“The household of God… is the church of the living God, which is the pillar and foundation of the truth.”
1 Timothy 3:15 NLT
“So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family.” Ephesians 2:19 NLT
Day 17 of 40: “Believing and belonging” make perfect sense to me, but like most aspects of life in Christ… the practice is much more difficult than the theory.
I think it’s the “imperfection” of it all that makes it so hard. And my own imperfections only add to the difficulty.
Which reminds me of Groucho Marx:
“I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”
(BTW – I almost ran over Groucho in a cross-walk in Beverly Hills many years ago… that would have been a “game changer”… for both of us.)
Believing: The Church is the repository and arbitrator of the Truth and Mysteries of God. The Bible, as we know it, has come to us through the Church. The essentials of Christian doctrine have been hammered out through the Councils of the Church.
That’s why Evangelicals and Mormons, for example, are sometimes on different wavelengths. Evangelicals have a 2000 year history traced back through the Apostles of working through difficult theological issues starting with the Apostles Creed. Joseph Smith decided he knew better, added a new “revelation,” and Mormons have been trying to harmonize it all ever since (160+ years.) Personally, I’m sticking with the Church of “Former-Day” Saints.
The recorded history of church councils sometimes makes my head spin and my blood boil… but nevertheless – here we are. And God has deemed it so… or else He would have selected another vehicle to be “the pillar and foundation of the truth.” With all due respect Joseph and Mohammed… I’m not buying your stories.
Belonging: Most of us don’t have to wrestle with the thorny doctrinal issues that have faced the Church throughout history. My personal wrestling match has been more focused and immediate. For example:
- The lady in the front row who indiscreetly nursed her child throughout the message… while I was preaching.
- Or the young people sitting in front of me during worship who can’t keep their hands off each other… I have to look through them to see the words of the song.
All of this brings me back to today’s reading – What does it mean to belong to the Church – the family of God? I get the benefits – identity, accountability, strength, service, purpose – but the core issue for me is commitment.
We live in a society today with an ever increasing fear of commitment. That translates into a plethora of single-family households and couples living together and having children together without ever formally committing to one another in marriage. And this unwillingness to make a commitment translates – from a worldly perspective – into the primary cause of poverty in America.
And, I believe, it’s the primary cause of spiritual poverty in the Church.
Believe me, I understand fear of commitment. I’m the one who called off our engagement three weeks before the original wedding date. We were married a year and a week later, but that took some serious soul searching for both of us. But it was a choice that we made and have happily stayed with for nearly 46 years.
Commitment is a choice to honor a contract, to live within a mutual framework of understanding, to abide by a set of behavioral norms (spoken or unspoken). Commitment in the Church is a choice I make to bind myself to a particular group of people and accept them as the “family” that God wants for me… at this particular time in my life.
It’s the mutual dimension of commitment that I’m working through right now. I know what the Bible says are the benefits and responsibilities… but it’s unclear to me what they are in the local church. Most churches seem perfectly happy with little or no commitment from its congregants.
The church seems content to mirror the commitment level of the world… rather than model the commitment level of disciples of Christ. That’s not good news.
The Peanut Gallery 