Come Together

Written by Steven Grezlak

This article courtesy of Christian Single  magazine.

Through the wall I could distinctly hear the combination of praying and weeping in an adjoining room. I was alone in the office on a Saturday afternoon. On the other side of the wall was a small break room with some tables, chairs, and two vending machines…and a group of about 20 Romanian Christians who met every week at this time for church worship by permission of my employer.

Mesmerized by the passion filtering through the 10 inches of concrete block and dry wall, I found I could not keep to my work. We were no more than three months beyond Romania’s bloody December of 1989. Anti- government protesters had been shot in the streets of Timisoara and Bucharest. President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, accused of genocide, had been executed. With their country in the midst of upheaval and violence, my friends in the break room sang and wept together, undoubtedly for loved ones still in their homeland. A pastor preached and they wept some more. Most of all, though, they prayed – and wept – together.

I do not know one word of Romanian, but that day I understood their language as an invisible member of their suffering congregation. My eavesdropping hopefully forgiven, I came away with a sobering lesson on what is meant by the phrase (found in the Apostle’s Creed) “the communion of saints.”

The Colony of Heaven

Like New Yorkers on September 11 and after, this small group experienced a rich bond of commonality. Suffering will do that. C.S. Lewis of Oxford did not speak Italian. Father Don Calabria of Verona did not speak English. So they wrote each other in their common Latin. Europe in the 1940s languished in war and uncertainty. “Those who suffer the same things,” Lewis wrote, “from the same people for the same Person can scarcely not love each other.”

Yet the Church of Jesus Christ – His chosen bride living as a colony of heaven on a hostile, sin-sick planet – is called to live this way at all times. Suffering need not be the catalyst that stirs up vibrant spiritual community. We already possess a deep, built-in commonality: the gospel.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who helped lead an underground church in Nazi Germany (and was executed for plotting against Hitler), wrote in Life Together about what Christian community was primarily for: “They meet one another as bringers of the message of salvation.”

“Christian witness that is limited to private religious experience cannot challenge secularism,” warns Edmund P. Clowney in The Church. “Christians in community must again show the world not merely family values, but the bond of the love of Christ.”

The Body of Christ

Paul greatly desired for Christians to see themselves as part of a greater whole, a body “joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grow(ing) and build(ing) itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Ephesians 4:16). With Christ as the head of this body, individual believers are to unite a diversity of spiritual gifts to carry out the work of ministry.

Is this happening in our churches today? To some extent, yes; but there is real work to be done and much sin to confess for the world to begin to see the church as a singular unit – a Great Commission army under the same banner. As Shakespeare’s King Henry V said about his fellow soldiers at Agincourt: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

The Body Dismembered?

“How good and pleasant it is,” writes King David in Psalm 133:1, “when brothers live together in unity!” But what if this unity is not readily apparent? It must be pointed out that the body of Christ, the communion of saints, is “not an ideal which we must realize,” writes Bonhoeffer. “It is rather a reality by God in Christ in which we may participate…It differs absolutely from all other communities.”

Though this bond is a spiritual reality, is it always incarnate – fleshed out? No. Many of us live fractional, isolated Christian lives. There are many reasons, but no excuses.

“Bouvet Christians”

Located 1,500 miles southwest of the Cape of Good Hope and 1,050 miles north of Antarctica, Bouvet Island is called the remotest spot on Earth by many geographers. The nearest island is more than 1,000 miles away. Bouvet is not much more than a chunk of black lava and glacial ice surrounded by miles of frozen sea. Landing on it is next to impossible because there are no natural harbors. One is hard-pressed to find a more isolated, inhospitable locale.

The Christian in America is continually pulled toward isolation. Popular culture is increasingly sucking at the biblical enjoinder of spiritual community and replacing it with the sham of virtual community. Thus, we can watch a televised worship service (or perhaps attend a drive-in church if we’re brave) and feel like we’ve gone to church. We have become a generation of “Bouvet Christians,” isolated and hard to approach, and oblivious to the harm being done. We have forgotten what the Church is.

“The church is a single worshipping community,” read the study notes on this topic in the New Geneva Study Bible, “permanently gathered in the true sanctuary, the heavenly Jerusalem (Galatians 4:26; Hebrews 12:22-24) and the place of God’s presence…On Earth, the church appears in its local congregations, each one a microcosm of the church as a whole.”

Alongside this reality is the world we live in – a world in which we come home from work, click the remote from behind tinted windows, drive into the garage and click the remote again, sealing ourselves off from the messiness of the world. We have become islands unto ourselves. And if it is not the culture that isolates us, it is our own sin. Through either an unawareness or a fear of James 5:16 (“Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed”), we let our sins shutter us in dark houses of fear.

There is a way out. “In confession,” writes Bonhoeffer, “the breakthrough to community takes place. Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community.” Internet church services (while perhaps reaching a certain audience) are not the answer.

I Need You!

The answer to this growing and gnawing problem of isolation and non-unity (to speak nothing of disunity – prideful infightings, squabbles, dissentions, and ego-revivals) is to see a simple but profound spiritual reality: our great need for each other, for community. We need to say, even out loud, “I need you, brother (or sister)!” Do you see your need for your fellow church member? Do you see yourself as spiritually incomplete without him or her?

Eugene Peterson, author of The Message Bible, enjoys the bracing writing of Annie Dillard. In An Expedition to the Pole, Dillard is critical of what passes in many churches as worship. Yet, in her dissatisfaction, she still sees her need to be there, worshipping with other Christians. “So she manhauls her humanity to her pew,” writes Peterson, “gives up her personal dignity and throws in her lot with random people. She realizes that no one can no more go to God alone than go to the (North) pole alone…If we want to go to the Land we must go with the people, even when they are playing banjos, singing stupid songs, and giving vacuous sermons.”

Along with this “I need you” mindset needs to exist an “I need more” desire. If Dillard criticized worship, what would she have to say about fellowship? A component of community, fellowship sits on the fence, ready to fall onto the side of true oneness or the side of hollow socializing.

Rob, a Christian single from Orlando, Florida, sees a difference between the two types of fellowship. “Among believers,” he says, “there are cheap substitutes for real spiritual community. I have seen the term ‘Christian fellowship’ applied to events where the common element being shared is not faith, but bowling, eating, or some other form of entertainment.”

Let’s not give up bowling or eating or going to movies together. But if that is all that’s happening, and there is no praying, no sharing of burdens, no confessing of sin (in proper context), no weeping together, no studying of Scripture, no worship, and no attempt at being salt and light in practical ways in the places we live, let us question what we are doing. Let what we do in community flow from what we are.

As Philip Ryken reminds us in The Communion of Saints, Christians share “everything that matters,” including “a common body, connected by a common Spirit, entered by a common calling, destined for a common glory, serving a common Lord, on the basis of a common faith, sealed by a common sacrament (baptism), to the glory of a common God, who is Father of all.”

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