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Our new life in Christ is celebrated and nourished in the fellowship of congregations, where we praise God’s name, hear the Word proclaimed, learn God’s 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’s 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—that 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!)

There is a strong thread in North American Christianity today that says: “I don’t need the church in order to be a Christian.”  But that’s wrong.  Here’s why…

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

It’s a lovely thing to think that you love “neighbours” or “the poor,” but without a real, concrete person with a name, face, and story attached to that verb of love—you actually don’t love anything or anyone at all.  It’s easy to “love humanity” in the abstract, for instance.  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’t it?  Loving the real Christians that gather together in our church on any given Sunday is no easier. 

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.  But it is only in being confronted with this real mess of humanity—this real mess of Christ-redeemed humanity—that you can ever begin to grasp how offensively wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ actually is.  Because to be in the church, you will be forced to admit that your love simply isn’t up to the challenge of loving the people that God loves in the way that God loves them.  What a stiff-necked and hard-hearted people this is!  It’s enough to make anyone contemplate leaving any church.   

But it’s 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’s holy people that we come to know the offensively expansive nature of Christ’s love for us. 

Of course, God has to do the heavy lifting if we are to remain together long enough for this to happen—which is why this is a prayer.  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—a word that is even confirmed tangibly in sacrament.  So: trust this work of God.  Commit to the church.  And, may this prayer eventually also be answered in you.