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Being a community

Eph 3: 2 – 21

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 16 Jan, 2005

AS A young Christian, I was impressed by the ministry of one of our pastors. He was sometimes autocratic, sometimes a bit uninformed, but he understood the power of community.

  Two weeks ago, I mentioned that, in troubled times, we need to have a clear concept of our mission and we need to be in community. I spoke about how Psalm 133 reminds us,

How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity.

  I spoke about how the great movers of Christianity nearly always have had a strong community behind them.

  In fact, I believe that one of the greatest weaknesses of the church today is that we have lost our sense of community.

  When I was a teenager, we did things together. We left a lot to be desired. Our theology was often weak. We didn’t understand much about how our feelings are critical to the kinds of people we are and to how we react to the situations we meet. There was a lot of unresolved conflict in many churches. But our lives were lived together.

  Here’s a typical week.

Sunday morning: Sunday School. Then Church at 11:00

Sunday Afternoon: rest time

Sunday 5:30: maybe a fellowship tea

Sunday 7:00: evening service

Monday evening: deacons once a month,

Sunday School Teacher preparation once a month

Tuesday evening: Girls' and Boys' clubs

Wednesday evening: Prayer Meeting

Thursday evening: Choir practice

Friday evening: Youth groups

Saturday evening: Baptist Youth Fellowship, Church Social, or special event.

  So, at the age of about 22, I’d have been at church from 9 to noon on Sunday and from 7 to 9 every week, and I’d have been at Prayer Meeting, Choir Practice and Youth Group every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night.

  And we did it because we liked to be there, because we were part of the same family, even if we squabbled among ourselves.

  There was a sense of community among us. It wasn’t perfect — in fact, it left something to be desired most of the time, but it was there, and, when it was strong, remarkable things happened.

  And that was where Mr Hawley came in.

  Before he arrived, the church had been through many struggles. We were tired from the battle. If you think about spiritual warfare, this was real spiritual warfare, and, too often, we tried to fight it with weapons of the flesh. People driven by demonic forces had caused great turmoil. Many left us, and some abandoned their Christian profession altogether.

  I can recall how it nearly caused a serious rift between me and the young woman who had really taken me under her wing when I first attended the church. I opposed a man who was leading the church in wrong directions, and she supported him. We had a big argument in the church yard, and he came to see what it was about, and I told him, and he took it from me.

  But later that woman realised that what I told her was true, and also struggled against that man.

  The thing that really made me laugh finally was that it wasn’t our opposition or the arguments among us that solved the problem. That man tried to manipulate the church and ended up not even a member any more. No one was more surprised than he was!

  He was such a user of the Church Constitution, yet he didn’t check the Constitution to see what it said about what he was planning to do. He had no way out, and it was one of his supporters who broke the news to him! “Mate, you’ve just resigned, and we have no option but to accept your resignation.”

  Our God is a great and powerful God, who acts in ways you and I would never expect!

  Anyway, Mr Hawley came along and he hammered and hammered the idea of community. He kept telling us about the New Testament concept of koinonia — of sharing our lives in common.

  And the idea began to take root.

  You remember all those meetings I told you about?

  They began to come alive.

  We had a little church building. It probably sat 120 on a good day.

  Sunday nights, we had to get all the Sunday School chairs and put them down the aisles. We’d be worried if only 100 came at 7 pm! Wednesday night we had 30 or 40 at the prayer meeting. We still had to endure dear old Mrs E’s prayers which covered everything in the world, starting with the drought in Africa and ending with Amen and a knitted tea-cosy. But she was family, and some people in families talk on and on, and others don’t make a peep.

  When community happens, blessing happens, too.

  This is very clear in what Paul wrote to the Ephesians.

  He begins,

⁴ In reading this, then, you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, ⁵ which was not made known to men in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets. ⁶ This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.

  Here Paul takes up a theme he had introduced back in Chapter 1, that God plans to unite all things under the headship of Jesus Christ our Lord.

  Here Paul narrows the focus down a little, and shows that it means a unity between Jew and Gentile, as both share together in the promises which are ours in Jesus.

  Today, we are thinking of the suffering inflicted on the world by the recent tsunami. It is not the biggest natural disaster on record — millions died in floods in China about 30 years ago, but it was covered up by the Chinese Government. It is a middle–sized natural disaster, but it has happened on our doorstep to a part of the world that suddenly is immensely interesting to Western Governments.

  So we think of their suffering. We also think of the many tourists who lost their lives. Even little Switzerland, according to an article in this week’s edition of Die Woche in Deutschland, has lost several hundred dead.

(Die Woche is a Sydney publication and covers German, Austrian and Swiss news as well as news of German speakers in Australia.)

  We think of orphaned children and widows. We think of peasants whose livelihood has been drowned out and whose land has been poisoned by salt for years to come.

 We think of them and we realise that we are in community with them, that no one lives to him or herself. The international response is part of how human beings respond to crises. We are created to act together and with a single purpose when crises occur.

  But when we don’t perceive a crisis, what happens? We forget about each other, and go back to living for ourselves!

  And this is precisely what Paul understands to be contrary to the gospel, the antithesis of what the Gospel stands for.

 He longs for believers to be filled to the top with love — God’s love. He says,

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, ¹⁸ may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, ¹⁹ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God

  How can we be filled with God’s kind of love and not express it? How could we not long to share with those needier than ourselves?

  This is the God who

...so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

  If God gave his son for us in our day of crisis, what should our giving for those in crisis be like?

  God’s love is expressed in giving. That’s a basic way for us to express ours as well.

  We give to those who need it, because we belong to them in love, just as God gives even to those who would kill him.

  We give to our Christian community, because we are to specially love them. Doesn’t Paul describe each church as a family, bound together by one heavenly Father in bonds of love?

^{EPH 3:14} For this reason I kneel before the Father, ¹⁵ from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.

  The gospel is about a community of faith, formed through the shed blood of Jesus our Lord. It is about a great family of the Redeemed, standing shoulder to shoulder against the overwhelming waves of hopelessness and despair; standing there so that the full fury will be diverted from those lacking the strength to resist for themselves.

  How do we begin to experience some of this sense of community?

  Finding ways to be together is always good, but there are several personal keys in what Paul taught. He says,

¹⁶ I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, ¹⁷ so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, ¹⁸ may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,

  The beginning of the formation of true Christian community is the strengthening power of the Holy Spirit.

  Frank Bartelman, who was associated with the early days of the Azusa Street Mission and other revivalist and Pentecostal outreaches, says that, when the revival at Azusa Street in Chicago was underway, people were in the church all day, getting right with God. Sometimes there was a preacher or leader present, sometimes not. Yet suddenly people would cry out to God for mercy and fall on the floor where they would writhe in agony as they confessed their sins to the Spirit who convicts the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment to come.

  Only as the Spirit broke down their false idea of community, only as the Spirit destroyed their counterfeits, could Christ the Lord come in and take control.

  And that’s exactly the second stage of what Paul teaches:

...that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.

  The usual word for “dwell” is meno. It’s used in John’s gospel when some of John’s disciples ask Jesus, Kurie, pou meneis? Literally, it means, “Lord, where are you staying?”

  But Paul uses a different word: katoikesthai — to settle down and be at home.

  He wants Jesus, not to be a visitor, nor even to be a long–term house–guest, but to be securely in control with access to all areas. It is then that we will be able to savour, to experience in depth, what it means to be rooted and grounded in love, and filled with all the fullness of God.

  As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, our response to crises like the recent tsunami has to include our own sense of mission and our own sense of community. We will have no genuine and lasting effect without those things. And community is important above all because it gives us the love to respond in true love to the needs of others.

  M Scott Peck, the famous psychiatrist, talks about the necessity of community if our civilisation is to be saved, He says that the formation of true community involves four stages.

  In the first stage, we play at community, being polite with one another, avoiding the uncomfortable differences, making sure we look good to others.

  Then we move on to a stage of chaos, where the appearance begins to unravel. The old revivalists and M Scott Peck say the same thing about this, that this is the critical stage, because most people find the chaos so unpleasant that they withdraw and return to the imitation of community.

  If people allow the stage of chaos to continue and determine to press on through it, brokenness arrives suddenly. People give up their personal agendas and find a new basis of belonging to each other. For the Christian, this is Christ and the gospel, but in a truly shared way. There are strong emotions at this stage, but they are the emotions of deep personal change.

  Out of brokenness comes reintegration — what Peck calls the formation of true community.

  And, in true community lies the power to transform the world!

  So, let’s look for ways of being together as God’s people. Let’s allow the Spirit to search our hearts, both convicting us and presenting Jesus to us, until we are broken and devoid of self.

  Let’s determine to stick with the process until Jesus makes everything new and can truly be at home among us and in each heart,

  And may we become a blessing to the whole world as we do!

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2005. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)