The crowd and the bride.

It’s 2017 and as I look back on 22 years of walking in faith and 38 years of being alive, one of the many blessings that God has allowed in my life is the blessing of community. I am an extrovert and so I naturally love meeting people and therefore am very comfortable in community. The Christian community around me has been incredibly influential in my development as a person and has been instrumental in my faith journey as well. I see this community as vital to God’s plan in my life. And this is fitting because when I study the Bible, I see that God places a high value on community. In the bible narratives, He is the one who builds communities and is Himself the one upon whom eternal communities are built on.

 

When we come to the life of Christ we don’t find a loner. We find community, we find many people around him. It is wonderful to see that Jesus had no restrictions for those who sat in audience as he taught or as he performed various miracles. He did not stop to identify true followers before feeding the masses. All were welcome and he had no bar. That crowd that seemed to follow along behind Him seemed to transcend borders of ethnicity, language, gender, social standing etc. It seems from the gospel that anyone was welcome – yes anyone including the haters. The teachers of the law who always seemed to be there, in the distance but always there, were never discouraged from being there. The disciples of Christ tried to shoo away the children from a Jesus who they perceived was too busy for the little ones. But Jesus rebukes them, and calls the children to Him. These and many other instances show that Jesus did not create barriers to come near to Him and to be in the crowd that was following Him. Yet in John 2:24 we find that Jesus did not really entrust Himself to these people who were not just following Him but even expressing belief in Him as they witnessed the incredible things He did.

 

As I read these truths I realise that Jesus differentiated between those who formed this crowd that was following Him from the body that would be His bride – the Church. He knew that this wonderful community would experience much of the miraculous and hear the powerful truths of God that He Himself was teaching. Yet he also knew that a disciple was more than a bystander to, or just a beneficiary of God’s work. Jesus knew that according to His definitions a disciple’s belief would be life altering in a manner where they would “pick up their cross and follow” (Luke 9:23), they would “deny themselves” (Matt 16:24). He came to be the head of “a body that was prepared for Him” (Heb 10:5). There is a stark difference between this “crowd of followers” and the bride of Christ. The first is there and undoubtedly partakes in all the blessings poured out by God and yet only the second follows Jesus to the cross. The truth of the scriptures is also that only the latter are recipients of salvation and so become heirs of eternity and sons and daughters of God.

 

I believe both these communities and the truths about them are what the Church today not only has to recapture but also continue to hold in tension if she is going to be the light that Christ has called her to be in her time. As I look around, I find that most churches tend to veer to one end of the pendulum or the other.

 

There are some churches that I have been in where so many barricades and barriers were created before people can be part of the Sunday gathering. We have created what our ideal “Christian” ought to look like and if the new comer doesn’t fit that image he/she is made very aware of this truth and they slowly look for the door of the church because they are just not Christian enough. I have heard story after story of people who wanted to hear what the bible says about life, or just loved church music or just wanted to see what the church experience is like, but they were made to feel totally unwelcome because they did not sound or look anything like what a “Christian should look like”. Many churches today are more like exclusive clubs where some of the people who hung out with Jesus Himself would not be allowed in. Our programs and gatherings walk this tight rope whose balance can be set off with the appearance of just one alcoholic, porn addict, person with a different sexual orientation or even political affiliation. Our gatherings have no place for the broken, messy and hurting of the world much less for anyone who might have a different opinion from ours. There in the fragility of these paper-thin communities that we have created we hide behind our preferences of music, fellowship events and prayer meetings, and we are being of little difference to the world and offering little or no light of the gospel of Jesus to our time. We need to learn from Jesus, who had no barriers and no hurdles to cross before he healed, preached or fed. He had no fixed notion of who could attend his large gatherings – all were invited and everyone had equal opportunity to experience Him and hear Him and be blessed by Him.

 

But on the other side of the same pendulum are churches that I fear have put so much emphasis on creating these “welcoming Christian communities” that they have committed themselves to the crowd. Within these kinds of church communities there are little or no hurdles to be part of the gathering but unfortunately, they have also not dared to share the price that Jesus put on following Him. These communities are made up of many followers but very few disciples. The pastors have entrusted themselves to their masses and sacrificed depth and real discipleship for the 5000 whom they feed through God’s abundant and gracious provision Sunday after Sunday. From within these lukewarm congregations filled with spectators and cheerleaders we find the real disciples come stumbling out – burned out and tired from the weight of trying to carry this body and meeting needs, way more than God intended them to.

 

We need to learn from Jesus to not be carried away by the crowd and its size. We need to learn that there is a big difference between a crowd of followers and a gathering of disciples. The body of Christ is comprised by those who love God back with the same sacrificial kind of love that He has first loved them with. The body is made up of people who can say they live by faith and not be sight (2 Cor 5:7), that they no longer live but Christ lives in them (Gal 2:20).

 

The gathering (crowd) should be one with no barricades at the doors and no hurdles before people can come in and experience Jesus and the blessings He wants to bestow on them. The body of Christ however has a standard – deny yourself and follow Christ. When we expect those in the crowd to act as those in the body we place impossible expectations on them and pretend that the Christian life is possible without the Spirit’s regenerating work within our heart. But when we tell those in the crowd that they are part of the body we have given them a false sense of assurance of eternity and salvation and have not really introduced them to gospel of Jesus and the call He has for their life. The crowd and the body of Christ are different and the Church needs to recapture and hold in beautiful tension both these communities; she needs to create and celebrate each of these communities and so be the light of the world. If our Sunday Church gatherings settle for only being the body we will run the risk of being irrelevant and judgmental and if the Church settles for being only about the crowd, then that same so called “Christian community” becomes a curse rather than the blessing she could and should be. May God strengthen us and our congregations to be as He intends us to be.