Unsettled by the continuing lack of meaningful concern and action over disunity in the body of Christ I have set forward the same arguments you’ve been reading from this site since its inception into proper print format. The House that Stands: Seeking God’s Kingdom and Unity in the Body of Christis now available in print and as an e-book from Amazon.
Christians of all stripes have worked on meaningful solutions to all kinds of problems we have encountered in our time on this earth, but unity with God and with one another is not one of them. We pay tribute to the reality of the global church or even perhaps the church that transcends life and death but cannot grasp that most believers are nothing like us, and yet we are called to be as one with one another and God as God is one with Himself. The House that Stands attempts to guide the reader’s thoughts towards these foundational truths with medium to short chapters probing the depths of unity in the body of Christ as it relates to the Kingdom and House of God.
I’ve grown tired of lip-service calls for unity among the people of God without the hard theological and philosophical work of determining what the underpinnings of that unity are and if we can continue much in the same way and yet somehow do life together or if we need a fresh start. What I’ve written is a start towards those ends; contemplations that will be familiar if we’ve talked recently as they have been my focus for some time now. Some of it will be difficult to understand and other parts perhaps too simplistic, but none of it is meant to be read once and ticked off the list of reading material. These are my ever-present meditations, and I offer them for you to meditate on as well. The chapters are medium to short in length and while deceptively short, they should have you thinking along the lines of how exactly we are supposed to be as one with one another and God as God is one with Himself in our lifetimes.
But I, brothers,[a] could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. 2 I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, 3 for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? 4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?
5 What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. 6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8 He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. 9 For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.
1 Corinthians 3:1-9 English Standard Version
The Through Thread
Paul asserts, if there was any question about where the Corinthians were on the spectrum of being naturally or spiritually minded, that they are in fact quite naturally minded; unobservant of spiritual things and, as a result, full of jealousy and strife, pitting Peter, Apollos and Paul against one another by claiming to hold exclusively to any one of their teachings as being distinct from another. Today we might say that they believed that they had distinct truth claims on the gospel of Christ. Paul’s point here is that they only saw their respective words, analogies and arguments for the gospel and not the through-thread of the Spirit of God which joins them all together. He uses the example of being a labourer in God’s field or a builder of God’s building.
From Simple Seeds and Stones
Paul relates his work in the gospel to sowing seeds or laying a foundation. Seeds were sown by broadcasting them which is literally walking for absolute miles back and forth casting the same seeds over a large area. Foundations were laid by digging a hole and dropping massive stones into the hole and surrounding them with smaller stones to fall between them to give a solid base to build on later. Both of these are rather boring, laborious jobs that rely on seeing the bigger picture to see the significance of what would otherwise seem to be busy work. Paul says that while putting seeds or stones in the ground might seem like simple work, it is this work that allows for others to come along and add water that activates the seed when the sun hits the soil around it allowing it to become a more complex fruit bearing plant. In the same way putting stones in the ground prepares the way for the more complicated work of building the walls, hanging doors or setting a roof on top. They are all the same work, for the same person and so are all connected. The point is that from the simple seed of the gospel comes the fruit of the life of one controlled by the Spirit, and from the foundation that is Christ comes a building made of precious stones–both themes Paul will return to later in the letter.
Fulfilling the Assignment
Paul’s use of, ‘assignment,’ is not as permanent as it might sound. In the same way that his later use of, ‘gift,’ of the Spirit is not a once for all time gifting but rather a living manifestation of the Spirit of God. In the same way, our, ‘assignments,’ (some call them vocations) from God are less like homework or employment and more like listening to and obeying the voice of His Spirit. Too often we think of a “call into ministry,” as being a lifelong commitment to one job within the body in the same way that we think that, having once manifested the gift of administration, the Spirit won’t manifest Himself in us in other capacity and that, that’s our life’s purpose. What happens is that God uses us in some way, either to speak or to teach or to call people to Himself and it feels so good to be used by Spirit of God in any capacity that we attempt to reproduce the environment in which it happened. I felt this same pull after inviting a homeless man into my garden to live for a week. We walked very closely together for that week as we discussed spiritual things and worked on procuring more stable living conditions for him. I felt afterwards that God must want me to start a homeless ministry, but when I prayed and searched the scriptures for confirmation God asked me to let my experience of being used by the Spirit be what it was and to let it go and to continue to listen to His voice instead. He told me that if I went forward with starting a homeless ministry that it would be a hinderance to other’s responsibility to invite the homeless into their homes and feed them their food and walk with them for the week that He calls them to do that. My assignment had been completed; I listened and obeyed and was shown the state of the body of Christ as a result.
Paul had been assigned to sow seeds in Corinth. He did a bit of watering and harvesting while he was there as well as he attests, but his main assignment was to plant the pure seed of the gospel in their hearts and then leave it to the work of another whose assignment had been to water the seeds of the gospel. Paul generally allowed others to water and harvest, he took special interest in a few who he personally raised to full reproducing maturity in Christ but allowed the rest of the body to raise one another up to full reproducing maturity. He did not allow himself to be side tracked with the task of being the one to whom everyone outsourced their assignments–and neither should we. We all have our own listening and obeying to be getting on with, and only the Spirit knows our next respective assignments.
In episode 517 of The Holy Post Podcast, frequent co-host Kaitlyn Schiess challenged the Christian community to write about human flourishing and how that impacts the way that we live in community. I considered this challenge and have decided to accept and expand the idea of the pursuit of human flourishing beyond what I believe is currently taking place. It is first necessary to recognise a distinction between pursuing abstract flourishing and pursuing human flourishing. Is the abstract flourishing of all created things the sufficient and consistent ideological end of Christianity? I believe it is certainly a part of it; perhaps the by-product of a more deserving end goal. Humans objectively flourish in certain environments of love and community which we know can and have been created on a one to one basis and even in a small community such as a family unit, but how does the abstract pursuit of flourishing scale? In this introduction, we will examine human flourishing as the by-product of the maintenance of intersoul communication.
Intersoul Communication
Human Flourishing is an objective end goal. Everyone wants to flourish in their own way, and ultimately we all agree about what flourishing looks like. When we consider the abstract objective of human flourishing, however, we do not consider that there are ends greater than my individual flourishing even if it also contributes to the so-called flourishing of the wider community. We will see that this kind of flourishing is always at the expense of our own humanity and the humanity of those least valued by the community. With the option of flourishing or communicating I would much rather communicate. Indeed, this is the example we received in Christ.
Jesus: the Great Teacher
We must reclaim Jesus’ example as the greatest communicator who ever lived. Consider that if Jesus was flourishing by anyone’s standards in heaven then, by comparison, he most certainly was not flourishing on earth. He gave up that which caused him to flourish, face to face communion with Himself, not to ensure the flourishing of those around Him; indeed, His closest followers were put to death for His sake just as He prophesied. He gave up that flourishing to re-establish the primary interface between the Father and His children. In the course of re-establishing this connection, Jesus demonstrated how to re-establish the primary interface with one another which resulted in human flourishing. By their faith, they walked and saw and spoke and were healed and ate. Jesus did not set up a secondary organisation to do this for him or shotgun heal or feed a whole crowd–he did it personally, one by one, in order to communicate through and repair the primary interface. When He had repaired his disciples sufficiently, He gave them the Holy Spirit to do the same things and they went and personally did the work that Jesus was also doing. This, I believe, is what Jesus meant when just before He was about to die he prophesied,
12“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. 13Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14If you ask mee anything in my name, I will do it.
John 14:12-14 English Standard Version
When Jesus re-established the people of God, it was a community of people who were doing exactly this. They were doing the same work and a greater work, by Jesus’ own estimation, of re-establishing peoples communion with God and with one another than Jesus was able to accomplish in his brief time with us. We began to fail this vision when we institutionalised the people of God and symbiotic organisations grew up and took over in the form of the church. We traded direct intersoul communication resulting in human flourishing for indirect flourishing. We considered that if flourishing is the direct end of all things then people don’t need to be communicated to, they need to see and hear and speak and eat and flourish in every way possible and in as efficient a way as possible. This resulted in a ‘sit down, shut up and listen to your Bible story, and then line up and get your gruel and sit back down’ message being communicated by the secondary interface. By neglecting to continue Jesus’ work of personally repairing the primary interface and establishing reconciliation with God and other people, we also neglect the work of seeking human flourishing.
Conditions for Flourishing
People do not flourish unless they are effectively communicating with God and with one another and this cannot happen unless we shed our secondary interfaces and communicate with people through the primary interface. People are the primary interface for intersoul communication. If I interact with anyone on the basis of my acting on behalf of anyone else or being over them in any capacity, be they my children, my employees or a public servant, and not as an interpersonal interaction, then I act upon them in an impersonal manner. If I am impersonal then I have communicated that it is better to forgo both my humanity and yours in the pursuit of our collective abstract flourishing than to take the time to repair the breach and temporarily sacrifice my own flourishing in pursuit of re-establishing communication with people as part of the primary interface. This will result in far greater and more widespread human flourishing than the impersonal seeking after collective flourishing via a secondary interface.
Communicate and Flourish
It is therefore my conclusion that it is not consistent with the Christian faith that we should seek flourishing through secondary interfacial institutions at the expense of our humanity, but rather that we should seek to re-establish the primary interface of soul to soul care and communication resulting in human flourishing according to Christ our example.
James 1 Lit Test
If our main individual pursuit and purpose in this life is to commune with God and with one another then we cannot effectively run after those pursuits if we continually outsource that responsibility to those we think can do a better, more efficient job. We will fail at both our own flourishing and the flourishing of others if we fail at personal intersoul communication. We will not effectively communicate our love and mercy nor the love and mercy of God if our foundations feed a billion people in the third world next year. This is not because God doesn’t want us to feed a billion people in the third world, but because we were not the ones to do it. We had a plan B. We didn’t give our last mite to do it, and ultimately those people are so far removed from us that we think we achieved our purpose when really we met a dead-end. World hunger would be over tomorrow if those who were hungry helped feed one another. The world is not divided into have and have nots, but into care and care-nots. If I gave up my flourishing in my food supply chain to help those around me who were hungry to eat then I would be doing the work of removing secondary interfaces and repairing the primary interface between myself and those I help feed and between them and God. I would learn their names and professions and call them to walk after me–not for the purpose of collectively filling our bellies and flourishing in that capacity but to learn to repair the communication lines between God and ourselves; that we would live as one with God and with one another as God is one with Himself.
Ammi Ruhama Community 