Together – Ecclesiastes 4:7-12
A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart.
Insight Ministries shaped how I thought about Christianity. IM was the collegiate discipleship ministry Daneille and I were a part of for the first 6 years of our marriage. Insight was essentially a charismatic version of the Navigators. We studied our bibles, memorized scripture, shared our faith, held retreats, conducted Summer Training Programs and worshipped together in small groups. The ministry was also like YWAM except it was equipping people to live as missionaries in our culture as opposed to foreign ones. Insight grew to include 7 campuses in the U.S. and 3 in Europe. Around 1983 everyone returned to Tulsa to form Ahava Community Fellowship.
We had all just been married or were about to be. Kids were multiplying like rabbits. While people intentionally lived in the Tulsa mid-town area, we were continually moving, remodeling and painting. We helped watch each other’s kids, repair each other’s cars and appliances. We shared many common goods, even money. Many of us came to think of our life together as worship. While our families and most church attenders saw us as cultish, we saw ourselves as a New Testament church.
We lived in the Ahava community for 6 formative years. We did not know how intertwined with these people we had become until we moved to Enid in 1991. Neither did we know how unique our experience was until, for the first time, we became a part of a traditional local church.
As we attempted to integrate into our new Enid church family, we were shocked at how private, independent and disconnected people were (at least by our standards). It felt as though we had moved from a family into an organization. Right or wrong, we had been ruined for church in the traditional sense of that word. Daneille and I had thought our Ahava DNA might be transferable. We felt as though our lives depended upon it. I kicked hard against the organizational goad in an attempt to reestablish what we had lost. It was futile. People were kind and patient but, to the eldership, I was a thorn in its side and was eventually censored. Censorship is a sign that its time to move on.
However, the strand had not been quickly torn apart. We participated in the traditional local church for 23 years. I was an elder most of that time. Since 2013, I have been living life as an untitled person, relating to others simply as a friend or as a potential friend. It seems I have been a much better representative of the kingdom of God as a friend than I ever was as an elder, worship leader or teacher.
I learned the hard way that institutions don’t want reformed; they want perpetuated. And the things that perpetuate them tend to shape them into businesses with employees who have jobs as opposed to families who have members with lives to live. Those called to model community as shepherds end up modeling corporate america as CEO’s. Life together cannot be modeled by someone on the top of a pyramid.
Ultimately, whether we are in a traditional church or an organic community our kingdom relevance will remain proportional to our relational intimacy with Christ and each other. Before the final chapter of the Church is written we are going to need Christ in each other far more than we may currently grasp.
Father, as we see the day drawing near, teach us to abide in you and draw near to each other. May your love give us the security to become authentic and available to each other. May we become the family to which all men hunger to belong. Amen.
A nice testimony to an organic reality that emerged and took root in in a group of young(ish) people who weren’t trying to create community or follow a script for growth. They were simply laying down their lives in the most practical ways for Christ and others that necessarily diminished independence, privacy, and the American focus on “me and mine.” Without scripting it, they discovered to some degree what Paul meant when he stated that we are “members one of another.” The survival and effectiveness of our local churches may depend on them discovering a way to orderly dismantle a structure that is antithetical to to the organic reality you write about. Isolation and aloneness in the midst of a crowd may create an unbearable vulnerability for individual believers as we all pass through a future where organized Christianity is becoming increasingly marginalized and disrespected. The history of structured church is that they praise God when numbers and revenue increase but bemoan the decline in numbers and dollars as if God were sovereign in the first case but not in the second. When numbers and dollars decline the pattern is for the Church is to redouble its efforts to reverse the trend, so, only the most inspired and courageous would dare to take the initiative to decentralize institutional power and control as a necessary prerequisite to discovering survivable community. Few pastors are equipped to model this “laying down of their life” except in ways which they learned in seminary or have experienced while occupying the pinnacle of the pyramid. The impulse to lay down our lives is inherent in the Spirit of Christ within all of us; we only need a respected someone to model it who doesn’t have as their agenda a new clever way of building up the numbers. For whose sake might one adopt such a lifestyle? For my sake – making me more fulfilled? For the beneficiary’s sake – lifting their load in some practical way? For the world’s sake – providing a truer picture of “how they love one another?” yes, these will occur, but it is for Christ’s sake – that He might receive the reward of His suffering – that can alone sustain the diminished self-sovereignty involved in becoming “members one of another.”
Well said, kinda like don’t let success get to your head, don’t chase success but chase Christ !