The realization that Jesus “baptism” was actually an explicit instruction about how to make disciples should lead us to an inevitable conclusion: Human transformation cannot occur in isolation. We must be immersed in a life permeated with God’s work, and because God most often does his work through and among people, the only way to be “baptized” in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to live in and among a community of other Jesus-followers.
We first see this truth most strikingly in Jesus’ own ministry, where students were folded into the life of a larger community that was actively seeking transformation of themselves and the world around them. Paul also exhorts us to radically commit ourselves to the “body” of Christ (Rom 12; 1 Cor 1; Eph 4), his vivid metaphor for the community of believers.
These passages reveal that there must be a high level of commitment within the community precisely because the students need each other in order to become mature (Eph 4:14-16). In fact, there is a particular way the community of faith achieves maturity and it guarantees that we cannot be isolated, autonomous believers. What is that way? God has given gifts to every person in the community of faith that create interdependence. Everyone needs every gift, yet no one person possesses them all. Therefore, we need one another.
Everyone has a need, and everyone has something to give, and it is only through the free exchange of these gifts we experience transformation. Only by freely giving and receiving do we encounter the grace and love of God.
This relational dynamic of grace presents us with a bit of a dilemma, because modern American church life often bears little resemblance to this kind of “gift-economy.” Indeed, Eddie Gibbs points out that a Biblical community should embody values that are quite the opposite of our modern market-economy approach to relationships, saying,
“A further aspect of the exchange basis of marketing [that negatively impacts the church] is its reciprocal basis. [Kenneson and Street] write, “the reciprocity embodied in self-interested exchange is not the same as the reciprocity embodied in gift-giving…Gift giving establishes and sustains relationships by acknowledging indebtedness…but this is precisely the kind of indebtedness that self-interested market exchanges seek to avoid.” In the marketing scenario, once you have paid the price and received the goods, you are free to walk away…In contrast, the gospel is not a product to be marketed, but a life-long relationship to be established and developed” (Gibbs:2000:51).
In other words, the benefit of paying for something is that it frees one from any and all obligations to another person. By contrast, the befit of giving and receiving gifts is that it bonds people together in relational attachments of loyalty. Market exchange creates detached autonomy; gift exchange creates loyal interdependence.
This is a powerful critique of the market-driven church culture because, according to Paul, the dominant social feature of the people of God is gift-giving (Rom 12, 1 Cor 12). Stop for a moment and think about that; the very character of the community of God is the giving of gifts to one another in order to meet each other’s needs, enjoy each others company, celebrate the goodness of God, and redeem the world. Compare this with many modern churches which – precisely because of the way they attract people through the offering of goods and services – more closely resemble a market economy, which actually frees people from commitment to one another.
The people of God, by contrast, are to exist within a new gift-based way of living and interacting with each other, which generates radical relational commitments – which in turn become fertile ground for human transformation. Without gift-giving as a means of meeting one another’s needs there is no transformation into the image of God. There is simply no way to be the people of God without living concretely among the people of God and participating in that life of communal gift-giving.
Since salvation is holistic, this community generosity is expressed in every conceivable way – from the sharing of material wealth to the giving of spiritual resources (Acts 2:42-47). However, it is through the sharing of the supernatural spiritual gifts (Rom 12; 1 Cor 12) that the community of God becomes undeniably distinctive, for no other community on earth can share in these specialized gifts of grace that work together for the powerful formation of the body of Christ as the sign of the Kingdom to which it belongs.
