TOM and the Goldfish Bowl, Part 2, B
THE KINGDOM, THE CHURCH, AND THE TRADITIONS OF MEN
THE CHURCH
The Wife that Jesus Loves
I sat beside Bob Terrell years ago on the front row of a little fellowship in west Texas. I had just played a song for the gathering, and he was getting ready to take the stage and teach, probably on 1 John. I had just “retired” from a staff position at a local fellowship and had begun my experimental career as an musician and minister—sort of an arts missionary. He turned to me and said, “Ben, do you worry sometimes about where your provision [money] is going to come from?”
“Yes.”
He said, “Well, you take care of the Bride and the Bridegroom will take care of you.” The fellowship leaders introduced him and he moved up to the podium and began to teach. I just sat there thinking.
Now it is my turn, fifteen years later, to encourage you with the same question: Do you sometimes worry about your provision?
Well, remember this: Jesus loves his wife. If you love her and take care of her, you will certainly win his heart. This applies to everyone—not just experimental missionary types. Love the wife of Jesus, and you will win his heart.
I do not want the Bridegroom to ever overhear me slandering her. I also do not want to become complacent in my work to promote her health. I want to be known as a lover of the Bride in public and in private. As she matures I will compliment her on her beauty. When I read these words in Ephesians 4:29—“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen”—I think of how my words affect her.
I want to be a graceful gift to the Bride that Jesus loves.
Let’s think of it this way: If you come to my home and want to find favor with me, what might you do that will just about guarantee it?
Yes, that’s it.
If you honor my wife and children, compliment them, encourage them, and help them in any way, I will notice. I will be compelled to give favor to you. I will provide for you in some way. Jesus will do the same, but his ability to provide knows no bounds.
The only people who will have trouble with this challenge to love are those who can’t separate their ideas of the Church as a building where all the people meet and the Church as the people of God.
The Church is the people of God. She belongs to God. I am not a Church cynic because I believe that my complaints and disappointments with her are like my disappointments with my own family. My role is not to criticize or diminish but always to build up. I may criticize malfunctioning institutions because they don’t let the Church be herself, but I don’t waste too much time on it.
Bashing institutions has no great payoff.
Being a reformer of institutions is a very weak step towards helping the Church mature. If institutions could have perfected her, then they would have perfected her a long time ago. You see, many people have obsessed over and financed great and innovative organizations that were built for her service, but none of these efforts have done what we hoped for.
Want to know why?
Family only matures according to family rules. Family does not mature according to organizational rules. When the hearts of fathers and sons return to one another we mature, but we do not mature when the hearts of employees turn toward their managers. When sons commit to loving one another we mature, but we don’t mature when organizational members commit to work together to complete a task. When we receive the grace gifts of people more than we strive for the grace gifts of ideas, then we mature. When we see the Holy Spirit as the great family builder and receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit as sons instead of seeing him as an optional power enhancer, then we mature.
Dear believers, we must put all our effort into being the family—the Kingdom people—God has created us to be. And the Church will then grow and mature as the natural byproduct.
Listen: A tree is to a forest as a son is to the Church. If we put several trees together in a field, we call it a forest. If we put several sons together in loving relationship, we call it the Church. This is why we don’t have to try and build the Church, and it is why we were never called to try. We are called to receive the Spirit of adoption and to mature as his sons. When we love one another according to our new nature and we grow together, then we are the Church.
Easy.
The Church is nothing more than the identifiable people of God connecting together in love as one family on this earth.
Jesus loves the Church.
Seeing the Church
I’ll say it again: The Church is the people of God—not anything else.
The Church is not the meetings. The Church is not the buildings. To think so is craziness. Unfortunately, however, we have shifted from a people-only understanding of the Church to system-and-building understanding.
Our fixation on promoting Church meetings is connected to the way we have defined the Church. In short, we adopted the idea of Church as a structure—a form—and so now we obsess over getting people into it. It has depreciated our heart for evangelism and has made many of us very, very tired.
Sure, it is a basic human instinct to build homes, towns, and fortresses. That is not a problem. It is a problem when we confuse our home with a house. One is real and relational, and one is temporary and impersonal. “Home,” to quote the cliche, “is where the heart is,” and it is found in the eyes of our family. A house is made of mere wood and stone.
When we shift away from understanding the Church as the people of God, then our focus shifts right along with it. It goes something like this:
- We must meet together! (Great!)
- We must build great meetings! (Really?)
- We must have buildings worthy of our meetings! (Oh, no!)
- The Church is a place where we go to have great meetings! (Craziness.)
Do you see how easy it is to slide into craziness? Though we had great intentions, the houses we have built have become prisons for the people of God. They have locked us in, and they have locked others out. Our only hope is to rediscover the Kingdom of God and redefine the Church as people.
Unfortunately, to really understand the depth of this pathology—this mental sickness—we can’t confine our observations to the Christian obsession with physical buildings alone. That would be a gross reduction of the true width and breadth of modern Christian institutionalism. Institutionalism is when something meant to live free is confined within a static, non-living system. We have not only called a place—instead of a people—the Church, but we have also allowed our imagination of Church to settle inside of the good ideas and static structures of our traditions. We have now come to see “the way we do it” as Church.
We show this as our working definition for Church by marking our territories of doctrinal influence and staking our traditional claims. This is my Church. This is our way. That is their way. We prove it when we grow fond of words like attendance, growth, liberal, traditional, mine, yours, location, relevant, emergent, progressive, we, them ... and many more. We are all being reduced by this categorical, territorial language. It reduces us first in our imaginations, then as individuals and ultimately as a connected family.
As a matter of fact, since these words have been successfully killing the idea of family for quite some time we are now left searching for new words that we can understand ourselves with. Many of us have been opting for the word community as a working replacement. Community, in this new vocabulary, happens when people live close together or even in the same home. Community happens when people share meals and time and conversations. Community, in this modern usage, covers almost every healthy activity people can do with one another in close proximity, but we all know that community is no replacement for family. It is easy to see that community flows effortlessly from family, but family is not, in any way, the natural byproduct of community. Community is an inferior replacement for understanding the Church as a family, but it has been needed because we have lowered ourselves into much-less-than-family institutions both on the ground and in our minds.
When we divide the Church into pieces and parts based on doctrine, traditions, and buildings we reveal our inferior imaginations. We have often seen the Church as little more than an organization built to defend the greater Christian ideas from the lesser ideas, and so down we go into classes and divisions.
The Church is not a collection of great ideas. We must repent from reducing her to this!
The Church is the beautiful people of God.
God’s people are not cattle. They are not to be divided and classed according to their assent to specific ideas or adherence to a system of traditions. However, we have become famous for marking lines on the ground and herding the believer-livestock into our stalls. This separation has brought so much prejudice that now we need schools to justify the spiritual meaning of all these divisions. This caste system will never be the glory of the beautiful people of God, yet author after author and speaker after speaker hit the sales-trail in hopes of selling their latest version of the new-and-improved Church. This is nothing but immature promotion of division in the family.
We are a family who are meant to be reconciled together, and we must pray for reconcilers to take courage and lead!
The Beautiful Church is One
When we hear the appeal to discover the beautiful Church we are not going to lower our minds and obsess over narrow ideas that only addresses her form. For instance, it would be misguided to promote the small Church as the best one. It would be misguided to believe the modern Church with new worship styles as the most effective one. And it would painfully prejudiced to cling to the notion that only the ancient Church with liturgy and tradition contain the best things about her.
Foolishness.
Remember, Jesus only used the word Church twice in all of the Gospels: once when he claims it as his own to build in Matthew 16, and once when he requires reconciliation among its members in Matthew 18. Jesus spoke of the Church like a man standing near a huge grouping of trees can point to the forest. It is obvious. It is clear to see. It takes no striving for him to identify her as the people of God. Her beauty is intrinsic just as each person is intrinsically beautiful. God sees the beauty of his people individually, and then together as his family. This should be our vision as well.
My wife is not beautiful because of what she does or what she wears or where she sits. Her very essence is beautiful, and she is most beautiful to me when she is at perfect rest in who she is. Jesus feels the same way about his Church, and his love for her does not change based on whether she is working hard, or lying perfectly at rest in his love. His love does not change if she is meeting in a stadium or in a home, whether she plays electric guitars or pipe organs, or whether she wears an old dress or enjoys a brand new one. He simply loves her.
In modern Christian life it is talk about the form, the style, and the function of the Church that dominates our books and our conversations. Let’s stop obsessing over the very things that Christ made absolutely no effort to entertain and start obsessing over reconciling with the people in our view. Reconciliation and forgiveness are the only directive words Jesus ever spoke regarding the dynamics of our life together as the Church. This says something important and we should take note. Matthew 18 is not first a guide on how to be reconciled, it is first and foremost a directive to be reconciled together as one family.
Seeing the Church
Let’s take a few moments to lift our imagination of the Church so that we can be clear and encouraging to one another and so that we can learn to see her as Christ sees her. This will help us avoid any accidental diminishment of the Bride or any unwholesome talk that might come out of our mouths and harm her. Here we will choose to be brief and scripturally to the point as we establish our new vision for the Church:
The Church belongs to Jesus.
He claims her in Matthew 16 when He says to Peter, “on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” The Church is not ours and does not belong to men in any century. We should repent for ever using the words “my” or “your” when trying to identify the Church or any individual fellowships that we have learned to call Church. These words make us seem petty to the world, and they breed division between us.
The Church is the people of God.
She has never been a building or an organization, and we should repent for stupidifying the word by using it in this way almost constantly. There is no reference in all of Scripture to prove otherwise, and we must stop worshipping idols by constantly referring to these man-made things as the Church that Jesus died to build. He did not die for wood and mortar; he died for his people. His wife is not a stone edifice but a collection of living stones. For this reason we never “go to Church.”
There is only one Church.
She may be identified as the people of God in a city or region that meet together like the Church at Antioch or the Church in their house or the Church of God that is in Corinth. These phrases are clear; however, they identify only one Church who happens to be gathering in different places. It is the one Church who in part can be seen in Antioch, or who, in another part, can be seen in your home. There has never been more than one Church, and to even consider that there has been is just nuts. Jesus claims one Church, and she may be found in many, many places both big and small throughout the world. It is only with this understanding that we can use the plural word “Churches” like it is used in the Book of Revelation. We can recognize the Church that meets at First Baptist’s building, but we will not continue to recognize the First Baptist Church as though it is a different Church than the forty-seven other gatherings in the same city. The difference is not subtle. Jesus is not a polygamist.
The one Church is a multi-faceted beauty.
As his people we understand our nature as the Church in different, beautiful analogies, each having a unique revelation for us. These include the temple, the body, the bride, and the family. Each of these word pictures speaks to our nature and our relationship to God. The temple speaks to our sacred purpose and the presence of the Holy Spirit. The body speaks to our work in this world, and our inseparable relationship with Christ, the head. The bride speaks of our value in the eyes of our Lord, and his great passion and pursuit of us. The family speaks of the very nature of God as the Trinity and the nature of our Kingdom DNA code. None of these give support for division in the Church based on style, race, doctrine, or history, and so now we are committed to ignoring the bigotries of men. We ignore all of them. There is no such thing as a black Church, or a house Church, or a liturgical Church. There are black people who are in the Church, there is Church that meets in homes, and there are some in the Church who enjoy liturgy, but this is a huge difference in language and belief.
We must be committed to building the multifaceted people of God without prejudice.
The Church has only one foundation.
The first foundation of the Church, the stuff that gives it stability, is Christ himself who is the Chief Cornerstone. Jesus is the unmoving, eternal anchor point from which the whole Church is fit to and built upon. He is the plumb-line and the structural basis. He is the beginning of the Church and he is the final word on its growth and fulfillment.
The second layer of foundation are the apostles and prophets. According to Ephesians 2:20 and 4:11, Jesus gives us the apostles and prophets as people that build stability into the Church. (He also gives us teachers, pastors, and evangelists to build us up, but these are not mentioned as foundational.) Apostles and prophets are expressions of his own foundational grace. These are real people, not just concepts. They are real people who serve underneath the family as load-bearing servants. They architect and they foresee. They plan and they promote. What do they plan and promote? Always the family of God and never the form or the organization. They proclaim what is coming, and they require everything to be properly related to Jesus the Chief Cornerstone. This was true of the prophets before Jesus, and the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb, and the prophets and apostles of the first century Church, and it is still true today. Any Church expression, local or translocal, that is not built on these foundations is destined to be structurally unsound, unstable, and will eventually come to ruin the more weight is placed upon it.
Jesus’ gifts to the Church are people.
The ministry gifts—who are first the apostles, second the prophets, and third the teachers, pastors, and evangelists—are all given to build up the Church by building up every believer to do works of service and to mature in Christ. They are not called to build organizations or doctrinal fortresses, but rather they are called to give themselves away to serve the people of God. According to Ephesians 4 and 1 Corinthians 12, these leadership graces equip the saints; they do not strive to build a better organization. Furthermore, as directed in Titus 1:5, elders are to be appointed by the apostles to lead the local gatherings of the Church. The “order” of the Church is founded in actual people full of the grace who are connecting together, building one another, and submitting ultimately to Christ. It is not established on doctrines or traditions, and there is no other way to imagine the health and maturity of the Church that Jesus loves.
The Church is always the people.
Church uniquely identifies the people of God on the earth, not the structures of organization or the traditions of men. We are, according to the Greek translation of the word Church, the “called out ones” of God who love to gather together because we are family, not because we all agree with each other about everything. The word Church is always used in any New Testament teaching to identify us—the people of God—and our function in the earth. The word is not used to identify our eternal life to come because the Church is about the practical here-and-now understanding of who we are in Christ, set apart from others in this world who have not yet been adopted as sons. In the next life, I could suppose, we won’t need to see ourselves as “set apart from others.” Church identifies who we are for one another right now.
The Church is the people of God wherever they are.
I realize this may almost seem repetitious, even remedial, at this point, but it bears a moment of emphasis. If a family doesn’t need a house to be a family, then the Church doesn’t need a meeting to be the Church. The sons of God—wherever they are—are always the Church. They can be on a mission endeavor or resting on the porch. They can hold hands in person, or they can connect over the phone. They can be in a huge worship meeting or driving together in a car. They can be in an international relief hub or in a local prison. They are the Church everywhere.
Being the Church
Jesus has already claimed us as his Church, so let’s receive it and be who we were reborn to be. Let’s be God’s beautiful family! Why should we worry about the future of the Church? If we pour the best of ourselves into our natural families, we have to let go and trust that they will grow and do well. We can do the same with the Church that God gives us to love. We don’t need to control or design. We can just pour out our love on each other and trust that Jesus alone will build it.
Can you leave that job to him?
Remember Matthew 16:18 when Jesus says, “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
He has called us to build each other up, but he has not called us to build his own family. Building each other up is a radically different proposition than the work required to oversee and direct the growth of a family. Jesus will make all the plans necessary for his Church to grow. All we have to do is love the people he has given to us the best that we can.
Our small part in the life of the Church is to love those within our reach. He is always directing us to love, to pastor, to encourage, and to prophecy in order to build other people up, but he is not trying to turn over the architecture to us. We are called to cooperate with him and, like happy workers, to obey the constant and clear vision of our master builder.
Now, Paul does say in 1 Corinthians 3:10: “By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds.” We might think this sounds contradictory. I don’t think it is. Paul is speaking in a metaphor that always fills an apostle’s heart. He is not assuming the authority that Christ has to build the Church, but he is aware of his own grace to be a foundation laying leader. Apostles are foundation layers and fathers. Apostles are always laying foundations and creating a space that is clear and level for the people of God to build on together, but they would never assume Christ’s authority and try to direct the growth of the family on their own.
What is the foundation that they lay?
It is always Jesus.
Every leadership grace, including pastors, prophets, teachers, and evangelists, given to the Church expresses the heart and purposes of Christ in leadership, but we all have an expression of Christ to share! Every believer has a portion of grace, that is, an expression of Christ that they can share with those around them. The Church is where we enjoy being who we are in him as sons and sharing ourselves with one another. It is the living, breathing example of one another love. We don’t have to proclaim the Church in order to see it come to life because when we come together around Jesus we simply are the Church. Oh, my friends, if we could only put down all the tools and monies and energies we put into trying to make the Church a certain way and just rest in being the Church, how full and wonderful our lives would be. This is a call to stop promoting mega-Church, or small Church, or relaxed Church, or formal Church, or traditional Church—et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseum. Promoting these things will not lead to anything other than divisions and prejudices and immaturity.
God has not called us to promote our best idea of the Church; he has called us to promote and proclaim the Kingdom of God.
We can simply be the Church.
Claiming the Church
Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom. Jesus claimed the Church.
He spoke of the Kingdom as a force, a way, a reality that we could release, enjoy, and find power for living in. He looked out over the future of his new people, saw our faces, and said, This is my Church. He claimed the Church like we might claim our own family.
We have permission, I believe, to look out over the fields of our lives and claim just what Christ claims. We can claim the people of God around us as our new family and then we can call ourselves the Church. By opening our eyes and listing the names of the believing people around us we are actually bringing the Church to life, and it will be the kind of Church that we can live with. Church, for us, may never have to be any larger than this list. We might imagine the Church in the whole world, but we are finite creatures so we can only take up our responsibility in the portion of the Church that we can see and call by name.
The reason I am making this point here is crucial. Many people passively move through life with no intent to claim anyone. They move from this place to that place, from this fellowship to that one, from this event to another and they never lay hold to any relationship and call it permanent. These same people don’t have a clue how to enjoy the Church because they have fundamentally failed to see that the Church is only people and that the Church is theirs to claim. The most common complaints from Christians who slide though life without claiming others as family are: I don’t have friends. I don’t feel welcome in the Church. I feel alone.
Take out a pen. Write down the names of the believers around you with whom you have some kind of personal connection. Say aloud, “This is the Church for me.”
AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK: TOM AND THE GOLDFISH BOWL
BY: BEN PASLEY
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