Seven Woes, part 4
Woe to us when we justify unfaithfulness to the Church.
Will we commit to the gathered people of God?
This is not about taking prayerful time to find a spiritual home in a new city or a new season.
Nor is this about house churches or home groups or appreciating diversity.
And this is also not about supporting churches in our community by creative cross-pollination of events and ideas.
This is about cultivating a lifestyle of being spiritually transient.
This is about going from dessert to dessert, rarely sticking around for the main meal let alone the clean-up. This is about jumping from this worship experience to that relevant teaching to this creative community to that vulnerable life group: always grazing, never committing.
Why is spiritual transience so common in our day? Justifications abound: “The church is sickly here, ingrown there, and filled with hypocrites throughout…and since God is everywhere, we don’t need to belong to a church to worship Him.”
Okay.
But perhaps it would serve us well to pause and consider that these truths did not prevent Jesus from committing himself to the gathered people of God in his day.
He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up,
and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.
Luke 4.16
Why did Jesus commit himself to participating in the life of the “organized” religious community of faith? Perhaps because the synagogue was filled with happy, healthy, holy saints? Perhaps because the worship was breathtaking and the programs catered to his specific age-group?
Or perhaps Jesus was committed to the gathered people of God because God is committed to us and he has committed us to one another.
As counter-intuitive as it seems, our very brokenness is a saving grace. Living connected to other in-process, imperfect humans can actually ground us and keep us from floating off into spiritual strangeness. Consistently shared life frees our theology to get dirt-covered and practical; life-together frees our faith to have roots instead of just wings.
Yet we pick th
rough churches as though we were picking through a box of assorted chocolates:
This one? Hmmn, nope: too little substance.
This one? Hmmn, nope: too many nuts!
And as we toss half-eaten pieces of church on the floor, is it any wonder that the world often finds the church so very unattractive?
Stay in the struggle to follow Jesus’ model of commitment to the gathered people of God. His example calls to us all. Through His eyes we will see that our actual communities are far more satisfying than our pick-and-choose-smorgasbord-transience.
Because Christ’s Church is mysteriously His Body on earth. And somehow, His commitment to us and our commitment to Him and to one-another, lets the world know of Jesus’ saving love.
