I wanted to write an article that expresses my feelings of gratitude and praise for the church I belong to with my family - St Mary's, Eastrop, Basingstoke. But I wanted to do that in a way that glorifies God and encourages all Christians to see in some measure the true value and glory of the wider church in general. So I first of all want to encourage my brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow members of St Mary's. But my encouragement to other Christians is that you should see the great blessing of belonging to a church, as well as attending.
It is more than 18 years since I first moved to Basingstoke and came to St Mary's. I found the welcome there to be warm and was drawn in, as a young single Christian man, to the fellowship. I got involved in leading the music in the services, and in leading services, preaching, teaching at housegroups, evangelism, and in helping with some of the teaching and activities for young people. But my involvement has varied over time, and certainly has been much less since we had kids. I met my wife at St Mary's, was married at St Mary's, and had all my four children baptised as infants at St Mary's. And things have changed subtly and matured over time. Clive Hawkins is still the rector, but curates, associate pastors, ministry trainees, youth workers, housegroup leaders have come and gone. The "new building" is no longer new! And our styles of worship, our evangelistic activities and other regular activities have evolved.
But, over the past four or five years, and especially in the last year, I have really experienced first hand St Mary's as a Christian community. I really can't tell you all the ways we have needed help, counselling and support as a family. But I can say that we would not have got through the past few years without the church.
The most overwhelming example has been this year. I was taken ill and rushed to hospital on Christmas Day, and I stayed there until the middle of February. I was diagnosed with cancer and started having chemotherapy during that time.
Heidi and the kids were well supported by church members while I was in hospital. They had a rota going whereby meals would be delivered to them every day, so that Heidi did not have the worry of having to do that.
I was visited in hospital, not just by Clive and other leaders, but by quite a few members of the church. Being in hospital can be boring, apart from the unpleasantness of illness, so just having people come to chat was great.
Since I came home, and have not been able to work while going through the chemotherapy treatment, things have been tough financially. And whilst it is true that most of the financial support that has kept us from going deeper into debt in the last few months has come from state benefits, we have also been humbled by the generous and spontaneous donations of Christian brothers and sisters both at St Mary's and beyond. Some gifts have been anonymous, some direct. We have not asked for anything, and yet people have seen our need and given generously. Without those gifts we would be seriously struggling.
One Christian friend left some cash in our house without telling us after visiting one day. When we sent a text message later on to ask if it was their cash, the response we got back was simply, "Acts 4:34". This verse is from a passage that speaks of how the early church ensured that there was "not a needy person among them" because they shared their possessions. This brought a tear to my eye, not only with gratitude, but because it was clear that their generosity was not just because we were friends. This was a gift following the example of love in the early church, and in response to the love of Christ who "was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich." (2 Corinthians 8:9).
Church members have also helped us out with a variety of jobs that I didn't have the energy or strength for.
And we have been constantly upheld in prayer. This is something that I cannot fully grasp. People at St Mary's have mentioned us to the only God, the Creator of the Universe, in their prayers! There are so many other things to pray about and pray for, and yet they pray for us. But it doesn't just stop at St Mary's, or in England for that matter. I am aware of brothers and sisters praying for us privately and in churches around my own country, and in Canada, the USA and India - people I don't even know!
I should say that we have received a lot of help from other people outside St Mary's and outside of the wider church as well, including some of our unbelieving friends and family, which really is equally appreciated. If they are reading this I do not want them to feel that I think less of their help and their gifts than those of Christians. I am not trying to say that Christians are more caring than anyone else. And I am not trying to say that people at St Mary's are more loving than other people. The Lord indeed provides for His people through many divers means - but that is something to write about another time!
I am only trying to say that church is much more than a Sunday thing, and we have experienced that over the last few years for us, both through St Mary's and through the wider church around the world. You see, the way that love, support and care works, in this context at least, sets church apart from, say, the help received from a charity or a social club, or from close friends and family. We have been treated with generosity in many cases spontaneously and without direction from the church leadership, so it's not a formal organisational thing. We have also received help and been offered help from people within the church that we don't even know very well. These are not necessarily our close friends at church who are helping us out. People want to help because Jesus Christ has loved them, and they want to share that love as he commanded.
I was reflecting on this. And I was thinking how little teaching the Bible contains on the things we normally associate with church - church buildings, church government, church meetings, church music. When the New Testament speaks about church it has much more to say about relationships as a group of people. In fact, it fundamentally addresses us as a church and not as individuals. It's what John Frame calls "one-anothering" in one of his books that I'm reading at the moment (Salvation Belongs to the LORD, P&R Books, 2006).
Peter says, in 1 Peter 2:9-10, "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for [God's] own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people…"
Paul, in Ephesians 4, speaks of the church as "the body of Christ" (v12). And he says that the reason God gave apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers and evangelists was, "to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ…"
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 12, again uses the analogy of Christ's body to describe the church, where, "there are many parts, yet one body." (v20) His thrust is that different people in the church have different gifts and talents, and therefore different roles, but we all need each other.
But after talking very practically about everyone having different gifts and needing each other, and the fact that it is good to desire the higher gifts, Paul says, "and I will show you a still more excellent way." (1 Corinthians 12:31) He then goes on, in the well-known passage in chapter 13, to say that exercising these gifts with love is more important than anything else. "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing." (13:1-3)
And that reminded me of what Jesus said in John 13:35, "By this all people will know that you are my disciples…" What did he say next? If you have a great choir and sing nicely every week? If you read your Bible and pray every day? If you wear an ichthus, fish, badge at work? If you refrain from swearing and getting drunk? If you give up every Sunday to meet with Christians and hear preaching from the Bible? None of these things are bad. Some are very good and essential. But they are not what Jesus said. Jesus said, "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."
John expands on that in his first letter: "By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth." (1 John 3:16-18)
Love within the church community, and love for those outside the church, is to be the main defining mark of our Christianity and our churches. And that's what I have experienced in St Mary's, Eastrop, Basingstoke, whatever our faults and foibles in all sorts of other areas. And that's why I thank God for St Mary's and for his grace towards me through the church there and the wider church. And I want to encourage all my brothers and sisters to keep on loving, because in your love God is working His love through you.
But I also wanted to share this for the sake of some of my friends and family, who would call themselves Christians and have a strong belief in Jesus Christ, and yet are not members of a church. They have a variety of reasons. Some don't think it's important. Some haven't made a huge effort to find a church to go to, and say they can't find one. Some are put off by superficiality in Sunday services. Some are shy. Some didn't like the last church they went to and have been put off. Some are simply chickening out.
I don't judge anyone. But my heart aches for them, whatever their reasons, because they are cutting themselves off from one of the main channels of God's love for them. ¬¬I do also believe that God commands us to meet together as Christians, and to align ourselves with other Christians publicly by belonging to a visible church. And therefore staying away from church whilst wanting to call yourself a Christian is sinful. However, my main concern is that without the support of the church they will fail to grow and will eventually fall away from Christ altogether.
There are, however, at least two objections that these Christian non-church people might throw at me for my audacity:
First, the concept of church in the Bible encompasses both a visible church and an invisible church. All believers, those who have faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins and their eternal life, are part of the invisible church. We don't get a choice. We are all automatically part of it by God's choosing of us before the creation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), and then his calling us into it (1 Peter 2:9). Therefore, they might argue that they are already part of the church, Christ's body, and they don't need to actually go to church on Sunday or belong to a church in this life.
But this overlooks at least two things.
It overlooks that the New Testament never speaks to anyone outside the visible church. The gospels and the letters were written to people who had relationships with other Christians in churches - good or bad. We are told to love one another visibly and obviously so that people will know that we follow Christ. How can we display that love for one another if we do not do it in the context of a visible church? If New Testament Christians had issues with other Christians they were never given the option of ostracising themselves and acting as an independent, lone believer. They were taught how to act, speak, learn, grow, submit, love, care, build up, edify, in the context of the church.
More importantly it also overlooks the fact that the invisible church doctrine was conceived in order to highlight a particular truth, and not to minimise the importance of physically belonging to a church in this life. The invisible church concept is important when we consider that Jesus said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'" (Matthew 7:21-23) So Jesus knew that there would be some in the visible church whom we would think are genuine believers, but he would know them to be "workers of lawlessness". He also said, "I know my own and my own know me." (John 10:14) So whilst the visible church may be a mixture of true Christians, the deluded and the "wolves in sheep's clothing", we can be sure that, "the Lord knows those who are his" (2 Timothy 2:19).
Second, they may say that they just don't get anything out of the meetings at the local churches. They may say that they publicly confess that they are Christians, and are part of the wider church because they have ad hoc fellowship with other Christians. And I may have been misunderstood earlier as saying that meeting together on Sundays is not important, because the main thing about church is the relationships and not the meetings.
However, the thing about the meetings is that these are the focal point. We meet on a Sunday to worship God, to hear His Word, to pray to Him and to sing praises to Him, to visibly show that as a group of people this is what we are all about. "Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people." (1 Peter 2:10) God's people, not just a random group of people. God's people, not a networking group or a therapy group or a commune. Our purpose is to, "proclaim the excellencies of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvellous light." (v9) And when we meet and do what we do, we say to the world, "we are God's people and we proclaim His excellencies, we rely on Him, we trust Him, we learn from Him, we praise Him. He is our God, and Jesus Christ is our Saviour!"
It's also an expression of love for each other, because in our meetings we build each other up and encourage one another through Bible teaching and through prayer. So if we treat Sunday services with apathy or lack of commitment we are effectively saying that we don't care about our brothers and sisters - we can't be bothered. Christianity without meeting with other Christians is all about what we can get out of God directly, whilst refusing to be His means of helping, loving and caring for our brothers and sisters in Christ. The church is one of the main means that He uses to help His people, and yet we both refuse that channel for ourselves, and refuse to be part of that channel for others, if we refuse to be part of a church. We want help from Him directly - in the way we determine, rather than the way He reveals. In short it's self-centred rather than God-centred, and is therefore not true Christianity.
I have gone on long enough. I hope you see why I thank God for the church - my own local church at St Mary's and the wider church - especially in my time of need. And I hope that if you are reading this as a Christian you will place importance on the church, and give yourself to it. And I pray that as we give ourselves first to God, and then to each other, we may visibly demonstrate the love of Christ and thereby commend the gospel to the watching world.
"Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen." (Ephesians 3:20-21)
It is more than 18 years since I first moved to Basingstoke and came to St Mary's. I found the welcome there to be warm and was drawn in, as a young single Christian man, to the fellowship. I got involved in leading the music in the services, and in leading services, preaching, teaching at housegroups, evangelism, and in helping with some of the teaching and activities for young people. But my involvement has varied over time, and certainly has been much less since we had kids. I met my wife at St Mary's, was married at St Mary's, and had all my four children baptised as infants at St Mary's. And things have changed subtly and matured over time. Clive Hawkins is still the rector, but curates, associate pastors, ministry trainees, youth workers, housegroup leaders have come and gone. The "new building" is no longer new! And our styles of worship, our evangelistic activities and other regular activities have evolved.
But, over the past four or five years, and especially in the last year, I have really experienced first hand St Mary's as a Christian community. I really can't tell you all the ways we have needed help, counselling and support as a family. But I can say that we would not have got through the past few years without the church.
The most overwhelming example has been this year. I was taken ill and rushed to hospital on Christmas Day, and I stayed there until the middle of February. I was diagnosed with cancer and started having chemotherapy during that time.
Heidi and the kids were well supported by church members while I was in hospital. They had a rota going whereby meals would be delivered to them every day, so that Heidi did not have the worry of having to do that.
I was visited in hospital, not just by Clive and other leaders, but by quite a few members of the church. Being in hospital can be boring, apart from the unpleasantness of illness, so just having people come to chat was great.
Since I came home, and have not been able to work while going through the chemotherapy treatment, things have been tough financially. And whilst it is true that most of the financial support that has kept us from going deeper into debt in the last few months has come from state benefits, we have also been humbled by the generous and spontaneous donations of Christian brothers and sisters both at St Mary's and beyond. Some gifts have been anonymous, some direct. We have not asked for anything, and yet people have seen our need and given generously. Without those gifts we would be seriously struggling.
One Christian friend left some cash in our house without telling us after visiting one day. When we sent a text message later on to ask if it was their cash, the response we got back was simply, "Acts 4:34". This verse is from a passage that speaks of how the early church ensured that there was "not a needy person among them" because they shared their possessions. This brought a tear to my eye, not only with gratitude, but because it was clear that their generosity was not just because we were friends. This was a gift following the example of love in the early church, and in response to the love of Christ who "was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich." (2 Corinthians 8:9).
Church members have also helped us out with a variety of jobs that I didn't have the energy or strength for.
And we have been constantly upheld in prayer. This is something that I cannot fully grasp. People at St Mary's have mentioned us to the only God, the Creator of the Universe, in their prayers! There are so many other things to pray about and pray for, and yet they pray for us. But it doesn't just stop at St Mary's, or in England for that matter. I am aware of brothers and sisters praying for us privately and in churches around my own country, and in Canada, the USA and India - people I don't even know!
I should say that we have received a lot of help from other people outside St Mary's and outside of the wider church as well, including some of our unbelieving friends and family, which really is equally appreciated. If they are reading this I do not want them to feel that I think less of their help and their gifts than those of Christians. I am not trying to say that Christians are more caring than anyone else. And I am not trying to say that people at St Mary's are more loving than other people. The Lord indeed provides for His people through many divers means - but that is something to write about another time!
I am only trying to say that church is much more than a Sunday thing, and we have experienced that over the last few years for us, both through St Mary's and through the wider church around the world. You see, the way that love, support and care works, in this context at least, sets church apart from, say, the help received from a charity or a social club, or from close friends and family. We have been treated with generosity in many cases spontaneously and without direction from the church leadership, so it's not a formal organisational thing. We have also received help and been offered help from people within the church that we don't even know very well. These are not necessarily our close friends at church who are helping us out. People want to help because Jesus Christ has loved them, and they want to share that love as he commanded.
I was reflecting on this. And I was thinking how little teaching the Bible contains on the things we normally associate with church - church buildings, church government, church meetings, church music. When the New Testament speaks about church it has much more to say about relationships as a group of people. In fact, it fundamentally addresses us as a church and not as individuals. It's what John Frame calls "one-anothering" in one of his books that I'm reading at the moment (Salvation Belongs to the LORD, P&R Books, 2006).
Peter says, in 1 Peter 2:9-10, "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for [God's] own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people…"
Paul, in Ephesians 4, speaks of the church as "the body of Christ" (v12). And he says that the reason God gave apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers and evangelists was, "to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ…"
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 12, again uses the analogy of Christ's body to describe the church, where, "there are many parts, yet one body." (v20) His thrust is that different people in the church have different gifts and talents, and therefore different roles, but we all need each other.
But after talking very practically about everyone having different gifts and needing each other, and the fact that it is good to desire the higher gifts, Paul says, "and I will show you a still more excellent way." (1 Corinthians 12:31) He then goes on, in the well-known passage in chapter 13, to say that exercising these gifts with love is more important than anything else. "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing." (13:1-3)
And that reminded me of what Jesus said in John 13:35, "By this all people will know that you are my disciples…" What did he say next? If you have a great choir and sing nicely every week? If you read your Bible and pray every day? If you wear an ichthus, fish, badge at work? If you refrain from swearing and getting drunk? If you give up every Sunday to meet with Christians and hear preaching from the Bible? None of these things are bad. Some are very good and essential. But they are not what Jesus said. Jesus said, "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."
John expands on that in his first letter: "By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth." (1 John 3:16-18)
Love within the church community, and love for those outside the church, is to be the main defining mark of our Christianity and our churches. And that's what I have experienced in St Mary's, Eastrop, Basingstoke, whatever our faults and foibles in all sorts of other areas. And that's why I thank God for St Mary's and for his grace towards me through the church there and the wider church. And I want to encourage all my brothers and sisters to keep on loving, because in your love God is working His love through you.
But I also wanted to share this for the sake of some of my friends and family, who would call themselves Christians and have a strong belief in Jesus Christ, and yet are not members of a church. They have a variety of reasons. Some don't think it's important. Some haven't made a huge effort to find a church to go to, and say they can't find one. Some are put off by superficiality in Sunday services. Some are shy. Some didn't like the last church they went to and have been put off. Some are simply chickening out.
I don't judge anyone. But my heart aches for them, whatever their reasons, because they are cutting themselves off from one of the main channels of God's love for them. ¬¬I do also believe that God commands us to meet together as Christians, and to align ourselves with other Christians publicly by belonging to a visible church. And therefore staying away from church whilst wanting to call yourself a Christian is sinful. However, my main concern is that without the support of the church they will fail to grow and will eventually fall away from Christ altogether.
There are, however, at least two objections that these Christian non-church people might throw at me for my audacity:
First, the concept of church in the Bible encompasses both a visible church and an invisible church. All believers, those who have faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins and their eternal life, are part of the invisible church. We don't get a choice. We are all automatically part of it by God's choosing of us before the creation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), and then his calling us into it (1 Peter 2:9). Therefore, they might argue that they are already part of the church, Christ's body, and they don't need to actually go to church on Sunday or belong to a church in this life.
But this overlooks at least two things.
It overlooks that the New Testament never speaks to anyone outside the visible church. The gospels and the letters were written to people who had relationships with other Christians in churches - good or bad. We are told to love one another visibly and obviously so that people will know that we follow Christ. How can we display that love for one another if we do not do it in the context of a visible church? If New Testament Christians had issues with other Christians they were never given the option of ostracising themselves and acting as an independent, lone believer. They were taught how to act, speak, learn, grow, submit, love, care, build up, edify, in the context of the church.
More importantly it also overlooks the fact that the invisible church doctrine was conceived in order to highlight a particular truth, and not to minimise the importance of physically belonging to a church in this life. The invisible church concept is important when we consider that Jesus said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'" (Matthew 7:21-23) So Jesus knew that there would be some in the visible church whom we would think are genuine believers, but he would know them to be "workers of lawlessness". He also said, "I know my own and my own know me." (John 10:14) So whilst the visible church may be a mixture of true Christians, the deluded and the "wolves in sheep's clothing", we can be sure that, "the Lord knows those who are his" (2 Timothy 2:19).
Second, they may say that they just don't get anything out of the meetings at the local churches. They may say that they publicly confess that they are Christians, and are part of the wider church because they have ad hoc fellowship with other Christians. And I may have been misunderstood earlier as saying that meeting together on Sundays is not important, because the main thing about church is the relationships and not the meetings.
However, the thing about the meetings is that these are the focal point. We meet on a Sunday to worship God, to hear His Word, to pray to Him and to sing praises to Him, to visibly show that as a group of people this is what we are all about. "Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people." (1 Peter 2:10) God's people, not just a random group of people. God's people, not a networking group or a therapy group or a commune. Our purpose is to, "proclaim the excellencies of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvellous light." (v9) And when we meet and do what we do, we say to the world, "we are God's people and we proclaim His excellencies, we rely on Him, we trust Him, we learn from Him, we praise Him. He is our God, and Jesus Christ is our Saviour!"
It's also an expression of love for each other, because in our meetings we build each other up and encourage one another through Bible teaching and through prayer. So if we treat Sunday services with apathy or lack of commitment we are effectively saying that we don't care about our brothers and sisters - we can't be bothered. Christianity without meeting with other Christians is all about what we can get out of God directly, whilst refusing to be His means of helping, loving and caring for our brothers and sisters in Christ. The church is one of the main means that He uses to help His people, and yet we both refuse that channel for ourselves, and refuse to be part of that channel for others, if we refuse to be part of a church. We want help from Him directly - in the way we determine, rather than the way He reveals. In short it's self-centred rather than God-centred, and is therefore not true Christianity.
I have gone on long enough. I hope you see why I thank God for the church - my own local church at St Mary's and the wider church - especially in my time of need. And I hope that if you are reading this as a Christian you will place importance on the church, and give yourself to it. And I pray that as we give ourselves first to God, and then to each other, we may visibly demonstrate the love of Christ and thereby commend the gospel to the watching world.
"Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen." (Ephesians 3:20-21)
