Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Real Community in the Church--Cerulean Sanctum

Dan Edelan is doing a series on community within the church right now that I'm really enjoying so far. Here is one comment that really stood out to me:

"If there's no real community at your church, then the Holy Spirit's not there. Pure and simple. If your church is a tenuous affiliation of individuals, then I don't care how powerful you may think the preaching, teaching, and worship are, your church is stone cold dead. We've got to stop lying to ourselves. The proof of the Holy Spirit's absence is right there in the lack of community within our churches."

3 comments:

jul said...

You're very welcome. I really enjoy your blog and am happy to recommend it to others.

Tami said...

How do you measure this? It can be very subjective. Pick any two people out of any church body and my guess is one would say community exists and another would say it doesn't. A person's experience can be determined by their investment in it as well.

Thanks for getting my wheels spinning!

jul said...

Hi Tami, thanks for your comment. You're right about community being difficult to measure sometimes. I guess when many people are not experiencing true fellowship within a body, then you know there's a problem. Also, if you love and serve others and still have trouble experiencing true relationships, then there may be a problem.

I agree that we all need to be an active part of community to make it work, but we should also be willing to reach out to those who have a more difficult time (for whatever reason) developing intimate spiritual relationships. Sometimes I think we do well at socializing in church situations, but if we examine the nature of our interactions, our relationships are really quite shallow and very little sacrificial love and care is shared.

My husband and I have noticed this many times and want to have a home where we welcome people not only into our presence but more importantly God's presence (true fellowship), which could happen through encouragement, sharing Scripture, communion meals, testimonies, and/or prayer for and prophecy over one another.