"Everything I learned about the Christian life I learned from my church... a local church determines what the Christian life looks like for the people in that church... we all learn the Christian life from how our local church shapes us."
Scott McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents
Tim Suttle, in commenting on McKnight's book writes that churches have always been a fellowship of difference and differents. Christian discipleship is not about what I'm doing as an individual, so much as it is about what I am doing in the mix of this community called the church-a community that is necessarily diverse.
Why? Because, the love of God is diverse; the very life of God is diverse. Naturally the people and communities created with the specific purpose of imaging this God will be diverse. God has not created a homogenous creation, so why would God desire a homogenous church? "The church God wants is one brimming with difference, and that will mean the Christian life is all about loving whoever happens to be with you in this fellowship of differents."
McKnight makes the point that the English word for faithfulness is actually the word faith in Greek. One must determine from the context whether the word means faith or faithfulness. Sometimes we can't even tell which one it is. What we know for sure is that Paul's vision for the church was that they would walk faithfully over the course of a lifetime-that they would finish the race.
"What the church most needs is not heroes of the faith, but faithful followers of Jesus. What your local church needs in order to live out the designs of God for a church, that grand social experiment of bringing all sorts of people to the table and into the circle of one another's lives, is not great Christians, but faithful Christians." (164)
"Faithfulness is not our own strength muscled up by determination and discipline and grit; nor is it our strength combined with God's strength. Faithfulness happens when God's strength is unleashed in us as we look to, lean on, and love God." (165)
Simply put, the church is God's design for Life Together.
It is not about a monolithic fellowship of the doctrinally pure and piously holy. It is not a place that self-made men and women to gather with their chosen affinity groups and pat each other on the back. The church is a challenge to the ways in which the brokenness of the world seeks to divide us. The church is God's vision for human communities. (above comments excerpted from Tim Suttle's comments on Scot McKnight's book)
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