It’s Not About Me

We live, in fact, in a society that is so subjective and individualistic in character that it finds itself less and less able to tolerate anything like a church. Philip Turner III

Bingo. The origin of our turnoff about church is in us.

The church is first not something about me. I come to the body of Christ—the people of God yet alive from centuries past, a gathering of all the saints, seated before I was born, that yet continues after I am dead to this world—and it’s just not about me here.

My preferences, my thoughts, my predilections, my biases, my agendas are judged by the body of Christ, regnant, suffering and beautiful. I have no standing to judge her.

Even the particular churches to which we belong—with their hypocrites (like us), hyper-developed and over-elevated doctrines, petty politics, filled with folks that are so, um, different from me—are the arena in which, if I am paying attention, the Spirit is calling me to greater faithfulness, simplicity of confession, humility, prayer and love of others.

This is why I resist our society’s privatization of church—Jesus, me, my Bible; me and my closest friends; me and my family—and insist on the public gathering, where times for the adoration and contemplation of Jesus are posted and made known and where all persons are welcome; that is church and nothing else, however beneficial and good—not concerts where people pay to get in, not dinners out with friends, not your Christian club at school—should be labeled “church.”

C.S. Lewis said he came to understand that he wasn’t fit to fasten the boots of his fellow congregants; that is the realm of mind and heart in which we begin to see and comprehend the inescapable necessity of the church.