Life2gether

If you’re like me, you like your time alone.  You come away feeling refreshed, revitalized, and ready to live for Christ.  And then you come into contact with real people again.  And it doesn’t take long before you feel tired and impatient.  Sure you could chalk up some of this to your temperament, but we all know something deeper is going on.  It’s called sanctification.  God wants us to be in community with others because that’s where we change.  That’s where sin is exposed and humility is grown.  That’s where mistakes are made and grace is given.

Don’t get me wrong.  We need both community and solitude.  As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said,

“Let him who cannot be alone beware of community.  Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.”

How true.  But the danger in solitude is that we miss the fellowship of others who can help us see into our souls.  We miss the encouragement and exhortation from those who care about the outcome of our faith.  As B. Witherington so eloquently put it,

“The community, not the closet, is the place where our salvation is worked out.”

Practically, wouldn’t it be wonderful to wed these two together in some kind of outing with others in your church?  Solitude mingled with community.  Community mingled with solitude.  Sounds like a worthwhile and perhaps life-changing idea.

4 New Testament (Church) Family Values:

1. We share our stuff with one another.
2. We share our hearts with one another.
3. We stay, embrace the pain, and grow up with one another.
4. Family is about more than me, the wife, and the kids.

~ Joseph Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family, (pg. 145).

Pastor Tullian:

So, we miss out on some great things God intends for us to enjoy when we separate in worship according to musical tastes. The idea to do this comes, not from the Bible, but from American consumerism and we adopt this practice to our own peril.

As my friend Steven Phillips rightly says, we ought to use the best music, prayers, and traditions of our Christian past, so that our worship is guided and enriched by our fathers in the faith. In doing this we demonstrate that our Christian faith reaches back thousands of years. And we ought also to use the best new songs and styles – to “sing a new song to the Lord” as the Psalms say – so that we can demonstrate that the grace of God is ever new. God’s saving power is available now, in the present day, to all who call on Him in faith.

By musically blending things in this way we  exercise love toward those who resonate with different musical tastes than us. We recognize that our worship service is a shared time and a shared space, so that if a particular song or style doesn’t inspire us, we can still look across the sanctuary and give thanks from our hearts for the diversity of people who are here. The gospel of Jesus Christ invites us to look across the aisle and say, “Though this song or style may not appeal to me, I see that God is using it to move you. I love you in Christ and I’m glad you’re here.”

(HT: Z)

About a year ago, I interviewed my friend, Jonathan Dodson, about his book, Fight Clubs: Gospel-Centered Discipleship.  Since then he’s started a website with resources for you to learn more about how you can start gospel-centered accountability groups in your church.  Recently, he spoke at Brent Thomas’ church (another friend of mine) about this topic.

He reminds us to 1) Know our Sin, 2) Fight our Sin and 3) Trust our Savior.  I encourage you to listen.

Other resources you may be interested in:

Starting Fight Clubs:

• How to Start Fight Clubs
• How Fight Clubs Work
• How to Promote Fight Clubs
• What other Churches are using Fight Clubs?

Todd Heistand:

Here’s a question for you: When’s the last time your family left the house at night without the intention of spending money?

One of the things my wife and I have realized recently is that we rarely leave the house in the evenings unless we are spending money.  We are either going to the store, the mall, a movie, or do some kind of shopping (side note: isn’t it sad that we call shopping “entertainment”). Even if we are simply intent on spending quality time together as a family we are still spending money.  We are going to dinner, going out for ice cream, or going bowling (which we’re recently discovered costs waaaaaay more than it used to!), going to get coffee, etc.

One of the challenges of living in the burbs (this is likely true for the city too) is that most of the “fun things to do” require us to spend money.

Now, I am not opposed to spending money but we’ve been trying to be more creative about how we spend our time and therefore our dollars. Read about his ideas here … 

I resonate with this.  My wife and I love to go on walks with the kids and visit the local library.  What do you do in your community that doesn’t require money?

Since my twin brother is a missionary in Japan, I found this quote to be quite fascinating in regards to community:

The Japanese word for human person is ningen, which literally means “between people.”  To be human from [their] viewpoint is to be together with others.  ”Community” is thus built in to the very nature of “humanity,” as the language serves to reinforce the strongly held conviction that the group comes first.

~ Joseph H. Hellerman, When the Church Was a Family, p. 20.

**BTW … for all you LBC folks, make sure to come out this Sun. night @ 6:30 to see my brother and his family as they share about “The Fight of Faith for All the Nations.”  Should be fun!

Sea Parable from ilovepinatas on Vimeo.

I was intrigued by this video.  I think it captures the reality that as churches get bigger they have a tendency to become comfortable.  They can get sidetracked and forget why they started in the first place.  It reminded me of the tagline of my blog.  Life Together  — SO THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE.  Our community is not for community’s sake.  It’s for mission.  I borrowed the phrase (so others may live) from the coastguard rescue swimmers.  What a fitting picture for those of us who have been rescued by Christ and sent out like Christ to seek and to save that which was lost. 

(HT: Church of the Cross)

A few days ago I wrote this post and it triggered some good dialogue with a friend of mine about the gospel and community.  This particular section stood out.  It was written by Chad Nuss who planted Christos Church in Jeffersontown, KY.

Church community consists of people that are very different, who sin against each other, who don’t like each other from time to time, who do all kinds of bad, hypocritical things–yet they stick together because the call to Christian community is to learn how to die to ourselves for the sake of the Gospel, for the sake of the church, for the sake of community, and for the sake of the glory of God.

Our enjoyment of community does not primarily come from how much we like each other, but from how much we are being rescued from destroying each other by the Gospel! The overflow of joy in the Gospel is joy in each other because we can look at each other and announce the Gospel to each other–the very Gospel that forgives us of sin and helps very different people with very different backgrounds with very different sinful tendencies with very different agendas, frustrations, and preferences come together around a common Savior.

We must be careful that we don’t get fired up and invite people to our community because of how awesome our community is–that is idolatry. We invite people to our community because of how awesome the Savior of the community is and what he is doing to enable our diverse community to gradually die to ourselves and become more and more authentic.

Yesterday my car started over-heating on the highway.  I was with a good friend of mine and we quickly pulled over at the nearest exit and prayed for a place to stop.  God led us to a Valvoline where I found out that my car had to be towed.  Little did I know God was ready to teach me about community from a most unlikely source.  

He was a scruffy, cigarette-smoking, 48 year-old country boy with a deep Kentucky drawal.  As we got into his tow truck, we started asking him questions.  It wasn’t long before he told us about how he was a member of the “Vannin Club.”  Yep, you heard it right.  The Vannin Club.  We told him we had never heard of such a thing.  And he was more than excited to tell us all about it.  In fact, he gave me the offical Vannin’ website and here’s what it says:

For those of you new to vanning, or who have somehow stumbled across us, vanning is a culture unlike anything else you may have ever dealt with.  Vanners are like a big family, they will travel for hours, even days to see each other on a regular basis. They watch out for each other, they celebrate together, and sometimes… they mourn together. Vanners are a diverse bunch brought together by their common love for the sport of vanning. Some people like to just camp out of their vans, while other prefer to make their van into something more them. Sometimes that is just curtains and a bed, for others its something they put their all into, chopping, gull wings, tubbing,..It’s amazing what you can do with a van. Whatever level of vanning you may enjoy, you do it because you want to. Vanning is also a very social event, we do some wild and crazy things, and consume more than our fair share of alcohol.   

There you have it.  Vanners are “like a big family … they watch out for each other, celebrate together, and sometimes even mourn together… a diverse group brought together by their common love for the sport of vanning.”  Wow.  Makes you want to be a vanner!  So as we thumped along in the front of his tow truck, this guy kept jabbering about his Vannin’ Club and the community he experienced there.  He rambled on and on about how much he loved it.  We just sat and listened.

Finally it was time to get out.  We shook his greasy hand, told him thanks, and said good-bye.  But he wasn’t done.   He actually turned to us, looked at us in the eye, and asked us to come to his next “Vanning Club” get-together.  We laughed out loud … but he was totally serious.  And as he rode off, I turned to my friend and said, “Weird.  He just invited us to his church, didn’t he?!”

You see, for this 48 year-old, buck-toothed, cigarette-smoking Kentucky hick, vannin club is where he’s found community.  He couldn’t help but talk about it, and in the end, invite us to be a part of it.

Everyone is looking for community.  Some find it in the strangest of places.  But I learned something from this simple tow truck driver.  He found community and was eager to talk about it and invite others into it.   Am I?  After all, I’m part of a community too.  A community centered on something that will last forever.  A community centered on a Savior who bled and died on my behalf.  All other kinds of community are only faint pictures of the real thing our hearts were made for.

And to think God used a tow truck driver to teach me all of that.

This made me think of Bonhoeffer’s quote below (Hat Tip to Zach Nielsen):

‘Nothing can be more cruel than that leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than that severe reprimand which calls another Christian in one’s community back from the path of sin.’ (105)

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community.

Not too long ago, I preached on Nathan’s confrontation with David in 2 Sam. 12 here.  It was a hard sermon to preach.