Community: The place for gospel teaching

Main point: Gospel teaching and gospel community go hand in hand, and we need to be intentional about both.

The first Christian church was notable for two things: gospel teaching and gospel community. They “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship” (Acts 2 v 42).

GOSPEL COMMUNITY: IT WON’T JUST HAPPEN

Through the gospel message, God saves us to be in community, a people. As Tim Chester and Steve Timmis put it in Total Church: “It is not that I belong to God and then make a decision to join a local church. My being in Christ means being in Christ with those others who are in Christ.”

We don’t just believe—we belong.

Which, Acts 2 shows, means:

• being together (v 44), eating together, daily (v46).
• sharing together (v44-45).
• praising and witnessing together (v47)

COUNTER-CULTURAL COMMUNITY

This kind of loving, sharing, trusting, affirming community is what we were, literally made for. And yet belonging to a gospel community is counter-cultural. It doesn’t come naturally, because:

• We are sinners. We like to put ourselves first, to do what is easiest and most comfortable for us.
• We are individualists. We tend to see ourselves as having a “me-and-God” relationship, not an “us-and-God” one.
• We are consumerists. We are a “cinema generation”—turn up, be served, go home.
• We are home-owners, not home-sharers. Our houses are where we shut the door on the rest of the world, not places we share with the rest of the church.

It seems to me there are lots of churches which are great at up-front gospel teaching—but wouldn’t be described as an Acts 2-type gospel community. Ironically, that actually undermines gospel teaching. Because it’s only in gospel community that gospel teaching becomes really effective—only there members can minister to one another, serve one another, encourage and rebuke one another.

INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY

Good church leaders don’t wait for gospel teaching to grow organically. They lead and model it from the pulpit, and they scaffold it through small-group Bible studies, encouraging people to use Bible-study notes, and so on.

Likewise, gospel community needs intentional building—requires leading, modelling, scaffolding. We can do church in a way that encourages and supports being together, sharing together, praising and witnessing together—being true community—or we can do church in a way which actually reinforces our natural individualistic consumerist tendencies.

Think about our churches.

• Do we sit facing other members of the family (round tables, for example), or do we sit facing a “performance area”?
• Do we take part together, contributing to the meeting, or do we consume something happening up front, led by a “professional”?
• Do we talk to other church members about the weather, the kids, the game, or do we trust them enough to be vulnerable, talking about our struggles, worries, decisions?
• Do we meet together midweek in settings where there is time just to spend time together, or do we only meet when there is Bible learning to be done?
• Are we in and out of each others’ houses, sharing and supporting—or do we need to wait for an invitation to a dinner party, where everyone makes a special effort?
• When we’re in trouble or need, do we go to the pastor and hope he’ll sort it out and organize any assistance (it’s his job, after all)—or do we go to the church community, our brothers and sisters?

Interestingly, in Acts 2, it’s not the gospel teaching so much as the gospel community which seems to have been noticed by those around the church. As Timmis and Chester write, “we have found some people wanting to be part of our church community not because they were interested in Christ, but because they wanted a kinder, gentler alternative to their existing network of relationships”.

Gospel teaching in gospel community is where we’ll see gospel growth. It’s worth being as intentional about planning and building community as we are about planning and preparing our teaching.

Practical suggestion: read Total Church. It’s one of those books that is both practical and provocative, and always thoroughly gospel-centred and gospel-hearted.