Being Part of the Family

Family can be hard to deal with. Parents embarrass their children, children disrespect their parents, and people can expect way too much of each other. All sorts of issues ranging from funny to very serious exist in families, and yet, we only abandon our families in extreme cases. Most of the time, we work through those issues because, well, it’s family.

The question I want to pose today is this; why is it so different with our spiritual family?

I’m talking here about the local church. Of course in a sense all believers are family, but it is clear in Scripture that God calls us to community, to special bonds as a  family of believers with whom we worship, grow in Christ, and live our lives. In 1 Timothy chapter 5 Paul exhorts Timothy to treat older men as fathers, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters. Indeed, one of Paul’s great concerns in the New Testament is the unity of the local church (cf. 1 Cor. 1:10, Tit. 3:10).

If this is true, and God calls us into strong, devoted community with other believers, why today do we see such a lack of commitment to local churches? Today more than ever, people leave churches for any reason they can conceive of. People leave because the worship style isn’t exactly what they prefer, or because the pastor isn’t as funny as they’d like, or because the church just doesn’t have the programs they want.

Whatever the reason may be, so many Americans feel comfortable taking off any time the church down the road seems a little nicer, and this is a MAJOR problem.

The root of this issue is that we’ve come to think of church as a product being dispensed for consumers, rather than a community growing in Christ. We believe, perhaps subconsciously but still wholeheartedly, that when we go to church its about worship that makes us feel good, and a message that is funny and not too hard to sit through, and comfortable chairs, and making every next step of involvement very easy. And if the church we are at can’t offer it to us, then we just go to one that is “better”. Church becomes all about MY experience, and not about Christ’s work in and through a community seeking him together.

In the long run, this mindset destroys the church. When we have a consumer mindset, we lose depth, because churches cater to what people want, and we want easy. We wan’t fun music with lyrics that don’t make us think. We want funny sermons that only barely prompt us to be slightly better people so we can feel better about ourselves. We don’t want the messy, hard work that goes along with truly getting involved in a community of imperfect people. We want polished and shiny.

And so we get what we want. We get shallow, topical sermons. We get fun, poppy music that all too often lacks any real depth. We get easy programs for getting “plugged in”. but at the end of the day, it doesn’t satisfy, and it creates a very surface-level Christianity.

This is because the hardships of the local church are one of God’s greatest ways of growing us. True, strong community is what can hold us up when we are hurting, it can correct us when we stray, and it can teach us patience and humility like nothing else can. God calls us to be part of a community of believers, not only until it gets hard, but especially when it gets hard. We are called to bear one another’s burdens, to love each other, to take care of the poor and hurting among us, and to strive for unity.

The point of church isn’t to simply go to the service that you like on Sundays, and then maybe join a small group if you really feel it. It is to be totally invested in a community. To love a group of imperfect, annoying people with all that you have, and to be loved by those people even though you’re imperfect and annoying too. And when things that you don’t like come your way, which they will, you are called to love that community, and at times deal with things you don’t like all that much, because family is hard.

There are certainly reasons to leave a church, such as departure from scriptural beliefs, but don’t let personal preference on ultimately insignificant things keep you from being part of the family that God has called you to.

This post is taken from my personal blog. See more here