Serving One Another in Shared Church

As you slip into the church meeting, you guess the gathering must number about 300. At their appointed times, seven take their places up front—the pastor and six on the music team. From your spot eleven rows back and in the center section, you scan the bulletin. The text for the morning comes from Galatians 5:13—“serve one another in love.”

For the next hour, the seven on the platform devote themselves to serving the church body, using the gifts God gave them (I Pet. 4:10). But as you watch and listen, it strikes you that these with the microphones are the only ones with the opportunity to act on what the text says. That means less than two percent of those present are able—in this meeting—to do so. In your small group of twelve, you do serve others. But that still leaves your gifts unavailable to 96 percent of the full congregation.

True, before this meeting began, a few handed out bulletins. At offering time, others will usher. But you doubt that these activities, while useful, achieve what New Testament writers meant by one-anothering. In all your years in church meetings, this pattern of miniscule participation has prevailed. So you assume that a group of this size must make it impossible for any but a tiny minority to serve each other with their gifts.

However, one-anothering can work not just in small groups but also in the larger gatherings. Recent posts in this blog series have provided evidence. To recap:

Greeting

June 15: In Mill City Church, Minneapolis, MN, Sunday meetings begin with a “community time” that lasts from five to eight minutes. Two suggested questions help people to begin greeting each other. As Stephanie Williams, one of their pastors, says, “You can’t remember someone unless they share something with you.”

Confessing

July 27: Another blog presented the FaithStory of Rachel Bichler, from Northwood—a church of about 500 in Maple Grove, MN. As she unfolded her experience to the congregation, Rachel openly shared how drifting from a godly upbringing had led her to brokenness and repentance. While staying well within tasteful boundaries, her comments let everyone know that she had strayed.

Teaching

July 20: This posting included comments from three pastors. Although saying so in different words, all recognized the richness that comes when those in the congregation participate in the teaching:

Mark Brouwer, Jacob’s Well Church, Chicago, IL: “There is a lot of wisdom in this church—far more than just what I am able to bring.”

Bob Hyatt, The Evergreen Community, Portland, OR: “I came to realize that, although I am the recognized preacher, I might not have the most important thing to say on a given Sunday morning.”

Lowell Bakke, had served as pastor, Bethany Baptist Church, Puyallup, WA: “Even with the aid of the Holy Spirit, my mind as a pastor is so finite that I don’t understand many things about the Bible that the congregation was able to bring to the table each Sunday.”

Spurring On

July 12: In Westview Bible Church, Quebec, Canada, a man who suffers from chronic back pain told the congregation, “I have such a temptation to take that extra pill. I know I’ll get addicted. It is so easy for me to become an addict.” After he spoke, two people came up to him and said, “You know, I’m addicted to painkillers, and I’m in the process of weaning myself off.” Nita Kotiuga, a pastor in that church, said: “These were two people we would have never thought of in this regard. In church, you can feel like everyone else has their life together and I’m the only one who’s wrestling. This happened in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning. It was a beautiful, holy moment of God.”

Encouraging

July 1: Bob Maddox, pastor in Grace Community Church, Gresham, OR, explained why their church meetings include frequent one-anothering: “One of our pastors can get up and say, ‘We’re going to have Tom come up and illustrate this point.’ Suddenly, the mood in the entire auditorium changes. Everyone stops and leans forward, wanting to hear Tom’s story. We choose to have people from the body up front on a fairly regular basis, because they can say things we staff people cannot.”

Praying For

June 22: Ollie Malone recalled how, as a seminary student, he had attended The Church on the Way shortly after Jack Hayford had retired from his role as pastor:  

“I was surprised when Pastor Jack (who, although retired, was leading the service that morning, but not preaching) asked the congregation to form in groups of four or so members, introduce ourselves, and identify any specific prayer needs we might have. I ended up in a group with three other men who were alone at the time. Quickly we shared names and prayer needs, then took to the task of prayer. “I have often thought how simple the request was at The Church on the Way, yet how powerful and transformative it was in my life and, I suspect, in the lives of others who still believe in praying for one another, as the Scripture exhorts.”

Serving

Greeting. Confessing. Teaching. Spurring On. Encouraging. Praying For. Each of these six can be practiced by members of a church body in a congregational setting. Each offers a means of carrying out a seventh one-anothering action: serving one another. And each flows directly out of Jesus’s New Commandment, “love one another as I have loved you.” He loved us by laying down his life for us. “So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters” (I Jn. 3:16, NLT).

In various ways, each of the seven one-anothering actions described above involves laying down our lives for each other. How? By giving up time and self-interest. By moving out of our comfort zones. At times, by risking misunderstanding or even disapproval. But as we serve one another in these self-giving ways, the body of Christ “builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Eph. 4:16).

Spurring On in Shared Church Meetings

• Peter is hanging out and eating with non-Jews. Now he suddenly pulls back from them.
• Esther, by speaking up, may save her people. But in doing so, she may lose her own life.
• Philemon suffers loss when his slave runs away.

What need do all three have in common? To be spurred on.

Paul challenges Peter over his two-faced behavior when conservative Jews from Jerusalem show up in Antioch (Gal. 2:11-14). Because Esther may have “come to royal position for such a time as this,” Mordecai urges her not to remain silent (Esth. 4:12-16). And Paul, having seen the runaway Onesimus become a Christ-follower, presses Philemon to welcome him back. (Philem. 17).

Encourage vs. Spur On

Spurring on, says the author of Hebrews, should happen when we meet with fellow Christians. Like encouragement, it is a major element in one-anothering—part of the mutual give-and-take of shared church. Encouragement and spurring on overlap. Yet the New Testament seems to distinguish between them. Encouragement aims to restore eroding trust (Jn. 14:1; Acts 14:22), whereas spurring on seeks to refuel love and right doing (Heb. 10:24). One shores up faith; the other renews practice.

Where the NIV uses spur on, other versions translate the Greek word as motivate, stimulate, or stir up. To many, a set of spurs may seem like an instrument of pain and cruelty. Yet to those who know and love horses, spurs—used in the right way—are simply intensive tools to move the animal into action.

In her website, Stacy Westfall (a trainer in horsemanship) says “a spur is nothing more than a motivator . . .  something that encourages your horse to make a change in its behavior. . . . When used correctly the horses don’t really mind spurs at all.  The key here is ‘used correctly.’  It is important for you to know your own limitations.  Don’t use spurs if you know you might jab when you don’t intend to.  And remember, using spurs when your horse doesn’t understand is like talking louder to someone who doesn’t speak your language; it doesn’t help.”

Like horses, we Christians often need to change our behavior. Living in bodies made of dust, working among the “thorns and thistles” of the world, we quickly drag our feet or balk. All too easily we “become weary in doing good” (Gal. 6:9). Even young people, Isaiah said, “grow tired and weary” (Is. 40:30). No wonder, then, that each one of us needs prodding to keep on plodding.

Churches Need It, Too

Churches can come up short on love and good deeds. So, they—like individuals—need to be roused and redirected. According to Jesus, the church in Ephesus had left the love it had at first. He spurred them on to “Repent and do the things [deeds] you did at first” (Rev. 2:4,5). He told the church in Sardis to “Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God” (3:2). And because the lukewarm Laodicean church was producing defective deeds, Jesus spurred them on to repent (3:15, 19).

Having served as a pastor, I know that some of the most effective spurring on comes from one’s peers in the trenches. Suppose a believer who works all week as an accountant for the government has nearly given up on shining the light of Christ because of a twisted emphasis on separation of church and state. Imagine the impact of hearing another government employee tell how God has shown her effective ways to live out her faith in a public agency without running afoul of the law.

A few days ago, I spoke with Nita Kotiuga, who serves as pastor of spiritual growth, connectedness, and prayer at the Westview Bible Church in Quebec, Canada. She told me about the Sunday-morning testimony of a man who suffers from chronic back pain. He told the congregation, “I have such a temptation to take that extra pill. I know I’ll get addicted. It is so easy for me to become an addict.”

Here was a man, whom the Westview church family holds in high esteem, confessing how easy it is to become an addict. After he spoke, two people came up to him and said, “You know, I’m addicted to painkillers, and I’m in the process of weaning myself off.” Clearly, his words had spurred them on to continue the battle.

Spurring On in the Sunday Meeting

Nita told me, “These were two people we would have never thought of in this regard. In church, you can feel like everyone else has their life together and I’m the only one who’s wrestling. This happened in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning. It was a beautiful, holy moment of God.”

For many Christians, what takes place “in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning” is the only church they experience. In Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I quote Steve Cordle, who reports: “The stark reality is that more of America’s church members stay away from home groups than attend them. Joseph Meyers writes that in the vast majority of churches, no more than 35 percent of the congregation participates in a home-based small group.”

If it is true that 65 percent of church people do not take part in small groups, where will they receive any regular spurring on by other believers? And where will fellow Christ-followers receive spurring on from that 65 percent? Is it possible that discipleship today too often lacks horsepower because so few church meeting formats provide a place for spurs?

One-Anothering in a Shared-Church Meeting

Jesus did not offer this as a new suggestion: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (Jn. 13:34). He called it his new command. So, one-anothering is not optional for Christians. The "must" is implied in the "command."

But wait. The command to love others had been around centuries before Jesus came. The ancient Israelites, in Lev. 19:18, were instructed to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus called this the second-most-important command of all (Mt. 22:39). Why, then, any need for another command to love? And in what way was it “new”? In at least three ways.

1. The new command named different recipients: “Neighbor” in the old command; “one another” in the new. A neighbor might be an atheist, a cult member, or a Christ-follower. One another narrows the field to fellow believers.
2. The new command set a higher standard for the love. “As [you love] yourself” in the old; “as I [Jesus] have loved you” in the new. His self-sacrifice for others becomes the new and higher benchmark.
3. When acted upon, the new command would bring about a new result: “This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other" (Jn. 13:35. MSG). One-anothering authenticates us as gospel representatives.

The New Command Amplified

Jesus’s new command blossomed into the dozens of one-another/each-other directives that lace the letters of Paul, James, Peter, and John. For the most part, practicing these one-anothering instructions requires that we get together. One-anothering can take place in a meeting of two or three (Matt. 18:20) or an entire church (I Cor. 14:26).

Many New Testament passages that call for one-anothering consist of inward attitudes: accepting, forgiving, honoring, and so on. But at least seven involve outward actions that can be carried out in a shared-church meeting:

• Greeting
• Praying For
• Encouraging
• Spurring On
• Teaching/Instructing
• Serving
• Confessing

This and each of the next few blogs will focus on one of these seven actions and our need to practice it as part of our one-anothering in church meetings.

Greeting Each Other

Let’s begin with “greet one another.” You enter a room where a group is gathering. No one speaks to you. Deep down inside, what are you experiencing? Isolation? Loneliness? Uncertainty about what to say or do next?

To anyone long familiar with Paul’s New Testament letters, it is easy to read right across the word greet and barely notice it. For one thing, greeting seems so mundane, disconnected from the “seriously important” matters of faith. Then, too, Paul uses greet/greeting/greetings so often (44 times in the NIV translation), we can begin to tune the term out, treating it like background noise.

Yet the roots of “greet one another” (Rom. 16:16; I Cor. 16:20; II Cor. 13:12) reach all the way back to Jesus’s new command. So, greeting each other—far from being trivial—becomes a matter of following Jesus our King. The Greek word for greet carries the ideas of welcoming, accepting, embracing—all part of showing love to one another.

In preparing to write Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I interviewed Stephanie Williams, one of the pastors in Mill City Church, Minneapolis, MN. She told me that their weekly gathering begins with a “community time.” This segment is always introduced with two suggested questions to help conversations get underway. First question: “What brought you to Mill City?” The second question is intentionally worded to work even if the parties are complete strangers. Sometimes this question relates to the sermon topic. For example, if the message will cover what Scripture says about listening, the question might be: “Who is the best listener you know?” To make it meaningful, the community time lasts from five to eight minutes (in contrast to the 60 seconds or so often given to a greeting time). As Stephanie told me, “You can’t remember someone unless they share something with you.”

Our Experience in Two Churches

Two personal stories—one positive, one negative—will illustrate the importance of greeting each other. In each case, my wife and I were visiting a good-sized church well outside our own community. In the first instance, a man in the church greeted us warmly. As we talked, he realized that we had never been to his city and that we wanted to visit certain places before we left. So, taking about 30 minutes of his own time, he led us to the subway, descended the escalator with us, and showed us how to use the system.

In the other city, we drove our car into the parking lot, walked a fair distance to the church building, and entered what appeared to be the main door. After a search, we finally found the restrooms. Next, we entered what was apparently the entrance to the main meeting room. An usher there had a handful of bulletins, but he was so engrossed in conversation with someone, we did not receive one. We found a place, sat through the service, got up after the benediction, left the building, and walked to our vehicle. During the whole time, not one person spoke to us or even noticed we were there.

The man in the first church demonstrated self-sacrificing love, reflecting the love with which Jesus has loved us. This stranger took time from his own schedule—perhaps even from dinner with his family—to greet us in a way that cost him something. Not every greeting needs to be that time-consuming. But every loving greeting will require us to place others above ourselves, putting I John 3:16 into practice: “We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters” (NLT).

Shared church means choosing self-sacrifice over self-interest—the way of the cross. Even in our greeting one another.