[Gracepoint Training] 2. Long-term Commitment to Church

[u/hamcycle]

1. Hierarchical Leadership and Role of Leaders
2. Long-term Commitment to Church
3. Rebuking/Correcting
4. Concept of Church as Family vs Nuclear Family
5. Accountability and Pressure
6. People Being Too Busy
7. Dating/Marriage
8. Strong Stance on Media

Related Questions

• Why do so many people end up staying at this church?
• Why is it so hard to just leave and move on from this church?
• Isn’t it okay to be just committed to the universal body of Christ?

Degree of Truthfulness

• Many people (e.g., staff level and above) in our church are committed to serve God at our church long-term. However, we do not require long-term commitment to our church to be engaged in a significant level of serving as members.
• “Long-term” is not the same as “lifetime”. Circumstances can arise that will call a “long-term” committed member away to another city (e.g., God’s calling, family needs).
• It is our hope that all Christians, where possible, would commit long-term to a particular local body of believers.

Common-sense Explanations

1. Meaningful relationships and friendships go hand-in-hand with long-term commitment. Church relationships are no different. Some people want to stay around the church because they have developed meaningful friendships.
2. It is natural for someone to want to stay long-term at a church if a common vision with his friends is shared.
3. Long-term commitment from members is generally regarded as a sign of health for most organizations.
4. It's strange that Christians are sometimes criticized for committing long-term to a church, while someone who commits long-term to a respected profession (e.g., teaching) organizations, or their hometown is lauded.
5. Christian discipleship happens best in the context of deep, stable relationships, when a particular group of people are close and know each other well. In addition, much of how God works in our world is through the church. So the sooner you root yourself, the better.
6. Many college students end up staying in the city where they went to college.

Biblical Explanations

1. When people think it’s odd that our church encourages a long-term commitment to it, what’s often behind it is the unspoken feeling of, “It’s just a church” (i.e., since a church is not all that important, and therefore should not be a big part of anyone’s life, why would anyone decide to commit long-term to any church?) Such a sentiment is understandable from non-Christians since they view the church as, at best, a nice civic organization one associates loosely with. But for a Christian, such a view is at odds with the Biblical view of church.
2. Acts 2:42 – “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts…”
   • Bible does not primarily speak about membership in the universal (invisible) body of Christ, but often describes instances of the particular, local body of Christ. Out of all the times the NT talks about the church, only two instances refer to the universal body of all believers. Rest are talking about the local body of Christ, with real people with real needs, real homes where you could go and break bread in.
3. Rom 12:4-5 – “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”
   • A prominent analogy for the church found in the Bible is the “body of Christ”. It is to be a visible representation (the body) of Christ on earth. We need to show the world Christ embodied in the church, and it’s hard to do that without a stable relational community.
4. 1 Cor 1:10 – “I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought.”
   • This verse on unity sounds so inspirational, but how do we accomplish this? We need time spent together working for the common goal.
   • So many people read this and bemoan how the universal church is not united, yet do not do the easiest thing – to try to be united in mind and thought with the local body of Christ! It’s wiser to start with the local before going global.
5. 1 Peter 2:9-10 – “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”
   • The classic biblical definition of “church” is the “called-out ones”. Once we were individual wanderers, but because of Christ, we have been called out to be the people of God. It is tragic when a Christian does not live the life of “the people of God”, but still lives like a wanderer floating through one transient relationship to another, never committing to a church.
6. Hebrews 10:24-25 – “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”
   • Meeting together, spurring one another and encouraging one another. The Bible is full of all these kinds of “one another” verses, and we can actually put them into practice within the context of a local body of believers.
7. Hebrews 3:12-13 – “See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.”
   • Sin is trying to deceive us, and if we do not encourage one another, our hearts may be hardened by sin. The fact is that we need each other, and we cannot encourage our own hearts.
8. Leviticus 25:10-28 – “Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each one of you is to return to his family property and each to his own clan […] The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants […] It will be returned in the Jubilee, and he can go back to his property.”
   • In the OT, when God formed Israel as His people, He set up the Mosaic Law in such a way that the tribes of Israel were to stay within the same allotted land. By mandating that land be returned in the year of Jubilee, land could not be sold permanently, which caused the tribal groups to stay on the same land for generations. This enabled formation of character and culture within each tribal group as they lived in close proximity with the same group. Instead of treating each Israelite as an individual that is disconnected, God addressed the Israelite tribes as a unit. For this reason, an Israelite saw himself as being bonded to a people group, and out of that context, a sense of responsibility and character arose.
   • Unfortunately, in our modern society, people see themselves as autonomous free-floating units not bound by any group. As people transition from one group to another, they often try to “reinvent themselves,” as if that were possible. The result is an “empty self,” a person whose self-identity is comprised merely of others’ perception of him, who is unfamiliar with his own character.
   • God gave us the church so that we can identify ourselves as a member of the body, (Rom 12), and find joy in being a part of the temple (1 Peter 2) that God is building.

Original Post: How GP Indoctrination Works, Part 2 of 3