By: Svetlana Papazov
Why do we want to go to church? What unites us with the person seated next to us? What makes us a church?
We are created to belong.
Activities don’t connect us to church, or make us belong. But God’s uniting love, and the human desire to connect, lead us to true belonging.
That desire is innately present in every human being.
Behavioral scientists say that little kids naturally make connections and begin to play with others before they can calculate the benefit of a relationship, because to belong to a relational community is within the child. If God has created us with the desire to belong, let’s see what community he has prepared for us to belong to.
Read 1 Cor. 12-12-14,27
God the Father reveals Himself to people. In his love, He seeks to reconcile the fallen human race to himself.
As we respond and transform under the redeeming work of Christ, the Holy Spirit baptizes us into the Body of Christ, connecting us to belong to each other and serve each other through supernatural gifts. Then Jesus Christ commissions us and sends us to make disciples thus impacting the world for Him.
The church is a supernaturally connected community where each one divinely belongs in relationship to others.
The church is not a randomly gathered people. The fact of the matter is that the church is a supernaturally connected community where everyone belongs for real.
At Real Life Church we are committed to the welfare of those members from conception to the grave. We are committed to strengthening children, parents, singles; those single again, the fatherless or motherless, and childless couples.
Paul, ones completely disconnected from church, hating it and persecuting the church, after experiencing the real community of church was most fitted to write what the church was about.
We are united, not uniformed.
I want to set the record straight: It is popular, but it is not biblical, to claim being a believer, but without belonging for real to a church. There are no churches-less Christians.
Church-less Christians is an oxymoron.
To be a believer in Jesus means that you have been baptized by God’s Holy Spirit into the body of Christ and in a very practical way you are connected to a local church.
But the ones who willingly separate from the church, they make the church body function at a lesser capacity. Because, if the hand decides to disconnect as part of the church body, who will steady, hold, help, and lift up the body? Instead the body will miss the function of the hand. If God gifted you to be the foot, who’s going to take the body to shop, to play, to rest, to work? If you’ve decided to disconnect from your church, your church body will limp through life without you. What if you are the heart, the brain, the liver? How will the body survive?
If church-less Christianity was not good for Christ, it certainly is not good for the Christ follower.
Jesus spent his earthly ministry in community of like minded believers. He was establishing a new, counter-culture and for that reason he needed a community. Jesus exists in a loving Triune community.
Humans are created in the image and likeness of God. That is why community is essential to humans and culture is formed IN and shaped BY groups of people.
It is so very important for all believers to live in transformed and transforming communities in order to live out the new life that is formed in the recesses of their being in community with other believers.
God’s mission is a “we” mission.
We are supernaturally connected body, called and commissioned for a supernatural mission for the life of the world. And that mission is not accomplished alone, by a brave, but lonely ranger—a church-less Christian. To accomplish God’s purposes for your life, he has connected you to God’s church to help you win at everything in life. Because those in the church love you as Jesus loves you. With that type of community everyone will know that we are no ordinary community but supernaturally connected by the love of Christ.
God always have had real people, embodying his divine character and empowered by his divine Spirit to live out his divine love for the life of the world!
God’s Mission is as simple as it is profound: It’s contained in a nut shell in John 3:16. The missio Dei is all-creation encompassing. It focuses on the Church’s development into the reality of God’s new creation, in order to become a credible witness to God and a blessing to the nations.
Reflection: Have you found a community to belong to?
Prayer: God, I pray for every person reading this, that you would allow them to embrace their church family, for those who are missing that community, I pray you would guide them to a community of believers to belong for real. Amen.
Svetlana Papazov is Lead Pastor and Founder of Real Life Church, President/Founder of Real Life Center for Entrepreneurial and Leadership Excellence, a first of its kind model of church and business incubator that educates in entrepreneurship, leadership and faith praxis, and author of the book, “Church for Monday.”