The Meaning of Gathering Together, Part 2 | Community Destroyer

"Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

What is the best way to show someone love? It is to give them a gift? Maybe it's to share a meal together? I'm of the personal opinion that a good old fashioned bear hug is one of the better ways to show love. Also, if you brought me a cup of locally brewed coffee, I'd feel pretty loved as well.

What is the best way to seek God's kingdom? Some people say you should sell everything you have and give the proceeds to the poor. Another ideal is to serve as a missionary in a foreign country. Other people seem to think that posting controversial Facebook posts will brings God's Kingdom.

What is the best way to gather as the church? Is it the large Sunday church service with lights, smoke, and rock n' roll worship? Perhaps it's the small home church? Maybe you're convinced that meeting one on one with someone in a coffee shop is the most meaningful way to gather. Whatever the answer, I think coffee should be somewhere in the mix.

The difficulty with these questions though is that most of use would prefer a straight forward answer when there isn't one. If someone would just tell us what to do to best show love, it would make life so much easier! But love is mysterious. It's possible to give everything you have to someone without actually loving that person.

Then we have the Kingdom of God – what is it exactly? The disciples had their own ideas about the Kingdom when they asked Jesus to call down fire from heaven to destroy the Samaritans (Luke 9:54), and Jesus said, " You do not know what kind of spirit you are of!" Later we learn in Luke 17:21 that "the Kingdom of God is within you." It's not something you can say "there it is" or "here it is." It's not something you can set up with worldly power and draw borders around. The Kingdom of God powerfully affects our physical reality, but at the core is spiritual. It flows out of connectedness and relationship with God.

After a long journey of trying to figure out exactly what the church is and how it should gather, I recently came to the conclusion that the same mysterious and metaphysical qualities we see with "love" and "the Kingdom of God" hold true with the Church. There isn't one right way to do church or be the church, because it's not about knowing the right principles or building the right structure, it's about being part of the body of Christ. 

I believe the answer to the questions about what the church is and how the church meets is both/and, either/or. The church is defined by something that itself is difficult to define, namely love. John said, "The world shall know you are my disciples by your love for one another." In other words, it's not about what kind of gathering you participate in, but whether or not God's love is present between you and the people you are gathering with. To put it mathematically: x+y+Children of God+God's love=Church or x-y/a+Children of God+God's love=Church. The variables don't matter as long as the constants remain.

My personal experiences with what I knew to be "the church" led me to seek a better way to do church – well, not just a better way but the "best" way. I developed and acquired ideas about how leadership should be structured, what strategies should be used to empower people, and possible ways to prevent burn out among volunteers. At one point I also went the opposite direction and felt that since the church is just people gathering, everything else is unnecessary fluff and human meddling. I judged large and highly organized churches as false or fake and favored small "organic" churches as closer to the New Testament Church model.

What happened, though, is that as I sought to define the church, I created an idol out of it. I worshiped my own idea of the church and found myself cynical of other gatherings. I destroyed the possibility of God moving in my life through community unless the community fit my limited parameters (which frankly did not exist anywhere other than in my head!). But could Jesus really be pleased with churches that used the same principles to operate as large corporations? The answer I eventually came to was, "yes." If Jesus can show up at our broken houses church and "organic" church movements, he can also show up at our flawed mega-churches. If I'm not perfect and God still uses me, why shouldn't I expect him to work through any gathering of his imperfect people?

The conclusion I finally came to was that it's all about faith.

Whether I'm meeting a friend at coffee shop to discuss a book, having friends over for prayer, or attending a large Sunday worship service, what I experience at those gatherings is limited by my faith that God can and will do awesome things in spite of us, not because of us! The form or structure of the gathering isn't essential one way or the other. If I want to experience God's presence when I meet with my friend, I need to be expecting and believing that God will use us to minister to each other. If I want to get anything out of a large Sunday gathering, I have to be expecting that God will show up because He loves us, because we are gathering in faith, not because we created the perfect church structure.

The revelation that God can show up and wants to show up in any and all our gatherings freed me to receive the blessing of community! Prior to this revelation my judgement about what community should be destroyed my ability to give and receive, and it prevented me from being able to celebrate the goodness of God with my brothers and sisters. I DOUBTED that God could use an imperfect way of gathering.

The thing is, gathering with others always requires planning, organization, and people working together, and the result of people planning and creating things together will always be a beautiful mess.

Our gatherings won't be perfect. They don't need to be perfect. And, thankfully, God doesn't require me to be perfect either. Don't get me wrong, God is perfecting us, but it is through the challenge of working through imperfection. He is calling us to cling to him, to believe that He is enough, that He is the head of the body and the source of our life. We just have to put our faith in Him. In fact, according to the author of Hebrews, "Without faith it is impossible to please God." (Hebrews 11:6)

None of this means that we should stop trying to organize well or cease giving thought to our structures and gatherings. It's just that as we plan and as we gather, we do it all with the realization that it is God who takes our imperfect gift and makes it whole. It is his love flowing through us that makes us fruitful. There is grace for me, and there is grace for you. None of us have perfect knowledge, but we can't gain more knowledge without each other! We are a body and we need every member engaging in faith to become all we were created to be.

-Jared

In my next post I will share what I've learned about the power and purpose of celebrating God's love together. In our culture we tend to internalize our faith and make it a matter of belief or head knowledge. This can lead us to doubt the importance of worshiping, learning, or praying together. I've found myself attending church in the past simply because it was the "right" or "Christian" thing to do, without really understanding the purpose of it. If you can relate, I hope that what I share in my next post will help make gathering together more meaningful and relevant!