We all know some church attendees well. They're the people who come to service halfway through worship, leave as soon as the pastor asks everyone to bow their heads and never show up for events aside from Sunday service. Chances are you were one of them at some point.
I don't think I can recall anytime I wasn't part of a church community aside from when I was younger. My family had just moved in from a different city and we started attending a new church. In the last church we had gone to, our family got in the middle of a messy fight (though that's been resolved by God's grace) and this time my parents had decided not to get too involved.
But only months into the decision to simply attend church, things just didn't feel right — not even to me, and I was just nine years old then. Cut the long story short, we started serving once more. My father served as the senior pastor for a season. I have been serving in the same church for the past 14 years.
What really compelled us to get back into serving is the reality that our being spectators really wasn't honouring God. I admit to once thinking that as long as I go to church, God is happy with me. But that's not entirely true.
Romans 12:5 says this: "So we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another." God's design for us is to be added not just into His kingdom when we surrender our life to Him, but into a church and to be involved in ministry as well.
Why?
Because God is a God of relational unity, not individualistic development. From the beginning, God's heart was for people to come together, but relational strife and wrong motives broke us apart.
Getting involved matters because relationship matters. When we go to a Sunday service, the encounter remains an experience and nothing more. But when we get involved, we start to build relationship with people we serve with and even people we serve. That's what church is about.
Getting involved has very little to do with repaying God for what good he has done or trying to earn His favour so that we can get the promotion or breakthrough we want. It has more to do with the desire to grow in relationship with one another and build a community as we get involved — one that will cause us to grow deeper in our relationship with God.
Yes, it's going to get hard, and, yes, there will be instances when relationships will get messy, but don't all relationships? What makes relationships worth it are the trials that strengthen and test how genuine our relationships really are and purge them of all wrong motives through the tough times.
Okay, so maybe God is happy that you at least show up once a week at church, but why settle for the bare minimum? If you want to go all in for Christ, might as well go all in for church community.
