He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God
(Micah 6.8)
It’s so easy to get disgruntled with others. It happens when we get ‘out of sorts’. We start to project our own dysfunctionality onto them. Our pathologies become, as we see them, their ‘problems’ that ‘they’ need to deal with.
That’s why it’s so much easier to approach church as a consumer commodity. Somewhere people go to have our needs met and our religious sensitivities soothed. Always keeping our distance from others. And there are people who can work in such a setting.
For me, there is no future in this. I have tasted community. Both its fragility but also its beauty. Like orchids. And therefore I have turned my back on church run as organisation and institution for religious consumers, constantly searching for new ways of commodifying the Gospel so that people will decide to believe. No. I have seen what the challenge of community does for people. I have chosen community over against commmodity. Discipleship over against decisions.
Being faced with Christ’s demand to forgive and be reconciled in the face of conflict and competition changes people for the better. Where humility is honed and love is learnt. This can only happen when we approach church as community: the discipline of gathering together, seeking out each other with sensitivity, in Christ’s name.
But note this. To sustain ourselves in a journey into humility and love we first need to learn to be alone before God. To face ourselves and all our fleshly appetites, and then to yield not to them but to the God who would pour out His Spirit upon us.
So this weekend, take time to be alone with God. So that you might go on Sunday to embrace the community of Christ in humility and love. And be changed for the better.
