And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. - Heb 10:24–25.
I grew up going to church meetings all the time. My parents were about the most involved church volunteers you could imagine, so if our little local Christian Brethren Assembly was open for almost any gathering, we were there. Three services on a Sunday, meetings on Mondays, classes, Bible studies, men’s and women’s groups, Friday night youth, and neighborhood outreach. You name it, the Lesters were there. There were times in my life when I saw that level of involvement with a measure of resentment, but now I look back with deep gratitude. My family prioritized the gathering of God’s people. And while it wasn’t always easy, or profound, or even satisfying, it had a formative effect.
Every gathering was a reminder of God’s mercy. The songs about God’s love and wisdom, sermons about his faithfulness, Sunday School lessons, every sip of that truly awful communion wine reminding me of the bitterness of my sin, and every taste of the sweet Kitka bread reminding me of the sufficiency of the body of Christ. Every single time we put someone under the water and pulled them back out to resurrection life, and every time we closed our eyes and offered up requests to the heavens, believing that the eternal God of the universe saw us, heard, and answered us–God was using all of it to shape and mold our little community more into the image of Jesus.
There are very few things that I enjoy as much as I enjoy gathering with God’s people. I love getting to interact with God’s people and to learn how God has been interacting with them since we last met.
Eugene Peterson spoke about the true nature of Christian community and what happens when we begin to see these formal and informal gatherings as reminders of God’s constant and various works of grace in the lives of people around us:
“When we are in a community with those Christ loves and redeems, we are constantly finding out new things about them. They are new persons each morning, endless in their possibilities. We explore the fascinating depths of their friendship, share the secrets of their quest. is impossible to be bored in such a community, impossible to feel alienated among such people.”
We miss out on much when we don’t gear our lives around regular interaction with God’s work in and through other people.
We are forgetful people. I believe this is part of why God gave us such regularity of gathering–to remind us of God’s reality. We go to church services every Sunday because it interrupts the forgetfulness of our lives and the temptation to believe that God isn’t present or isn’t at work. We need regular reminders! The more committed we are to this communal memory provocation, the more we start to carry the hope of God’s reality into the rest of our lives. We don’t attend church to escape the world, but to remember the true meaning of the world and the true love, power, and wisdom of the One who spoke it into existence and holds it all together. Without that regular reminder, we start to sink into a belief that no one is holding it all together, or even worse, that maybe we are responsible for holding it all together!
When we gather, in large or small groups of believers, we get to remember:
God is real
Love is real
Salvation is real
Christ really died and really rose
I can really find grace
The Holy Spirit is really with me
I am not alone
It is going to be okay in the end
Dear busy friends who are distracted by demands, I am not inviting you to attend church programs to add to your burden and busyness. Rather, I am offering you regular interruptions to your rhythms of unreality in the world where everything is pressing you to forget the reality of God. Regular gathering with the saints is an act of rebellion against the anxieties and brokenness of the world. They offer a refuge that comes when we remember God with us.
The earliest Christians provided a model for building our lives around the gatherings of the saints.
42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. - Acts 2:42
They devoted themselves to regular gatherings. That means they were disciplined and chose these gatherings over other things. They valued biblical teaching, fellowship, and the Lord’s Supper more than they valued anything else. Luke tells us that what happened in their midst was a powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit and a rich and robust community life, the likes of which we haven’t really seen since. And they kept it up. They didn’t back away from it.
46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. - Acts 2:46–47.
They attended large meetings in the temple courts, smaller meetings in their homes, and they ate and shared their joy and food together and with others who didn’t yet know Christ. The church in Acts is a picture of what a vibrant church community looks like. But many of us struggle to live this out.
Average attendance in churches like ours suggests that most people attend once or twice a month and don’t connect with a smaller community with any sort of regularity. The fruit is obvious and predictable: Loneliness, doubt, and stalled out growth in faith. While church services, member meetings, and small group participation aren’t silver bullets for a vibrant faith, they are among the most obvious ways Christians practice their communal faith.
Perhaps we swung too far in the 90s and 2000s when we made much of the fact that being a Christian isn’t just about going to church. Being a Christian is indeed so much more than church attendance, but we may have predictably yielded poor fruit by trying to pretend that one could thrive in their faith on less than regular church attendance. The early church would have no concept of a fellow believer who didn’t participate in the regular gatherings around which they centered their very lives.
Dear friend, if you want to continue to grow in your discipleship journey, it is good and right to ask how your commitment to gathering with the saints is going. Here at The Austin Stone, we speak of regular gatherings for worship and fellowship in congregational community, close community, and committed community. We believe that growth in Christ happens in regular gathering in Sunday services, in DComms (what we call small groups), and in pursuing and honoring partnership (our word for church membership).
I know many of you live busy, stressful lives. The lie we believe is that gathering with God’s people will only add to that sense of busyness and stress. But when we commit to doing it consistently together over a long period of time, God uses the means of regular gathering to form us, encourage us, grow us, discipline us, and persevere us. Don’t miss out on the blessing of gathering with God’s people.
How is your commitment to congregational community?
How is your commitment to close community?
How is your commitment to committed community?
