How good and pleasant it is
    when God’s people live together in unity!
It is like precious oil poured on the head,
    running down on the beard,
running down on Aaron’s beard,
    down on the collar of his robe.
 It is as if the dew of Hermon
    were falling on Mount Zion.
For there the Lord bestows his blessing,
    even life forevermore.

Psalm 133

I’ve been thinking about the Church and how she is meant to be. What is she? A club for like-minded people? A hospital for the broken? A body? A garden for watering and growth and fruit? A shelter for the road-weary? A boot camp? A family?

Maybe all of these, and so much more, such that any one metaphor alone is actually wrong, or at least anemic.

The Church is a hospital. In her midst healing can take place. It’s not so much that some of us are the doctors, though it’s true that we are all in different forms or realms or heights or troughs of wellness. Rather, we are all the sick and infected and diseased, but we all know who the doctor is. He does the healing, and sometimes he teaches us to help. This “helping” we attempt does more for our own souls than anything else because it (hopefully) means we’re obeying him. But remember, the disease is sin, and none of us are immune to it. Everyone who isn’t in the hospital also has this illness, but we have found the physician, the one physician, who can overcome it. The treatment plan is lifelong and mysteriously involves death of a spiritual kind, leading to real and actual life. It’s as though we were dying of dehydration and found water; we’d eventually stop dying but would never stop needing the water. The Church isn’t the water, but it can be the hospital in which God works.

The Church can also be a garden in which God sows and harvests. Let us remember that we did not plant ourselves here, and we don’t nourish ourselves. As seeds and plants we are created and are amazingly intricate and resilient, yet entirely dependent on what’s external to ourselves. We can pollinate each other with encouragement and the testimony of God’s word. We can shade one another and we can share the water from the sky together in this soil. We can set our minds to growing and bearing fruit. We can drop our seeds for next year’s harvest. In the end, the yield is not ours to own, whether it brings boasting or shame, because God’s hand brings it to be.

She’s in best cases a shelter. A place of respite among caring arms and hearts – not a building but a vibrant body, community. She’s a body with eyes to see needs, feet to move toward the other, blood to shed on behalf of someone else, sweat to drip in hard work and serving, tongue to taste God’s goodness and lips to help speak about it. A safe place where the traveler’s sins are not astounding, where our faults are forgiven, where our hunger is fed (even literally), where companions sit with us in our pain, where we are known yet wanted. Where we can find help and comfort because the people here know what we really need. The world outside thinks we need only food or clothes or money or admiration or adventure or compliments galore. Or even merely inner peace. In this shelter for the homeless-in-this-world, we know we need Jesus.

The Church is a sort of boot camp, a training ground for soldiers. Iron sharpens iron and we learn how to engage in conflict, navigate difficult terrain, hold fast to our allegiance to Christ, protect each other, and discipline our bodies and minds and hearts into a lifestyle of obedience. We desperately need to get in shape to be able to meet the onslaught of the enemy and withstand it. We urgently need to learn how to pray and how to become those who pray without ceasing. We need someone to tell us how it really is, to show us our weaknesses and train us to believe and proclaim the truth. The Church should do these things and then send us out into combat, the daily living and being of the Christian abiding in Christ, always on mission, vigilant, shrewd, wise, ready to act. Ready to die for God if it comes to that – many have, you know.

She’s a family in many ways and a club in many others. We don’t choose family in the literal sense; this is all arranged by God. Yet family is how things are passed on – traumas, traditions, inheritances, professions, cultures, jokes, stories. Many of our biological families are not always there for us, but in the best possible world they would be. Just by default, not by merit. I show up to a family reunion not necessarily because I’m longing to see everyone there but because we’re related and that means something. They’re people you don’t have to find an excuse to talk to or network with. We’re stuck with each other. We have seen each other in lots of seasons, and definitely in embarrassing moments. This family, this is given. We didn’t make it and we can’t unmake it. God put us here. He adopted us. The blood we have in common? His, spilled for us. We’re not going to really get away from each other – not if we’re doing things well, anyway.

A club, in some ways, because the Church should be like-minded. But here’s what I don’t mean: that we have the same interests, views, preferences, or that we get to exclude anyone from our midst (acknowledging of course that the Bible has some scenarios for even this). We need to be like-minded in our adoration of Jesus. We need to be on the same page about what matters in the most ultimate sense. We need to share an identity of people who belong to God. We should be heading the same direction always: toward God, ushering in his kingdom. Toward God, taking the gospel to the nations and to the next place we go. Toward God, stopping to be a neighbour. Toward God, being in his presence. Unlike preferences, we have to work to be like-minded here. We have to routinely humble ourselves and exalt others. We have to return and return again to the vision, together.

This Church is one its members must fight to protect and preserve. We should be willing to have hard conversations and bear with one another because this gift is too precious to lose. Too often we don’t tend to treat her like that, as some deeply invaluable fellowship or sweet family. Too easily we give up on each other, dismiss those with whom we disagree, avoid those who make us uncomfortable. We are quick to write off, to draw conclusions, to disdain.

What we should be is quick to seek resolution, to desire another’s good, to see God’s image in front of us.

I see many friends and acquaintances in conflict with one another. Conflict is nothing much, except evidence that we are different. But a conflict arising is not the same as existing in it and allowing it to remain and fester.

What is it that prevents us from moving toward one another? Pride and fear, in a cycle that augments both. We’re afraid of humility, afraid to try and be unaccepted or misunderstood. Afraid to look foolish, thus hurting our pride. We’re too proud to start with our own faults and simply accept ownership of those. Proud of being right. Too proud to ask for forgiveness or help or input or grace. Too afraid and proud to look away from ourselves or to pull our attention away from the magnet of self-absorption.

But these things are antithetical to what the Church is. Pride and fear put us alone, apart from our sisters and brothers. The Church is together. Sin exists more easily in isolation, but the fellowship of believers casts a light. She is a city on a hill, often seen best at night, the surrounding darkness only making more of a statement of her beauty. Her people should defend her against both external attack and internal corruption and disease that eats away. We should move toward one another because we each belong to God.

We see in the Acts 2 church such active examples of this kind of living. They devoted themselves to learning and fellowship and prayer. They were filled with awe. They were together and shared what they had (everything, by the way). They met whatever needs they could see, even when it required giving up something they owned. They met together consistently, in places of worship and in homes. They ate together joyfully. They praised God together.

This is exertion! This is no accident. They were responding to God’s love and incredible grace with everything they had. And this is the beautiful, desired result: “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”* Every day! Every day, more people came to Christ. This is proof that the Church isn’t meant to exist for itself. It’s not so only those inside can get better, learn, feel loved, and be accepted. We have to work for this city to be unified and vibrant and strong so that we’re bright enough to show Jesus to the world.

Here healing should happen, and growth, and training, and rest, and relationship and knowing, and unity around our Lord himself. We haven’t even discussed how the Church is a bride – the most explicit of biblical metaphors and one meriting its own exploration.

Come to this city and stay. Call others to join you. God has placed it here on earth for you and for the sake of the world. She is not God, not the source of life, not our salvation, not our eternal hope. But she is an imperishable gift, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against her.**

Live here. Do the work. Keep the fire burning.

Come in.

*Acts 2:47 NIV

**Matthew 16:18 NIV