Fellowship

10 Minutes After Church

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

What do you usually do immediately after your Sunday morning church service ends? If you’re like most of church-going humanity, you probably have a routine. Upon the final “Amen”, you arise from your regular spot and your body follows a subconscious script. You may go to the nursery to pick up a child, maybe you have your weekly chat about the high school sports team with the person seated in the row behind you, or perhaps you hightail it toward the coffee to snag a to-go cup on your way out the door.

There’s nothing wrong with being a creature of habit, but many of us have the same routine at the end of a church service as we do at the conclusion of a sporting event or any other public gathering. We gather our belongings, utter some niceties, and shuffle toward the exits. That’s a problem. More specifically, it’s a bad habit.

Since the church body is a family of brothers and sisters in Christ, the end of the formal part of a service is not the end of church but rather the beginning of a new segment of the family gathering. When the structured gathering ends, an indispensable aspect of Christian vitality and growth—fellowship—continues.

Don’t get the wrong idea. You don’t have to be an extrovert who seeks people out like a goldendoodle puppy to faithfully participate in the fellowship of the church. You just have to be intentional.

If you’re one of the many believers with a bad habit of neglecting the broader fellowship of the church after the service, here’s one simple suggestion: set apart ten minutes after the gathering concludes and devote that time to getting to know others in the church family. This is a ten-minute commitment to invest in your eternal faith family and show hospitality to those not yet in the family.

To help set these ten minutes apart, it may help to consider what not to do, in order to be free and available for fellowship with the body of Christ.

1. Don’t Talk to Your Besties

There’s nothing wrong with having close friends in the church (in fact, there’s much right about that), but the weekly gathering is the one time each week when all the people you don’t naturally bump into are gathered in one place. Don’t miss that opportunity to experience the fullness of the body of Christ by getting to know those who are unlike you or from different life stages and interests. Not only will you benefit from a more diverse fellowship, but over time the supernatural unity of the Spirit will be gloriously on display as members of a church family have genuine care and concern for those outside their immediate circles. Let your closest friends know that right after the service (and, ideally, before the service as well), your aim is to engage the larger fellowship of the church family. Maybe this will encourage them to do the same!

2. Don’t Talk to Blood

Similarly, in those first ten minutes after the service, skip the chit-chat with your family. This is not to denigrate your family. If you get to regularly attend church with your extended family, that is a gift from God to be cherished. But very often, one’s family becomes the relationally safe enclave that undermines more intentional branching out into the broader church family. If your habit is currently to huddle up with your family to chat after church, it’s time to replace that habit with a better one. You’ll talk to your family later, so in those first moments after the official time is done, reorient your family outward toward the broader fellowship of the church family.

3. Don’t Talk Shop

While circumstances will arise that need the attention of a staff member or ministry leader, the goal in the minutes prior to and following the service is to be freed up for fellowship. It’s common for those involved in the formal functions on a Sunday (music ministry, kids ministry, elders, deacons, staff, etc.) to ‘talk shop’ with others who are also involved in leading and serving. But again, this is the one time each week that the building is filled with the faith family! The shop talk can wait or be accomplished with an email. You might even need to politely tell a fellow ministry leader, “Let’s discuss this later. I want to go meet those people before they leave.” In doing so, you’re not only prioritizing what matters, you’re setting the tone for a culture in which all the ministry leaders are flock-oriented.

Habits are what we do without noticing. Most people are not actively trying to have shallow relationships with the church family. But without realizing it, many people are missing the gift of rich church fellowship due to unexamined Sunday habits. I encourage you to devote ten minutes after the service for conversing with others in the faith family—and soon you’ll likely find that ten minutes is not nearly enough. 

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This post was written by Andy Huette, Senior Pastor of Christ Community Church in Gridley, Illinois, and orignally published by Mattthias Media. Here is the link to the original post: The Ten Minutes After Church Ends.

Check out: How to Walk into Church

Messy Christian Communities

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

Missional Communities

As our church makes the slow but intentional shift toward Missional Communities, I found this illustration to be a good picture of the contrast between common perception and ideal reality of what such communities, or small groups, and even church is like.

On the left side, “What People Think It Looks Like“, we see the idea that the Christian life is one that should be free of ugliness.  It makes sense, right?  If all the people in the group are saved by Jesus, forgiven of sin, and empowered to overcome their sin, then a gathering of Christians should be pretty clean, and always leading us upaward.  Isn’t this what Paul calls for in Ephesians 4?

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called,2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  (v. 1-3 ESV)

11 So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, 12 to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. (v. 11-13 NIV)

It is the picture God calls for, through Paul, in these verses.  But it is the ideal; the objective. It is not the complete picture, at least not at present.  It is sort of a Norman Rockwell version of the Christian life lived in community.  It is true.  But it does not show the complexity, and the brokenness that is all around us, nor the baggage that we all carry in varying degree.

But we have hope to experience it.  Afterall, God has promised it. He has said that he is at work in us, and he would finish what he started. (Philippians 1.6)  And we get a taste of it, if we have the privilege of engaging in a genuine Christian community.

The picture on the right, however, “What It Really Looks Like“, is a reflection of the present reality of Christian community.  It is often messy.  And if it is done right, it should get messier. This is OK, though, because this is God’s means of achieving the picturesque image we may have in our minds when reading Ephesians 4.  It is the sharing of life, the freedom and safety to unload our baggage in the presence of others who, rather than judging and comdeming, help us to sort through it, to own our part, and to see ourselves – and our messes – as God sees: through the lenses of the gospel.

Because each of us has our own mess, it only makes sense that a collection of people would look like a bigger mess.  But there is a beauty in that mess!  Because in the midst of that mess, love is shown.  Love leads to freedom and honesty.  Honesty leads us to the gospel, the power of which transforms us, cleanses us, and frees us from the bondage of all that is aweful and ugly.

Neil Cole has rightly said:

“Life is messy. If someone doesn’t break your heart, you’re not doing it right.”

Likewise, if we are living in community with other Christians, and it never gets messier, it may be a sign that we are not doing it right. Thank God for the messes!  Thank God that he cares about our messes! Thanks to God, he has promised to clean our messes, and use other messed up people in the process.

Please note that while the picture on the right is messy, it does go up.  It is not that there is no evidence of change, of improvement.  There certainly is!  It is just not always a pretty picture on the way.  But it is beautiful – to God and to us – both in process and as a result. This is the beautiful reality of the Christian community – the church.

Loving Not Wisely But Too Well

/ Dennis Griffith / 2 Comments

Shakespeare’s Othello bellows:

“I have loved not wisely but too well.”

What he means is that his passions consumed him, and now he had destroyed what he loved.  If you know the story, you will remember he had strangled his wife out of the mistaken fear that she had not been faithful to him.

Similarly, in his monumental book, Life Together, Dietrich Bohoeffer warns:

“The people most in love with community are in danger of destroying community.”

In other words, there are people who have made such an ideal of “Christian Community” that they are easily dissatisfied with the real thing. In their dissatisfaction they grumble, causing others to become disaffected, which further fuels their sense that this real Christian community does not meet the measure of idealized Christian community.  In many cases such people eventually withdraw themselves from fellowship with the visible Church.  In the end they  devoid themselves of what they say they most wanted. And in their wake they leave behind others with feelings of abandonment, rejection, confusion, anger, and more inclination toward disengagement.  These are the effects of their having loved “not wisely but too well”.  Like Othello they kill what they claim they love.

I know people like this…

It is easy to love people hypothetically, or to love hypothetical people. It is quite another thing to love real flesh and blood.  Real people are flawed. The better we get to know others the more apparent those flaws can become.  That’s why the old adage is true: Familiarity does breed contempt.  But more important, what Peter tells us is also true:

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.  (1 Peter 4.8)

As I think about the communities of which I am part my hope is simply that, rather than idealizing Christian community, we continually recommit ourselves to enact and embody John’s encouragement:

Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. (1 John 3.18)

Such love is founded upon the gospel. It is rooted in the shared experience of grace through common faith in the atoning work of Christ. It realizes that we will let each other down.  It seeks reconciliation of wrongs and grievance. It models the laying down of our lives, and our preferences, for the joy of seeing others prosper and the oneness Jesus prays for us to be realized.