A version of this essay was originally published in Deeply Rooted magazine in March of 2017. The church described here dissolved the year after I wrote this post, and since then we have been members of a new congregation, which we also love.
But these themes continue to resonate for us: I feel more deeply than ever that it is a profound gift to be a part of the body of Christ, serving right where he has placed us—even (or especially?) during seasons when it seems hard to connect with others in that body. Through these seasons, Christ continues to shape us as he invites his people to lay our desires down again and yet again—following the pattern of surrender that he has modeled so beautifully for us.
Being a member of a church is not unlike being married. The first few years for me were like something from the end of a story, where the heroine decides that at last, after everything she’s been through, all is well. I was glad to be there with my husband, making friends and singing my heart out to old hymns and understanding new things about God with the suddenness of a light switched on in a dark room. All was well.
But a membership covenant is no more an end to things than a wedding is. Five or six years into life at our church, I found myself wondering uncomfortably if those early years were not an epilogue but a prelude to something much bigger, something I had not fully understood when I signed up.
Our church consists mostly of college students and young families—people who find it hard to stay in one place when the best jobs are elsewhere. So every few years, there’s a turnover at our church: people leave for work, for school, to serve overseas, or to tend to sick family members in other cities. But doctrinal issues draw people away, too. Those issues leave gaps in the fellowship that are painful to look at, harder to fill.
My husband and I have made and lost a lot of friends in the twelve years we’ve been at our church, and that has left its mark on us. Every time a family climbs on stage for a parting prayer, every time we hear that another friend we love is looking elsewhere for fellowship, an old grief stirs, one that has not had time to heal between departures. Every few years the construction of our church body changes: it shifts like a kaleidoscope, and as the gems settle, we find ourselves tossed to a new place in the pattern.
Sometimes, that’s easy: we slip quickly into friendships with new members who share our theology, our interests, our family culture. But sometimes our new place is harder to find. We are tempted to curl up protectively then, afraid to reach out to others because if we make new friends, we reason, they might leave. And if they leave, it will hurt. Meanwhile, we watch as community springs up among those around us, and we feel the way our daughters do at recess when everyone else plays a game that looks enviably fun, but no one pauses to invite them in.
We feel, as our first grader puts it, left out.
And feeling left out is not a bad thing. It is not a pleasant thing, but it is not bad, because it forces us to make a decision: either we roll up like a pill bug in its shell, or we expose those soft and vulnerable parts and do the hard work of showing up each Sunday and making friends, even though we feel lonely, like the only one of our kind, like the work of making small talk might kill us. We either stand on the edge of the playground and wait for an invitation to the game, or we grab the next kid to run by and ask, “Hey, can I play, too?”
The beauty of feeling left out is that it can spur us to reach out to others—rather than waiting for others to draw us in.
The Lord has given us differing gifts. We have known this since some adult told us, probably after we tried and failed to play four square or to draw penguins, that we’re all special, every one. We’re all good at something, she said, even though it might take us a while to find out what our something is. And that’s true. What changes when we come to Christ is that we can no longer pretend that those gifts, whatever they are, are ours to use as we please.
When we become a part of a church, our gifts and experiences become part of that church body, too. In the book of Romans, Paul writes, “For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another” (12:4–5). We fit not because we feel like we fit there (though sometimes we do, and that is a nice perk), but because the Lord has placed us in that church body.
He is the Lord: he gets to send us on hard assignments into zones that aren’t always warm and welcoming, where people may or may not appreciate our love of language, our knack with numbers, our zeal for X-Men memorabilia. We may be the only couple with small children or the only couple without small children, or the only young person in a body of old folks. Our profession, ethnic background, or theology may set us a little apart.
But perhaps we are in our particular limb of the church body precisely because there is no one else there like us.
If the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. (1 Corinthians 12:16–18, emphasis added)
An ear’s life is not easy. There is only one other ear, after all, and it’s on the far side of the face. We may need to be content with befriending an eyelash, some skin cells, a few molars, and the seventy-five strands of hair that seem so content with one another, so sunk in their camaraderie that they sometimes forget that they would be deaf without us.
Because that is the heart of it: we feel most left out in the places where our gifts are sorely needed. When we feel like there is no one like us in our church body, no one who understands us or appreciates our gifts, then perhaps it is our assignment to help others understand: to open up about the struggles of being a widow, a single parent, the only person (apparently) wrestling with a particular doctrine. Perhaps we are meant to invite others into our lives rather than wait for an invitation into theirs.
But inviting others into our lives is hard work, especially when we are hurting, and there is a good reason for that.
When we open our door to others, we work against a powerful enemy. Satan’s lies are most persuasive when told to us in isolation, and so he strives to separate us: one niggling hurt, sprung from a comment in the cry room or an unreturned text, sows bitterness like an invasive vine. If left unplucked, that vine will eventually cut us off from one another and from the rest of the body as well.
But sometimes the bitterness springing up around us is rooted not in miscommunication or accidental sin but in a legitimate hurt. The people closest to us are capable of wounding us most deeply, so if we’re connected to the body in a healthy way, we will feel it sharply when another part of the body sins. It will hurt. That is a healthy response. Something would be wrong with the body if it did not register pain.
What we do after another wounds us, however, is crucial: we can recoil from the sting and leave the body completely, we can let bitterness crystallize into a protective shell around us, or we can practice deep and costly forgiveness toward those who hurt us.
If we view the church as a collection of like-minded believers, then the temptation to leave or to isolate ourselves when we’ve been hurt is strong. But the church isn’t a collection of like-minded believers: like marriage, the church is a drawing together of disparate individuals into a new creation—a body of members who function together in sickness and in health, and who are led by the One who came “not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
He is the one who calls us to lay down our lives for others, to stop measuring our worth by any metric but his, to trust him to lead the church the way he deems best. He asks us to stop shielding the place where we were wounded and allow him to heal us completely.
Because he knows what we often forget: we do not fit anywhere on this earth.
The ache that we feel to fit in can only be relieved by Jesus and will only be completely relieved on the other side of this life. We long for the kind of fellowship that God the Father enjoys with the Son and the Spirit; we long to know and to be known. But being a human, made in the image of God but dwelling in a fallen world, means living out of joint with those around us. Proverbs 14:10 touches on this sorrow: “The heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy.”
Being a part of a church body whets our appetite for belonging but never fully satisfies it, because the church does not fit neatly around us, not in our current shape. Like marriage, church membership shapes us; it whittles away the bits of us that are not suited for heaven. We feel left out not because we do not fit with this church body or that group of friends, but because we do not fit anywhere yet: we were never meant to fit in this world, but we are not yet ready for heaven.
We are all outsiders, and being an outsider hurts—sometimes unbearably so. That pain has an inward pull, but let’s resist it: let us remember instead the one who cut himself off from perfect communion with his Father to live among a people who could not possibly understand him (Phil. 2:5–7). Let us remember that Jesus—the only person who could ever be entirely faultless in a conflict—was mocked and murdered by those he came to rescue. He did not surround himself with like-minded people, because no one had a mind like his. Instead, he surrounded himself with sinners in need of grace—the very people who surround us every day. The people whose need for him is, most often, the one thing we all have in common.
So let us submit to the work of our God, who is preparing us to fit with him there. He loves us and accepts us; we have value because we are his. If we steep ourselves in that truth, we can invite others in, even when we are suffering. We can open ourselves up to those who seem closed toward us. We can reach out to others even when our arms can’t quite close the gap, and we can trust the Lord Jesus to bridge the remaining divide.
May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans 15:5–6)
"We may be the only couple with small children or the only couple without small children, or the only young person in a body of old folks...But perhaps we are in our particular limb of the church body precisely because there is no one else there like us."
These words fairly leaped off the screen. They describe our church situation perfectly and it NEVER ONCE occurred to me that this was why God has us at this particular church: BECAUSE there is no one else in our age bracket. It isn't easy being odd-man-out, and it can drive a desire to want to find a place where everybody knows your name, so to speak. To leave where God has us would be seeking a place where we would be served, instead of where God has us to serve.
Very powerful words written here. Thank you for the exhortation.
Wow, reading this right now was so perfect! Our pastors are preaching through 1 Corinthians currently, most recently in chapters 12 through 14. And much of this resonates with my experiences in multiple churches.
Have you ever read Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer? The first portion touches on many of the same topics you touch on here. So convicting and encouraging!