Want Connection? Try Commitment
For nearly forty years, my wife’s family—her grandparents, parents, two brothers and their families, as well as other occasional relatives and friends—drive over ten hours to the North Carolina coast every summer to spend a week at the beach together. This trip has been a fixture over the duration of my wife’s entire life. Nearly forty years ago, her grandparents and parents decided it was important to budget for this trip so that the family could enjoy an annual week at the beach together. I joked with them this past summer that, if they would have planned better, they would own a house on Holden Beach by now.
We don’t plan a lot of activities during this week every summer. We cook our own meals, hardly leave the immediate vicinity of the beach house, and mainly just enjoy hanging out together. It’s a tradition that has blessed me and my family immeasurably over the last eighteen years.
Before a meal one night this past June, my father-in-law took the opportunity to provide some perspective. He noted how rare it is for a family to stay connected the way this one has. It’s not just the annual beach trip. We’re all blessed to live within an hour-and-a-half radius (we’re the furthest away), and we all get together as much as we can. We spend every Easter at our house and every Christmas at my in-laws’. We make it a priority to celebrate birthdays and graduations. We try to support all the kids in their various sports and performance endeavors. There’s no way to calculate the miles we’ve all logged on Interstate 64 over the last seven years.
In my father-in-law’s pre-meal speech, he remarked that keeping a family together like this takes a lot of work. It requires every member of the family buying in. If one member quits believing it’s worth the effort, it simply won’t continue to occur. Uniquely, the entire family believes staying connected is valuable, so they all put the work in to make sure it happens. It’s not always convenient. Sometimes it means giving up what we had planned for the weekend and three round-trip hours in a car. But we share belief that it’s worth the sacrifice. We believe that our lives are better because of these relationships with one another.
Over the course of my ministry in the local church, I’ve occasionally heard complaints from people who say they “don’t feel connected.” Honestly, it’s usually a frustrating conversation for me because I don’t know how to make someone feel differently about something.
I usually point to a plethora of people in the church who are having the opposite experience—who are obviously meaningfully connected with one another. I then point out that the person making the complaint is not involved in very much outside Sunday morning worship because these complaints almost always come from people who aren’t involved in very much outside Sunday morning worship. Then, I usually give a spill about how experiencing the richness of fellowship in Christ with other people requires hard work, commitment, and sacrifice.
The Bible uses familial language to describe the relationship between people in the church. God, through Christ, has adopted us into his family. We are now “brothers and sisters” living together in the “household of God” (1 Timothy 3:15). The first description of the church in Acts 2 certainly describes a familial community of sharing, mutual support, and love. The New Testament contains nearly sixty “one another” commands, specifying the obligations church members have to one another.
But here’s the thing. A church family is not an immediate family. We don’t live together under the same roof. We don’t share bank accounts and argue over leftovers. We’re not naturally family. To the degree that a church is family, it’s much closer to an extended family of adults who must choose to remain in fellowship with one another. It’s not going to automatically happen. You’re not going to be zapped with deep feelings of connection with these people simply by walking through the church doors on Sunday morning and lifting your voices in unified singing. You’re going to have to do what my wife’s family has been doing for forty years. You’re going to have to believe that fellowship with one another is important and valuable enough to inconvenience yourself in sacrifice for it. Family requires commitment from everyone involved.
Many of us don’t benefit from the fellowship of the church, not because something is lacking in our church, but because we don’t believe what God says about the church. We don’t believe it’s really that important—important enough for Jesus to consider himself incomplete apart from it (Ephesians 1:23) and important enough that New Testament Christianity is inconceivable without it.
And if we don’t believe it’s important, we’re never going to put the necessary effort and commitment into it. And if we’re not willing to make sacrifices for it, we shouldn’t be surprised when we “don’t feel connected.” We will feel connected when we commit ourselves to one another. We shouldn’t expect the reverse.
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