Called to Community

This is what transforms the whole character of their fellowship. The wife obeys her husband “in the Lord”; by serving his master the slave serves God, and the master knows that he too has a Lord in heaven (Col. 3:18–4:1), but they are all brethren “in the flesh and in the Lord.”

In the church, people look upon one another no longer as freemen or slaves, as men or women, but as members of Christ’s body. To be sure, this does not mean that the slave is no longer a slave nor the man a man. But it does mean that in the church no one has to be considered in his special capacity, whether he be Jew or Greek, freeman or bondservant.

This is how the church invades the life of the world and conquers territory for Christ. For whatever is “in Christ” has ceased to be subject to the world of sin and the law. No law of the world can interfere with this fellowship.

his is no accident, for fellowship always springs from the Word and finds its goal and completion in the Lord’s Supper. The whole common life of the Christian fellowship oscillates between Word and Sacrament, it begins and ends in worship. It looks forward in expectation to the final banquet in the kingdom of God

The bodily presence of God demands that for him and with him we should stake our own lives in our daily existence. With all the concreteness of our bodily existence, we belong to him who for our sake took upon himself the human body. In the Christian life the individual disciple and the body of Jesus belong inseparably together

The kingdom, even in its imperfect stage as we now see it – still a good deal of a mustard seed – is the most impressive revelation of God there is in the world today. It is the only way that the will and life and love of God can be fully revealed. In this emergent group life, where love comes more fully into play than it does anywhere else, we catch some gleams of the Great Life that works through us now and some prophecies of that kingdom which shall be when all people see what a few see now.

There is a proverb which says that God empties the nest not by breaking the eggs, but by hatching them. Not by the violent method of revolution will the new social order of life come, not by the legal enforcement of ancient commands, or by the formal application of texts and sayings, but by the vital infusion of a new spirit, the propagation of a passion of love like Christ’s, the continuation through the church of the real presence of eternity in the midst of time, will something come more like the order of life which we call the kingdom of God

The primary function of a church, if it is to be the continuing body of Christ in the world, is to raise human life out of its secular drift and to give reality to the eternal here in the midst of time. When it ceases to bear witness to the real presence of an eternal reality operating in and upon our lives, its race is run; it has missed its mission. But just as certainly the church is commissioned as the organ of the Spirit to bring health and healing to our human lives and to the social order in which our lives are formed and molded.

In short, however important the creative insight of the rare soul may be, religion does not count as a contribution to the race until a beloved community is formed and the discovery is interpreted and transmuted into a social movement. As far as its significance is concerned, religion is essentially social. It is an affair of a beloved community. . .

He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now and how secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in people and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and the privileges that he has won for himself.