Community: Living As One Family/Body of Christ

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit…But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”

-1 Corinthians 12:12-13, 24b-26

I often refer to my kids as “feral church children.” They have grown up spending a lot (probably too much) of their time at church. In fact, Iris is sitting in my office reading as I write this devotion because we didn’t register her for any camps this week.

My kids will sometimes get out of the car at church and simply disappear. They do this because they have grown up in churches all their lives. They are at home here. They know where snacks are kept. But more than that, they know the church is a place where people “got you.” They know that every staff person, every parent, and every grandparent in the church is going to be looking out for them.

That is one of the things I love about the church at its best. Children are not treated as interruptions. They are part of the life of the church. 

Last Sunday, it poured rain down at Epworth. It rained so much that the annual Lowcountry boil, which, as I understand it, has always happened “under the trees,” as the Epworth regulars say, had to be moved under the new pavilion on campus.

This may have been a fortunate accident because the pavilion sits on a bluff overlooking the Mackay River. As the rain began to subside and the orange and pink rays of the setting sun began to peek through the breaking clouds, it felt like heaven. The children played together, their laughter mixing with the chirping of tree frogs, while the more “seasoned” members of the church bounced children not their own so that parents could have both hands free to eat dinner. The young adults sat around in camp chairs talking and playing with the children who ran by.

It wasn’t anything fancy, and it wasn’t over-scheduled. It was just the church being the church.

In Conrinthians, Paul paints a picture of the church that is in no way individualistic. There are not separate members trying to maintain separate lives while occasionally gathering to pray. They are one body. There is no other identity that matters. Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, women and men, American and Iranian, Republican and Democrat, yes, even Bulldogs and Jackets, all become one body in Christ. It is an all-consuming identity, so powerful that if one member suffers, all suffer together, and if one member rejoices, all rejoice together.

I am certain there were a wide variety of identities present last Sunday under that pavilion. I am sure plenty of people there have had their disagreements in the past and will again in the future. I know plenty of them have disagreed with me before. We all come from different places. We have different histories, different convictions, different personalities, and different ways of seeing the world.

But in that humid twilight, satisfied by a shared meal and soothed by the laughter of old and new friends, we were reminded that we are one body. We belong to Christ, and because we belong to Christ, we belong to one another.

The church is one connected body learning to carry one another in love. It is the grandparent bouncing someone else’s child. It is the young adult who once came as a child and now makes room for the next generation. It is the parent who can eat dinner with both hands because someone else has stepped in. It is the child who knows, deep in their bones, that this is a place where they are known, watched over, and loved.

That is not a small thing. That is the body of Christ.

And maybe that is one of the great gifts of a retreat like this. For a few days, we get to see more clearly what is always supposed to be true. We are not alone. We are not just individuals trying to make our own way toward God.

We are members of one another.

So may we become the kind of church where every child knows they are safe, every parent knows they are not alone, every older member knows they are still needed, every young adult knows they still belong, and every person who suffers or rejoices discovers that they do not do so by themselves.

Because in Christ, we are one body.

Rev. Ryan Young