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Our new life in Christ is celebrated and nourished in the fellowship of congregations, where we praise God\u2019s name, hear the Word proclaimed, learn God\u2019s ways, confess our sins, offer our prayers and gifts, and celebrate the sacraments. (OWBTG 36)

I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord\u2019s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge\u2014that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:17b-19 Note: this is a different text than listed in the Prayer Guide, because we covered Acts 2:41-47 on October 20!)

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There is a strong thread in North American Christianity today that says: \u201cI don\u2019t need the church in order to be a Christian.\u201d\xa0 But that\u2019s wrong.\xa0 Here\u2019s why\u2026

Love is a relational word.\xa0 You cannot love in the abstract.\xa0 This verb requires an object in order to be enacted.\xa0

It\u2019s a lovely thing to think that you love \u201cneighbours\u201d or \u201cthe poor,\u201d but without a real, concrete person with a name, face, and story attached to that verb of love\u2014you actually don\u2019t love anything or anyone at all.\xa0 It\u2019s easy to \u201clove humanity\u201d in the abstract, for instance.\xa0 But to love the real neighbour that blows their leaves onto your yard or the real homeless person that leaves their shopping cart in the middle of your street is quite a different matter, isn\u2019t it? \xa0Loving the real Christians that gather together in our church on any given Sunday is no easier.\xa0

To be a part of a church community is to be annoyed, offended, hurt, suspicious of or disappointed in the real person in the next pew over whose name and face you know and whose voice you can hear.\xa0 But it is only in being confronted with this real mess of humanity\u2014this real mess of Christ-redeemed humanity\u2014that you can ever begin to grasp how offensively wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ actually is.\xa0 Because to be in the church, you will be forced to admit that your love simply isn\u2019t up to the challenge of loving the people that God loves in the way that God loves them.\xa0 What a stiff-necked and hard-hearted people this is!\xa0 It\u2019s enough to make anyone contemplate leaving any church.\xa0 \xa0

But it\u2019s actually only in committing to this mess of folk who are on the way that we live into this odd prayer of Paul, because it is only together with all the Lord\u2019s holy people that we come to know the offensively expansive nature of Christ\u2019s love for us.\xa0

Of course, God has to do the heavy lifting if we are to remain together long enough for this to happen\u2014which is why this is a prayer.\xa0 But God does do that work, as the testimony says: he nourishes us in the fellowship, giving us a word of praise, a word to follow, a word that turns us around and transforms\u2014a word that is even confirmed tangibly in sacrament.\xa0 So: trust this work of God.\xa0 Commit to the church.\xa0 And, may this prayer eventually also be answered in you.\xa0