Church – Loving Community

The Beatles sang, “All you need is love”, and humans have always known that it is love which builds bridges between people who are similar, but also with people who are different. Jesus said it is a reasonably easy thing to love your friends, but he called us to love our enemies as well. If love is able to do that, then we need to understand love in a particular way.

I have shared with you before a definition I found in Bagster’s Lexicon of New Testament Greek which means “to love, value, esteem, feel and manifest generous concern for, be faithful towards; to delight in; to set store upon.” It is this valuing love which is a mark of the Christian Church. It is that we value everyone in the community, whoever they are, that stands out as remarkably different to observers.

When Jesus says, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”, he is talking about the expression of this quality of love within the community of believers. One of the unique facts about the nature of the church is that is a community of “whosoever will may come.” There is no sorting at the door to see if a person is socially acceptable or morally pure. There is no financial or intelligence test to prescribe entry or inclusion. We don’t screen people’s dress code or jokes before they enter.

The only qualification we have is faith in Jesus, a determination to learn from him and a commitment to love the variety of people who come. We will even welcome and love those who do not have faith in Jesus, but we will not expect the same commitment to love in return. They are seeing our discipleship in action by the way we love each other and them as well. While Jesus spoke of this as a commandment, love is not something we can legislate or fake. This love is the expression of changed lives in a changed community.

The healthy church is a miracle of God’s love because it is something that we can’t do on our own. It is natural for us to look after our own interests, but God’s love is always calling us to look beyond these to the interests and need of those around us. This love brings us to sharing, not just our money, but something of our privacy, our time, our skills, our hopes, our dreams, our faith, ourselves. This love accepts and forgives completely, not without facing consequences, but sticking by someone through the consequences. This love listens, giving respect and acknowledgement to another’s need to be really heard, whatever they have done. This love faces the truth, however difficult, without denial or rejection. This love provides a safe community in which people can be themselves without fear, and find that they are still valued as children of God, even when they are known.

The challenge of Jesus is for us to become this kind of community, not just for the comfort and security of those who belong, but as a witness and call to a broken world, to love like that, by faith in Jesus.

Adrian.