will actually be able to challenge modern thinking in experienced preachers. I suspect that the reviewer, Sam Horn, is likely to be a greater authority on the subject than I, given the letters “Ph.D.” after his name. However, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d completely missed the point, given that the conclusion of Horn’s review spent most of its time criticising Johnston for using an illustration containing homosexual practices.

“In fairness to Johnston, a careful reading does not reveal a pro-homosexual agenda or even acceptance. However, neither does he clearly state his stance against homosexuality and given the nature of the illustration, one would expect at least a caveat of disclaimer somewhere in the paragraph.”

Horn seemed to miss Johnston’s point about the postmodern objection to unequivocal moral pronouncements from the institutionalised church. Whether Johnston thinks homosexuality is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is entirely beside the point. It’s about time that the church realised that people want our love first and our opinions on morality second (if at all).

Hopefully Johnston made a few preachers squirm ever so slightly in their reading chairs.

A Christian STD: Spiritually Transmitted Disease

For everyone who hadn’t already realised that the Christian message often isn’t communicated or modelled very well by churches. I can identify with a lot of things that this article has to say. That doesn’t mean “write-off” church. But I guess it is worth being aware that the message that (should be) spoken from the front doesn’t always reflect every participant’s (primary) motives for being there.

http://www.theooze.com/articles/article.cfm?id=1454