In the last session, we unraveled this beautiful mystery called church.
Not an event. Not a ritual. Not an experience only—although it can include all of those things. Nor is it simply a movement designed to accomplish something practical for us, although, practically speaking, life in the church can bring an enormous amount of good.
Rather, the church is something God has made. And not made in quite the way God made trees or mountains or oceans—as one more thing in creation. Paul reaches for the language of sacred space: God is building people together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
God has made a home.
Which means the existence of “church” is still not fully reducible to a reason. Before we can explain its usefulness, measure its effectiveness, or calculate what we are getting from it, there it is: a gift to receive. A place God has chosen to inhabit.
THE REASONS NOT FOR CHURCH
But have you ever stopped to consider all the reasons not to bother with church at all? The reasons NOT for church.
If we are being honest, Romans 15—and the chapter leading into it—could make a pretty solid case. Romans 14 is full of Christians disagreeing about food and holy days, judging one another, looking down on one another, and struggling to live with consciences that do not work exactly the same way. Then Romans 15 opens with this stirring invitation: Bear with the weak. Do not please yourself. Carry the other person. And Paul points to Jesus, whose life included the words, “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.”
There is the messiness of church. People who misunderstand you. People whose weaknesses become your inconvenience. People whose convictions frustrate you. People who need something from you. People who sometimes hurt you.
That does not exactly write itself into a marketing campaign.
RELATIONSHIPS WITHOUT THE RISK
A recent Wall Street Journal article surfaced something startling. A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study of more than 2,300 middle-school students found that roughly one in five reported using AI for emotionally intimate companionship. The attraction itself is not difficult to understand.
Whatever else an AI chatbot can do, at its core it is extraordinarily good at predicting the language that should come next. And when flesh-and-blood relationships become unpredictable, costly, awkward, disappointing, or demanding, it is not hard to understand the appeal of something that feels easier.
Need somebody available at midnight? Need someone who never gets tired of hearing the story? Need a sympathetic counselor who does not charge $50 an hour? You can sell comfort.
You can sell support. You can sell convenience. It is considerably harder to sell “bearing with the failings of the weak.” Or “the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.”
There is your reason not to bother with church.
Now, that needs an important qualification. A church characterized by cruelty, abuse, manipulation, or contempt is not redeemed simply by calling those things “the cost of community.” But a church in which no one ever has to absorb inconvenience, forgive an offense, surrender a preference, or bear with another person’s weakness may simply be a church in which nobody has gotten close enough to anybody else to need grace.
Still, how exactly do you pitch this? Come. Be part of this messy place God calls home, and receive the unique opportunity to have other people cost you something.
AND SOMEHOW, HOPE
But then Romans 15 gets stranger. Immediately after pointing to Christ—the one who did not please himself, the one who bore reproach—Paul writes: “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.”
That little for matters. Paul has not suddenly changed subjects. The Scriptures tell the story of a faithful God and, ultimately, of a Messiah whose faithfulness takes the shape of self-giving love. That story gives God’s people endurance and encouragement.
And somehow, Paul says, that leads to hope.
A few verses later, he is still going. Jews and Gentiles—people with every reason to remain divided—are worshiping God together. “Accept one another,” Paul says, “just as Christ accepted you.” And the whole section eventually lands with a prayer to the God of hope, asking that they would “overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Hope is everywhere.
Another place in Romans may help us understand the missing link. Back in Romans 5, Paul traces another surprising sequence: suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. Not because suffering is secretly pleasant. Not because difficult relationships are automatically good for us. And certainly not because pain itself deserves to be romanticized.
Hope comes because endurance gives us a history with the faithfulness of God. We remain. God meets us there. And eventually we can look backward and see something we could not have seen at the beginning. God was faithful here. God carried us through that. God made something here that we could not have made ourselves. And once you have seen God do that, you have reason to believe he can do it again.
That is hope.
MAKING ROOM
When we think about things like hospitality and giving ourselves to other people, I suspect many picture something a little more like Central Perk on the nineties sitcom Friends. The coffee shop where everyone knows our name, the backyard where the same friends keep showing up, the table where there is always another chair. There is something beautiful about that. We deeply long for community. But notice the subtle difference.
We imagine creating space so that we can find our people. Romans 15 imagines creating space for people who may cost us something.
That is why the church is so radically different from many of the communities we naturally construct for ourselves. It takes the things we genuinely long for—belonging, support, friendship, encouragement—and refuses to separate them from patience, inconvenience, forgiveness, sacrifice, and the surrender of some of our self-protection.
So when we come to church carrying expectations of connection, support, being understood, spiritual experience, or people who simply feel like our kind of people, those expectations are not necessarily wrong. But they can become the terms on which we are willing to stay.
And if they do, we may leave before we ever discover some of the goods that only exist on the other side of faithfulness. Because here is the strange promise: When we see God making something among us that our preferences, compatibility, and self-interest could never have produced on their own, we have hope.
Because when that thing happens, we know God is truly among us.
We see people staying. Bearing. Forgiving. Welcoming. Making room. People who would not naturally have chosen one another learning to glorify God “with one mind and one voice.”
And suddenly the church is not merely telling us that God is faithful. We are watching his faithfulness take shape among us.
Maybe that is why making room for other people always contains an element of risk. And maybe that risk is not an unfortunate flaw in the gift. Maybe it is one of the places where we discover just how extraordinary the gift really is.
If this raised a question or something you’d like to talk through, I’d be glad to continue the conversation. Email Pastor John.
Return to Pulled Together