A Roof and a Foundation are Essential, But Not Interchangeable.
It’s no new thing to hear secondary things preached as primary things in church. The history of the Church bears witness to that pattern. While our confession and understanding of the Christian life has changed little on a foundational level, what we emphasize changes like the weather. Christian churches with alike beliefs have diverse priorities.
At one time and place, personal holiness may be elevated as the pinnacle of the Christian life. At others, evangelism, social justice, the family unit, missions, and other worthy ambitions lead the charge as what should characterize the Church. These special emphases of the Church arise from the special need of circumstances in different times and places.
At other times, however, the Church can easily raise something trivial and secondary over something essential and primary to the calling of the Church, smothering it. A foundation and a roof are essential for a house, but they are not interchangeable. Just because a church emphasizes something Christian does not mean that it belongs at the foundation. You would probably be concerned if your local congregation talked about nothing but giving tithes, but said nothing about the gospel.
When secondary aspects of the Faith have trumped primary ones in the history of the Church, the result has been stagnation and spiritual deadness among God’s people. Serious and spiritually desperate Christians have always had the responsibility to break the silence in these low places. We call these reformations. Reformers in every age knew the only solution to this problem is to sound the alarm and undertake a desperate rescue operation before this precious aspect of the Faith is suffocated under an avalanche of misplaced good intentions.
While you can apply this to many aspects of Christian life and experience throughout time, I have a specific, irreplaceable, foundational calling of the church in mind: community.
Community Double-Talk in Church
Growing up in a missionary family, we had to move frequently, and this meant we were in and out of a lot of different local churches. As an adult, I continued what had become normal in my childhood, bouncing from one church to another. Wherever I went, I saw a similar thing.
People, especially in leadership, would talk eloquently about Christian community, about loving one another like Jesus and having each-other’s backs in hard times. They would quote verses like Acts 2:42, about sharing all things in common, and about giving generously. Some churches prioritized language about community more than others, but unanimously, Christian community was an assumed cornerstone of what it meant to be the Church.
However, despite the attractive rhetoric, actual community always felt like a scarce commodity in every church I’ve attended. Even when small group Bible studies, prayer groups, and community-building events were organized, interaction seldom dipped below the surface, often feeling forced and artificial. Interacting on a personal level was rare for church members outside of those gatherings. It was a common gripe I heard between church administrators that it takes a whole week of planning and effort to get members to interact for more than five minutes. The words love and fellowship felt sickly when slapped on these stumbling efforts at Christian community.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t say all this just to “beat the Bride” and ridicule the Church. I say it out of love for her, and to lament what is lost by half-baked attempts at community building. The saddest part of all this is I actually believe every church I’ve been to genuinely wanted real community.
I would be willing to say it’s a common desire of every Christian in the west today. We know we need to share life together, in actual loving community with other followers of Jesus, if we are to survive as Christians. Our parched bones ache for substantial caring fellowship, to be a part of a family where we know we are loved, heard, nurtured, and challenged.
I don’t think the issue is that we don’t have enough value for community in the Church today. Our rhetoric, programs, and books about it suggest the opposite. Even half-baked efforts like what I’ve experienced in church after church show a deeper heart of longing for what they’re failing to achieve.
No, the issue isn’t desire for community. At its core, the issue is that building community is just plain hard. It’s messy and often as painful as it is healing. Other good and godly focuses, like worship, study, social activism, and preaching, feel more clear and measurable, bypassing the complex and uncomfortable minefield of human relationships.
To make matters even worse, in the west, we live in a task-oriented culture. Our culture puts high value on schedules and tangible objectives. We cherish that feeling of checking off a box on the to-do list. We love the process of problem solving and accomplishing a measurable goal. The whole professional work-world is built around this mechanistic obsession.
We are also an increasingly individualistic culture, valuing personal space and time above everything else. We naturally see plans on the calendar as obstacles to our private time later. We have to work through the week to have the weekend to ourselves. By default, our culture has trained us that the vulnerability and trust necessary to have a serious community is a threat to our independence and must be purged if we are to remain “free”. I’m as guilty as any modern westerner of thinking this way.
The result in our churches is a losing battle for community. Although we may feel a real need for community on a deep and intrinsic level, we’re daunted by the fact that it doesn’t come naturally. We may talk as if community is a primary concern, but at the end of the day, we are wired to take the path of least resistance, and community gets quickly and quietly sidelined.
The moment there’s hard-feelings, the moment it feels like our time is being wasted, the moment we feel awkward, is the moment we crumble back into the cultural mold we grew up in. We then begin looking at people as tasks to accomplish, or obstacles to work around, or plans to keep or cancel, instead of as brothers and sisters in a family Fathered by God. It is simply easier to talk about community and make measurable programs to “encourage community” than to seriously commit to the level of work, intimacy, and patience it takes to really love one another the way the Church was meant to.
We’re Suffocating Our Greatest Witness to Christ
“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35)
Loving other Christians might not make it to my top-five characteristics of genuine followers of Jesus if someone approached me on the street and asked. Loving the lost, preaching the gospel, serving the poor, and growing in personal holiness, all these things would easily bubble to the top. But what about loving each other in the Church?
If you’re like me, there’s almost a sarcastic dismissal of the local congregation for the great priorities of advancing God’s Kingdom. If I don’t say it out loud, it shows up in the way I treat the local church. I would rather talk about the universal Church as a theological, idealized pie-in-the-sky concept than talk about Joe and Sue who sit in the pew in front of me every Sunday. The reason is simple and very often glossed over. It’s hard and risky to love people.
But Christ expressly tells us that love between Christians is the sign and seal of genuine followers of Him. Everyone everywhere will know that we are members of Christ’s family, not because we are perfect, always right, or always stand for and oppose the right things. They will know we are Christians because we actually really love one another.
Believe it or not, although our modern western culture is saturated with language screaming about “love”, real, self-giving, good-intending love is nearly extinct today. The Church is meant to be a school of love in a world lost in itself.
Knowing the way Christ loved the twelve, we know the love Jesus talks about runs deeper than feeling fuzzy affections. Jesus himself was often frustrated, saddened, misunderstood, and even betrayed by his disciples—and still he forgave, persevered, and died for them! He later empowered and entrusted these same people to run the Church, the tangible embodiment of Christ in the world. This kind of love does not come from unaided human nature. It has to come from God, who Himself is love (1 John 4:8).
We Were Supposed to Be a Family
Being “hurt by the church” is a common badge of victimhood today. Almost always, these hurts stem from churches doing things that compromise their calling to be living embodiments of Christ in a world starved for a glimpse of God’s character. However, I believe the more pandemic source of being “hurt by the church” comes from what we are not doing, more than what we do. Given time, neglect can be just as damaging as violence.
When we neglect to really show love to one another, we injure each other. Keeping your relationships with people at church casual and surface-level, without ever making any intentional efforts toward deeper friendship and vulnerability, is not a harmless act—it harms people. That you can go to a church for years and half the people don’t even know your name, let alone invite you to darken the door of their home, is a tragedy.
Looking down at our New Testaments and up at our churches today, what we see passing for community should break our hearts. Christian Churches in the New Testament were described as families, households of God, members calling each other “brother” and “sister”. This was no casual, weekly meetup. These people were intimately invested in each other’s lives in ways that make modern westerners like me flinch. They shared everything in common, they confessed their deepest sins to one another, they lived together and died for one another. Church, not the home or workplace, was the center of the believer’s life, because it wasn’t just a task or event on the calendar, it was the family that knew them, nurtured them, and loved them.
Now, I’m not saying every church needs to mimic first-century Christians in every detail of life. What I am saying is we need to consider that painful thought that we have lost something essential to real Christian community. Somewhere along the way, we exchanged the deep-seated, Christ-empowered love for the family of God with a mechanized love of accomplishing tasks and prioritizing personal time and space.
Far from dying to the world and coming alive in Christ, we’ve exchanged the glorious witness of supernatural love in the Church for something more easy and convenient to our busy schedules. We should have expected it and should not be surprised when we see it week by week. Our culture has indoctrinated us into turning our noses up at the thought that we actually need other people in our lives beyond casual, fun encounters and surface-level conversations.
Trying to keep a death grip on our independence and personal space doesn’t fit with the kind of intentional familial love we are meant to have with our brothers and sisters at church. Community simply will not happen until we begin to take seriously the joint calling to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and….Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12:30–31).
We Have to Change
So, our individualistic, task-oriented, consumerist culture has shot our church communities in the foot. We may crave the deep love in the Christian communities we read about in Acts, but we feel powerless to change. Is there realistically anything we can do?
My message here is not to just shame people and say, “just try harder!”. I see these same issues present in myself, and lament the countless other Christians in the west who go year-to-year feeling the heart-breaking effects of isolation and community starvation. The answer is not an easy one, and it’s a challenge for me as well as the rest of the church.
Although the culture we grew up in is to blame for most of this drought of Christian community, I don’t think it’s realistic to simply ‘reject culture‘. The culture we’ve inherited is not a carved idol we can just take out back and burn. Our culture’s values and assumptions are deeply ingrained in our personalities and characters. The deadening effects of our culture are closer to a habitual sin, like anger or lust, than to a tangible thing we can just toss out.
While this means change will be slow and difficult, it also means there is hope for real transformation. Like any habitual sin, our warped cultural reflexes can be disciplined and changed. The first step is to recognize we have a problem. We must gradually learn to second guess our thoughts and impulses when it comes to community.
Like someone who struggles with anger, we need to recognize our cues and triggers. We have to take practical steps toward change and be willing to forgive ourselves along the way. These practical steps can feel silly or trivial at times (i.e. Count to ten before responding. Take a few deep breaths. Etc.) But as we take these little steps, we will soon begin to realize that we are changing.
What are the cues and triggers for isolating ourselves from community? What practical steps can we take toward combating our impulse to turn people into tasks or obstacles? If being vulnerable with others in your church community frightens you, ask yourself why, then take realistic measures to discipline that fear. Practically, you can practice confession with a friend at church, being open about your struggles. If you find you steamroll people in conversations, practice the discipline of asking more questions. If you find your calendar prevents you from spending quality time with members of your church, consider cutting out some of your weekly obligations to make time.
In all cases, I guarantee there is a common fear of wasting time and surrendering personal space. We have to combat these fears in practical ways in order to make realistic room for community to grow. If all our decision-making is determined by whether we feel our time will be “productive” while visiting someone, talking over the phone, or intentionally spending our free time with people from church, then that shoots community in the foot. Since our culture values private time and personal space above anything else, a people who sacrifice these things for each other will stand out in stark contrast to the rest of our world.
In any case, the goal is to confront our selfish cultural DNA and grow new, natural impulses around Christ-like love. Pray and seek God on this, because this is not something you can do on your own. Don’t let anyone tell you this is impossible—we can change. For the sake of Christ’s witness and love in the local church, we have to.
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