God's People

There's a very common word running through our English bibles when God is speaking and laying out His plan and His promises. That word is "you."

The trouble with English is that we are prone to misunderstand what this little word means. In our individualistic, self-centered culture in which we are praised for self-reliance and self-sufficiency and self-actualization, we read that word and believe that the Bible is talking just about us. Singular. Me. The individual. 

But the very common word that is running through our Bible is not "you" (singular). It is "you" (plural). It's "you all." It's "y'all." You, as a group. You, together. You, collectively. The people - the children - of God. 

And this is very consistent with the rest of God's story. 

Oh, sure, God made promises through individuals like Noah and Abraham. He worked through individuals like David and Solomon. He tells the stories of individuals like Job and Paul. But overwhelmingly, the Bible talks about the way that God works through His people - plural. As a group. 

He talks about the way that Israel - the whole nation - will be a beacon in the world. All of the other peoples will see something in them as a group that will draw them to God. Their worship and faithfulness, collectively, will be a testimony to His glory. His plan has always been to redeem the world through His people - not His individual persons, but His people as a group. 

When Jesus comes, what's the first thing He does in His ministry? He forms a group. A collective "we." A plural "you." He chooses 12 guys and tells them plainly, Y'all will change the world. It's not that Peter is going to change a little bit of the world and Andrew is going to change a different little bit of it and Bartholomew is going to impact this little section over here while Thomas impacts that little section over there. It's that the collective testimony and witness of this group, taken together, will change the world. It's that from these twelve men, collectively, the entire world will be changed. 

And that is something that we have lost sight of in our culture, in the way that we've been taught to think about "you." Because we hear messages about how we're supposed to be God's people in the world, and we think that means we're supposed to be God's individual persons. So we've taken on our shoulders this great big burden. We even preach in our churches about how many individuals we, as individuals, have brought to Christ. How many have you (singular) invited to church lately? How many have you (singular) prayed for? When you get to heaven, how many persons will be there to great you (singular) and thank you for your individual witness into their lives? 

Yes, we are really talking about this. 

But the story of God is not an individual story, and this is one reason our churches are struggling so much. Because we are not the sum of our individual persons; we are something greater than that - we are a people. And it is a people that God has always used to be a witness to the world. A you (plural). You all. Y'all. Us all. 

And if we ever want to see God do amazing things like He's done throughout this entire story that He's given us, we have to find a way to push back against our individualistic culture and recapture this sense of who we (plural) are. Because that is who God has always called us to be. 

God Keeps His Promises

We know that our God is a God of promises. And we know - or at least, we have heard - that God keeps His promises. Every single one of them. 

Then why does it feel like we're never going to see those promises come to fruition?

This is one of the things that we struggle with quite a bit. We are a people who have seen how long it sometimes takes God to fulfill His promises, so we have become a people who don't hold as tightly to them. 

God promised His people Canaan, the Promised Land. But it took them 40 years of wandering and many more years of fighting to ever take possession of that land. Moses, who made the promise to the people for the Lord, never got to see it. Joshua led the people valiantly across the Jordan and into the first part of the land, but he didn't get to see it all, either. In fact, when Joshua was preparing to die, he reminded the people that God keeps all of His promises and that they just have to keep pushing into them. 

Fast forward a little bit, and we have an Israel who has waited for hundreds of years for the promised Messiah. Hundreds of years. There are something even like 400 years or so between the end of Malachi and the beginning of Matthew, 400 years or so during which there was no act of God worthy to become part of our Scripture. No act of judgment. No act of mercy. No measure of grace. Nothing. There is just silence, then the fulfillment of the promise they had been waiting on for so long. 

We, too, are a people waiting on a promise. Well, we have the promise; we're waiting on its fulfillment. We have been promised that Christ is coming back. But we are a people who don't wait quite like Israel waited - we just assume, it seems, that we're never going to see this promise. Oh, we still believe God is going to do it. We just don't believe He's going to do it in our lifetime. And so, we believe that God does keep His promises, but that He is slow to do it and that His promises may not be for us. 

So let's go back, then, to what Joshua said to the people as he prepared to die. He told them, "Remember, God has kept His promises. Every single one of them." 

This is important. Remember, Israel had been wandering for 40 years. The people to whom Joshua spoke were not the people who received the promise from God in the first place; they were the next generation. (Not going back, of course, to Abraham, who was the first to actually receive this promise.) They had spent their entire lives wandering. Wondering. Living in tents. Eating manna and quail. Seeing shadows of the Promised Land. 

They had spent many years fighting. It probably seemed to them like every time they won a battle, there was another one waiting for them. They probably felt like they were moving from one war zone to another to another without any time to even really relish their victories...or even process them. It was one thing after another after another, and now, here's Joshua, about to die, and he has to refocus their vision for them. 

They are well into the Promised Land now. They don't have all of it, but they have a good portion of it, and Joshua, in his wisdom, pauses near his last breath and reminds them, "Look around. You're here. God has done it. He has kept this promise." 

Sometimes, we miss the way God has kept His promise because we get so caught up in the fighting for it. We get so caught up in our battles and in our own existence that we lose sight of the big picture and forget to look up and look around every once in awhile. But if we do...here it is. We're here. This is God's promise. 

And He has been faithful to bring us this far. 

It's a reminder we all need.  

The So-Called Body

Perhaps one of the things that would help us to understand the nature of fellowship within the church is to look more closely at how, exactly, the New Testament defines us. 

It is most common for churches to think of themselves as the "body of Christ." Certainly, the body metaphor is well-expounded for us. It goes something like this - we are all members of one body, unique in our own way, gifted to serve in a way that complements every other part of our body. So we have come think of ourselves as elbows, as stomachs, as pinky toes, what have you. 

This satisfies something in our cultural selves. We live in a world that tells us how special and unique we are, how there is no one else like us, how we're supposed to "find" and "be" our "self" and "let others deal with it." And so, we come together in our churches as parts of a body. 

It is only natural, then, that when the elbow of the church decides to leave and find another congregation, we simply start looking around to figure out who else is equipped to serve as an elbow. We are a body, and we need all of our parts to function, and it's less important who fills that role as it is what exact role they are filling. So we spend our church lives performing these replacement surgeries on ourselves, swapping out an elbow here and an ear there, deciding we can live with perhaps one fewer finger for a season or that it's okay if we can't taste anything for awhile. 

But what if I told you that even though it's one of the most expounded-on images of the church in the New Testament, the body is not the most common expression of the church? 

Well, it's not. 

The most common expression of the church in the New Testament - throughout the Bible, really - is the image of the family. We are, as He says over and over again, children of God. We are brothers and sisters. We come together in the house of the Lord. 

We're a family.

And being family changes the way we have to think about the church. See, family is family, no matter what. And trust me, I get it - I have spent years as the black sheep of my biological family. I spent years going to Thanksgiving and Christmases in the house of the family where no one seemed to notice I was even there at all, where I spent most of the day in the corner by myself, but where, when I went to leave, a few voices would always pipe up and say, "Are you leaving already? I feel like you just got here." I have argued with family, more than I care to think about, but still come to lean on one another in times of trouble. I have shared great big belly laughs with family. My best - and worst - memories all come from family. 

Families...are complicated. 

But there's something special about them, and that's this: they aren't optional. It doesn't matter what you believe, who you are, what your status is in life, what you look like, how you speak, you are still part of the family, like it or not. Whether the family likes it or not. You don't choose your family; God puts you into it. And there's nothing you can do to change the blood in your body that eternally connects you to everyone else who has those same strings of DNA. 

And that means that when Bill leaves, we didn't lose an elbow. We lost Bill. We can't just go out and get a new Bill. You can't replace a person. There's a real sense of loss, a real grief. We know, forever, that part of us is missing from this gathering. It means that the older generations naturally take the younger under their wings, that the young are eager to learn from the old because there's something about passing the family story down. It means that we naturally come together and lean on one another in hard times. It means that we're here for each other, whether we always like each other or not. We argue, sure. We fight. We also have great big belly laughs with one another. Our best - and our worst - memories all come from this place of togetherness, but even the worst ones don't change who we are. 

We're family. Because we all share the same blood - the blood of Christ. And nothing can change that. Once we get that amazing grace down in our souls, we're connected forever to everyone else who carries those same strings of holy DNA. For better or worse. There's nothing we can do about it. God has given us this family, and we're part of it - no matter how much our world tries to tell us that if we don't like it, we can just trade it in for another one. That's not how God's family works. That's not how our biological family works. Family is forever. Our time together, then, is just a matter of us figuring out how to spend our time together. 

We think we're a body, but we're not. The body image is what keeps us fracturing. It's what keeps us swapping parts out over and over and over again until the church becomes some weird sort of Frankenstein's monster. No wonder the world looks at us in horror. 

The best churches are families. That's who God has called us to be, and it's the living testimony the world needs, too. We're not perfect, but we're here for it - together. Brothers and sisters. In the house of the Lord. Bonded by one blood. Children of God. For better or worse. 

And when we're doing it right, I'm telling you - it's overwhelmingly better.  

Fellowship

The truth, even if we don't want to hear it, is that if we're not making fellowship a central part of our time together on Sunday mornings, then our people aren't getting it. If we're making them choose it on their own and work for it out of their own energies, they aren't having it. 

We've seen two objections to the notion of making fellowship central in our gatherings - first, that no one wants to come to a place where they are expected to be socially vulnerable and second, that if we spend our time on fellowship, we'll be diminishing the time we have available to "preach Jesus." 

Let's start with the second objection, because I cannot stress this enough: doing fellowship right is preaching Jesus. In fact, it's more preaching Jesus than anything we could do with straight-up words. The biggest attraction of the church has always been not its theology, but its community. 

The fact of the matter is that there's plenty of theology in the world. There are plenty of gods, each with their own story. And if you just take them at their words, there's not a lot of significant difference between them. That is, they all tell the story of a god who is bigger than us and who controls the world and who has some measure of cosmic power and some set of rules by which you get on his good side or bad side. For all practical purposes, most "god stories" are relatively the same. 

What makes the Christian God story different is His nearness, His presence, His incarnation so that He walks among us. And the God who walks among us set for us an example of how we're supposed to do it, by always being in relationship with the persons around Him. By establishing a core group of believers and disciples who completely changed the world. And this Christ-God told us, plainly, that the world would understand only when they see us loving each other. 

I don't know how that could be any clearer. 

So if folks walking into your church are getting a god story....*yawn*. God stories are a dime a dozen. But relationship is that thing that our human souls long for, and that's what makes our God story so dramatically different, and so wonderfully better, than all of the others. So maybe we aren't "preaching Jesus" with words, but I tell you with absolute confidence that love preaches Jesus better than words ever could. 

Now, as for the notion that no one wants to come to a place where they are expected to be socially vulnerable, I think we have to change our understanding of this. It all depends, really, on how we define social vulnerability. 

The overwhelming human ache, especially in our individualistic generation, is to know and to be known. It's to have a place to fit in. It's to have a place to be and to be welcome. Not just because you exist and you happen to be there, but because you are known and others are choosing to welcome and include you. We all want to be part of something; we all want to be connected to others. 

There are ways to do togetherness that don't have to be awkward. It all has to do with how you normalize it. 

We have a bit of a pressure in our culture toward "privacy." We think we have to protect the privacy of others, and in the church, this means that we've sort of tucked our needs away. No reason to name any names, no reason to embarrass anyone. No reason to call anyone out in front of everyone else. And for all practical purposes, this means that we have essentially stopped praying for one another as a body. If you want to know who to pray for, check the bulletin or read the weekly email or whatever, but we don't make it a habit any more of bringing the needs of our members before the body publicly. And even if our members have a need, they can respond privately to the invitation, pray privately with an elder, walk back to their seat alone, and everyone else waits for the email update. 

What if we normalize making the needs of our members public in our time together? What if we normalize having a gathering where addressing the real lives of those among us is our primary emphasis? 

The early church came together to meet the needs of those in attendance. They spent their time dividing up their resources and making sure everyone was taken care of. This wasn't something their deacons did after the assembly was over; it was part of their assembling together. And it wasn't that long ago that it was part of ours. It wasn't that long ago that no one thought twice for us to interrupt the assembly to pray for someone, for us to stop everything else and take time to hear a story, for us to break between worship songs to hear a testimony. It's only been recently that these things have been pushed to the side..for no other reason than that they aren't part of our very-scripted program. 

But church was never meant to be about a program, and there's not one single example of that in the New Testament. Not one. Church was meant to be about a fellowship. 

And if we're not using our time together for being together, we're doing it wrong. Period. We simply have to make fellowship central to our time together. We have to make our togetherness the thing. Even Jesus said so. 

Wasting Time

The second objection that churches make when invited to renew an emphasis on fellowship is this: We can't waste our precious time together on that. 

Yes, that's the word - waste. 

Churches have become very invested in the emphasis that they put on preaching Jesus, on being seeker sensitive, on having the right invitation to "make a decision for Christ." Most churches run on a very tight schedule in their programs - there were even times when I was told exactly how many minutes I had to offer a Communion devotional. 

We have a lot of Jesus to cram into a very short amount of time, and anything that might take away from that time is, well, not welcome. 

We have to sing three songs, read a Scripture, have a prayer, pass the plates, listen to the sermon, and leave enough time for at least a few responses to the invitation (but not so much time that it's awkward if no one comes forward this week). We have rehearsed music, prepared slides, prepped speakers, written out devotionals, poured cups...if we don't get to all of that, if we don't get through all of that, then something essential will be missing from our Sunday morning. 

Except... 

For all of our hustle and bustle, something essential is already missing from our Sunday morning. 

That something is fellowship. 

Oh, no, Aidan, I hear you saying - there's plenty of time for fellowship on Sunday. Anyone who wants to fellowship can show up a few minutes early or stay a few minutes late and hang out in the lobby fellowshipping with anyone they want to! Our members have as much time as they need to fellowship; we're not kicking them out right after the closing prayer. 

No. Just no. See, this goes back to what we were talking about last week, where the fellowship aspect of the church is something extra, something that the members are expected to do themselves, something that they'd have to commit to outside of the core time that you spend together as a body. 

What do you say to someone who shows up early to fellowship, but there's no one interested in talking? Not everyone who loiters in the lobby is interested in fellowship. Or maybe there's someone in the church this person would really connect with, but that person is a stay-later, not a come-early-er, so they keep missing each other. 

Well, Aidan, it's up to them to figger their schedules and make the time if fellowship is important to them and if they want to meet up with certain sets of folks. 

No. Again, no. That's not how the body is supposed to work. That's not how the body has ever worked. (In fact, in seasons in which this has been the primary model for the church, I am telling you - it hasn't worked. That's why our churches are getting emptier, not fuller. That's why more folks are walking away from us.) 

Having an opportunity for fellowship outside of your core time together, even if it's just fifteen minutes outside of that core time, is still putting the onus of fellowship on your people to do it themselves. To try to make it happen on their own. To build that if they want to build that...with other folks who want to build that. But not everyone. 

We keep saying we can't "waste" our precious, limited time on this fellowship, but I'm telling you - failing to make fellowship central to our precious, limited time together is already a failure. It's already a waste. It's killing us. 

Because it means we're not doing the one thing that Jesus called us to do above all other things, which, if you'll remember, was not to go and make disciples, but actually, it was to love one another.