Welcome to week 2 of our series Take Me to Church where we are discovering what it means to be a part of a healthy church. This week we are exploring what it means to be gathered when gathering itself is not an indicator of our core identity in Christ.
Take Me to Church | Part 2
In Which we Determine what it Means to be Gathered
In Matthew 16 Jesus lays the foundation stone for the House of God. In the famous, “on this rock I will build my church” passage, Jesus is responding to Peter’s answer to the question "who do you say that I am”. It’s a good answer, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” and Jesus’ praises the Father for revealing it to Peter and essentially says that around this standard he will gather his people.
Jesus uses the image of laying a foundation stone for a building and the building facilitates what Jesus calls His Gathering. This is deeply messianic language that harkens back to Isaiah1 in which the prophet Isaiah prophesies that the Root of Jesse will stand as a signal to the people and trigger a great gathering together of the lost children of Israel from the four corners of the planet to the Messiah. Taken together with the revelation from John the Baptiser that God is raising up sons for Abraham2 and from Jesus3 and the book of Galatians4 testifying that all who walk by faith are sons of Abraham it can be safely said that we are the lost children of Israel being gathered to the standard.
Last week we discussed how gathering together is largely inconsequential to our identity as the people of God who have received mercy. We said that putting too heavy of an emphasis on gathering gives us an organisationally heavy interpretation of Church that causes us to believe that the Church is the organisation rather than the people themselves. No matter how this essay resolves we must contend with the top heavy organisational structures that come from a hyper literal understanding of Church as organisation—they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
The question we can be asking in the meantime is, am I still being gathered to Christ if I don’t belong to the organisational Church? It’s important in seeking understanding and wisdom to remember that the Kingdom that Jesus came to establish is not of this world by His own confession to Pilate. Jesus is not, therefore, physically gathering the lost children of Israel to any one place at all. We stated last week that God is not about creating an economy or government or culture, but is reconciling people to Godself. The Kingdom of God is not an ethnic, political or economic kingdom that we should be united in a common culture but only in love, faith and hope in the gospel of Christ.
Therefore, whatever Jesus and the Apostles mean by any of their seemingly cut and dry organisational writings and sayings, they cannot be the foundational thoughts, principles and permission structures we assume they are which give us the modern Kingdoms of the Earth we have built and called the Church. They must mean something far more transcendent in nature such that a healthy church is not concerned in any way with establishing themselves in an earthly fashion.
Keep in mind what we discussed last week which is that a healthy church is an integrated church; one in which each individual Anthrohead is cared for in honour, respect and submission in love as the scriptures teach. It’s still difficult to image this outside of a front focused highly organised Church. I daresay we may never fully dispose of this idea’s permeation of our collective conscious.
On this point, I interacted with a Note from
about the occasion of Churches becoming cult-like:I don’t think it’s too heavy handed to say that churches become cult-like when they cease to be fluid and crystalise in form and function. The moment we stop being people; flesh and blood humans and become an organisation we have stepped over into cult-like behaviours of embodied desires for safety, legitimacy and provision leading to death.
3 Suggested Applications
Repent of the Sin of Embodied Desire:
No One is a Blank Slate of Desires. It’s tempting to think that if we just cast off our old church and start a new one, we will magically be free of all of the old desires we embodied and which were embodied for us in the old Kingdom—this is not that case. We must repent of the sin of embodying desire. Starting over, we may have reprieve for a while, while we treat one another as humans which we are wont to do when the SO5 is still young, but unless we repent, we will embody those same desires
Turn to Christ and be Gathered
We are gathered together not only in the name of Christ but by Christ. It is an involuntary gathering—like our sanctification, if we are in Christ then we are gathered, are being gathered and will be gathered together in eternity. Acknowledge this and dispense (as we learned in Temptations) with what you have previously believed to be indispensable—yes, even and especially the earthy organisational church.
Come Out from Among Them and be Separate
Human Bodies are God’s Temples. Paul, teaching the Corinthians, discusses the nature of the human body as the temple of God which cannot be joined with any organisational structures which make it a practice to embody desire. As discussed in It Ain’t Me Babe, we don’t make heroes, or declare enemies for ourselves like the people around us—we love God beyond desire and that overflows into our intersoul relationships with real flesh and blood people who are, together with us, being gathered together under the wings of Christ.
Isaiah 11:12
Matthew 3:9
John 8:39-59
Galatians 3:7
Symbiotic Organisation—that organic organisation that grows alongside the people of God in their early stages and eventually takes over.