ME Team Meeting 10/30

15 Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. 16 From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

This was a passage I read for us at our first meeting and the reason I wanted to focus on this briefly again is because we need to be reminded again and again that our work as a Member Engagement Team is not to make people busier in the life of the church, it’s not even to merely fill volunteer spots or even create make-work jobs for people to have so it feels like there’s an energy here at the church. What’s at stake is what we see in this passage—Paul gives these verses right after talking about the gifts of the Spirit that have been given to all believers and that when we exercise our gifts together effectively we get this in v. 15: unity and maturity. A culture of engagement, involvement, using one’s gifts leads us into gospel maturity. But it is also that Gospel that helps create this culture. Really, member engagement is a gospel issue. As humans we do not naturally move toward sacrificial service of one another, using our gifts and abilities to serve others before ourselves. But we more readily do that when we understand that Gospel: that Christ freely gave Himself for us, therefore we can freely serve others.

A gospel culture is harder to lay hold of than gospel doctrine. It requires more relational wisdom and finesse. It involves stepping into a kind of community unlike anything we’ve experienced, where we happily live together on a love we can’t create. A gospel culture requires us not to bank on our own importance or virtues, but to forsake self-assurance and exult together in Christ alone. This mental adjustment is not easy, but living in this kind of community is wonderful. We find ourselves saying with Paul, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things”—all the trophies of our self-importance, all the wounds of our self-pity, every self-invented thing that we lug around as a way of getting attention—“and count them as [dung,4] in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ” (Phil. 3:8–9). Paul did not regard the loss of his inflated self as sacrificial. Who admires his own dung? It is a relief to be rid of our distasteful egos! And when a whole church together luxuriates in Christ alone, that church embodies a gospel culture. It becomes a surprising new kind of community where sinners and sufferers come alive because the Lord is there, giving himself freely to the desperate and undeserving. But how easy it is for a church to exist in order to puff itself up! How hard it is to forsake our own glory for a higher glory! The primary barrier to displaying the beauty of Jesus in our churches comes from the way we re-insert ourselves into that sacred center that belongs to him alone. Exalting ourselves always diminishes his visibility. That is why cultivating a gospel culture requires a profound, moment by moment “unselfing” by every one of us. It is personally costly, even painful.

The church really has something unique going for it. I was reminded of this by a speaker, Joel Landis, at our last Presbytery meeting. He said there’s almost no other place in American life where people of hugely different socio-economic, political, racial backgrounds gather together regularly, volunteer, care for one another, learn together, and broadly have community together apart from the local church.

A question for you all: what would serve the church from this ministry? What would leverage the gifts of individuals here for the sake of unity and gospel culture?