Brethren in Christ Core Value #5 :

Belonging to the community of faith

“We value integrity in relationships and mutual accountability in an atmosphere of grace, love, and acceptance.”

If you and I would retrieve from our memory system a story about the church, it would likely be funny, exciting, sad or even unfortunate. My favorite church story is from the mid-80s. We were having problems with the piano. It squeaked every time the pedal was used. So the piano repairman was called and he came to tune the piano and fix the squeak. I was in the office and after a while I came to see how he was doing. Well, he had the tuning finished, and the squeak was gone, but he wasn’t very optimistic about it. He said the squeak was likely related to relative humidity and would probably return because “The church is always a pretty dry place!” He obviously had never been to our church! Let’s invite him! While we must acknowledge that the church of Jesus Christ this side of heaven, will never be perfect or problem free. Yet, in the words of urban church leader Mary Nelson, “The church is the glue that keeps us together when we disagree. It is the gasoline that keeps us going during the tough times. It is the guts that enable us to take risks when we need to.” Best of all, we’re together in this. That’s why “belonging to the community of faith” is one of our core values.

It all begins when a person prays, “Lord, be merciful to me a sinner”, and begins to follow Him in a new transformed life. Then God’s Spirit dwells within and, in fact, the disciple of Christ is God’s temple! The Bible reveals the first temple was a magnificent structure of stone. The second was the “temple” of Jesus’ body (“Destroy it,” he said, “and I will raise it again in three days.”) And now a third has taken shape, fashioned out of individual human beings. God’s holy place now is the believer’s innermost being. That’s why I cringe every time I hear someone refer to the church building or worship area as “the sanctuary”. I know what they mean, but that’s an Old Testament term. The New Testament sanctuary is the Believer, and together we are being built to become a temple in which God’s Spirit dwells! The church is never a place, but always a people, a community of care and support. Yet as Henri Nouwen states, “Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives. Often we surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with thus forming a club or clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.”

Amazingly, we are not merely forgiven sinners; we are the people of God, becoming all that He would have us to be! Dorothy Sayers has said that God underwent three great humiliations in His efforts to rescue the human race. The first was when He took on the confines of a physical body. The second was the Cross, when He suffered the “agony and shame” of public execution. The third humiliation, Sayers suggested, is the church. In an awesome act of self-denial, God entrusted His reputation to ordinary people. Imagine, the church, the community of faith is entrusted with the reputation of God! If you are a believer, you are God’s representative, “...as though God were making His appeal through us...Be reconciled to God. (II Corinthians 5:20) Awesome, isn't it? That’s why there is a constant call through God’s Spirit to renew the church, to purify the church, to cleanse the church. “Renewing the Church is like remodeling your house: It takes longer than you hoped, costs more than you planned, and makes a bigger mess than you ever thought possible.” (Paul Smith) Jesus says it happens like this: (Matthew 18) “If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that every matter may be established by the testimonies of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” It is clear that God’s plan for the church is to be a community of disciples growing in Christ, with accountability one to the other.”

It logically follows that we are to extend grace and love, just as we have experienced and everyone should be welcomed into the life of the church. If we say we belong to Jesus, inevitably we are involved in His church. To say we love Jesus and choose not to be actively involved in the church is a contradiction. Yet, I think I hear someone saying, “Hey, you do not have to go to church to be a Christian.” Well, you do not have to go home to be married either. But in both cases if you do not, you will have a very poor relationship. We value participation in the local church. Hebrews 10: 25 states; “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” There is something dynamic and transforming about our togetherness in worship, in growing together in God and His community. The piano repair man was wrong. The church is not a dry place. It’s the most exciting, dynamic, fulfilling place this side of Heaven!

Together with you in Christ’s Church,
Bishop John

« Back to "The Connection" Newsletter Articles