Previous Post – Your Will Be Done – A Prayer
In “Foundations In Community – Part 1″, I proposed the first two foundational convictions that we are exploring at Little Flowers Community. They are:
“Every member of this community is an important part of the whole that reflects Christ. Our ability to live & thrive as Christ followers is dependent on one another. Thus, we must VOLUNTARILY make the common good of the community our priority. Only in this way can our individual well-being truly be protected.”
“For our community there can be only one ultimate authority- our loving God, whose will we discern together as a community by His Holy Spirit”
Building on those two convictions, we will continue to explore and building upon more.
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There are times and places where a good, high percentage reflects well on a subject and other times and places where it does not. For example, if someone offered you a way to quit smoking that was proven 95% effective, that would likely be impressive enough to get your attention and possibly your respect. On the other hand, if you were sending you kid to summer camp for a week and the brochure boasted a 99.5% survival rate for the kids, I doubt you’d be packing their bags.
Perhaps the most significant example where anything other than 100% would not suffice is with respect to being faithful to ones spouse. I am not saying that, through forgiveness and grace, a couple cannot find reconciliation when experiencing infidelity, but rather that no matter how long I might be faithful to my wife, it only takes one failure to crush her heart. In fact, the longer one is faithful, the more devastating that infidelity can be. True faithfulness is an all or nothing proposition.
In Matthew 6:24, Jesus said:
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
While Jesus was referring to money, the truth remains true across the board: any desire, relationship, commitment, etc. that demands shared fidelity with Christ is unacceptable. This is not to say that my marriage divides my loyalty, as marriage is one context in which we can express faithfulness to Christ. Rather, it is about a submission to anything that leads us to compromise, even in small degrees, our commitment to live in the way of Jesus. Jesus will not share us with other masters, at all.
And yet, in beautiful, paradoxical contrast, Jesus responds to us sinners with grace, forgiveness and love, time and again. Few examples more powerfully illustrate this than Jesus’ encounter with the woman caught in adultery. Only at the very end of their exchange, does Jesus address her behaviour. He knows that her behaviour is more likely to be transformed by his loving defense and embrace (which put him at very real risk) than through fear of the judgment, legitimate as it might have been. So how do we reconcile this paradox?
The call of Christ to unwavering and absolute faithfulness stems from the same sources as His radical grace and forgiveness: they are borne out of His love.
It is, of course, critical that we never abuse this love by taking advantage of His grace (Romans 6), but it is equally critical that we do not use the call to faithfulness as a tool of exclusion and judgment on others. How we live and serve Christ must reflect the same central source of the paradox above: we are to love God and others.
Therefore, I want to propose the third foundational conviction:
“The only requirement to be welcomed as a member of our church community is the desire and commitment to follow Jesus.”
In other words, we are committed to welcome and include anyone into our community who recognizes their own brokenness and who desire to find wholeness in Christ. We are committed to welcome people regardless of what (if anything) they have to offer us, nor do we require conformity in every detail of belief and practice. Rather, what is required is a commitment to the exclusive Lordship of Jesus and a commitment to His Body, especially in this local expression.
Let me be clear: this is not what we require of people who join us in worship or share life with us day to day. Rather, this is a commitment for those of us who identity Little Flowers Community as our primary faith community, voluntarily submitting to this demanding, yet liberating way of life together.
Building on that, I would propose the fourth foundational conviction (insinuated earlier):
“The primary place the discern God’s will is in the context of the Christ-committed community.”
Many of us grew up in good, Christian contexts where, when a person became a Christian, the bulk of their spiritual journey was complete. Yes, they focused on morality and devotional disciplines, with a strong emphasis on ushering others into that culmination of faith that is salvation, but there was little beyond that except the expectation of heaven. Yet we believe that salvation is to faith what a wedding is to marriage- a significant and beautiful inauguration, not culmination, of something new. It is only when we enter into the Body of Christ that we are truly able to begin and discern His will for our lives.
This fourth foundational conviction is built on the truth that our local church is a small expression of the Body of Christ, while still a part of the wider, catholic Church. We relate and seek counsel from the wider community of communities that is the Church, but we take primary responsibility to discern God’s will for us. Yes, this primarily means His will for us as a community, but it also means we recognize the need to trust our community to speak into (not control) our personal choices as well.
The process of this discernment is more complex than this space allows for, but it includes prayer, study, discussion, debate, experimenting and, again, prayer. We seek to do things through consensus as much as possible. As idealistic as it may sound, in truth it is a very hard, slow and often inefficient process. Yet it helps us resist both the impulse to control and the impulse to be controlled, requiring all to own and invest in the work of God in our community. This is still a process we are wrestling with on a daily basis.
Let me sum up the four foundational convictions I have proposed so far:
1. “Every member of this community is an important part of the whole that reflects Christ. Our ability to live & thrive as Christ followers is dependent on one another. Thus, we must VOLUNTARILY make the common good of the community our priority. Only in this way can our individual well-being truly be protected.”
2. “For our community there can be only one ultimate authority- our loving God, whose will we discern together as a community by His Holy Spirit”
3. “The only requirement to be welcomed as a member of our church community is the desire and commitment to follow Jesus.”
4. “The primary place the discern God’s will is in the context of the Christ-committed community.”
Next week we will be focusing on a singular conviction that explores the missional implications of Christ communities.
