Embodying Our Story as Community

“…Be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” (Phil. 2:2-4)

“For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross.” (Eph. 2:14-16)

It is the hinge that holds our witness of the gospel together. It is what makes or message real to the world. In the texts above, Paul calls the people of God to witness to the world, not through words or apologetics or five-finger exercises. Paul calls the people of God to embody the story of Jesus as a community of faith, to live out the gospel story in the midst of the people, to help the world understand faith by being a living lesson in the biblical language of redemption, reconciliation, and new creation. This only makes sense, for the church is the “body of Christ,” the second Incarnation of Christ in the world. When Jesus came to earth, he shed a new light on the kingdom of God by bringing all of those concepts to life in his flesh.

In a post-Christian context, one in which the biblical story has lost any privileged place of importance, the intelligibility and future of the gospel depends on faithful communities of believers who will live out the gospel story in community. In Live to Tell, Brad Kallenberg puts it this way,

The gospel may remain a mystery to the surrounding culture unless the church lives out the gospel in the form of its life together. It is the pattern of the believing community’s relationships that embodies the story of Jesus in concrete terms that outsiders can comprehend. (50)

Although this may sound like a foreign concept to us, it is actually a much more biblical approach to mission and to the life of discipleship than many of our approaches in recent past. The world needs to see us embody the story of Jesus, “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death” (Phil. 3:10), to “let the same mind be in [us] that was in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5), to carry “in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:11). As we embody the master biblical narrative as a church family, we will become the living text of Scripture for the post-Christian world. Those who are not yet Christian will begin to see the story of God played out in front of them, both begging and daring them to take their own place in the drama of the kingdom of God.

But, this calling demands us all to engage in story of Scriptures more deeply than ever before. We must open ourselves to the transformative power of the Scriptures and engross ourselves in the world they imagine. Only when we open ourselves to the scrutiny of the biblical narrative will we be able to embody the gospel before the surrounding culture as a community of faith. But if we do not, the gospel will remain a mystery not only to the surrounding culture, but even to us.