Grace / Jesus and bad religion
What a Good Church Should Be Like
Compassion, kindness, honesty, patience, and room to grow ought to be ordinary church life. Colossians explains why.
If you've had a bad experience with church, a nicer website probably won't convince you to try again.
Neither will a slogan about being a family. Families can treat people badly too. You need some idea of what would actually be different and why you should believe it.
Colossians gives us a useful place to start. Paul spends a good part of the letter explaining the greatness of Christ, the forgiveness He's given us, and our life together in Him. Then he gets very specific about how people who belong to Jesus ought to treat each other.
There's a connection between those things. The church is a group of people loved by God, given life by Jesus, and learning to live together as His people. You ought to be able to see that in what happens when you spend time with them.
You're dealing with people God loves
Before Paul tells Christians to put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, he calls them God's chosen people, holy and beloved ().
That's their starting point. They're loved already. They've already been brought into a relationship with God through Christ. Now they're learning to treat each other in a way that fits who they are.
That ought to change the experience of being in a church. People have things to learn, and sometimes they need help with serious problems. But we can talk about those things as people who belong to God and matter to each other.
That means admitting you're struggling and having somebody listen, care about you, and help you think through what to do. It means asking a question without everybody deciding whether you still qualify to be there.
That fits the identity Paul gives us. We can help each other grow because we already belong to the family.
Kindness is something you can see
People can't read each other's minds. We learn what somebody thinks of us by the way they treat us.
That's why the ordinary things matter so much. Does anybody see when you're having a rough time? Do they listen when you answer? Are they decent to the person who can't do anything for them? Do they have any patience with people who are learning?
When I preached Colossians 3, I said you can see kindness or the absence of it. It isn't an obscure spiritual quality you need special training to recognize. I also said I don't know of a single church split in two thousand years over whether we ought to be kind. Nobody's ever started the Church of Not Kindness. We split over the outward stuff instead.
A church can talk all day about love. At some point, somebody who's inconvenient needs help, or somebody makes a mistake, or plans have to change. Then you find out how the people actually treat each other.
The kindness Paul calls for should be recognizable in those moments. It should also reach the children, the visitor, the person who isn't impressive, and the person who doesn't agree with everybody else about everything.
There's room to learn and tell the truth
Paul tells the church to teach and admonish one another. That means we help each other understand, and we help each other get things right as we learn ().
In the sermon, I compared it to teaching me to play the guitar, bless your heart. Teaching is showing me where my fingers go. Admonishing is every time after that when you'd have to say, "Toby, not like that. Like this." Nobody learns guitar by being told once where to put his hand.
Learning to live as a Christian includes that kind of patience. People need explanations. They need someone to show them. Sometimes they need a person who can tell them plainly that something they're doing is hurting somebody.
That help should go both directions. A preacher needs to learn too. So do elders, parents, teachers, and the people who've been there for forty years.
A church where certain people can never be questioned has a serious problem with that "one another." A church where nobody can admit a mistake has a serious problem with grace.
Forgiveness should help people live together
Paul tells Christians to bear with each other and forgive each other as the Lord has forgiven them (). That's a tall order. Jesus has put up with more from me than I'm inclined to put up with from anybody else.
If you've spent any time around other humans, you know why that's necessary. We're going to disappoint each other. Sometimes we'll be careless or selfish, and sometimes two people who mean well will misunderstand each other completely.
Forgiveness allows people to admit those failures and work through them. Somebody can say, "I was wrong. I'm sorry," and be taken seriously. The church can deal with what happened instead of making everyone pretend it didn't.
Forgiveness also has to mean something for the person who was hurt, and that includes protecting them. We can forgive somebody and still speak honestly about what they did, and still expect them to stop.
Church life ought to help you enjoy God
Paul describes a community where Christ's word is at home, where people teach each other, sing together, and give thanks to God. Gratitude keeps showing up in the passage.
There's something good to enjoy here. We get to praise the God who loves us, remember what Christ has done, hear His word, and encourage somebody else. A church gathering can give people strength for the week ahead.
The practical arrangements should help that happen. Music, schedules, buildings, and programs can all serve the people who gather. When they stop helping, we can ask whether there's a better way to do things.
I worked in manufacturing for a while, and I had a quality stamp with my number on it. When I stamped something, I was saying, "Toby says this is right." If it turned out wrong, somebody down the line could say, "Toby said it was right."
That's how I pictured Paul's instruction to do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus (). We're putting His name on the way we do life together. Our treatment of people ought to be something we'd be glad to show Him.
It takes time to know a church
A warm greeting is a good beginning. It takes longer to find out how a group handles disagreement, weakness, money, power, and somebody getting hurt.
It's reasonable to pay attention. Ask people how problems get handled. See whether leaders listen, whether the same people always have to give way, and whether the welcome lasts when somebody needs more than a handshake.
You may find a small, unimpressive-looking congregation where people take good care of each other. You may find a larger church where they do that well. Those virtues don't belong to one style of church.
What you're looking for has substance: people who trust Jesus, take His word seriously, and try to love each other in ways you can recognize.
None of this sounds like a big deal until you think about what the world would be like if everybody lived that way. It'd be just about paradise. A church is supposed to be a little of that right now, with Jesus's stamp on it. If church has disappointed you, I hope you get to find one like that.
— tobe