Chapter Three — The Family in the Circle (2 of 2)

In Romans he says it in one line: "so we who are many are one body in Christ, and individually we are members who belong to one another" (Romans 12:5, NET).

Members who belong to one another. A body does not attend itself. Each part is given to the others, and you were given too.

Your gifts were given "for the benefit of all" (1 Corinthians 12:7, NET). "Just as each one has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of the varied grace of God." (1 Peter 4:10, NET.)

So the question changes.

A person who thinks of church as a service will ask whether he is being served well. That is a fair question, and Chapter Six takes it seriously, because Scripture does say shepherds must feed the flock.

But a person who thinks of church as a body will ask a second question too. Who here would be weaker if I left? Who would I no longer be there to carry? "Carry one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." (Galatians 6:2, NET.)

Some who leave have never been asked whom they would leave behind. It is a fair question to weigh beside the others. It is a question for a safe church only. No one is asked to carry others by staying where they are harmed.

On the night before His death, Jesus prayed not only for the twelve but for everyone who would believe through their word:

"I am not praying only on their behalf, but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their testimony, that they will all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you. I pray that they will be in us, so that the world will believe that you sent me."

— John 17:20–21 (NET)

This is where the conviction of this book about staying comes from. Not from what happens to people who stay, which no one has counted. From this prayer.

Jesus tied the oneness of His people to the world's believing. That does not settle any one person's decision. It does mean that no parting among believers is small, whichever way it goes.

Earlier that same night He said, "Everyone will know by this that you are my disciples—if you have love for one another" (John 13:35, NET). And Paul's question to a church split into fan clubs still lands: "Is Christ divided?" (1 Corinthians 1:13, NET.)

None of this means pretending any congregation is perfect. The New Testament churches were not.

Corinth had factions, lawsuits, drunkenness at the Lord's Supper, and a man living with his father's wife. Galatia was being talked out of the gospel. In Revelation the risen Christ writes to seven churches and has a complaint against most of them. One has left its first love. One tolerates a false teacher. One has a reputation for being alive and is dead. One is lukewarm.

But notice what He does. He tells the churches to repent. He tells the faithful in Thyatira, "hold on to what you have until I come" (Revelation 2:25, NET). He stands at the door and knocks (Revelation 3:20).

He also warns that a church that will not repent can lose its lampstand (Revelation 2:5). He is patient with flawed churches, and He does not call His patience endless.

These letters are about a church's faults. They are not a word to stay where you are abused.

Jesus told a parable about weeds. An enemy sowed them among the wheat, and the servants wanted to pull them up. "No," the master said, "since in gathering the darnel you may uproot the wheat along with it. Let both grow together until the harvest." (Matthew 13:29–30, NET.)

Jesus said, "The field is the world" (Matthew 13:38, NET). Augustine and Calvin both taught that the church on earth is mixed, as Chapter Four shows. Either way, the parable warns against making a pure church by our own pulling.

It does not cancel the discipline Jesus gave in Matthew 18, or Paul's command about a church member who does evil: "Remove the evil person from among you" (1 Corinthians 5:13, NET). Chapter Eight takes that up.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who led an underground seminary under the Nazis, wrote a short book on Christian community that believers of many traditions still read. One sentence from it belongs on the wall of every church: "He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial."

Some who leave a church are not leaving the church in front of them. They are leaving the dream of a church they carried in, which this one failed to match.

The dream may have been a good one. But the church in front of you is the one with actual people in it, and only actual people can be loved.

This is about dreams, not about harm. A person who leaves because she was abused is not leaving a dream. She is leaving the abuse.

And none of this means a church owes you nothing.

A family that never feeds its children is failing, and Scripture is hard on shepherds who feed themselves and not the flock (Ezekiel 34:2). Jesus' charge to Peter by the sea was "Feed my sheep" (John 21:17, NET).

A church is where you are fed with the word and the sacraments (which many churches call ordinances), where "we who are many are one body, for we all share the one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:17, NET), where you are known and prayed for, and where you are given a place to serve. When a church stops doing those things, something has gone wrong, and the chapters ahead take that seriously.

But a church is all of them together. Before it is anything else, it is the part of Christ's family He has placed nearest to you.

Start there when you weigh it.