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The Real Call: Love One Another Clearly, Christ has called us to love one another, but we must discern how to go about the task. It has been said that when Christ told his disciples to love one another, he was not calling them to a benign positive regard. The command, specifically, was for the disciples to show the kind of love for one another that Christ had shown and would show for them, the love of the cross (John 15:12). When a Christian chooses her church so that she relates easily to the worship service and the preacher and the kind of people who attend there, positive regard is easy, but a part of Christian love falls by the wayside. The problem is not that we can’t love people at a church where the people are just like us; it’s just that typically we don’t have to. When I attend church every week with people who look like me, act like me, think like me, and worship like me, I can get away with effortlessly having positive regard for almost all of them and thinking I know how to love my neighbor. Jesus said, memorably, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them…But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked” (Lk 6:32-35). In other words, love that is easy to give does not mean much on its own. What reason could there be for us to form churches full of people just like us except that people just like us are easy to love? And what reason could there be for us to seek out people who are easy to love except that we are too frightened or too lazy to learn a deeper love which overcomes differences? The Obstacle: Self A recent New York Times best-seller called Quarterlife Crisis describes the struggles of upper-middle-class twenty-somethings trying to figure out what to do with their lives. The authors conducted dozens of interviews and found a generation faced with endless choices and possibilities, looking for direction. One of the people interviewed said, “I just try to do whatever will make me happier, and think of myself first (kind of self-centered, huh?) But if more people did it, they would be happier.” Many Christians, young and old, shun such an attitude for their daily lives while using that very standard –– their own happiness –– to select a church. Part of the difficulty in loving other people involves letting go of one’s self in order to love an other. In a sense, if I love someone just like me I have done no more than love myself, and in any event I deserve little praise; after all, people like me are those who love me, who pay back what I lend them. Loving a person when he acts just the way I want doesn’t, as it were, count. While all people have something in common –– the image of God, if nothing else –– I really can only love another person to the extent that I can recognize how he is different from me. Real love must overcome differences, and in the context of, say, a worship service, the preferences of teens, young adults, Baby Boomers, and senior citizens certainly differ. This need to respect the differences of others rather than expecting them to be like oneself is why Paul confronts division in the Philippian church with a call to humility, urging them to consider others better than themselves, to look to the interests of others rather than themselves. Humility, emptying oneself, is the one way to overcome the selfishness that prevents us from loving one another. We are called to be humble the way Christ was so that we can also learn to love the way he did, with the self-sacrificial love of the cross. |
May 20th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
This aspect of church life has been one of the most challenging for me over the last several years. Until knowing you, I didn’t realize that my default setting was to look for a church where people were most like me.
Without shifting blame entirely from myself, I think I’ve lacked (until very recently) a solid example of what a truly diverse - economically, generationally, racially, ideologically, doctrinally, politically - church looks like and how it operates healthily. (I also admit that it’s possible that the example was there, and I simply missed it).
That’s not to say that the churches I’ve gone to are against diversity. Rather, I think we’ve fallen into comfort zones that are difficult to give up, and we substitute cohabitation and passivity for the sort of love you’re talking about.
It seems to require a real purposiveness to achieve the ideal you present here. In many ways, we have to be like Opposite George from Seinfeld and decide to do the opposite of whatever our instincts tell us…
May 24th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Sorry for the delay in replying––I was wrapping up a paper (one more to go…).
As to going counter-intuitive: the trick is finding something that’s sustainable, which means we need to develop ways for people to want to pick a church for reasons other than just that they like it, or that they fit in there.
Right now, people tend to pick churches like we pick spouses. I think we should find a way to make picking a church more like an arranged marriage: it’s no good if we’re miserable there, but it destroys the whole system if we keep looking for just the right one.
My first thought is to start a neighborhood church movement. No more commuting 20 miles to a church unless you were already going there and just moved farther away. We’d still get some homogeneity based on the kinds of neighborhoods people live in, but at least it’s not an intentional, self-imposed homogeneity.
There are all sorts of problems with my suggestion. I can think of three couples off the top of my head that have trouble finding one church anywhere that they’ll have the motivation to attend every week. And I know there are theological difficulties, especially for women in Churches of Christ, that create other issues.
Still, it seems to me that problems with finding a church are mainly due to the insistence on finding just the right one. It’s my experience that every church has things that are going to annoy me, but it’s also my experience that every church has great people––some very much like me, some less so––if you stay long enough (think: years, not weeks) to get to know them.