EXPLORING CHRISTIANITY - The community of the church

EXPLORING CHRISTIANITY - THE CHURCH

THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

Grace
The importance of grace in the New Testament.

The community of the church

In the New Testament there are three events which are foundational to the creation of the church, the cross, the resurrection and the giving of the Spirit. Jesus took our sins upon himself on the cross, not only to reconcile us to God, but to reconcile us with one another. The shape of the cross itself is suggestive of both these aspects of salvation. The upright of the cross symbolises our reconciliation to God. By repentance and trust in the Saviour we may receive full forgiveness and become members of God's triune family as children of God. Russell Rook, in an article on the Trinity in Christianity entitled "Can you see who He is yet?" puts it like this:

Having received his Holy Spirit...we have become as close to the Father as Jesus himself and, like him, neither death nor life can remove this relationship. By the Holy Spirit, God has become closer to us than we are to ourselves. In this moment we have become one with God and, as the Cappadicioan Fathers suggest, we have joined the eternal dance of the Trinity.

But Christianity is more than this. Because we all matter equally to Jesus, the arms of Jesus stretched out on the horizontal beam are extended to all who wish to be embraced by that love. His desire is that those who respond may be drawn into one worldwide community of love, reconciled not only to God, but also to one another.

"We've got far too many churches and so few fellowships"
Richard Halverson

Paul enlarges on this theme in his letter to the Ephesians. "You were far from God. But Christ offered his life's blood as a sacrifice and brought you near to God. Christ has made peace between Jews and Gentiles, and he has united us by breaking down the wall of hatred that separated us...He made peace between us and God by uniting Jews and Gentiles in one body...And because of Christ, all of us can come to the Father by the same Spirit" (Ephesians 2:14-18). All who come to Jesus are now on an equal footing whatever our nationality, the colour of our skin, whether we have been big sinners or little sinners, whether we are rich or poor, or whatever our social standing, our gender, our mental or physical abilities. G. G. Findlay, commenting on this passage in the Expositor's Bible, wrote:

Coming 'in one Spirit to the Father,' the reconciled children join hands again with each other. Social barriers, caste feelings, family feuds, personal quarrels, national antipathies, alike go down before the virtue of the blood of Jesus.

We are all sinners who have been forgiven and are now children of the King. The engagement has taken place and we are all now the people of his special love, waiting for the final marriage consummation (Revelation 19:6-8). We all have direct access to the Father by the Holy Spirit who has graciously come to live within us. There is now no ground whatever for one to claim superiority over another. "Faith in Christ Jesus is what makes each of you equal with each other, whether you are a Jew or a Greek, a slave or a free person, a man or a woman" (Galatians 3:28).

This does not mean that cultural, racial or gender differences are not important. God created diversity, both among humans and in nature, and he loves it. Diversity exists within the Trinity. However, in Christ alone can diversity be brought into unity. He died to break down the hostility, not the diversity (Ephesians 2:16). All nationalities, cultures and languages will be represented in heaven (Revelation 7:9; 21:24). Those cultures, of course, will then be cleansed by the blood of Christ from the evil that now infects all cultures. But as Christians we are called, as Abraham was, to sit lightly with our cultural and family ties, and to break with the gods of our ancestors, out of allegiance to a God of all families and all cultures (Genesis 12:1-3). Bramwell Booth rallied his Salvation Army troops at the close of 1915 with the reminder: "Every land is my Fatherland, for all lands are my Father's." A Christian can never be first a Kiwi, a Croatian, an Irishman, or male or female. First we are "in Christ", our ultimate family is God's family (Matthew 28:19) and our ultimate citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20). As Miroslav Volf puts it in Exclusion & Embrace:

Christians are not insiders who have taken flight to a new "Christian culture" and become outsiders to their own culture; rather when they have responded to the call of the Gospel they have stepped, as it were, with one foot outside their own culture while with the other remaining firmly planted in it.

For this reason they are more ready to welcome members of other cultures. To quote Volf again in After Our Likeness The Church as the Image of the Trinity:

Just as the nations of the world will bring their "glory" and wealth into the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21:24, 26), so also must churches remain open for the entire natural and cultural wealth of human beings.

God's intention to break down the barriers that humans had built between one another is graphically illustrated by events on the Day of Pentecost, when "each one heard them speaking in his own language" (Acts 2:6). This was in marked contrast to the confusion of languages that resulted from the building of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:9). The ministry of the Spirit is now to build the church as God's community. Taking up the words originally spoken to Moses concerning God's people in Old Testament days, Peter says of the church, "You are God's chosen and special people. You are a group of royal priests and a holy nation. God has brought you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Now you must tell all the wonderful things that he has done" (1 Peter 2:9).

Someone has said that the kingdom of God is a Kingdom of right relationships. As Brian Hathaway puts it in Living with the Saints We Know:

It was to establish relationships like those enjoyed within the trinity that Jesus came to earth. He prayed for it. He died for it. He sent the Holy Spirit for it. He is interceding for it now. He is coming back for it.

Authentic revival in the church must always involve a revival of community life. "Saints" or "holy ones", used sixty-one times of Christians in the New Testament, is always in the plural. The concept of solitary sainthood is unknown here. The triune God of grace has created us to be "co-lovers" with him and one another, as John Duns Scotus expressed it in the thirteenth century.

A delightful description of Christian community comes to us from the pen of Tertullian, African Church Father, about AD 200. He describes the affection which marks the Christian brethren assembled together - fittingly called "brethren" because of their common relationship to the heavenly Father. He explains that the meeting is opened and closed with prayer. Worship, fellowship and feasting are all carried out under the Father's eye. The lowly, the needy, the sick are shown particular consideration. Contributions are voluntary and proportionate to each one's income; they are used:

to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls who are destitute of means and parents, and of old people now confined to the house, and such as have suffered shipwreck...or any who happen to be in the mines or banished to the islands or shut up in prison for their fidelity to God's Church...One in mind and soul, we do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another. All things are common among us except our wives.

This testimony from Tertullian is all the more interesting because there had been a mass turning to Christ in North Africa shortly before he wrote. The quality of Christian fellowship to which he draws attention had had large-scale effects in his native land.

Richard Halverson, former US Senate Chaplain, no doubt with tongue in cheek, but expressing some real truth, said:

In the beginning the Church was a fellowship of men and women who centred their lives on the living Christ. They had a personal and vital relationship to the Lord. It transformed them and the world around them. Then the Church moved to Greece, and it became a philosophy. Later it moved to Rome, and it became an institution. Next it moved to Europe and it became a culture. Finally it moved to America, and it became an enterprise. We've got far too many churches and so few fellowships.