Recovering the Art of Biblical Community
by Aaron Pierce
Jesus wants His followers to live in loving community with one another. In John 15:12 He says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Yet this practice seems absent in evangelical churches today. It is no secret that many churches aren’t known as safe-havens from gossip and slander or peaceful business meetings. While broken people in a broken world will never perfectly love one another, what if the lack of unity in our churches is not something to joke about, but is actually symptomatic of churches in our culture falling sinfully short of living in biblical community?
When we examine what biblical community actually is, we realize that it is vital to a proper ecclesiology otherwise absent in many churches. If we truly want our churches to become Gospel-centered outposts of a heavenly kingdom in a fallen world, we should recover the essential understanding and practice of biblical community.
The Origin of Community
The first step to recovering biblical community in our churches is not by examining the latest pragmatic fads of popular consumer-driven church culture, but rather by examining the theological foundations and origin of community. Community originates from the profoundly mysterious and beautiful relationship within the Godhead. Scripture is clear that God is love (1 Jn. 4:8). But what or who was the object of His love prior to creation?
In Augustine’s classic On the Trinity, the early church father uses an analogy to describe the eternally loving relationship between the members of the Trinity: “For I cannot love love unless I love a lover; for there is no love where nothing is loved. So there are three things: the lover, the loved, and the love.”[1] In other words, in order for God to be a God of love, He must always have an object (or objects) of His love. In the Godhead, this is the other members of the Trinity from before the foundations of time.
The Trinity then is not just a complex display of God’s transcendence, but the embodiment of His eternal loving nature displayed within the perfect community and fellowship of the members of the Trinity. Thus community is not just important because it is a good idea to keep God’s people together to accomplish His mission, but salient to His very eternal character.
While the origin and example of community is God Himself, mankind itself should reflect it too. In Genesis 1:26 God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” While generations of scholarly effort has sought to explain the imago Dei, part of what it means to reflect God’s image includes humanity’s capacity for relationship as demonstrated by the Trinity. In fact, this is certain since Jesus Himself says the greatest commandment is to love God and love others as themselves (Mt. 22:37-39).
These commandments mean that community is not optional for us as image-bearers of the Creator, but entailed in what it means to conform ourselves to Christ’s image. Spiritual formation pastor Trevor Joy explains, “Community was not God’s response to sin but a building block in the DNA of our creational image.”[2] This means that an essential part of every human being is the desire for relationships with God and other people.
But in order to understand how to manifest true community in the church, we must understand what biblical community actually is.
What Is Biblical Community?
Defining biblical community is essential to a proper ecclesiology. One of the most foundational principles of biblical community is to understand that the church is not a building, location, or organization, but instead a body (Rom. 12:3-8; 1 Cor. 12:12-31). The influence of consumerism in American culture has threatened to turn the church into a well oiled machine driven by CEO pastors who operate based on the people’s wants rather than a life-changing family centered on the Gospel.
Mark Dever discusses his struggles in understanding what he was supposed to think of the church until he came to the realization that “the church is a people, not a place or a statistic…It’s a family, joined together by adoption through Christ.”[3] From Dever’s statement, we see that church is not a gathering of people alone, but a group (family) of believers bonded deeply together in covenant around the truth of the Gospel.
Biblical community ceases to be biblical community without the Gospel at the core. The German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer states, “Christian community means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. There is no Christian community that is more than this, and none less than this.”[4] In other words, various kinds of community exist in our world today. Gangs are certainly a close-knit community of individuals who refer to themselves as a family, yet the relational aspect of being an image-bearer is oriented toward destruction rather than glorifying God. What separates biblical community from other forms of community is what is central to that community. For the Christian, it must be the person and work of Jesus Christ.
A biblical community must be more than a group of people who share common beliefs, but who also share “life together,” as Bonhoeffer puts it elsewhere. Scripture’s “one another” passages allude to Christians going far more in depth than mere Bible study. These one another statements include loving (Jn. 15:12), serving (Gal. 5:13), challenging (Gal. 5:26), bearing burdens (Gal. 6:2), confessing sins (Jas. 5:16), and praying (Eph. 6:18).[5]
We see some of the best examples of how this communal living was practiced in Acts, specifically 2:42-47, 4:32-37, and 6:1-7. While this is not exhaustive, some of the early Christian community’s characteristics and practices included praying together, serving each other and their communities, studying the Scriptures together, exhorting one another in the truth, meeting each other’s financial needs, having fellowship, and multiplying. The biblical picture of community is not merely a program, but a way of life, centered on truth that plays an essential role in making disciples.
Without the elements that define biblical community in Acts and the “one another” passages, we cannot understand what it means to live as a disciple in the church. If we are created in God’s Triune, communal image, then we cannot divorce our discipleship, or others’ discipleship, from biblical community. For Bonhoeffer, this is why biblical community can never reach inward only, but also must be manifested outward to the world since community is a crucial component of making disciples. As Bonhoeffer states, “There they find their mission, their work.”[6] What then does this look like?
Practicing Biblical Community
To practice biblical community means intentionally exhibiting the “one anothers” of Scripture and seeing and loving fellow believers as oneself. It means pouring one’s life into others. Due in part to our individualistic culture, we have deemphasized the depth and beauty of communal life. Western individualism has so embedded us into itself that we don’t even seem to realize that churches are filled with isolated, struggling individuals who cannot satisfy their innate longing for a deep relationship with God and others.
As people in Western culture, we must understand that practicing biblical community is an art and not a science. There is no perfect formula to guarantee a sound biblical community. While there are essential elements to what comprises a biblical community, it is the Holy Spirit Who creates the community from whatever structure we provide. Biblical community cannot be programed, so our job then is not to find the perfect cookie cutter formula, but rather to do our best to create atmospheres that are centered on the essentials of community and rely on the Holy Spirit to do the rest. God’s power will make up for our fallen nature in the context of community, which is a beautiful expression of the Gospel at work.
Conclusion
Many churches are unaware of the beauty and depth they are missing due to their failure to practice biblical community. The ministry of pastors and church leaders is to build Gospel-centered, life-investing community back into our churches. There is no perfect approach, but if we begin with the theological foundations of biblical community and align ourselves with the picture of communal living in Scripture, our churches will become healthier, vibrant, and unified.
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[1] Augustine, On The Trinity, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, Volume 2, ed. Whitley J. Oates (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 687.
[2] Spence Shelton and Trevor Joy, The People of God: Empowering the Church to Make Disciples (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2014), 30.
[3] Mark Dever, What is a Healthy Church? (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2007)
[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 5, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 31.
[5] The number of “one another” passages varies depending on the translation. The ESV contains fifty-one “one another” passages. While I do not have the space to include them here, I encourage readers to explore these “one another” passages in their entirety as they further consider biblical community.
[6] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 27.
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About the Author: Aaron Pierce serves as the Connections and Discipleship pastor at Peace Church in Wilson, North Carolina. He holds a B.A. in biblical studies and pastoral ministry from Welch College, and is currently pursuing his M.Div. at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He has been married for three years to his wife Courtney. His academic interests include historical theology, ecclesiology, and discipleship.
January 13, 2016
Great job! A misplaced truth for certain.