Church as Identity, Not Activity
Is church one of the things that you do, or is church part of who you are?
This is a question posed by the book the Session is reading together, Total Church, and it’s a good one. Our tendency, as individualistic, privacy-loving people, is to see church as one of the many responsibilities we have to juggle. There’s school, household chores, various sports leagues, work, social activities, community involvement, and alongside all of these things that we try to fit in are the weekly meetings we associate with church.
But in reality, church is not an activity: if we are a Christian, it is part of our identity. The Bible teaches that if we belong to Christ, we also belong to each other. Each of us are like different organs belonging to the same body, or brothers and sistersbelonging to the same family. What’s perhaps most striking about the Bible’s teaching is that our identity as members of the church is even deeper and more significant than our identity within our earthly families. Being part of a church is like being a husband or mother or sibling: it is not something we do for a short time each week; it is what we are, affecting our whole lives.
It’s worth considering the (rather dramatic) implications of this. If we, in Christ, belong to each other–if church is part of our identity–this means that our major life decisions should be made with careful consideration as to how they will affect Trinity, and we should consult with other members as we make them. It means that we are called to open up our lives and homes to each other, allowing people in our church to see us the way we are, not the way we want to be seen. And it means sharing each other’s burdens, even when it is highly inconvenient.
This belonging to each other is what our Session is referring to when it identifies the goal of being “a truly loving community” as one of our core values. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts: what are ways that we as a church can more effectively live out our identity as community?
