In the fullness of time Christ enters the scene in dependence. He needs the womb and nurture of a mother. It’s really an astonishing fact: the omnipotent, self-sustaining God has come to earth as a dependent. The God who made everything has come into the world he made to be cared for and sustained by his own creatures. Christ’s mission is to be a representative leader and to make a new people. The communal implications of Christ’s accomplishment are clear in Ephesians 2:
Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. (Eph. 2:11–16)
We “who once were far off have been brought near.” Christ broke down the dividing wall and made peace, reconciling us through the cross and killing the hostility between God and humans and also among humans. We hated God and each other, but in Christ we’ve become reconciled to God and each other.
Having been thus reconciled, “we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.” We announce to the world, “Be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20). God is up to this cosmic reconciliation and restoring of relationship. His desire is to heal the relational divide between God and humanity, between each of us, and even within our fragmented selves.
The picture of the end of time that God presents is a picture of a new community. Thousands upon thousands, more people than can be counted, “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” are around the throne of God and are worshiping him (Rev. 7:9). People of different colors and languages and interests and nations will be reconciled to one another. Nations that warred against each other will be friends. All things will be put right. All relationships will be reconciled. All hurts will be healed.
THE CHURCH: A NEW PEOPLE (OR, BEYOND INDIVIDUALISM)
To say “Jesus is a King” implies he has a people. There is no people-less king. Jesus is ruling over his people, the church, and we together seek to submit to the lordship of King Jesus. In other words, the gospel does not involve only individual submission to Jesus; the gospel comes with profound communal implications for us as a people.
At the very beginning of the church, the gospel comes with power, and this power forms a community. In Acts 2, after Jesus ascends to heaven, the disciples gather and pray. And suddenly, with the sound of rushing wind, the Holy Spirit falls like tongues of fire. Diverse people from all over the world, who are gathered in Jerusalem, hear the gospel and testimony in their own tongue (vv. 1–13). Theologians call this a reversal of Babel. In Genesis 11 people were united in language, building a community to their own glory, but then the languages were confused and the people scattered. Now, in Christ, the language barriers are overcome and the people regathered so they can build a community for God’s glory. God is building a transnational and multilingual community.
After the Spirit falls on the community of faith, Peter stands up—this Peter who denied Jesus just some fifty days earlier. He begins testifying to people who have the power to kill him. In addition to empowerment by the Spirit, the reality of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus gives Peter a confidence to witness despite the possibility of death (Acts 2:14–36). After hearing the truth of the gospel, the people respond, “What shall we do?” Peter says, “Repent and be baptized” (vv. 37–38). This baptism is into the trinitarian name of God, into a community of belonging. These new believers are baptized into a people.
Elsewhere, Peter relates baptism to Noah’s ark (1 Pet. 3:20–21). There is a difference between Noah building an ark and God saving individuals on separate boats, a difference between a community and a collection of individuals. God saves humans from individualism, making them into a people. After the baptisms in Acts 2, the early church begins gathering consistently and even holding their possessions in common (Acts 2:42–47). There is no such thing as a lone or individual Christian in the early church. Conversion results in community.
The rest of Acts is a testimony of how this strange group of people in the power of the Holy Spirit grows throughout the ancient world. The start of the church in Philippi is a microcosm of the church reconciling a diverse people so that rich and poor, old and young, Jew and gentile gather around a common table. The Holy Spirit gives Christians a radical and sacrificial love for one another that crosses barriers of class, ethnicity, social status, and any other worldly difference.
In Acts 16:11–15 a rich woman named Lydia comes to faith in Jesus. Lydia is a seller of purple goods. Perhaps we could compare her to a successful fashion designer today. Paul goes down to a gathering of women, and while he is speaking the gospel truth, the Lord opens Lydia’s heart to pay attention to what Paul is saying. She is converted, and she begs Paul and his companions to stay with her. The first disciple from Philippi that we know of responds to the gospel not just with faith in Jesus but with hospitality. Jesus welcomes her, and she welcomes others.
In the next scene (Acts 16:16–24), Paul and Silas are on their way to a prayer meeting when a demon-possessed slave girl starts shouting at them. Paul, as one could imagine, gets annoyed as this girl follows them around for days and constantly shouts at them, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation” (v. 17). That seems like free publicity, but after several days it gets old—perhaps like hearing a child saying “Dad, Dad, Dad” over and over. Paul commands the demon to come out of the slave girl, and her owners get mad, as they were raking in money from the girl’s demonic witchcraft practice. So these men complain to the town officials, and Paul and Silas are beaten and taken to prison.
The third scene (Acts 16:25–40) tells of Paul and Silas in prison at midnight. If it were me, I’d be saying, “This is how you treat me, God? This is your faithfulness and goodness? I leave my religion and all my friends. I come to this foreign city. I’m trying to do your work by preaching the gospel. A rich lady is converted. A slave girl is converted. And this is my payback? Beaten and thrown in prison?” But that’s not how Paul and Silas respond. They’re not even sleeping at midnight. They’re praying and singing hymns to God in their persecution. Then an earthquake occurs. The doors open, and the chains unfasten. The jailer is on the point of suicide, because if all the prisoners get out, he’s dead. He might as well do it himself. But Paul shouts out, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here” (v. 28). Instead of seeing this miracle as an invitation for escape, Paul sees it as an invitation for ministry. The jailer comes out and asks, “What must I do to be saved?” (v. 30). Paul repeats the salvation formula: Repent and be baptized. So, they go to the jailer’s house and baptize his family.
Imagine this first church in Philippi. There is a rich lady, a high-class citizen who is well connected. There is a slave girl who’s a former witch. She has been abused all her life and is likely needy because she has been in need and dependence her whole life. And we have a blue-collar jailer who’s an agent of state occupation.
In many ways these people have always been used for what they could provide but have never been truly cared for or loved. Lydia, I imagine, was used for her connections and wealth. The girl with divination was discarded as soon as she was no longer profitable. The jailer’s immediate response was to kill himself when the doors were opened. They’re all insecure in their own ways because they don’t know what it means to be fully known and truly loved.
And I’m sure each could be annoying in their own way too. “Lydia, enough with the purple clothes and the name-dropping. We know you’re wealthy.” Or “Could the slave girl be a bit more independent?” And “The jailer, he seems disconnected, emotionally distant, a loner.”
What could possibly keep this diverse set of people together? How in the world is this early church going to survive? What hope does the church have with this ragtag bunch? What would keep these people loving and committed to each other?
In Jesus’s last words before the cross, he gives us his plan. It’s part of his prayer in John 17, called the High Priestly Prayer. Jesus offers his final prayer before heading to the cross. He prays for himself and his task, for his disciples, and for those who will come to believe in Jesus. Here’s the central theme of his prayer: unity. His final prayer, spoken as his parting words to his disciples, is that they would be unified. And the way unity happens is through love.
Jesus prays, “I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26). What an astonishing thought. The love with which God the Father loves God the Son can reside in those who will come to believe in Jesus. That means that if you believe in Jesus, you have access to the love with which the Father loves the Son. The never-ending, incomprehensible, inexhaustible, fervent, affectionate love of God resides within you, so you can love those around you—not just friends you choose but also the diversity of people in your church, people who sit around you and whom you may hardly know.
So the hope of the church of Philippi is the hope of the church at large. You are called together as different, strange, sometimes needy, sometimes angry people. Your church likely has conservatives and liberals, rich and poor, NRA members and pacifists, Black people and white people, employees and employers, homeless people and rooted people, emotional people and intellectual people. If all these people are put together in any other context, they may have no reason to be friends. Sometimes you may be a little embarrassed by fellow church members, and they may be embarrassed by you. You may even be enemies.
However, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Rom. 5:5), and now you have Jesus in common. And if you have the love of Jesus in common, then you have more than enough to remain united despite all that may tear the world apart. Those fleshly boundaries mean nothing to the church of Christ.
So the world ought to look in on the church and ask the same question that must have been asked around Philippi: “What do these people have in common? How in the world could they love each other?” And the answer is that Jesus keeps the church together, so its members don’t need to have anything else in common in order to love each other. Stanley Hauerwas says, “The church is constituted as a new people who have been gathered from the nations to remind the world that we are in fact one people. Gathering, therefore, is an eschatological act as it is the foretaste of the unity of the communion of the saints.”7 Even when it seems like the church is fragile and divided, we continually meet to live into the unity and community that God has started and that God will complete.
THE LORD’S SUPPER AS COMMUNAL CONNECTION
In a traditional liturgy, as we prepare for the Lord’s Supper, a member from the congregation brings the bread and wine to the table. It’s a symbolic gesture showing that the gifts we offer the Lord are the gifts that God has already given us. We’re returning the gifts God has given us. God’s graciousness is shown to the world in his giving us gifts of wheat and grapes. Our creative gifts of cultivation turn the raw materials into bread and wine, and we then give back to God the bread and wine, a collective sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. God, in turn, gives us the mysterious presence of his Son in and through the elements.
Not only are the elements taken from the people, but the elements themselves connect us to one another. In a unique way, the Lord’s Supper functions with communal underpinnings. A sermon can be interpreted individually. A song may touch one person and not another. The Lord’s Supper, by contrast, is a common experience and communal practice. Many churches offer the wine in a single large cup. The symbolism is intentional. We don’t have individual cups; we partake together from the one Christ. We eat and drink together as we share Christ’s nourishment of grace. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is the subject of chapter 12, suggests, in the Eucharist “Christ’s presence means community with God through Christ and realization of the church-community as the bearer of individuals.”8 The Eucharist entails a mutual dependence.
On any occasion, eating together is formative. Sharing a meal is meaning-making. It’s an opportunity to enjoy conversation and be grateful. At the Lord’s Supper, all our shared meals find their ultimate meaning. All meals are symbolic representations of this perfect meal as we look forward to the marriage supper of the Lamb at the end of time—where people of all nations and languages will gather around a table to share a meal in eternity.
CONCLUSION
Community is the outflowing of our life with God. If we aim at community, we strangle community. We crush it by our expectations of what we think it should be. But if we aim at spiritual formation, we get community thrown in.
Life with God is like a team sport. If we take up a sport for the purpose of having friends, then we’ll likely not be very good. And when trials and conflicts (and losses) come, there will be no rootedness and stability. We can get friends more easily someplace else. But if we aim to be excellent participants, then we’ll have a lot more fun playing (and winning). We’ll form deep bonds through sacrifice and mutual dependence. The friendships will be deeper than they would have been if we had joined for the sake of friendship.
Spiritual formation functions in a similar way. We can choke friendships by the pressure we place on them if we focus on relationships in themselves. However, if we focus on growing with God, the outcome is a depth of community that strengthens and deepens us.
1. Hauerwas, “End of American Protestantism.”
2. Dailey, “Taylor Swift’s NYU Commencement Speech.”
3. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 32–33.
4. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 34.
5. Werntz, From Isolation to Community, 5.
6. Hauerwas, Community of Character, 68.
7. Hauerwas, In Good Company, 161.
8. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 243.
