Tag Archives: church

The faith of a community

Olive treeYesterday we started looking at a quote from Stanley Hauerwas that said in part:

But one of the great problems of Evangelical life in America is evangelicals think they have a relationship with God that they go to church to have expressed but church is a secondary phenomenon to their personal relationship

That’s a powerful statement. It reflects well the American spirit that seeps into our churches, the spirit of individualism that is so strong in our country. It’s the idea that the church is a gathering of like-minded people who share a common faith. Each person’s faith is built in the privacy of their own homes, then they come together to share it on a regular basis.

We like the idea of one man with a Bible, seeking out truth apart from other influences. But that’s not very biblical. Faith grows in a community. The Word of God is heard together, studied together, applied together.

We need some of the language of Romans 11, where Paul talks about non-Jews being grafted into the olive tree which is the people of God. We were brought into a holy nation, made part of a royal priesthood. We are members of a body; those members only live when connected to the body. We focus on our connection with the head, Jesus, yet forget that without a connection to the rest of the body, we will shrivel and die.

Our life of faith should flow out of our time together. The idea of “I love Jesus but not the church” is a proclamation of individualism, not of Christianity. I love Jesus as a part of his church… or I don’t really love him.

Again, I see that this leads us to a consumer attitude. How does this congregation help my faith? If it’s not helping in the way I want, I’ll shop around and find another. That’s not how it works!

We will never truly know Christian faith until we launch ourselves into a body, a local church body, and make ourselves an integral part of it. We lose ourselves in that body until we can only speak of it in the first person and never the third. We can only say “we” and “us” and not “they” and “them.”

But as long as we place ourselves above the body, we can never know what the Christian life is really like. As long as we live in a parasitic relationship, co-existing with the body without becoming a part of it, we will never be what God called us to be.

Dive into a community of faith. There’s risk, of course; it may be a community full of individualists, none of whom are unwilling to fully give themselves to you. Dive in anyway. Take a chance. Your faith will be the better for it.

Image courtesy of MorgueFile.com

Church members and the church

church-487980_640I included recently in the Links To Go a couple of articles Jay Guin published with reflections on statements by Stanley Hauerwas. Here’s one Hauerwas quote that caught my attention:

But one of the great problems of Evangelical life in America is evangelicals think they have a relationship with God that they go to church to have expressed but church is a secondary phenomenon to their personal relationship and I think that’s to get it exactly backwards: that the Christian faith is meditated faith. It only comes through the witness of others as embodied in the church. So I should never trust my presumption that I know what my relationship with God is separate from how that is expressed through words and sacrament in the church. So evangelicals, I’m afraid, often times, with what appears to be very conservative religious convictions, make the church a secondary phenomenon to their assumed faith and I think that’s making it very hard to maintain disciplined congregations. (found here)

That quote fit with some things I’ve been thinking on, namely the concept of church members as consumers. In my experience, we talk a good game about all of us together making up the church, yet all too often we find ourselves talking about the church as something external to us. We talk about what “they” are doing at church. We talk about a dissatisfaction with our local church and a desire to look elsewhere. When church isn’t what we want it to be, there’s little sense of personal failure; “my church” isn’t doing things right, instead of saying “we” aren’t doing things right.

So help me as I start working through some of this, using blog posts to think out loud. To what degree should our identity as a Christian be tied into our local congregation? Is it enough to feel loyalty to the universal church and not to the local expression of that church?

What about the concept of submitting to the leaders of that church? Seems like that gets harder when they are your peers, or worse yet, people younger than you.

How should we be expected to react when those leaders make a decision that goes against one of our convictions? Not just an opinion item, but something that we strongly hold to be true?

What responsibility do congregations have to one another when members want to stop attending one place and start attending another? What if there has been sin involved?

Lots of questions, and I can think of more along these lines. So I’ll stop muddying the waters and ask you to help me find some clarity. Let me hear some of your thoughts on these issues.

(Oh, and I know that those who belong to other religious groups may find all this a bit baffling, as does Hauerwas when observing Evangelical churches. If that’s the case, I ask that you bear with us as we discuss things foreign to your thinking.)

Image courtesy Pixabay

Building the church by building our families

weddingOn October 7, I published ten affirmations about marriage. Since then, we’ve been looking at the ten. Here’s the last:

Our church needs strong, healthy marriages.

Some people rankle at the idea that the church needs anything. Christ built and sustains the church. Does the church really need humans?

I understand that line of reasoning. I even agree with some of the sentiment. But I also know that God expects us to do our part to see help the church grow. (Ephesians 4:16) And a bit part of that is helping our families, our marriages, be strong.

There have been cultural shifts that have damaged marriage. The sexual revolution, from birth control pills to changing moral values, was in many ways an assault on the family. Marriage became optional. Divorce became acceptable. Children were seen as a hindrance to career and freedom. Sexual identity became a sea of confusion.

Some speak of restoring traditional values. I prefer to speak of restoring godly values. The church needs to focus on the home, building marriages and strengthening families. We need to enunciate our belief that families matter, that building a home is our highest priority. We need strong, healthy marriages.

Affirmation #10: Our church needs strong, healthy marriages.

Corporate worship

groupAnother barrier to celebratory worship has to do with the walls of individuality that we often build when we think about corporate worship. Seems like an oxymoron: individuality in corporate worship. Yet much of Western Christianity is based on a concept of individual salvation, personal Bible study, a private relationship with God….

Nowhere is this seen better than the Lord’s Supper. In churches of Christ, at least, this is often seen as an individual moment. We read 1 Corinthians 11 more often than any other passage, yet we seem to ignore the teachings of that passage. We emphasize 11:28, which talks about each man examining himself, and downplay 11:29, which talks about us being aware of the gathered body of believers. (while some confusion exists over the use of the word “body” in this verse, the text itself makes it clear that this refers to the church)

We’ve created a culture where people feel that they can enter a service and leave, speaking only to a bare minimum of people. After all, we’re there to be with God, right? Wrong. We’re there to be with the body of Christ, worshiping together, communing together at the Table of the Lord, singing together, hearing Scripture together. Together. Corporately.

Corporate worship is a family gathering. Can you imagine someone going to a family reunion, eating a meal, then leaving without speaking to anyone? Some people try to do it at church.

Let’s put the corporate back into corporate worship. It will do us all some good.

Bilingual ministry in Abilene

DSCN6505I realize that my last couple of posts could leave people a bad impression of our church and our bilingual ministry. So let me try and point out some good things.

Abilene is a city of about 120,000 people. (According to Wikipedia, Abilene “metro” is about 165,000) The ethnic makeup of the city includes about 25% that identify themselves as Hispanic.

There are over 30 churches of Christ in the city and immediate area. As far as I know, there are only two which offer a service in Spanish. Only one of those functions within a larger, predominantly Anglo church: the bilingual service at University.

This work has been functioning for over 25 years. It has had its ups and downs but has always counted on the full support of the congregation. The elders have made it clear that the bilingual ministry is an important part of the University family.

The average age of UCC members trends toward the upper end of Abilene’s population. The bilingual group trends much younger. A large percentage of UCC members are longtime members of the Church of Christ; the bilingual group includes many who have been converted to Christ within the last 5 years or so.

It’s only fair that I point out some of these good things even as I’ve mentioned a few negative ones. To refer again to Jason’s analogy from Sunday, our church is working hard to look like a Cliff Huxtable sweater.