The Lamb's Bride Project
Satisfying Christian Community Take Christian community to a level that helps everyone in your church succeed, overcome problems and more completely obey the Bible. Capture the power and vitality of the first-century church in your small groups. The Bible is full of examples of the people of God achieving the success of obedience together. The focus is not on a few heroes who stand out as winners; even these people did not succeed alone. Look at what happened to King David when he began to live too autonomously -- adultery, deceit and finally murder! Since true Christian success is obedience, we need each other for success. Obedience is really a "group thing." Look at Achan (Joshua 7). God had declared the plunder of Jericho, the possessions captured, to be His alone. Yet Achan stole a few things and buried them in his tent. Because of Achan's autonomous act, 36 of Israel's soldiers were killed in a battle they should have easily won. God punished Achan's sin as though it were the sin of the whole nation. We in the West do not understand this. Our values are so different from God's values, or even from the values of the Mediterranean world. We are strict individualists. God is not. (In fact, He's a trinity!) Even today in much of the Mediterranean culture, a person's sin is attributed to the family and to the various groups that person belongs to. So God saw Achan's sin as Israel's sin. Even more specifically, God saw Achan's sin as that of his family and had them all put to death. The point? God does not want His people to live so independently of one another, so autonomously, that any individual can get away with private sin. In God's eyes, obedience is a corporate act. Consider the promise of 1 Corinthians 10:13. To understand it, we must include the previous verse and look at the use of plural pronouns in the Greek that are not apparent in English translations.
From the very beginning when God created Adam and Eve, He designed them to be incomplete alone so they each would need a helper. Together they were completely perfect and perfectly complete. Knowing this, Satan spoke only to Eve. Mankind fell into sin -- one person at a time. If they had worked together, Adam and Eve would have been strong enough to defeat Satan. Obedience, thus success, is a "together thing." Unfortunately, when the secular world learns something about truth, they come out with a counterfeit that is embraced by Christians. The secular concepts of networking and community are not questioned as to their necessity for an individual's success. Why are we in the church so resistant to the absolute necessity of Christian community for success in the Christian life? To take your church into this kind of corporate obedience where individual Christians achieve levels of success far beyond the normal, let us teach you (1) to lead groups rather than individuals, (2) to read back into the Bible its plurality, and (3) to know what it is that God expects of Christians when they are together (what we call The Togethers of Scripture). It was actually easier in the first century to obey the Bible's commands for relationships between and among Christians. The things Christians were to do, such as examining one another's faith, could be easily done in the course of life. Every day, Christians walked to the community well together. They lived near each other all their lives. Contact was constant and automatic. Today, such contact comes only through small groups that go beyond Bible study to Bible obedience, fulfilling God's requirements right there in the group meeting. A capable leader who knows the difference between leading individuals in a small group and leading the group itself, while also having an adequate knowledge of what we call The Togethers of Scripture, will be able to lead people back to the beauty of first-century Christianity.
|