"42And they devoted themselves to...the fellowship...to the breaking of bread.....46And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts"
I use quotes because I don’t want to imply that we should compare church to your family. There are a lot of families who aren't loving nowadays, so I know this is a hard one to visualize and relate to for a lot of you.
When you ask someone to describe their church, what do they usually say?
You usually get a recount of the service: how moving was the music, how inspiring was the teaching/sermon (if you’re talking to a theology buff it’s usually about how they don’t agree with it), how organized they were, how advanced their AV system is, perhaps a mention of the smile on faces of the ushering team (or sometimes lack there of). You realize nowadays those are the elements that people take as the dominant characteristics of a gathering of God’s people.
John 13:34-35 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."
God's people is to be known for the way they radically display their love, His love, not their knowledge or teaching or music or operational prowess.
That makes perfect sense when you remember Jesus saying the two most important commands were to love God, and to love your neighbour as yourself. And I’m not so sure how many of you would personally feel loved if we spent ourselves putting on this fantastic show every Saturday, just like the video.
That’s what we realized two years back, when we had ten people on the band (we ran out of AV channels or stage space for that matter), and three bible studies going on with increasing levels of intellectual difficulty (we even named them that way, Perspective 1, 2 and 3), we were pushing a hundred for our Saturday service as we created larger and larger corporate structures to cope with the increasing number of people who just wanted to come and sit and consume and “grow”.
Craziest thing is that we wanted that, we felt driven and called to give them the best spiritual experience two hours can buy.
We used to have a ton of meetings back then specifically as to how we’d run the 2 hour service better. Our operations checklist to prepare for the service reached to 27 separate tasks at one point before we even got to 4:30pm. I specifically remember one meeting where we sat around and discussed how we could make our newcomer process less set up and obviously scripted, to make it seem more like our guys just happened to want to get to know their assigned person.
The plan we came up with was for the ushering team to secretly text the newcomers team a physical description of their newcomer assignment during the praise time, so that they could have the rest of the service to find that person to make sure they approached them after service.
Funny enough in the end we had to scrap that plan because we got really poor reception in our old room. I have to tell you though, when all the gears meshed right, the show was super slick.
Yes, people enjoyed coming to that, that service even sort of “worked” in terms of getting people excited for a little while about attending our events.
Then the floor fell out, us leaders were tired and burnt out, most only cared to sit through the show, the fad of being the “hip church for students” went to some other safer, non-”charismatic” churches, as did the crowds. We went through three years of this flurry of activity but saw that in the long-run most hearts didn’t transform. There was lots of motion, but when the dust settled, there was no movement.
We were left to wrestle with the question that went surprisingly unanswered (well we never asked it really) in our 3 prior years of “building church”: What is church?
We prayed, we dove into scripture, we laughed, we cried, we listened to God, we shouted at each other (well no, it was just me shouting at people), it finally dawned on us that church wasn’t an idea or an event or a place, it was a people belonging to God’s love. Believers don’t come to church, they become church.
And what we were doing was never going to prompt people to that for long, for most it didn’t even prompt them out of their Saturday seats. We realized that no amount of organizing or doctrine or excellence or attractiveness could ever compensate for a gathering of people who don’t love one another; no corporate event, no corporate structure could ever substitute for the soul to soul connection of God’s love.
So we got off the stage, got off the fancy platform that we had built, and refocused our lives to touching individual hearts and raising them to love others. For our gatherings we’ve pursued a different atmosphere ever since, keep it simple, keep it freeing, keep it joyful, keep it loving.
Acts 2 gives this picture of people's lives intertwined together. It wasn't a gathering where you didn’t even know the name of the person sitting beside you, never mind love them. People didn’t gather so they could, you know, not talk to each other for two hours every weekend. People didn’t gather to individually interact privately with their own God. Why gather if you spend most of the gathering not caring about the people gathered with you?
When the Apostle Paul scolded the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 11 about messing up the communion meeting, what was his beef?
Many will read the few verses about drinking judgement and examining themselves themselves and think that the Apostle Paul was talking about their lack of reverence.
But if you read the whole chapter, the whole book actually, Paul was really getting at their divisiveness, their lack of love, mentioning in verse 33 a remedy for their situation was to wait for each other before starting the meal!
That this meal was supposed to be about you celebrating Christ together, without segregation, without favoritism, with generous hearts tied together by the bond of Christ and the Corinthians made it into a showy, class divided, every man for himself event. That’s what the Apostle Paul was upset at, that they gathered in His name but didn’t represent His love at all.
Being part of the body of Christ, being church, isn’t about you and God. It’s about us and God, being a body that is truly joined together.
Simplest part of that is showing up.
Every year, someone will do this. Someone will regularly come to the service, leave right afterwards week in and week out, and sometime later talk about how they’re not growing, or finding community here or they feel left out and no one’s feeding them.
This kills me every time, it’s like a needy girlfriend telling their boyfriend that she feels so lonely that he’s never around. And the boyfriend is like, well you never show up to our dates!
Participating in a body of Christ is not supposed to fit into a two hour service. If you want to be part of this family, if you really consider church to be God’s people and not just an event you attend, then surprise, you need to spend time loving and connecting with your brothers and sisters.
We pray together every Tues, Weds, Sat. We have bible studies on Sundays. Small groups. We always go out for food after service, I dare say that we have a communion meal together every weekend. People randomly show up at Ward and hang out. Those are just as much “church” time as right now.
Being part of church, being part of the body of Christ, actually becoming more like Christ, is not about the attending good programs and joining the right organization; not about coming, sitting and expecting some other human being to reach you and feed you.
It’s about playing a part in the loving, reaching, shaping and supporting of other brothers and sisters and as they play that part for you; to become church for each other and the world around us.
That’s what you’re called to give for each and every community you walk into, however new you are. There have been some some new believers here who have done more to love this community than people who have sat through church services for decades.
God’s love, it’s in you to give.
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