The Church is often called a community which can be understood to mean: a social unit in which one finds shared unity. But, as we learned in Part 2 of our Take Me to Church series, this is largely the conversation around (and inherent problem with) defining the Church as a Gathering. Many people gather, but not every gathering is a church. When people gather together long enough they tend to be identified together and in identifying together they are seen to be part of the same community. Now, if you have community in a local softball league, it isn’t likely that you’re going to experience the kind of community you might find in religious circles but it also isn’t likely that you’ll be asked to sacrifice more than your Summer of Saturdays sitting by the water cooler. Religious communities call for far more commitment and most times those commitments end up amounting to selling your birth right for a bowl of beans. So it might be important for us to determine what we mean when we say that the church is a community and also to determine where to draw the line of commitment. Let’s get into it.
Just Joining this Series?
Take Me to Church | Part 1: In Which We Determine what We Mean by Healthy
Take Me to Church | Part 2: In Which We Determine what We Mean by Gathering
Take Me to Church | Part 3
In Which We Determine what We Mean by Community
Dr Iain McGilchrist is a Psychiatrist and researcher who studies the brain and integrates science and philosophy into his work. His book, The Master and His Emissary (2009), is the product of 20 years of research and nearly 20 more standing uncontested. The work is an examination of the hemispheres of the brain, how they function separately and together and how this has impacted western civilization. It is a massive work. If you buy the audiobook of the second edition it will take you over 27 hours at 1x speed to digest it. It is a field ripe for harvest that we would be amiss for not at least gleaning from the edges as we pass by as sojourners on the road.
Dr McGilchrist offers us an interesting insight into the diversity of the human body in regards to the brain, its hemispheres and their relatively sparse connectivity based not in the free movement of information but in selective inhibition—the delay, interruption and, at times, total dismissal of information passed from one hemisphere to the other causing us to take in absolutely everything around us but retain only a very focused beam of that information as being relevant to us. As a result we understand some things very little, only able to recognise their basic shapes and, as well, we know a great deal about other things to which we have escribed the importance of retaining minute details of their individuality.
In practice we read the Apostle Paul as he reaches into his big bag of biblical illustrations to explain Christian community and pick out concepts like body and building because they are instantly recognisable shapes which can be easily broken down into their many individual parts without which they are hardly recognisable as a whole. Paul works from the shape to the individual. Not all bodies are the same, nor are all buildings the same but if I showed you a flashcard of a square with a rectangle on top, something in your toddler brain involuntarily offers the answer and expects a cookie for being such a smarty-pants!
It’s the same for the human body. 100% of people read human at first glance. Their general shape is undeniably recognisable as being human and the closer we get, the more the individual comes into view. They are not only a human but a specific, recognisable human with key features and characteristics.
So Paul starts with an abstract, wide angle view of Christian Community as being recognisable from afar. Some people stop here. It’s a community, and you don’t need to get any closer, because, inside, they’re all the same. Our inhibitors kick in and say we don’t need anymore information to make a judgement. But the general shape of a community seen from afar only gives us so much information and then we have to fill in the blanks with what we think we know about real flesh and blood people within that community. So Paul takes us in closer.
The body Pauls shows us in 1 Corinthians 12 is at conflict with itself. Some parts of the body want to be other parts because they seem to have a more honourable position in the body but zoomed out we don’t see this conflict—we just see a human body. The building Paul shows us in 1 Corinthians 3 is a little more stable concept1. Christ is the foundation which sets the level of the whole building so it doesn’t fall over, but his outline still comes with a warning—while the body is consumed with infighting, the building is consumed with shoddy workmanship. The Apostle Peter takes up the task of explaining community in 1 Peter 2 through the silhouette of a building and tells us that while the walls and internal structure of the house can be built up and toppled down the foundation itself never changes. It looks like a house but as we get closer we see the individuality of the house; each brick laid upon brick.
Neither Peter nor Paul make this next connection but it could be extrapolated that what they are referring to here is that seemingly indispensable people will die and be replaced but Christ being the cornerstone will never change. The purpose of their analogies are different but the same. In their analogies Peter and Paul give us this idea that we have a plurality of gifts that are all used in the community at the same time. If we are in doubt of this point I encourage just a small moment of wonder at the inconceivable2 size of the body of Christ and tell me that we are not like innumerable neurons in the brain all firing off at the same time. It would be chaos, except for the Corpus Callosum where the two hemispheres meet. This truly indispensable and irreplaceable part of the brain is the equivalent of the foundation of the building—it, among other things, enacts inbuilt safety protocols that protect us from capital T Trauma, it helps us gloss over true pain we have witnessed or endured that would otherwise drive us to the edge of insanity. This is the proverbial seat of Christ in the brain.
Christ the Inhibitor?
Whoa, whoa, whoa…I don’t like to think about Jesus being the Eternal Inhibitor of the Human Body. That kind of theology sounds too akin to the worship of Angry God—too much can go wrong here. I agree, but also, if anyone is going to sit in the place of governor over our bodies it must be Christ who, being born into the world, emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.3 A servant is not privy to everything the Master knows. Our Creator is all-knowing—as in, any and every angle and depth of knowledge, data, reasoning, outcome, timelines, cause, effect; truth to depths that render our understandings to be infantile babbling at the highest level of IQ and education. The Scriptures say that God’s most foolish thought is wiser than the wisest person who will ever live.4 To best understand this, we need to take a look at what we mean by inhibit.
When we think of the word inhibit we can jump very quickly to thinking of the word prevent which is not the same thing. To inhibit something can be better understood as an exercise of restraint; a slow, measured pour that knows when to start and stop. For example if we were to take certain drugs without inhibitors they would kill us or flush through our bodies giving only 20 minutes of treatment. Science, thankfully, has figured out a way to design inhibitors into these drugs to make them slow release to provide care to the body over a longer period of time. If you’ve ever taken a Long Acting, Double Strength, or Double Action pill, then you’ve benefitted from inhibitors.
The place of inhibitors within community is sacred, and because it is sacred it must not be transgressed by humans. Inhibitors help us love one other more fully. They are slow acting rulings that are based in mutual honour, respect and submission to one another in love. Our inhibitors allow us to push through the pain that often comes with being human. I am speaking of course, of our natural, inbuilt inhibitors. When we as people transgress the place of inhibitors we remove our own and place them on others—again it is a sacred thing to participate in long-acting righteousness, which requires of us long-suffering kindness which only comes from the Spirit of God.
A healthy community is a long-acting community. They are not consumed with being caught up in a movement nor being pulled back into the past. Both are flushed through the system, we are told, every 15-20 years.
recently gave us a beautiful essay detailing how pop-up cultures cause moral panic every 15-20 years. I encourage you to take a deep long read in your search for understanding.So what are the natural inhibitors at play in community? We already know them, of course, only by another name: boundaries. A community does not have natural boundaries being nothing more than a longstanding grouping of flesh and blood people. In fact, when a community develops boundaries we can be sure that they have been procured from its members and so too from its non-members. When a community develops boundaries it is because we have attempted to make the community as important as a real person—taking spiritual and legal rights away from individuals in a bid to offer them safety, legitimacy and provision which the community can never offer but whose lies we fall for regularly.
The sacred place of inhibitors in community is therefore its very members; those flesh and blood people who must be treated with honour, respect and submission in love. As soon as we attempt to remove those inhibitors on people and apply them to the community we form the non-community. The non-community are those who hold to their boundaries to varying degrees. A leader in the community may have wholly given up their boundaries but remember that they have also been freed of their inhibitors in a landscape of people without boundaries nor inhibitors themselves depending on the extent of their commitment to the community; read, sacrifice of their boundaries.
We regularly stand in horror as leader after leader does what people without inhibitions or boundaries do. They live by the flesh, trampling over anyone who gets in their way saying that they are not real Christians because they have not yet given away their boundaries and inhibitors to the community. No four man accountability group can ever counteract the sacrifice of individual inhibition and boundaries to Angry God. Where boundaries and inhibitors have been meaningfully removed from the members, we attempt to replace them with legal boundaries and inhibitors which do not require honour, respect and submission to be adhered to. They require a check-in system, members lists, non-disclosure agreements and mandatory reporters all of which attempt to do the collective job of our bodies which (ask an abuse survivor) warn us continually before the fact. But, sadly, we ignore our bodies because we have already sacrificed our inhibitions and boundaries to the community. We have sold our birth right for a bowl of beans that may fill us once but after this, we will go hungry and no one will recognise our plight because they don’t have boundaries or inhibitions either.
3 Suggested Applications
A Community is a Group of Individuals Committed to Honour, Respect and Submission in Love towards the Effect of a Life of Long-Acting Righteousness.
Let no one tell you that individualism is a sin and collectivism its’ saving grace.
Natural Inhibitions and Boundaries are Sacred and Cannot be Synthesized
If a Community claims to have inhibitions and boundaries then they are stolen from its members and non-members and must be returned or face continual communal breakdown and death.
The Ends of the Integration of our Body, Soul and Spirit are that we no longer regard them as separate but one. This requires that we sanctify our hearts, repenting of sacrificing what is sacred to Angry God and being renewed, practice showing honour, respect and submission to people rather than their organisations to whom we have traded what is sacred for a bowl of beans.
Pun (as always) intended.
Phil 2
1 Corinthians 1:25