11 Aug Why the Church Will Make You Win in Life

This article originally appeared at www.carriestephens.net.

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
John 17:20-21

I love the local church. Not just the one I attend, but all of the gatherings of Christ followers out there, finding ways to shine the light of Christ’s love in their cities.

I love the people who give their time and hearts to those communities.

I love the beauty of how we gather together on Sunday mornings, all over the world, with such vastly different expressions of worship.

I love that Jesus bared his heart to the Father about His followers to be united in their love for Him in John 17, making space in that prayer for all of us who would one day believe in Him because of the word of faith that would flourish through the centuries.

I love how Paul in Colossians 1 and Ephesians 5, Paul calls the church Christ’s body, and how Revelation 19 says that the churches are being called forth as His Bride.

I love tending the Bride by being faithful to Jesus, and that I can love him best by being a faithful member of His Body.

I daily fail in my attempts to be faithful to Christ and to His Bride, though. I am distracted by my own insecurities and the temptations that wage war for my allegiance. I don’t always master the tensions of being in the world but not of the world. I’m not alone in this, though. From what I’ve experienced with other people, there is not one human alive today who has achieved perfection.

We are Christ’s body, but we don’t always do such a good job of living like He did: perfectly and without sin or fault.

And so this is the story of the Church: we get a handful of things right, and have pockets and suitcases full of the things we have gotten wrong along our journey.

Because of all that baggage, the Church is full of people who have hurt some of us in disheartening ways.

Somehow, we seem to have believed that being hurt by the church means that we are no longer a part of it; that unity is not the dream of God’s heart for us; that our souls will flourish alone on our spiritual island with our triune God.

But island existence is not the way of our triune God, whose very fabric is woven in the communal love of three Persons in one God.

Being in community is a foundational piece of God’s Kingdom. Unity is meant to be the defining story of the God’s people.

So how do we find our way together when the journey does not go as we think it ought?

Most summers of my childhood, my family drove from our Southern California home to Oklahoma to visit my great grandparents on their cattle ranch and cotton farm. For a week or so, I traded my, like, total valley girl ways for the life of a country girl. I rode in the back of a pickup along red dirt roads and fed the cattle hay from the fields.

My favorite part of these trips was the horses.

One year, I rode a horse named Schoolboy out onto the property alone. He was an old, docile horse, who had been a barrel racer once upon a time. No one was worried anything would happen that either he or I couldn’t handle.

It was assumed that Schoolboy and I were in unity.

But I got a little too comfortable and gave sweet old Schoolboy too much reign. He assumed the increase in reign meant I wanted to stop meandering along the dirt road along the pastureland, and Schoolboy picked up some speed, doing what horses do so well: running.

I panicked a little when he took over and unconsciously tightened my legs on the sides of his massive body. Every good barrel horse knows tighter legs mean only one thing: RUN FASTER.

At this point, Schoolboy and I were approaching the main road at breakneck speed. He was living a horse’s best life. I was afraid I may die my worst death if there was a truck barreling down on us when we crossed that road.

But when we got to the road, schoolboy didn’t cross the road like I thought he would. Schoolboy remembered the glory of the rodeos in his past, and he rounded the last fence post like he was rounding a barrel.

Schoolboy took a hard right home.

I, however, kept going straight across the road.

More accuarately, I landed straight on the road, a little wounded and a lot terrified.

I never saw the hard right was coming.

Church and faith are full of hard rights home, painful falls, and unexpected miscommunication. God sticks us together and we assume we are in unity, and that we’re all headed the same direction.

But like my experience with Schoolboy, our past experiences and our current assumptions occasionally frustrate the process.

We’re all heading home, though, one hard right or hard fall at a time.

Not all churches are safe. Not all churches can be trusted. That’s okay. You don’t belong in all churches. But somewhere out there is a community of people longing for you to belong there, and take the road home with them.

When I got back up on Schoolboy all those years ago, I was a braver, more resilient rider. Even so, I cried the whole way back to the farmhouse because I was afraid of what else could happen.

The only word that can describe the feeling I had when we took that final, beautiful hard right home together is Victory.

Unity feels like victory. Unity is how we find our place in the heart of God, over and over again.

So if you’ve taken a hard fall along the way, don’t be afraid to get back on that horse. God’s will for you is belonging and unity, somewhere and somehow.

Together, we win in Him.

Carrie Stephens