Birthing Christians

When Cyprian wrote in the third century "He cannot have God as his Father who does not have the church as his mother,"  he was asserting church authority.  And like Tim Stafford points out in his article, "The Church Why Bother," the reformers were not interested in weakening that stand.  But I want to offer it as more than a statement of church authority, but also as a spiritual reality.  True Christian belief is "birthed" through Christian community.

This is just a spiritual fact: there is no true believing without belonging.  True believers belong to Christ and to other believers.  They are “engrafted” into his body as “members of one another.” (Romans 12:15). 

But that true believing often starts, appropriately I might add, by “hanging out” with Christ and the believers.  By “belonging” first.  Christian personhood, like human personhood always comes to us through other believers.

Miroslav Volf reminds us (in a passage from After our Likeness, p.183 which I cite in It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian: How the Community of God Transforms Lives), “Without other human beings, even God cannot create a human being.”

Volf also says, “Christ’s presence is promised not to the believing individual directly, but rather to the entire congregation, and only through the latter to the individual.  This is why no one can come to faith alone and live in faith alone” (Volf, After Our Likeness, 162, emphasis mine). 

This is not only a challenge to unchurched believers, but also a reminder to us that when we invite someone into our fellowship, we are extending to them the good news that we both proclaim and demonstrate with our lives. 

For the gospel messages to transform they must be far more than just content communicated, even the content of the Divine love of the Father in Jesus, but also include the personal and experiential way in which that content is communicated. 

Think of the stories at bedside and the radiance of a face reflecting the love of Christ, words of admonition and the silent holding of the hand of a person in pain, eating and drinking the bread and wine, worship of the one true God, holiness and failure, manipulation and sword, the blood of the martyrs, the lives of the saints, hypocrisy and lust for power among church dignitaries and the rest of us, and economic interests and political machinations. (Volf, “Theology, Meaning and Power,” 57.) 

It seems beyond doubt that a person becomes a human being not only by learning her mother’s language but also by feeling her mother’s touch and hearing the sound of her voice. Similarly we become Christians not only by learning the language of faith but also by being “touched” by other Christians and ultimately by God on a nonsemiotic level. 

When Jesus called the disciples to follow him, it wasn’t as a bunch of individuals who were disconnected to each other.  It was within the context of a rabbinic relationship where they would be together be deeply bonded to him and each other. 

And of course, they didn’t understand exactly what they were getting themselves into when they chose to follow him.  They had to learn on the go.  They listened to his teaching and enjoyed his touch.  They partnered with him in the ministry and they ate and drank together.  They were a “band of brothers” who had no small degree of sibling rivalry and even at the very end of Jesus’ life, they still didn’t really get it.  (See Acts 1 for an amazing excerpt of how even after resurrection, the disciples still missed the point.)

In fact, until the Spirit came upon them at Pentecost, we could call the disciples followers who were not believers.  They “belong” to Jesus, but they still didn’t “get” Jesus.  In many ways, this is the state of a lot of the church today.  (What one friend insists—rightly so—on calling the “visible church”, as opposed to the “invisible church” of true believers.).  But once they did believe, then their bond to the fellowship deepened and became the primary social relationship in their lives.

Let me end with one more excerpt from my book:

The early church understood and taught that to be baptized as a Christian meant to undergo an “extraordinary thoroughgoing resocialization” so that the Community of believers “would become virtually the primary group for its members supplanting all other loyalties.” ( Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The social world of the Apostle Paul, 78.)  Through this relational restructuring of the Spirit, the believer progresses in depth of faith (relationship to God) and in transformation into the likeness of God (understood in relational terms and expressed in relationships with other believers—see 2 Corinthians 3:17-18; John 13:14-15).  Indeed, as the “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22-26) attest, relational maturity is virtually indistinguishable from spiritual maturity and the spirituality of a Community is defined by the quality of the relationships formed.

When we as churches focus on offering belonging first (but not finally) we are offering both welcome and a challenge.  Our hospitality itself is evangelism, an offer of the good news we want adventurers to find in our midst, affirm in faith and demonstrate by joining with us. And for belonging to turn into true believing, what truly gets left behind is the goal to go it alone.

Comments

[David Wayne]

Outstanding Tod - have you read Hunter's book on the Celtic way of evangelism. He contrasts the Roman way of evangelism with the Celtic way. Basically most churches have taken the Roman way of evangelism - you must believe before you can belong. The Celtic pattern was "belong in order to believe" - welcoming people into the community of the church so that they could hear the gospel and see it incarnated within the community.

[tod]

David. Yup. Cited that book the first post on believing and belonging. Hunter nailed it.