People Need People

Shaun has just posted a blog entry on his two churches, the “institutional church” where you go to learn how to be happy, and the “church” in his cul-de-sac with his friends. It reminded me of something Dr. Harold Best wrote in Unceasing Worship, the book that has had the biggest impact on my thinking of anything I’ve read.

We were not created to live in compartments. People belong together. We must own up to this fact about humanity even before we consider the scriptural examples and instructions about Christians meeting together. If I go to a baseball game, I want to be with my grandchildren or my buddies or my associates. The more crowded the ballpark, the greater my delight and the more I soak up the warmth of this communal cacophony called a baseball game. There I am, caught up in the colors, the smells, the cheers and jeers. Why do we have clubs and quilting bees, cookouts and beach parties, other than to do something in each other’s company?

Put the Lord Jesus and his gospel into this natural urgency for company, and we have the body of Christ eagerly seeking times and places to be together. Mutual indwelling demands company. Continuous outpouring demands fellowship. The corporate assembly is where love and mutual indwelling congregate; it is where believers have each other within eye-and earshot, within kindly embrace. If there were no such things as church buildings and regularly scheduled services, Christians would, out of necessity, seek each other out for the sheer pleasure of finding Christ in each other, hearing different stories about his work in them, enjoying the ordinary and the exceptional, and perhaps only then gathering around what we call a liturgy. In such a gathering there would be little need at some point to say, “Now let us worship,” because no one would be able to locate the dividing line between “now” and “always.”

Christ in us demands that each of us seek out who the rest of us are. It means realizing that we actually have each other, that we are already at one with each other, greeting each other, blessing each other, settling on acceptable ways to express ourselves to God’s glory. Then we craft these into a liturgy, knowing that it is at best a passing reference to the one who abides from the eternities and lights our path wherever we walk. If we were to concentrate more on the sheer joy of getting together on a Sunday – people made holy, people yet to be made holy and people not sure of the difference, all banded together around the Lord – we would then more fully understand the depth and width of “the communion of the saints” in the Apostles’ Creed.