As Threshingfloor Ministries develops, one of the main things we are aiming to develop is a network of gospel communities that provide places for people who are already Christians to grow in and live out their faith, and a context for people in our post-Christian culture to see what it looks like for a community to be transformed from glory to glory into the image of Christ. We’re early on in the process, spending much time in study and prayer and discussion, asking questions like, “how do we develop communities that live out the gospel in a culture that is geared in the exact opposite direction?”, and, “Once developed, how do we keep those communities gospel centered and battle the tendency to get caught up in earthly things?” There are hundreds of things that are on our list of things to be answered, and God has been providing examples, books, sermons, and numerous other resources to send us in the right direction.
Three things that have influenced me heavily in the last month or two have been the book Total Church, which much of this post is inspired by, the first few chapters of Acts, and most recently a conference by Acts29 at River City, a local church. There’s a lot that I could write on this, but for the moment I want to lay out several things which I believe are absolutely essential to a gospel community. If these things don’t exist, it’s not a community built upon Christ, and therefore, I would argue, not really a community at all. Here they are;
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Christ and the Holy Spirit
Makes sense, huh? If a group of people is to be centered upon the Gospel, Christ must be their focus. The creator and result of this focus on Christ is the presence of the Holy Spirit in their midst, because as John Owen asserts in his book Communion with the Triune God, all good effects of the gospel in our lives are the working of the Holy Spirit. It’s not like the Spirit came at Pentecost and worked big time to make the people all speak in tongues, then was working less powerfully as the people, “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,“ and sharing all they possessed (Acts 2). It was the Holy Spirit’s work that brought about the transformation in the lives of those 3000 that were added to the number of those who believed. Without the focus upon Christ and His presence by the power of the Spirit, gospel community does not – can not – exist. The way this looks practically is developed more in the following sections.
Word Centrality
If we better understood the way God works, I could take this point for granted. However, in light of many people’s skewed view of the Spirit and the Christian life, I dare not leave out the reminder that the centrality of Scripture is essential to a gospel community. Even as quoted above, the first thing that the early church devoted themselves to was “the apostle’s teaching,” which for us is synonymous with the scriptures. Note that this comes before fellowship, breaking bread, being in awe, and signs and wonders in the narrative of Acts 2.
In the gospel of John, Jesus is introduced as the Word who became flesh. It’s no accident that we call the scriptures the Word, for in them , as in Jesus Christ, is found the power of God. Christ is present where his Word is made clear.
Calvin notes in his Institutes of the Christian Religion that man cannot come to a saving knowledge of God apart from the scriptures. Neither can we grow in that saving knowledge apart from study and meditation upon scriptures. The Holy Spirit’s main aim is to glorify the son, and the son is the Word. Don’t expect the Spirit to do lasting work where the Word is not consistently studied, read, and dwelled upon.
A true gospel community keeps scripture central to its life. This means that when its people gather together it is natural for them to talk about scripture. This means that it’s people know the general concepts of scripture and memorize specific sections. This means that people in the community regularly read the Word together and exhort each other to be in the scriptures on their own.
Mutual Exhortation and Grace
Hebrews 10:24-25 declares, “let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” (NIV) Mutual exhortation is a critical part of a gospel community. People who have received the gospel, live in the Spirit, and are drenching themselves in the Word will be consistently discovering that they fall massively short of their calling. Rather than condemning one another or despairing, they look to Christ and the promises of the Gospel, encouraging and challenging one another to run the race marked out for them. Oh how beautiful a thing it is to be in a community like this! To have a community that gives massive grace when one falls short, but consistently encourages and draws one another further up and further into holiness is something that the world will find strangely attractive. A community that doesn’t spur its members into deeper communion with Christ will not long be a gospel community.
The way this looks in action is varied, but includes people being willing to confront each other with grace, people being willing to have their sins called out because they recognize their fallenness and trust in Christ’s atonement, groups of men and women gathering together to hold each other accountable to living godly lives, and much more.
Gospel Intentionality
I wasn’t sure where to put this in the list, since it’s really something that flows in and through all the other points, but gospel intentionality is an essential part of an active gospel-centered community. Spiritual transformation isn’t something that happens by accident. Neither are evangelism or discipleship or mutual exhortation or studying of the scripture. The people in a gospel community are people who have had their
hearts so captured by Christ that they consciously restructure their lives and actions so that the gospel is able to flow out of them in all situations. They are intentional in the public sector, knowing that “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” (2 Cor. 5:20) They go out of their way to make relationships with non-believers and consciously draw them into the community, discipling them in the gospel by any and all means. They set their schedules so that they have regular time to be in the Word and to be with the body of Christ. Gospel intentionality means that the work of Christ changes everything about how we do life, and we do it consciously.
Outward Passion
Lastly (for this post), a gospel community is passionate about drawing others into itself. One of the great dangers as people come into close relationships is that they will circle the wagons and block out the world in order to protect themselves. Because this is something that happens naturally, gospel intentionality is particularly important here in order to prevent a community to become a clique. Instead of allowing the closeness of its members to block others from entering, the gospel community’s members desire that the graciousness and love of their relationships would be a thing that draws others in. They actively step out from the group, inviting others to join them. When a new person is present at a community event, they are welcomed by all who are present and shown that this is a place where they are loved as they are.
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I’ve gotten to see this work in beautiful ways here at Threshingfloor. Over the last several weeks we’ve been putting on random events every other Thursday, encouraging Christian community members to invite people who aren’t believers or are not connected elsewhere. Just this past Thursday a girl I’ve known for most of my time here at MSUM finally came after much urging by others and I. She (and others) joined us for an evening of games and laughter and snacks. I talked with her over dinner yesterday, and she kept talking about how refreshing and different our group was, and how she felt so welcomed. This girl knows the gospel and grew up in church, but has been estranged from the Christian community and has had no one showing her how to live by the Spirit, to dwell in scripture, exhorting her to live a life worthy of the gospel, or demonstrating a Christian life. Thanks to the passion of our people, she’s being drawn in and is starting to be transformed.
I could tell numerous stories from the last several months of the work that the Lord’s been doing in people’s lives. Not huge things. No mass revivals or momentous conversion experiences (yet!), but there is work being done. Each of the things above are critical elements to that work, and I believe are critical in all gospel centered communities. There’s much more that could be talked about, such as each of the fruits of the Spirit, regular preaching of the Word, involvement in the local church, repentance, and the like, but for the moment this will have to do. If you haven’t experienced relationships like that, then why not start something? That’s what we’re doing here in Fargo-Moorhead, by the grace of God, and it’s a glorious thing!
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