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Do you want your church to be a place where people feel like they belong? Where there is a close sense of mutual dependence and love, and where there is a genuine experience of Christian community?

Who doesn’t?

(Well, there are times when I don’t, and wish that everyone on the planet would just leave me alone, but let’s not get into my problems.)

How could we pursue or promote this kind of community?

The small contribution I want to make in this week’s post is to pause and ponder what we mean by ‘belonging’, ‘membership’ and ‘community’.

Like me, you probably have a range of different memberships. There are overlapping families I belong to (immediate and extended, on my side and Ali’s side). I belong to the Christian communities at St Paul’s Carlingford and at Campus Bible Study. But I’d also say that some part of my heart will always belong to Matthias Media, and the team that still pursues that vision. I’m a member of Concord Golf Club and of the Qantas Frequent Flyer program—one of them of far more importance than the other. I guess I’d also say that I’m part of the little community in my street here in West Ryde, and of the broader communities of Sydney, New South Wales and Australia.

So far I’ve been using the words ‘belong’ and ‘member’ and ‘community’ pretty much interchangeably, and in everyday speech we often do.

But these three words are also subtly different. They describe the same kind of thing from different angles, with different metaphors. It’s worth teasing out their nuances, even if we have room to do so only briefly.

Member

To be a ‘member’ of something is to be a part of a body; to be an arm or a nose or a spleen that derives its identity and function from the interconnected organism of which it is a part. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12, being baptized into Christ means becoming one of his body parts, which should put an end to all arrogance, divisions, jealousy, partiality and selfishness in general. You make no sense and you’re of no use as a member of this body unless you realise that you’re part of an interconnected whole, with Christ as the head. Being a ‘member’ is about seeking the well-being and benefit of the whole body, according to the direction and rule of its head. The body strengthens and builds itself as all the individual parts speak the truth of Christ to one another in love (Eph 4:14-16).

I guess being a member of the body of Christ looks kind of like this … 

Community

To be in a ‘community’ is a different metaphor. A community is a group of people who love or participate in a common object or person. A community is not one organic whole, like a body. It’s a group of people who share something, who are united by their ‘fellowship’ or ‘partnership’ in something. As Oliver O’Donovan puts it, a community has a “common object of love”. (He gets this from Augustine, who distinguished the City of God from the Earthly City by their different objects of love.)

Now for Christians, that centre or common object of love is Jesus Christ. Our fellowship or communion is with God through Jesus Christ (1 John 1:1-4). Because we know him and love him and have him in common, we are a community or fellowship of Christ. This means that whatever else we might share—common demographics, language, interests, or even just a common desire for friendship and mutuality—Christian community is not about any of these. It is fellowship in Jesus Christ. He is what we have in common, and through him we love one another. To build our community, therefore, we need to encounter each other more often and more deeply through him (that is, through his word, which is how he is present with us).

We might picture it like this …

Belonging

What about ‘belonging’? To belong to something means that we fit there, mos