A Place to Belong (eBook)

Introduction

Around the corner from where I live, a house is for sale. In bold green letters the lawn sign reads: “I’m Gorgeous Inside!” The message is surprising. From the street, the house is thoroughly ordinary, even run-down. It’s a seventies-era raised ranch with dingy white vinyl siding and a location on a busy road. The roof looks like it lacks the necessary resolve to bear the weight of another winter’s snowfall. The circular driveway loops around a weedy patch of grass obviously intended for a fountain but more likely currently concealing ticks. The bushes are too big, the windows are too small, and the backyard is nonexistent.

But the sign encourages me to believe there is something more beautiful—and more valuable—about this seemingly ho-hum house than I can appreciate from the curb.

The local church is a little like that house. At first glance, “the house of God” (Heb. 10:21) is unremarkable: a regular gathering of ordinary people committed to a largely invisible mission. We are young and old, male and female, single and married, unemployed and overworked. None of us is much to look at. We sing slightly off-key, and we can’t always clearly articulate the faith we profess. Anyone can see that our diverse personalities, political views, and parenting styles don’t easily harmonize, and even our most spiritually mature members sometimes stumble into quarrels, petty jealousies, grumbling, and lethargy. Following worship, bad coffee and awkward moments are served at plastic tables in a damp basement.

But the church has more beauty—and more value—than we can see with physical eyes. Like the Old Testament tabernacle that was covered on the outside with rams’ skins and goat hair but ornamented inside with gold and silver, the ordinary-looking church is actually much more than it seems.1 The Bible proclaims that the church is a radiant bride, a spiritual house made with living stones, a pillar and buttress of the truth, the very body of Christ himself (Eph. 5:27; 1 Pet. 2:5; 1 Tim. 3:15; 1 Cor. 12:27).

We may not immediately realize it from the curb, but this house is gorgeous.

I have had my share of ordinary church experiences. I’m a pastor’s wife and a pastor’s daughter, but I’ve been a member of churches where I was neither. I’ve been a church kid, a youth-group member, a college student, a single woman, a newlywed, a mom. I’ve attended Sunday school. I’ve taught Sunday school. I’ve taken my kids to Sunday school. I’ve been part of a small church surrounded by cornfields and part of a thousands-of-members church in the city. I’ve gone to churches where everyone remembers my birthday and churches where I felt like I was always and forever the new girl. I have been loved by people in the church—given casseroles and prayed for and encouraged to use my gifts—and I have sometimes been hurt by people in the church—ignored and misunderstood and intentionally deceived. I know I have hurt a few people myself. I’ve been impatient with the weak, and I’ve looked past people who were struggling because I didn’t feel like mustering the energy to get involved. The local church doesn’t always seem gorgeous.

Perhaps no group is known to meet claims of the church’s beauty with more skepticism than the generation just a few years behind me: millennials. Among Christians in their twenties and thirties, narratives of questioning, criticizing, and rejecting the church are common. Seemingly, wandering away from the church is the new road to spiritual maturity and religious credibility. But it’s not just young Christians who have grown cold toward the church. People of all generations can struggle to look beyond the church’s lackluster appearance. If we are honest, life in the local church sometimes seems ordinary and repetitive. Week after week, we interact with the same people and do the same things together. Over the years, we’ve been frustrated and disappointed, and we have never seen as much fruit from our worship and work as we would like. In fact, many weeks there seems to be no fruit at all. Maybe we aren’t about to leave, but belonging to the local church doesn’t always seem like much of a glorious privilege.

So what do we do? When the local church appears utterly unremarkable—insignificant in the eyes of the world and pretty ordinary even in our own—how do we delight in belonging there? And how can we encourage those around us—our children and teenagers, our fellow church members, our newly converted brothers and sisters in Christ, our curious neighbors—that the church is more than it may seem at first glance?

I have taken the thesis of this book from Martyn Lloyd-Jones: “Our greatest need is to recapture the New Testament teaching concerning the Church. If only we could see ourselves in terms of it, we would realize that we are the most privileged people on earth, that there is nothing to be compared with being a Christian and a member of the mystical body of Christ.”2 We may be young or old, newcomer or founding member, leader in the church or teen in the back row, but this is our task: to see the church as God sees the church and then to embrace the privilege of being part of it.

In these pages we’ll focus on the New Testament Epistles and the beautiful words those letters use to describe the church (though we’ll also see these same truths revealed in the gathered people of God from Genesis to Revelation). Focusing on these terms will help us to clarify what is essential to the value of the local church. Whether your church gathers in America or Azerbaijan, whether it has ten or ten thousand members, whether it hosts dozens of activities or simply meets on Sundays to worship, the same biblical truths should define it, and the same biblical truths will foster your delight in the fundamental loveliness of Christ’s gathered people.

When we take seriously what God says about his church, it will shape our experience of belonging there.

We will see from Scripture that the church is the beloved (chapter 1) and the called (chapter 2). We love the local church because God loves the local church, and we share a common testimony with everyone in the church. Next, we will see that the church (chapter 3) exists to worship. When we gather together, week by week, to hear God speak to us and then to speak to him, we are at our highest expression of what it means to be God’s assembled people. Then we will consider the way the church is organized by God. The church is a flock (chapter 4), receiving care from shepherd elders, and the church is a body (chapter 5), requiring the gifts and graces of every member. From there, we will look at how we engage with one another—what the Apostles’ Creed calls “the communion of saints.” We will learn to see ourselves and one another as the saints (chapter 6), brothers and sisters (chapter 7), and gospel partners (chapter 8). Finally, we’ll consider what it means to be the heavenly multitude (chapter 9) and take encouragement from the fact that each local church is part of something bigger than itself. In every chapter, we’ll discover that the local church is much more than it first appears. We’ll consider how this knowledge equips us to pray for one another, to speak to one another, and to live alongside one another. And we’ll find that there is nothing to be compared with being a member of the body of Christ.

As I think back over years of Sundays in the pew, I have seen the significance of these truths in my own experience. If I have any maturity in the faith, any authentic spiritual life, any resolve to follow Christ, any experience of his fullness, it is because of the ordinary local church. It is because men of God have been given to me as priceless gifts to preach the word of God for the good of my soul. It is because the members of the church have prayed for me and because its children have noisily added their praises to mine. It is because men and women whom I might not otherwise have met are committing their lives to helping me become like Christ. For four decades now, I have worshiped and worked alongside those for whom Christ died, and I am absolutely convinced that I am more of a Christian in the church than I could ever be alone.3

It’s worth noting that most of the terms we will consider are given to us (through divine inspiration) by someone who had a very complicated church story. The apostle Paul was a religious kid, but rather than growing up into love for the church, he kicked against it (Phil. 3:5–6). He hated the church, celebrated the death of her first martyr, and used all his energies to strike down Christ’s beloved people wherever he could find them (Acts 7:58; 8:1, 3; 9:1–2). Then on his way to persecute the Way, he was waylaid. Christ appeared to him, and the direction of his life forever changed. Overnight, the church’s enemy became the...