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
No comments:
Post a Comment