Cerulean Sanctum Series

Being the Body: How to Forge Real Community, Part 4

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It’s discouraging how disconnected we are as people. Even Christians live like there’s no one else outside the walls of their church. Sadly, in many cases, we erect walls inside the church, too.

I continue to receive private e-mails from folks who are resonating with this series because they’ve been victims of our lack of community. Their churches gave them the “God helps those who help themselves” line and let them twist in the wind.

It tears me up to read those stories. Yet they keep coming in increasing number.

In some ways, I can’t blame people for choosing self-sufficient isolation and a hands-off attitude toward others. Prayer circleWe’re inundated by those two messages. As much as we believe that no one can tell us Americans what to do, we live in a culture that bombards us with a million takes on how we should live. Every day, no matter how much we believe we’re our own guides, media saturates us with messages we heed without much thought. Don’t believe me? Did you tailor your wardrobe or plan your activities today based on what the weatherman said? That’s just one simple example.

While Joe Meterologist at KRPP TV isn’t certified to teach, his message is educational nonetheless. Our teachers outnumber us, and few of them teach a message that upholds basic Christian thought. We tell ourselves we ignore the pedagogical aspects of the messages we hear, yet they still impart a worldview. We Christians need to understand that just because we spend ten minutes a day in Bible reading doesn’t mean we’re inoculated against the diseased mantras the world chants around us.

One of the worst messages we Americans receive focuses on the idea that each of us is our own man (or woman). But as pointed out in the first installment of this series, that message conflicts with God’s message of community. We Christians must mercilessly counter the propaganda of self-centeredness by understanding that

#7 – Godly education builds godly community.

Just as people don’t start out seeking good, they don’t start out seeking godly community. Nor do they even know what it is, considering so few truly see it practiced.

Seeing it practiced lies at the core of how our churches need to begin educating Christians to be a community. Several educational practices, if correctly instituted in our churches and homes, can help us develop true community:

a. We must teach community.

Community is at odds with the selfish way we live. Living selfishly takes no conscious training at all. Simply allow a child to absorb our culture as it stands today and that kid will grow up thinking of one person and one person only.

Our churches need to start teaching the “We”  and the “Us” instead of the “I’ and the “Me.” Our worship songs need to be about our community worshiping God, not just individuals. Our Sunday School curricula must stress that none of us lives or dies to himself. We must train our children to get their focus off themselves and onto the Lord and His people. We need to make it clear that Christians do not go the way of the world, making us a countercultural community that must increasingly swim against a cultural and societal current that works against everything community is. For that reason, we must hang together or the stragglers will get picked off.

Children who are taught to value the community will stay in that community. Our kids must know that they are part of a much bigger picture, the entire story of God’s redemptive plan.

b. We must teach a holistic Christian worldview.

It’s time we got serious about starting in Genesis and teaching through Revelation, underscoring God’s relationship with His called-apart people. Each Christian must fully grasp they are part of a community of faith. They must know what makes that community special. They must also know the worldviews that war against Christianity, understanding them for what they are, while also understanding how those other viewpoints fight to suppress community within the Body of Christ.

c. We must teach a unified curriculum.

One of the reasons that so many churches have problems with cohesiveness starts with their teaching. Very rarely does a church teach a unified, age-specific curriculum. By failing to teach this way, we send people home with no basis for further conversation. A family of five might have had the parents, teen, tween, and kindergartner receive totally different teachings, giving the parents no clear way to use what the kids were taught throughout the rest of the week.

But if the entire family received the same teaching geared for their level of understanding, everyone benefits from the community of learning fostered. In this way, the community teaches and learns together, unifying the Body.

d. We must teach the way of Christ to mastery.

Years of lousy achievement test scores have provoked public, private, and parochial schools into teaching to mastery. Students must master a topic before they advance.

Yet our churches seem to have no clue about mastery. The Bible hints there are levels of mastery in knowing Christ, but our church-based education systems (and in many cases, our teaching at home) reflects a cavalier osmosis approach to education.

But what if we discipled people to mastery?

Take serving. We should teach serving in our churches until people actually serve or else we don’t move on. We teach honesty until people are honest. We teach selflessness until people are selfless.

Radical idea, I know. But if our current system of making disciples is any indication, we have no clue how to make disciples. Mastery education will make the difference. Our churches will be profoundly altered if each person in them were to learn one truth of the Gospel a year and fully put it into practice—just one!

(I’ll be expanding this idea in a future post.)

e. The truths and values that we teach our church communities should always be visible.

I’m a strong advocate of churches putting up a huge plaque at every gathering spot within a church building stating what the core truths and values of the church community are. Obviously, affirming the kind of theological truths found in historic Christian creeds (like the Apostles or Nicene) would be included. Yet each church community is unique, therefore the Holy Spirit will be doing unique things in that body. A church located in a wealthy suburb will probably have fewer opportunities to work with the poor in their neighborhoods than an urban church would. Their truths and values would differ. Their plaque should reveal their community’s uniqueness.

If we’re to develop true community, we cannot avoid reinforcing the truth of the community’s shared creed. Making it readily visible to all in the community through plaques and remembrances is critical.

More importantly, the values a community believes and the truths it upholds must be seen in its practice of them. Actions do speak louder than words—or in the case of Christianity, godly actions permit the message to be received and believed. A community at odds with the practice of the Gospel will have zero influence in the lives of those in the church community and the lives of anyone they seek to reach for Christ. For this reason, the greatest means for upholding the Gospel within a community is truly living it.

f. Theological disputes must be handled as a community.

This may not seem unrelated to education, but the manner in which a church handles theological disputes proves to the community that everyone in it can learn from the collected godly wisdom of the group.

Sadly, one of the great gains of the Reformation has also turned into the great tragedy of Protestantism, in that we do not seek truth as a community, but as individuals. Though I fully support breaking from the hellish Roman church, we Protestants have not done well in upholding a unified interpretation of community truth. The freedom given for individuals to come to the Scriptures as unique persons results in a few too many unique views completely lacking in God’s imprimatur. A return to a community-based interpretation of Scripture would strengthen our churches’ educational programs by allowing the community to approach interpretation rather than just the individual alone.  (David Fitch discusses this marvelously in The Great Giveaway.) It also acknowledges the truth that the Holy Spirit not only dwells in the individual, but also in the midst of the church assembly. That understanding reduces opportunity for heresy and creeping error.

Having seen so many churches undercut by a winner-take-all approach to theological disputes, I think it’s high time we find a better alternative. A community approach may just well be the best way of all to educate our people even in the midst of controversy.

I fully believe that rethinking our education models within our churches to better align with community goals would greatly amplify our teaching and, ultimately, our success—a success for both making disciples and building godly community.

Look for the last set of suggested ways to build vital church community tomorrow.

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Being the Body: How to Forge Real Community, Part 3

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In this fourth installment of the series “Being the Body,” we’ll look at the major conceit of most of us in the Western Church. I believe this fallacy prevents us from becoming the real community of Jesus Christ on Earth. If we can get over this lie we’ve believed, great things will happen in our midst.

The Scriptures say this:

The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein….
—Psalms 24:1 ESV

[King David praising God before the assembly of Israel:] “But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly? For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you….”
—1 Chronicles 29:14 ESV

“The silver is mine, and the gold is mine,” declares the LORD of hosts.
—Haggai 2:8 ESV

“Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine….”
—Ezekiel 18:4a ESV

“For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.
—Romans 14:7-8 ESV

“You are not your own, for you were bought with a price…..”
—1 Corinthians 6:19b-20a ESV

Here’s the short summation: you and I own nothing. We don’t even own ourselves. It’s all the Lord’s.

But do we Evangelicals, so enamored of our supposed political and economic power, truly believe that? The way we live would suggest otherwise. Yet for us to embody the fullness of Christ as His Body, we need to realize an important truth:

#6 – Real community can only come about when we understand that everything God has given us must be in play for others at all times, especially for those within the community of faith.

If we truly believe the Scriptures above are true, then we have no right to ever withhold needful things from others. Sort of explodes our fallacious notion of “mine,” doesn’t it?

If our current church culture is any indication, no lie from hell can outdo our allegiance to “mine.” We may talk about original sin and point to the lies children tell as proof, but a sixteen-month-old child whose first words consist of “mine” is just as convincing a proof of original sin as lying. Unfortunately, though we discourage the lying, we smirk at the grab for what’s mine. “Isn’t that cute, hon? He’s destined to be a corporate raider some day!”

As we know, “mine” knows no boundaries. It doesn’t stop at the expensive items like cars or houses. Our love for what we convince ourselves is ours extends down to the most insignificant things.

The Bible says this:

He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes? Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.
—Ecclesiastes 5:10-12 ESV

We can’t stop accumulating wealth can we? Fifteen years ago, everything I owned in the world could fit into the back of a Honda Civic Hatchback. If it all got stolen, I wouldn’t miss it.

A self-examination: If you’re reading this and are married, isn’t it amazing how much more stuff you’ve picked up since saying, “I do”? It costs money to insure all that accumulation, too, because we all worry what might happen to it. Not so much that we would lose it, but that once it was all gone, people would treat us differently. We wouldn’t be as affluent. People might actually think we were—God forbid—poor!

How many of us reading this sleep a little less comfortably at night than we did when we owned nothing? That sleep largely suffers for one enormous reason. Few of us, deep down inside, can rest assured that our church communities would draw alongside us should we suffer financial ruin. We fear that our churches are not convinced of the following:

“If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God, that your brother may live beside you. You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food for profit.”
—Leviticus 25:35-37 ESV

God did NOT say that He Himself would rain down food, shelter, or clothing, but that this help should come from the community of faith! The act of true fear of God within a believing community is that we cover the needs of our brothers and sisters.

Just this weekend I heard from yet another brother in dire financial straits. (We’ve never met face-to-face, but I know him from his online writings.) Helping handThe broken-record response from his church? “Sorry, we won’t help you.” They have the financial resources, so they could help; they just won’t. They love money more than they love this brother or their own community.

I have one word for that: sickening. Are there any churches left that fear the Lord?

We watch faithful brothers and sisters in Christ go through bankruptcies and other financial disasters without lifting a finger to help, then we excoriate them for it. There’s not a person reading this right now who doesn’t have a decent, hard-working family in his or her church enduring financial hell. What are we doing for them? Anything? Or are we blaming them instead, trying to find a reason for their ruin much the same way the Pharisees sought to find a reason for the original blindness of the man Jesus healed?

Do we know that it’s for the glory of God that we help our brothers and sisters in their time of need?

Folks, if the rest of the world around us still wants to cling to “mine,” it means that those of us who understand that it’s all the Lord’s are even harder pressed to pick up their slack. We have to decide that we value Christ more—and subsequently the ones He died to save—than we value material wealth. We must desire to live like this:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
—Acts 2:42-47 ESV

If it means we do without a 60″ plasma TV so we have funds to help a family who can’t pay their electric bill, then we do without.

If it means we don’t go out of town on a vacation this year so we can pay the rent of a family hit by unemployment, then we don’t go. (And our children learn a valuable lesson about what is important in God’s eyes.)

If it means that we eat canned soup the rest of the week so we can make a weekly feast for all those in our church who can’t even afford canned soup, then we eat canned soup the rest of the week.

If it means that we have to sell something of “ours” so that a family in our church can keep a roof over their heads, then we sell it.

Because we believe that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Because we believe that He died and rose again to forge a community of saints who will live forever in Paradise.

Because our reward is in Heaven, not in this life.

Because we know that unless we start living that way, we will never see revival in our churches or the kind of Christian community that brings healing, peace, unity, love, and the presence of the Holy Spirit. The kind of community that has the lost taking notice.

Putting what God has given us into play means more than handouts, too. It means we open our homes to others because those houses are God’s. It means we give our time and effort to help others, because we don’t own time and effort, either. It means we don’t hold exclusive rights to our family members, making other families our family, too. When we finally realize that we own nothing, what we can give to others is magnified a thousandfold. And community is built.

We’ve believed the lie of “mine.” But there is no “mine.” It’s all God’s. And His command to us is that we give what He’s given us to those in need, especially those in the community of faith. Because that’s what the Body does, it looks after itself. If the heart is sick, the whole body is sick. All suffer together.

And when we look after each other, all rejoice together, too.

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Being the Body: How to Forge Real Community, Part 2

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As we’ve seen, the Lord views real community among us believers as critical to our spiritual health and of those yet to enter our community. Despite wanting vital interaction with others, we stumble when it comes to execution. How do our churches forge real community?

Today, I want to discuss a simple way we can build a better community of faith. I’ll focus on one common item already found in most churches.

#5 – Leverage your church directory.

    Even now I can hear the faint mouse clicks as hundreds flee this site for greener Web pastures. Stick with me, though.

I believe our church directories are one of the most underutilized resources we have for building community.  While nothing beats face to face interaction, Searching the listings...our church directories are a database for community growth and blessing if done correctly. I acknowledge up front that it would be better for us to learn about other people in our church through sharing meals with them in our homes, but we need a babystep back toward that reality. Expanding our vision for what a church directory affords us can get us to that better place. Then when we’re doing our community life better we can use the directory as a fallback in the future, not a primary means of accomplishing community.

Before we begin exploring this more, I’d like to share a few verses. Much of what follows depends on our understanding a painful truth about dying to self and being raised into a community of faith:

You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.
—1 Corinthians 6:19b-20a ESV

For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ.
—1 Corinthians 7:22 ESV

If I am not my own, if I am a slave of Christ, then what rights do I have as a Christian? None that have anything to do with personal privacy.

A dead man doesn’t have any privacy. We saw our right to privacy die at the foot of the cross. If we were free before, we’re slaves to Christ now. We don’t get to call the shots, Jesus does. And as part of being born into Him and the Church He died to create, we don’t get a say about our own privacy. Just as the clay can’t talk back to the potter, we can’t tell God we don’t want to be a part of community. Nor can we tell Him we’re not happy about losing our so-called right to privacy.

The Christian isn’t a private creature. The Christian lives and dies to a Lord who lived and died for others. Again, our focus is outside ourselves. For that reason, a true Christian gives up any pretenses to privacy.

Now this doesn’t mean a Christian can’t rent a cabin in the deep woods for a week and get away for an occasional  break. What it does mean is that our lives are now lived openly, with a servant heart toward others, even if those others infringe on our privacy from time to time.

You won’t hear that message from too many pulpits because if we truly believed that (as opposed to believing the American civil religion we tend to bow to), our lives would be drastically altered by living it out. Radically counterculture, eh?

A church directory is not a private thing. I’ve heard anecdotal reports that more and more Christians are opting out of having their personal info included in their church directories because of privacy issues. I know for a fact that fewer churches are attempting church directories in the first place, either because they’re megachurch-sized (I’ll speak to this issue in a future post in this series) or they’re getting a big ho-hum from their congregation.

Tough. A church directory is essential. Trust me on this one. My first explanation says it all:

a. We’re praying through our church directories, right?

    If we want one reason why our churches are ineffective, it starts here. The people who make up our churches are not praying for each other. If we truly believe that prayer matters, how can we not being praying over every person in our church? Good grief, whenever I hear someone like John Eldredge spouting off about how men in our churches are bored, I’ve got to ask if those men are praying over every person who walks through the doors of their church! Who has time to be bored when we’ve got such an enormous task ahead of us covering each other in prayer? I’d go so far as to say that we should have praying over the church directory inserted into the everyday service we perform when we become members of a church. A-1 priority. Church leaders, I implore you to consider this if you’re not already doing it at your church.

Here’s a way to start. Break up the alphabet into sections, A-E, F-J, K-N, O-S, T-Z. If a family’s last name is Edelen, the Edelen family would pray for other families in the section that corresponds to their last name, in this case A-E. Do that for a set period of time, then have the families move onto the next section. Edelens would then pray for those in F-J. Every day, pray for three families in that section, praying for each individual within each family.

That kind of covering prayer can be tweaked, so a million options exist. But church leaders should let their congregants know that praying through the church directory is one of the ways the church functions, and therefore it’s expected of everyone.

Praying through the church directory opens up myriad possibilities for community growth and bonding. I know that I would want to know more about the people I’m praying for, wouldn’t you? I might even pick up the phone and call those families to find our how I can pray more specifically. I’d also like to know how those prayers I’m praying with others are coming out. What a blessing it is to hear of prayers answered. But if you’re like me, you hear about answered prayer far too infrequently for it to have any impact on your own faith for big requests. Think how blessed we would be if our entire church were soliciting prayer requests, praying for those requests, then actually hearing those prayers answered!

It can start with praying through the church directory.

b. Faces matter. So do names.

    We humans are visual. Any anxiety we have about interacting with others is dramatically reduced when we can routinely match a name in a church directory with a face. For that reason, spend whatever it costs to get pictures in your church directory. Pictures make praying through the church directory even more effective.

When you go for a visual directory, make certain that the names of individuals within families are correctly noted in captions below the pictures. If a family has five teenage sons (God have mercy on them!), we should know which teen face matches which teen name. While Dale Carnegie isn’t a spiritual mentor in the slightest, he was right about one thing: a person loves to hear his own name. Our names matter in community. We need to get them right as practical proof that we care about the people in our church.

c. Tell us everything.

    Here’s where the privacy pushback comes in.

In order to have a community that seeks the best for every person within that community, we need to be open. We can’t hold back information that can be helpful to other members of the community.

Long ago, we used to know what others did for a living. Chances were that Millers operated the town mill, Smiths manned the blacksmithing duties, while the Taylors made the clothes.

Today, our work lives are far more complex than they once were, nor do they align with the rest of our life experiences, even our college majors. But as believers in community, our work matters not only to our employers, but to each other. Community necessitates that I know what your job is at your company. That helps me to give you business; your financial health matters to me because you’re part of our community.

It extends beyond work, too. Knowing your hobbies and talents can better allow me to join in those hobbies with you or leverage those talents to the betterment of not only myself, but the entire community.

We need to go beyond a name, address, and phone number. Knowing what teens have completed childcare courses can better help me choose a babysitter. Knowing who in the church speaks Spanish can help my child when he or she’s learning the language. Knowing who lived in Silicon Valley for ten years can help me should I need to move there.

Options abound. Put the directory on the Web and give church members a special login to access the info. Given that most people have computer access, a church can keep the info up to date with an online list of the talented people within the church.

Only your church community can decide how much info is too much. Personally, I think a church directory should move beyond a name, address, and telephone number to encompass full biographies of the people who attend our churches. If we want to better unite our people in community, that kind of information is priceless.

Communities of long ago knew this kind of detailed information, but today we barely know the names of people in our churches. We need to attempt this kind of transparency. God intended us to network with each other and those outside the church proper, yet when I look around, too many of us know hardly anything about the person sitting next to us in the pew. A more robust church directory would go a long way to fixing that problem.

Can we consider doing more with our church directories? If the world is hard to navigate as a community, how much harder is it to handle as individuals cut off from each other? Yet that kind of disconnection typifies our lives in America 2006. We don’t know anyone beyond a handful of people, and what we know is so shallow as to not help us or others when times are tough.

More community-building ideas to come…

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