It’s easy to take good things for granted, especially things that are fixtures in our lives. Take something as ubiquitous as one’s church community: In the back of your mind, you know that particular community is there for you, should you need it. But maybe we should bring our church communities to the front of our minds more often, rather than treating them as fallback entities if something dire befalls our lives.
After all, if we take our church community for granted—or worse, if we behave as though we have no church community behind us at all—then we are apt to look to other avenues of community to take its place. Other communities aren’t inherently bad things, mind you. But do they function the same way for us as the Body of Christ?
Temporal Communities
Maybe we turn to our carefully curated friend groups as the main source of community in our lives, or even our families. Friends and family are wonderful, God-given gifts. They are definitely one way we can feel attuned to others in a meaningful way.
Maybe we find something beneficially communal in our workplaces or in our educational endeavors among work friends, school friends, or the departments, groups, and clubs associated with these. This, too, can be fulfilling.
Sometimes we commune in sketchier places, though. It’s no great revelation that our culture has become increasingly digital. As a result, the communities where many of us choose to give our focus cater to our baser problems as people. We do like an echo chamber where nobody voices dissent or opinions that differ from our own. We gravitate like sheep toward negativity, filling our feeds and conversations with the doom and gloom of our screaming world. We get ourselves into a tizzy of misplaced anger over anonymous opinions, bots, and trolls.
Left to our own devices, we don’t always choose the community that best serves us, even though it is steadfastly there. We take church community for granted and embrace the things that fall a little short at best or, at worst, directly clash with God’s intentions for our lives as Christians. Yikes.
Christian Community
So what’s the big deal with church community, then? What are the benefits of seeking it out more intentionally instead of simply taking comfort in knowing that we’ll always have it if we need it? I think the most obvious answer comes from Jesus in the book of Matthew: “Where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I among them” (Matthew 18:20). Jesus is there in our churches and among His people who gather in His name! And this extends beyond Divine Service on Sunday mornings; a church community is always gathered in the name of Jesus, sharing Jesus with others.
The church community serves people—serves us—better than any other community, yes. We are served by Christ through His examples of love and sacrifice to His people. He showed us how to love others during His time on earth, and He reminds us through the voice of Paul to the church in Thessalonica to “encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thessalonians 5:11).
Sharing the Love of Christ
But also, a church community is a dedicated place where we, too, get to serve. Nobody exists in a vacuum, and everything isn’t all about us all the time. In true community, we are serving just as much as we are being served. That servant mentality just doesn’t translate quite the same way in other forms of community. And neither does the content—a church community gathers around the miracles and sacraments of our all-powerful God, united by the host of believers who have gone before us as well as those present in the room. It’s a little more profound than like-minded posts on social media.
Truly, other community is not a bad thing. Family, friends, jobs, education, and even online groups that don’t bring out or glorify the broken side of humanity are blessings. But none of them are equal to your church community, nor should they be a surrogate for church community. We can’t replace the mutual sharing of the love of Christ with anything this world has to offer, and we would do well to remember to shine a light on the good things in life that point us toward the cross. We would do well to participate in our church community instead of letting it fall back into the wings, only relevant in times of necessity. The truth is that the love of God, shared by His children, is always necessary. And we get to be a part of it.
Scripture: ESV®.
Learn more about the unique gifts Christ delivers through His church in Christa Petzold’s book Gathered by Christ: The Overlooked Gift of Church.
