Last night we had a great discussion about what it means to be a community of faith and what some of our challenges might be. This week I’d like to use this website as a way to anchor that ongoing discussion.

This will be the only major post this week. I’ll add a few brief quotes and links over the next few days that hopefully with stir the pot a bit, but for the most part this is the critical discussion we need to have in depth.

Last night I suggested that community life together is where discipleship actually occurs most powerfully. I would add that it’s only in our community relationships with one another that we encounter biblical “salvation.” If you want to dig in a little right now, here are some key biblical narratives for gaining a vision of how the people of God are to live out salvation concretely in community:

The kind of “gift-community” we discussed in Part 4 would be remarkable in a world of greed, isolation, aggression, and loneliness. It would be conspicuously Godly or “Holy.” In fact, that’s the point. Ultimately, we are becoming eikons of God designed to both imitate Him and become a dwelling in which He lives by His Spirit (Eph 3:22). But what does it mean, practically speaking, to be God’s eikons? What does that look like?

Again, Jesus gives us the answer.

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.

Something is very wrong with the world. Oppression, violence, exploitation, injustice, sickness, and even death can all be attributed to mankind’s broken relationship with God – the source of all that is good. The bible calls this brokenness “sin,” and it is the result of our willful rejection of God’s good rule in our lives.

The gospel, or “the good news,” is that God’s rulership has returned to earth through Jesus Christ and the door is now open for anyone to enter His kingdom and enjoy the goodness of God. As Jesus himself said repeatedly, “Repent, for the Kingom of heaven is at hand” (Mk 1:14). Jesus’ clear invitation is to simply change our minds (that’s what “repent,” or metanoia means) about the way we live and join him in a brand new life where God and his goodness is available to anyone who seeks.