Holding Us Together
What is it that holds our church together?
Is it our preacher who studies all week to bring
a sermon we can understand and be challenged by?
Is it the color of our skin or our ethnicity?
Is it our common rural culture and love for raising beef,
cutting hay, and going to the county fair?
Is it the style of music that we sing together?
Is it our common desire to go to church every week
and keep up with each other in a social setting?
Is it our common political leanings or our common
views on particular political issues?
Is it our common economic class, upper, middle, or lower?
Is it the way we dress or a common
stance we take on tattoos or body piercings?
Is it the way we educate our children?
What is it that holds our church together?
I hope it is none of the above. Yes, all of the above are important, in various ways, but none of them are ever going to be universal for all Christians, not even for all of us in this small town. What holds our church together is nothing other than our unified commitment to Christ, a commitment that grows every time we gather together to pray and hear God’s word preached.
“And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ,
till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head – Christ — from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which
every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.” Ephesians 4:11-16