Country Club

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     When I was a kid my family lived across the road from a country club for a few years, during which I was on the premises exactly once, on a sixth-grade field trip. In the years since, I’ve driven past the place several hundred times without turning in. Nothing against it, really; it just doesn’t appeal to me, so I haven’t sought any meaningful connection with the members, the people, by way of the place. If someone offered me a membership, I might accept. But then, if someone revoked that membership because I had ridden a loud and obnoxious dirt bike all over the golf course, I would say, “Whatever…” and move on to a better place to ride.

     It’s not unusual to hear a preacher mention church and country club in the same sentence, as in, “This church ain’t no country club!” I can recall several occurrences, maybe dozens counting radio preachers – might even have done it myself a time or two. If the preacher is using the verbal momentum well, the next thing you’ll hear will have to do with a call to commitment and sacrifice – in the church, that is, as distinct from the country club. If the verbal momentum is being used to the very best advantage, you might even get the idea there’s some accountability involved – in the church, remember.

     This week’s “Hey, Cobblestone” letter is the third in a series on “community,” one of the more ethereal terms we deal with on a daily basis. Last week we began listing the ingredients thereof – what goes in, what does not? The first ingredient was truth; true community adheres to truth that both precedes and supersedes the community itself; members of the community bond by committing to the same truth and seeking more of it together. This is what we’re calling “abiding community” – as distinct from “contemporary community,” which precedes its own “truth.” With a commitment to what has always been true, abiding community is off to a great start, and the recipe is coming together. What’s next? May I please offer a large scoop of accountability?

     For almost two decades I’ve kept a running list of the most over-used and under-defined terms in the English language, as measured by frequency and flippancy. It consists of no less than four and no more than seven, and certain terms float onto and off of the list. When I see and hear a term used a lot without much effort to describe what it means, and yet there’s some tacit agreement that we’re all working from the same definition – onto the list it goes. “Accountability” has never been bumped off; I keep finding reasons to challenge the assumptions attached to it. And in the past couple years, a newbie has come along – “community” – and rocketed into second place (right below “love”). So… in the space of one week’s letter, you and I are going to wrangle not one but two shifty/change-y terms and try to see them for what they really are. Oh, boy – we’ll need some Bible for that job!

     The exchange of letters between Paul and the church in Corinth is, in my humble opinion, the most fascinating study in community ever, surpassing even the wilderness experience of Exodus-thru-Deuteronomy. What happened in the wilderness took places as examples for us (1Corinthians 10:6), “us” meaning first-century Christians, and was written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come (verse 11). Without doing a bit of harm to Scripture, you and I right now can receive what was written down by Moses thirty-five hundred years ago, and what was written down by Paul to the Corinthians nineteen hundred and sixty-odd years ago. I said in a previous letter that we have to understand what community was like in Corinth to understand how Paul’s letters were received there, and gain the best understanding we can get. Take a look at Chapter Five.

     It’s a wack-o situation: a member of the church is having sexual relations with his step-mother. “Wha-a-a-a-a-a-t?!” you say. Yeah. Even more wack-o: the other members aren’t calling him out on it; in fact, they lay claim to this guy’s actions as one of the more progressive elements of their freedom as Christians. Paul gets the news by way of his coworkers in the gospel, and puts quill to parchment without delay: “Purge the evil person from among you” (1Corinthians 5:13).

     Paul wants this sexually immoral man booted from the membership of the Corinthian church, like right now. So what would that have meant for the offender? Before attempting to answer that question, let’s consider: What would it mean for an offender now? If someone within the membership of a twenty-first century Christian church ran afoul of what is acceptable, remained unrepentant, and removal from membership was in order, how would the person be affected?

     The man in Corinth would have been devastated. Christians had no power in 55AD – Christians were in Corinth precisely because they got persecuted out of Jerusalem. They were exiles, outcasts, weirdos. They believed their Savior defeated sin by taking it all on himself, and defeated death by dying. Who does that? To be outside the church in first-century Corinth was to be cast into hell-on-earth. The destruction of the flesh (verse 5) was a very real possibility.

     What about now? By and large, the loss of membership from a twenty-first century Christian church in America involves pulling into a different parking lot next Sunday. Sad to say, but accountability isn’t high on our list of priorities, by a good and reasonable definition of the term. It’s not totally absent, I’ll admit, but I don’t think we could honestly say that in our time, accountability is having the effect Jesus desires in his church. And I hope the Lord isn’t displeased as I go out on a limb and say…

     Until the loss of community becomes an unbearably horrible thought, it’s not true community.

     What if our commitment to Jesus and to each other were so strong, we couldn’t imagine any relationship like it outside the church? For that to even be desirable, we’ll need to understand that accountability is not a stand-alone ingredient; it’s a compound of other elements. I won’t pretend to have a complete list (still working on it), but we can be sure it includes at least these few: Humility – counting others more significant than ourselves (see Philippians 2:3). Mutual submission out of reverence for Christ (se Ephesians 5:21). Encouragement (see Hebrews 10:25). Nuance, through knowing one another’s stories (see the book of Ruth). And of course, accountability is nothing of the sort without adherence to the truth (see John 8:31-32).

     How, then, does accountability work? How is it applied? There could be a lot of details plugged into an answer to that question. In the interest of simplicity, I’ll say this: I agree to have expectations put on me by you; you agree to have expectations put on you by me; and at frequent intervals, we check to see if those expectations are reasonable and helpful, as measured by Scripture.

     In the 10-15 second definitions of community I asked for a couple weeks ago, accountability was a theme, though implicitly. I’m encouraged; I know it’s working among us. We feel the connection, and we know there have been and will continue to be very tangible manifestations of it. We understand that our relationships are not made by the place.

     So far, nobody has offered me a membership to a country club… anywhere. Nor has anyone suggested I purchase a membership. Just as well. Maybe they can see it in my eyes – dirt bike-riding kid from Darrtown… the golf course is bound to suffer. There’s a rule against that, isn’t there?

      

Grace and Peace (in the mix with accountability),

 

John       

 

       

 

 

 

 

Community, Part 2: Recipe

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     Here’s the weird part: the Bible book of Romans was written and distributed after the letter we know as First Corinthians. I know, flipping through the pages from left to right, Romans comes first, but all the best evidence points to Romans coming along 2-3 years after First Corinthians, which, you’ll remember, was the third letter in the exchange of five between Paul and the church in Corinth. What makes this weird is that the Corinthian Christians sure could have benefitted from the clarity packed into the letter to the Roman Christians. As copies of Romans began to circulate, I can imagine Christians in Corinth, in their finest sarcastic tones, saying, “Gee, Paul, this would have been helpful.”

     Did God make a mistake? Did he forget to give the Corinthians all the info they needed? Makes one wonder, does it not? Why would he send this community of faith into the big/bad world half-cocked?

     The letter I wrote to you last week was a primer, the first in a series of yet-to-be-determined length, in which we’re asking the Lord to help us develop an accurate and sustainable definition of community. If community has a recipe (and I believe it does), last week we preheated the oven. This week we begin gathering the ingredients. I have a list in my notes, and it’s growing still. Truthfully, I may already have some ingredients that don’t belong, and there’s always the possibility of others plopping into the mix. Some years back, I heard a comment about the difference between knowledge and wisdom: knowledge is being informed that tomatoes are, technically, a fruit; wisdom is not putting tomatoes in the fruit salad. Please pray with me for wisdom, so we don’t end up with a Franken-salad definition of community – there are too many of those already.

     Let’s try to imagine: How would a first-century Christian have engaged Scripture? What Scripture was available? What authority did it carry? While we’re imagining, let’s remember: There was no New Testament as we understand the term today. Looking back, we can see that our forbears were getting their New Testament on-the-fly, all through the second half of their century. But to them it would have looked like really good teaching – in modern terms, roughly the equivalent of a great book or a mind-blowing podcast. Did they have anything of authority that preceded the apostles’ letters? Let’s give our imaginations a breather and go to cognitive thought:

For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness (1Corinthians 10:1-5).

     Helpful, no? Maybe not, at least not at first. Let’s try not to get wrapped up, for now, in what it means to be “baptized into Moses” – deal? Instead, look at the thrust of the paragraph: the apostle wants his readers to be aware rather than unaware. Aware of what? Of their history, and its effect on their lives:

Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did… Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall (verses 6, 11-12).  

     Of all the ingredients on my growing list, vying for first place in the recipe for community – hmm, what goes there? How about a common goal? Fellowship? Love? Humility? I don’t see a throwaway on the list so far (do you?), but if I may be so bold, I’ll insist that first place goes to truth.

     Two Sundays ago, standing on the front porch of the church building, Jack Sasser gave me a verbal recipe for zucchini patties. I didn’t know zucchini patties would appeal to me at all until Jack started describing how they’re made. He got me, I think, with the parmesan cheese. Early on, the ingredients sounded more like they would add up to a stir fry, or baked, maybe a casserole. When he listed flour, I began to see how this would turn into a patty, as I understood the term. And then he said, “Oh, shoot, an egg! You gotta have an egg. That’s what holds it all together.” On my prompting, and best recollection of Jack’s recipe, Kay made zucchini patties for family night this past week. There were no leftovers. And like Jack, I was late getting to the egg part, causing my bride to say, “Where’s the egg? It won’t hold together without an egg.”

     Truth holds community together, making it possible to be in community. And at this point, we have to become aware of two categories of definitions for community. The terms I’ll assign, and hope they’re helpful for us all, are “contemporary definitions” and “abiding definitions.” Not being Latin students, most of us, we might still see the clues in con-tempor-ary: “with temporal status,” here today, gone sometime later. Communities that form under a contemporary definition start with somebody who wants to be in community who finds others who want to be in community; they get together, after which the members find something to be together about. The community preceded the chosen binding agent.

     By an abiding definition, members of a community bind themselves to prevailing truth, after which they bind themselves to each other. The binding agent precedes the community. Under the very best conditions, the members of a community formed under an abiding definition will have bound themselves to what has been true in all times and for all people. It won’t matter what new info comes along – truth has an amazing way of bearing itself out. The community members can stay in community.

     On the force of Jesus’s promise, all truth is available to a community of Christian faith – just not all at once:

“I still have many things to say to you,” (Jesus said to his disciples on the night before his crucifixion), “but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:12-15).

     Just like the Corinthian church, ours was established with enough truth to get us started, along with plenty of incentive to become better equipped. On the other hand, Cobblestone Community Church has spent long periods of time trying to build community by a contemporary definition, and if there’s anything we should want the Lord to “cook out of us,” like right-the-heck now, it’s that… exactly. We have got examine what binds us together. I suspect, at the moment, it’ll be a mix of contemporary and abiding definitions – in fact, I’m sure it’s a mix. Where we are bound by what has been true for all times and all people, and we have abiding community – well and good. Let’s build on that. Where we are bound (supposedly) by what is fleeting – let’s please stop pretending to be in community on those terms.

     So the letter Paul wrote to Rome showed up a bit late in Corinth – big deal. Actually, Paul alluded to several of the same concepts in his Corinthian letters – it was only by doing life with his Christian brothers and sisters that he was able to receive and report the Romans versions of the same. (Nope, I’m not running afoul of divine inspiration, only pointing out the complex and glorious process God used to bring it about!) Salvation was their common starting point, becoming aware, and more aware as time went on, of what had been true all along. Paul and the Corinthians had bound themselves to truth. Same goes for the Roman Christians, the Ephesian Christians, and the Cobblestonian Christians. There’s more community-building available to us, more opportunity to be in community, than we can currently imagine. We will benefit our neighbors best, maybe even invite them into true community, when we commit to a true definition.   

    

Grace and Peace (and an appetite for truth),

 

John

P.S. Many thanks to those who sent your spontaneous definitions of community – they’re in the pot! Anybody else?

  

Community, Part 1: A Primer

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     In the next ten to fifteen seconds, define “community.” I’ll wait.

     Thanks! What did you come up with? Seriously, send it my way, please. Without further thought (yet), email your 15-second result to john@cobblestonechurch.com. I won’t hold those responses to any kind of judgment; they will simply be part of the body of research you and I will be assembling over the next few weeks, and as a baseline, it’s important to have un-messed-with evidence. Thanks again!

     I should probably stop this letter right here, to keep from messing with the evidence, but we can’t afford to lose a week. Definitions of “community” are popping up (and down) like Whack-a-Mole gone mad, and I sense the Lord pressing us, his people, to begin building one that will withstand any scrutiny applied to it. Only please, promise to send me your shoot-from-the-hip definitions, since this is all in-house. Now we can proceed.

     In our Bible reading plan, we got the first two chapters of 1Corithians last Thursday and Friday, followed by a weekend of reflection. We also got a remarkable sermon from Andrew this past Sunday from Romans, the book we had just finished. As reluctant as I am to leave Romans (ever), it’s high time we took up a major topic in the letter we’re reading now. A little bit of familiarity with the Corinthian letters will say that the first one is all about spiritual gifts, and the second one is all about being a cheerful giver. But I’m pushing us into a much deeper familiarity. The good Bible teachers agree that a Bible reader will gain the best understanding of any given passage by understanding what it meant to the original audience. The community of Christians in Corinth around 55AD was comprised a certain way, and when Paul’s letters arrived there, they had a certain impact. Understanding God’s words in the Corinthian letters begins with understanding what community was like among the recipients.

     To begin with, we need to know that the two letters in Scripture make up less than half of the total number of letters between Paul and the church he had planted. There were five all together: one from Paul that instigated the exchange; one from the church with a bunch of questions for Paul; Paul’s reply to the church’s questions (1Corinthians); one from Paul, addressing some ugly stuff that happened during a quick visit prompted by the letter before; and finally, the letter called Second Corinthians, which put their relationship (mostly) back on track. All the “missing” letters are referenced within the letters we have in Scripture; if you’d like to know where, let’s get together and have that micro-study over coffee or a Coke.

     You’ll notice (I hope) that I’ve mentioned mostly relational concepts embedded in the letters, rather than the doctrinal concepts that usually get all the attention. That was on purpose, because community begins with relationship. If we’ll allow them, those long-ago Christians and their apostle will give us a massive boost in developing a truly workable definition of community in our own time. And as it was then, so it is now: not all the examples will be positively glowing.

     At this point, we need to take a look at the word itself: “community.” Standing alone, it’s a noun waiting for the adjectives to show up. Therein lies the problem. Within 30 minutes on any given news feed, a news-consumer will encounter the term “(such-and-such) Community” at least once, more likely several times. Ah, the adjectives have arrived. But the term is still deficient, because it carries no useful description of what life is like for the members of the community – anyone who is not truly within the community is left to assume. The next attempt at a definition usually involves more adjectives – more suches and suches strung end-to-end with the ones already in play. Net result: somebody gets left out who wants to be in, while somebody gets lumped in who wants to be out. And it only gets worse when the adverbs try to help. No, “community” gets its best help from two other parts of speech, and they get us thinking in a whole different direction.

     Enter one verb and one preposition. Community is not a thing nearly so much as a state of being, and it’s not possible to have a state of being without some form of the verb “to be.” And “to be” will be useless without knowing how the being takes place – being what, where, with whom, and on what terms. We’ll need a preposition, a word that precedes the anxious noun, and the best one to precede community is “in.” We will begin to make progress on our definition, I promise, in the very instant we quit thinking so much about a community or the community, and start thinking in terms of being in community.

     Let’s look at how it worked out for our forbears. Paul planted the church in Corinth and stayed with the Christians there for eighteen months. By all indications, they got along famously: he taught and the people learned; he learned as he saw the people learning; the people learned from each other as they put into practice what they’d learned from Paul. The relationship only got rocky when Paul left. Over time he was getting second- and third-hand reports of the Corinthian Christians running off the rails, which triggered the exchange of letters. And in case you hadn’t realized it, the letters weren’t written from across town and trotted over by courier; two out of five were penned while the recipient and author were in separate countries, and the other three from separate continents! It could easily be said that Paul and the Corinthians were in community while they were together, but were having a dickens of a time cultivating the relationship – and therefore community – through the mail.

     Which begs the question – is it possible to be in community with someone (or many someone’s) you’re not actually with on some regular basis? I’ll contend, from this example in Scripture, that the answer is No. Of the many concepts God conveys to us in the Corinthian letters, I’ll say that this tuned-up, divinely inspired glimpse at community is the single most useful and helpful in moment-to-moment life. To be in community requires being there.

     To be fair, there was an aspect of the Corinthians’ relationship with Paul that could have rescued community for everyone closely involved. Our big clue is in the opening paragraphs of the third letter in the series:

    I give thanks to my God always for you…

Wait. Really? Why would he do that? Those Corinthians seemed to be a major pain in the rear!  Oh, here comes the Why…

… because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge— even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you (1Corinthians 1:4-6, please excuse my interjections).

     Even though they’d had some sharp disagreements already, their common bond was their common redemption in Christ. Now, if they had all clung fiercely to the grace of God and the testimony about Christ, they would have understood that their relationship was animated by the gospel, which is exactly the idea that got lost in the mail. The application of the gospel of Christ is a very intimate undertaking, if you’ll pardon my use of the i-word; applied from a distance, it runs a high risk of being misapplied. For an example, check out the whacked-out situation in chapter 5 of First Corinthians – the absurdity of the Corinthians for allowing it for even an instant, and Paul’s stern reaction that triggers an overreaction in Corinth, for which he calls for reason and reconciliation in Second Corinthians. All the while, emotions are running high as the letters spend weeks and months in transit. And I would contend that the solution to the problem was not some form of first-century social media. Distance was the problem, not time. Absence may make the heart grow fonder, perhaps, but it sure-as-heck makes the mind grow restless.

     With “community” being tossed about willy-nilly in our time, my heart’s desire is for our assembly of Christian faith to develop a fair and accurate definition of the term. At some point, we’ll have to answer the question “Does Cobblestone Community Church have community?” We won’t know what we’re up against until we know what we’re talking about. This week’s letter is titled “A Primer” on purpose – it’s meant to get us started.

     Lord, please help us to make good progress – and soon!

 

 Grace and Peace (for making the progress),

 

John     

Appeal

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     Few books of the Bible are so neatly categorized as Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians. And in the interest of keeping it simple, God gave the book just two categories. If you’re tracking the reading plan, or have some familiarity with Romans already, you might say it’s anything but simple! But give me a minute, please, to make a case for the letter’s elegant construction.

     At times I try to imagine what it was like for Paul to receive the breathed-out words of God. I picture him pacing, pausing, then launching into the next divine thought. My mind’s eye sees his arms flung wide in praise, then brought close in contrition. My mind’s ear hears his voice rise and fall. I picture his secretary, Tertius (see Romans 16:22), faithfully recording the words of God as the apostle faithfully delivers them – quill and ink opening a window into the mind and heart of the Eternal One. I suppose the letter had an utterly ordinary beginning – hmm, we haven’t written to the Christians in Rome yet… probably ought to get that done – and along the way becoming the juggernaut of theology that it is. Paul and Tertius, in simple faith, were only cooperating with the Almighty.

     God gave the letter a pivot point, located at the break between chapters eleven and twelve. The original letter, and the manual copies of it for many hundreds of years afterward, didn’t have chapter and verse divisions, but the essential shift would have been no less recognizable. The break is a doxology, a smelling-salts moment for the reader – stop what you’re doing, right now, and give praise to God:

    Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

    “For who has known the mind of the Lord,
        or who has been his counselor?”
    “Or who has given a gift to him
        that he might be repaid?”

    For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen (Romans 11:33-36).

     The idea, we may suppose, was to give the brain a chance to cool off and the soul to be refreshed. Even Paul, who is generally given credit for being a really smart guy, seems to have come to the point where he turns his hands palm-upward and is left with little more than “wow.” The old-old-timers, the Israelites on the verge of entering the Promised Land, got a similar reprieve:

    “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 29:29).

    It’s so much bigger than we had imagined… and that’s OK.

     There’s only so much doctrine and theology a person can handle. Besides, there has to be a point at which we put theory into practice. The break in Romans is exactly the point. Take a deep breath, use it to express praise to the Lord, and then roll up the sleeves. And our Father, knowing precisely our limitations, puts the rest of the letter in terms we can understand completely – do this with your body; do this with your mind:

    I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12:1-2).

     Walking out the life of Christian faith, those two verses give us two simple questions – better yet, two simple prayers: “Father, I’m doing this with my body – is it holy and acceptable to you?” “Father, my mind is running in this direction – am I conforming to the world, or being transformed?” Throughout the ages, when the Father’s children have asked in sincerity, the Father has answered in faithfulness.

     The first 10.9 chapters of Romans describe what God has done in salvation, with the doxology rounding out the eleventh chapter. The remaining five chapters describe what we can do because of what God has done.

     Along with wondering what it was like for Paul to receive the breathed-out words of God, I also wonder what it was like for those first recipients of the letter. Rome was still on the western outskirts of the territories reached by the gospel; the doctrine and theology section must have done a lot of clarifying. But I’m imagining them very grateful for the doxology, the chance to say, “God’s got this, and even though I don’t exactly know how he’s got this, my soul is satisfied!” And I’m imagining them especially grateful that, after the doxology, Paul moved with fresh vigor into the practice of the faith, making his appeal by the mercies of God.

     In my journaling Bible, I had to draw a small diagram of Romans 11:36. It has three phrases spaced at equal intervals in a circle: from him at the top, with an arrow running 120 degrees clockwise to through him; the next arrow runs to him, with a final segment returning to the top… on repeat. That language circle encompasses everything everyone will ever know: For from him and through him and to him are all things…

     To him be glory forever. Amen.

 

Grace and Peace (forever, amen),

John