Season 4 - Episode 36

To listen to an audio version of this post, visit www.covenantchurch.ca/podcasts/covenant-weekly.

Good morning, Covenant Family.

Today, we continue through our Covenant Weekly series considering our Be In Christ Church of Canada’s Core Values. Today’s value is one that comes from deep within our Anabaptist roots and it may be the value most in tension with many expressions - even theological understandings - of Christianity, particularly in the West. It would be easy to hear this value and think it is about an institution or a physical space. I hope and pray that your imaginations are encouraged beyond that as we consider the value Belonging to the Community of Faith in this Covenant Weekly for May 20, 2025.

Belonging to the Community of Faith:  We value integrity in relationships and mutual accountability in an atmosphere of love, grace, and acceptance.

For several decades, alarm bells have been going off in institutional church circles, warning of the decline in church attendance – particularly in the affluent West. This value is not meant as an attempt to push back against church attendance decline. It is meant to push back against a culture that measures someone’s level of commitment to the way of Jesus by whether or not they show up in a crowd on a Sunday morning and whether or not a church is “healthy” by how large the crowds are.

Notice, in the value statement, there is nothing about “attending church.” It is all about Belonging to the Community of Faith, what that belonging looks like, and what identifiers mark out that community of faith.

Belonging is centred not in “attendance” but in relationships marked by integrity and accountability. Another way to put this is that, people know each other and are known by each other. We see what is going on in each other’s lives and we long to help each other on the way.

But knowing each other and trying to help each other go (and keep going) in the right direction doesn’t always look healthy. It doesn’t take long in conversations about people’s church experience to hear stories about things going very badly. Sometimes it is because people weren’t known. Often, though, it is because people did know and didn’t care or used what they knew to do damage.

Our value emphasizes that the community of faith should be “an atmosphere of love, grace, and acceptance.” Jesus' final command in John was “Love one another.” And he even said that our love for one another is how people will know we are his disciples. When people are among us do they feel and experience love? Are they aware of the embrace of grace that says, “Neither do I condemn you!”? Do they sense the acceptance of God among us?

It is within this relational context that we will be most free to grow as followers of Jesus. And it is in the relational context that the areas we need to grow are exposed. It is freeing and incredibly hard at the same time! That is why the writer of Hebrews exhorts his readers, “And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near.” This isn’t about “attending church.” This is about embodied community helping, supporting, and encouraging each other to persevere in the way of Jesus.

I mentioned in the introduction that this value may be the one that is most in tension with many expressions of Western Christianity. And at this point, some of you may be wondering where the tension is. In an essay about this value, Rob Douglass and Naomi Smith contrast two ways of thinking about God’s purpose and how God goes about accomplishing that purpose.

They suggest that, beginning in the Reformation, the posture of the church started to change from a focus on the collective to a focus on the individual. (This was a cultural shift, not just a religious one.) Over time, the developed belief became that God’s ultimate purpose was to save people (individually), and the means to that end was the church (the institution/organization). In making the church a means to another end, people’s connection to the church became as workers, tools, to that end. This individualism easily lets us opt out of community if it “isn’t working,” since God’s work in our lives is the primary goal anyway.

Drawing on the work of others, Smith and Douglass suggest that the early church’s conception of things was that God’s ultimate purpose is to form a people for himself, and the means to that end is personal salvation. This reordering may sound subtle, but it has deep and significant implications.

If God’s purpose is to form a people who will be in relationship with God, opting out of the community of faith isn’t an option. To ask, “What do I get out of it?” is an entirely wrong Christian question. “What do I want?” is a distant consideration far after trying to discern, “How can we embody the rule and reign of God?” We’re told to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. The kingdom is a corporate, a community, reality. The same is true of God’s righteousness, a word that is rightly understood as embodied justice.

Douglass and Smith suggest that thinking about being a follower of Jesus without leaning into being a part of the people of God, the community of faith, is akin to buying a ticket for a vacation, but never taking the trip. The first is meant to be the means to the end and should never be thought of as the goal. They write:

If personal salvation is the necessary entryway to being a part of the people of God, how could a person ever be content with stopping at the doorway? Why would someone not proceed to enter the beautiful thing that God is building for himself?

I think there’s an answer to that question. It’s because we have often confused the means and the end, and we’ve not joined God in building that beautiful thing. Many of us have experienced the potential of that beautiful thing being sacrificed on the altar of efficiency or control. We have emphasized the individual so much that the church itself has become merely a tool to another end. We’ve lost sight of the essential value of Belonging to the Community of Faith where we value integrity in relationships and mutual accountability in an atmosphere of love, grace, and acceptance.

Peace,

Jon

P.S. Take a few minutes to watch the video below and think about the beauty that can come when the goal moves from emphasizing the individual to focusing on what we can be and build together.