THE FULL MONTY: Acts 2:42-47, 1 Corinthians 3:16 John 1:14
To read if you have time to take in the full story.
THE CONTINENTAL OPTION: Acts 2:42-47
Read this if you only have time for one significant passage.
ONE SHOT ESPRESSO: Acts 2:44
‘All the believers were together and had everything in common.’
I spent years growing a local congregation as a young leader fresh out of training school. I was immersed in the project. Designing the best experience I could, we had worship that was warm and contemporary and preaching that was fun and relevant. It was a success – a huge success based on the normal standards of church expansion in our country at the time. The problem was that it left a bad taste in my mouth.
It wasn’t that it was bad. It was exactly what we had set out to build. It’s just that it wasn’t, well, it wasn’t the Church. I didn’t really understand this truth until that moment but the Church is not a programme that meets in a building. I feel dumb now of course, because it’s obviously not a building with a bunch of people meeting for a programme. Or is it?
At my ‘successful’ church, people hardly even knew each other
A distaste for church
What happened to me happened first on the inside. I grew a distaste for a thing we called church but lacked the essentials of what makes church ‘Church’. For one thing, when I read my Bible it seemed that the Church was marked by her capacity to love each other. At my ‘successful’ church, people hardly even knew each other. It seems that the early Church met together during the week, sharing their lives and homes with each other. My ‘successful’ church would never choose to move in together – let alone spend more time at the church than necessary. In the early Church, it seems that no one had a need among them. They had solved the poverty problem in their community by – get this one – sharing! My church loved to hand out cards to the local food bank and then feel good about it. But they hardly ever shared their own stuff or home or food.
I realised the ‘success’ measure I was using was wrong. I had succeeded all right – at building a programme of people meeting on a Sunday for a good show. But I had not grown the Church. So, I preached a series on, ‘Why bother coming to church?’ and talked of cancelling Sundays for a while to give us all time to contemplate becoming a real church rather than spectators at a decent local show… and then my supervisor offered me another job. Instead of destroying what had taken years to build, I took him up on it. My husband and I moved into a low social-economic community as new parents, looking to start a ‘missional community’ (which of course is just another way of saying ‘church’ but without making all the normal church people feel bad about it).
We want to ‘do’ church and not ‘be’ the Church because ‘being’ the Church is stinking hard and ‘doing’ church is relatively easy
The ‘real’ Church
We had read up on cell-based churches in China, and the home church networks in North America. We dreamed about living in ‘authentic Christian community’ and sharing our lives with people as a different way of living – revealing through our lives that the kingdom was among us. But we really needed to learn from God about how to ‘be’ the Church – not just ‘do’ church. A few others felt God prompting them to join us and we started phase one of the new missional community: moving in.
Now, I’m a type-A personality, and by that I mean I like to get things done: I’m super-functional. So the idea of phase one being moving in was a hard one for me. I mean come on, move in? How long could that take?
But it soon became clear that moving in was a kingdom strategy. Incarnation is the fancy term for what I’m talking about – it’s the word that describes what Jesus did. In The Message it’s translated like this: ‘God put skin on and moved into the neighbourhood’.
The traditional translation is also good when it says that God made his dwelling place among us. Incarnation is not just about geography. It does include making your life among a people where they live. But it’s not just about finding an apartment that will suit your needs. It’s also about ‘incarnating’ your life into the lives of the people around you. That is a much trickier and longer venture.
A difficult phase
Phase one took some time. This frustrated me. All of us recognised the tension we were feeling and voiced it together. We wanted to start a worship service. How could we be a church without a worship service? But the more we talked about why we wanted to start a worship service the more we realised that we wanted to ‘do’ church and not ‘be’ the Church because ‘being’ the Church was stinking hard and ‘doing’ church was relatively easy. And if not easy, it was at least familiar. So we made an important decision that changed us for ever. We decided that we were not going to do a worship ‘service’ for a long time. At least two years. Ouch.
This hurt. This hurt because the actual first stage of transition from ‘doing’ church to ‘being’ Church is not simply incarnation – it’s detoxing ‘doing’ church. I know it sounds crazy but we stopped going to church and just started being ‘community’ in our local context and enjoying life and living well. We started going to the park and having barbeques and sharing our food with people there. We started taking our kids to play at the local playgrounds and having great conversations with other parents and arranging play dates at our houses… and before we knew it a few things had happened:
• We had become part of a community.
• We were sharing our faith and praying with our neighbours who were also our friends.
• We were sharing our lives together.
• We were enjoying our life. Imagine that? Christian leaders enjoying their lives! Who would have thought it!
A less difficult phase
This community started to become attractive. We met in small groups in each other’s homes, in bars or in community rooms at apartment buildings. We met together to create ‘Christian’ community: in other words to meet about Jesus, to pray with each other and share our burdens, to confess our sins. It was amazing, disorganised, de-centralised and actually, fun.
But one thing we realised is that everyone who joined us from a life of ‘doing church’ had to go through that same detox programme, every single time. This time, of course, we were able to tell them what it was they were feeling. And that it would go away as they lived out ‘being’ Church. The thing that was most amazing was how clear it had become that Church was meant to be lived out in real life.
Actually, whenever we would ‘go’ to church the whole exercise became a bit weird. It felt ‘off’ somehow. Sure, it was great singing and sometimes hearing a wonderful sermon but it all felt, well, dislocated from real life somehow. We began to understand that what had changed was us. We had begun to reimagine how Church could really be if we actually became the church instead of attended it, and it was truly a revelation that began to awaken in us so many more things, so much more than we could have ever imagined.
