God's New Community

New Testament Patterns For Today's Church

Graham Beynon

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844744817
• eBook ISBN: 9781844747177
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

When someone uses the word 'church', what comes into your mind? A building where a congregation meets? A room inside such a building? The main Sunday meeting? A denomination?
Graham Beynon shows that when the Bible talks about 'church', it is always referring only to people, and a particular sort of people at that. From a range of key passages in the New Testament, he explains what church is, what it is for, how it is to work, how it is to be led, and what it means to belong to God's new community in Christ.

1 : A breed apart

1 Peter 2:4–10

I would like to invite you to join my personal campaign. It is only a small venture and very limited in scope, but I think it is worth joining. My friends tell me I’m a bit sad about it, too focused on details, but I can’t let it go. ‘What is it?’ you ask. It’s a campaign for Christians to use the word ‘church’ properly. Let me explain.

I had been in my position as an associate minister for only a few weeks when it struck me that I’d heard the word ‘church’ used in about six different ways. Some people used it of the building where we met on Sundays; they said, ‘Let’s meet at the church.’ Others meant the large meeting room in the front of that building; when standing in a back hall they said, ‘Let’s go through to the church.’

I had heard someone else ask about the Methodist church, meaning the Methodist denomination, while someone else talked of ‘the church in this country’, referring to all the denominations and independent churches together. Others spoke of seeing me at church, by which they meant the main Sunday meeting. And finally, one kind soul had said how good it was to have my family as part of the church!

Which one of these comes into your mind when someone mentions the word ‘church’? I hope that the image that comes into your mind would not in the first instance be of buildings or institutions, or even activities or services, but of the faces of people. When the Bible talks about the church, it is only ever talking about people, and a particular sort of people at that.

There’s a passage in Peter’s first letter that helps us to understand a bit more about church, and my little campaign, and why it’s so important. The passage shows who the church is in two ways: people who believe in Jesus and people who belong to God.

People who believe in Jesus

When I was a student one of the discussions we used to have was about whether a Christian had to go to church. The outcome of these discussions was always something like, ‘You don’t have to, but you’d want to; it would be good for you to grow as a Christian.’ That reflects a very common approach to church today – it is there to help me grow as a Christian, and so it is important, but not vital. It is something I ought to opt into because it is supposed to be good for me – even if the reality sometimes seems a bit boring.

Peter paints a completely different picture in this passage. He says: ‘As you come to him, the living Stone – rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him – you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house’ (1 Peter 2:4–5). Let’s begin by asking who is this living Stone Peter is talking about here? He is the one who is ‘rejected by men but chosen by God’. That can mean only one person – Jesus. And when Peter says ‘come to Jesus’, he means ‘trust in Jesus’. Peter makes this clear in verse 6 where he backs up what he says by a quote from Isaiah about the chosen and precious cornerstone that God has placed in Zion. In fact, this passage sees Jesus as being the one who divides the world into two camps. In verses 7 and 8, we have on the one hand those who believe in Jesus and to whom he is precious, and on the other hand, those who don’t believe and reject him.

Those who reject him are like builders who look at a stone and say, ‘That one’s no good, we won’t have that one.’ But in fact, that is the stone which God has made the most important one, the capstone (verse 7).

So Jesus separates people; or rather people are separated by their attitude to him. There are those who believe, who come to him in trust, and there are those who do not believe, who reject him and stumble over him because they disobey the message (verse 8).

But our focus here is on what happens to those who believe in him. Peter says that as we come to Jesus, God is putting on his builders’ hat and starting construction. He says we ‘are being built into a spiritual house’. Peter has in mind here the temple in the Old Testament. That was the physical building where God was said to live with his people. When you went to the temple you went to ‘meet with God’. But now, Peter is saying, those who believe in Jesus are being built into a new structure that God is putting together where he lives with them. The difference is that this time the bricks in the walls are people, they are living stones.

Occasionally you hear people refer to a church building as ‘God’s house’. And even if people don’t use that language, many still think of such buildings as special places. That kind of attitude shows we haven’t really understood this passage. In the Old Testament, you could speak of the temple as ‘God’s house’, but now you can point at a group of people who believe in Jesus and call them God’s house. We see the same thing in Ephesians 2:22 which says that people who believe in Jesus are ‘being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit’. God is in the building trade all right – but he’s building a house for himself made up of people, not of bricks and mortar.

Peter then changes the metaphor from ‘living stones’ to ‘priests’: ‘to be a holy priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God in Christ Jesus’ (1 Peter 2:9). As you trust in Jesus, you become part of a temple, and you become a priest in the temple who offers spiritual sacrifices. Again he’s looking back to the priests in the Old Testament, who worked in the temple offering animal sacrifices. And he’s saying that those who come to Jesus become priests, who offer a new sort of sacrifice, a spiritual one.

The Old Testament mentions two sorts of sacrifice. First there were sacrifices for sin, where an animal was killed to take the punishment for something a person had done. That sort of sacrifice has been fulfilled in Jesus’ death on the cross, so we don’t offer those anymore. And secondly there were sacrifices of thanksgiving, which weren’t because you had messed up, but because you wanted to show your gratitude to God and your love for him. And this is the kind of sacrifice we offer now, but we do it in the way we live our whole lives (see Romans 12:1–2 for more on that).

So these verses in 1 Peter give us a picture of the church. It’s a new group that God is putting together, a new temple where God lives, a new priesthood who offer him new sacrifices. This is why Christians could forget about the temple in Jerusalem once Jesus had come, because all that the old temple symbolized is now going on in the church, among those who believe in Jesus.

This has some simple but profound implications:

Church = people who believe in Jesus

This is what defines the boundaries of the church. Jesus divides people into two camps, either you’re in or you’re out; and it’s those who trust in Jesus who are in.

By comparison, some people think that coming to church services or church meetings is what makes you part of the church. Or it’s being on a membership list, or being baptized. But none of those things can make you part of the church – only believing in Jesus can do that. So we need to distinguish between those who come to the meetings and the true church itself, which is only those who trust in Christ.

Not that we want to put people off coming! I would love it if more people who weren’t believers came to our meetings regularly. And of course they should experience the love of the community of the church without having to ‘sign up’. But God cements them into the wall of his house only as they come to believe in Jesus. We need to remember that ourselves and gently point it out to people who come.

People who believe in Jesus = church

If you believe in Jesus, you are part of the church. To put it another way, joining the church isn’t another decision you make after becoming a Christian. Peter said ‘as we come to’ Jesus, ‘we are being’ built. Coming to Jesus means you are automatically included in this new spiritual house that God is building, you instantly become a priest in this new priesthood God is forming. If you believe in Jesus, you are part of the church.

Remember the discussion I mentioned earlier about whether a Christian had to go to a church? The usual answer was that it wasn’t compulsory, but it would help you get on as a Christian. No-one said, ‘If you believe in Jesus, you are part of the church already.’ But that’s the truth of the matter: if you believe in Jesus, you are a member of the church whether you like it or not. So how are you going to live out your membership? That’s the real question, not, ‘Do you want to join?’

No Christian can say, ‘I’ve got my relationship with God, but that whole church thing, well, I’m not really part of that scene.’ You are part of the scene. If you have faith in Jesus, you are bound together with everyone else who has faith. You are like bricks in the same wall.

Of course, we might not always feel like we fit in, it might be hard work sometimes, we might even feel that we would like to get away from the rest of the church. But despite all that, we are part of it. As we come to Jesus, God builds us together.

So the assumption of the New Testament is that all Christians are part of a church. The letters are written to churches. When the word ‘you’ is used in the Bible it is almost always ‘you’ in the plural, that is, the group that is the church. In our culture, which is increasingly individualistic, this is a crucial point: we cannot be individualistic Christians. In trusting Jesus I am connected with others who also believe in him. We’ll come back to this in the next chapter and think about it some more there.

Church = people

This point may be obvious, but it’s so important it needs to be underlined: the church is solely made up of people. That means that any organizational bits of it, any institutional structures and especially any physical components like buildings are not the church. They are only things that serve the church.

We’ve got a joke in our family about this. When my daughter Cara was about four, she was very good at spotting classic Anglican church buildings. You know the ones built a few hundred years ago with spires and all the rest. She would often say to me, ‘Look, there’s a church, Daddy.’ I’d agree with her, and she was very pleased with her church-spotting abilities. But one day it finally occurred to me that I was teaching her something terrible. The next time she said ‘Look Daddy, there’s a church’, I had to say, ‘You know that’s not actually a church Cara, that’s only a building, where a church meets.’ And now if you are ever in our car, you might hear Cara proudly announcing, ‘Look Daddy, a church building.’

The fact is that the word translated ‘church’ in our Bibles had none of the associations that the word ‘church’ has today. It could be translated ‘gathering’ or ‘meeting’ or ‘assembly’. It could be used of any gathering of people who met for a particular purpose. It had nothing to do with buildings, or institutions, or even the activities of that group of people, it just referred to them as a group gathered together. That’s why in the New Testament there are many references like, ‘the church of God in Corinth’. That is, ‘God’s gathering in Corinth’, the gathering of God’s people who live in that town. Over time, of course, the word started to get used only of Christian gatherings, and then of Christian institutions and buildings and so on.

Our family usually walks to our church meetings on a Sunday morning. As we rounded a corner, the church building came into sight, with people arriving at it, and one of my sons said, ‘People are going into the church.’ My wife wisely pointed out that actually, ‘The church is going into a building’!

And so we return to my campaign to restore the proper use of the word ‘church’ to mean those who believe in Jesus. In one sense, of course, it doesn’t matter how we use the word, as long as we know what we mean by it. The problem is I really don’t think we help ourselves. We keep slipping into thinking of church as buildings, programmes, committees, synods and institutions, whereas we should think of those people we know who also trust in Christ. My campaign doesn’t have a lot of supporters but I’d encourage you to think about joining.

So Peter describes the church as people who believe in Jesus. But he also tells us something else about this group of people that make up the church; they are people who belong to God.

People who belong to God

In verse 9 Peter uses a number of different ideas to describe this group who believe in Jesus. He says this group is:

• chosen by God: he’s singled them out, chosen them to be

his, to be distinct from the rest of the world;

• a royal priesthood: they have new a relationship with

God where they have access to him, and offer him sacrifices;

• a holy nation: they have been set apart by God;
• those who belong to him, literally, they are ‘for his possession’: they are those he owns.

There are a number of different ideas in that list, but I think they all focus on belonging to God. What is going on is that God is calling people into a relationship with him; calling people to belong to him, and to be distinct from the rest of the world.

Some people at our church have recently adopted a child. What were they doing in that process? They were choosing someone they wanted to care for, to grow to know and love, and to be bound together with. Now that they have their lovely little girl, you watch them doing all those things. They chose to adopt a child to have a relationship with her. And that’s what God is doing with the church – he chooses people for a relationship with him.

However, the church is different from adoption, in that God is more than a parent. He is also the king we are to live for. So when God chooses people, it is like parents choosing a child, but it is also like a king choosing his subjects. God wants people who belong to him, whom he can live with as their God and they his people. That is the basic idea of church. God’s people living in a relationship with God.

This point raises an interesting question: when was the first church? Some people talk about the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came, as the birthday of the church. In fact, in one church I was in we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to the church on Pentecost Sunday (to most people’s embarrassment, I have to say). It is certainly true that something very special happened at Pentecost that affects the church, but that is not when the first church was formed. The idea of church is people belonging to God, in a relationship with him. So the first church was actually back in the Garden of Eden. God created people who were to live with him as their God, people who belonged to him. So Eden is the first picture of ‘church’. We could even say that God created the world and people in it so there could be ‘church’!

Adam and Eve of course then turned their backs on God and rebelled against him, and they were sent out of the garden and out of God’s presence. The relationship was broken, church was over. But God immediately put plans in place to regain that relationship. In fact, we can see all of God’s plans of salvation as plans to recreate church.

In the Old Testament, we see that most clearly in the people of Israel. It all starts with God calling Abraham, and then acting to save his descendants, the nation of Israel, from slavery in Egypt. God calls them to belong to him. Actually the phrases we have looked at from 1 Peter 2:9–10, are from the Old Testament, describing Israel. For example, in Exodus 19:5–6 we read: ‘you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ And in Deuteronomy 7:6: ‘you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.’

These things were originally true of the nation of Israel. They were the ‘church’. But we know that Israel was only ever a picture of what God would achieve in Jesus. And that is why Peter uses all these Old Testament terms now to refer to Christians. What Israel symbolized is now fulfilled in the Christian church. No longer limited to one race in one geographical region of the world, it has become a multi-ethnic, international community. So the church began in Eden, it was then restored in Israel but now is those who believe in Jesus.

Ultimately, the church will find its fulfilment when Jesus comes again and recreates this world. When we look at descriptions of the new heavens and new earth in the book of Revelation we find they are given in terms of this relationship, for example, Revelation 21:3 says: ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.’ So when we think of ‘church’, we’re talking about a big part of God’s plans; in fact, it’s the centre-piece of God’s plans. God’s intention was always to have a relationship with the people he’s made. That’s what was lost when we rebelled against him; that’s what he has made possible again through the death of Jesus. And now as we believe in Jesus, we become part of this people who belong to God, who enjoy a relationship with him.

I hope you can see that the church is a key part of history; God’s acts of salvation are so that he has a people who belong to him. He saves people to create the church. That’s how important it is.

And so what God is involved in at the moment is the business of calling people to belong to him, through Jesus. He is building his church. He is creating a new restored people out of this rebellious world. Calling them out of darkness into his wonderful light, calling them to receive his mercy (1 Peter 2:10). God is forming a new people who belong to him; he’s doing it through Jesus, and one day it will all be fulfilled and perfected in heaven.

So what do we get up to in the mean time? We’ll be looking at the purpose of the church in a later chapter, but Peter mentions a couple of things we should be doing. First, God’s people declare his praises. He has made us his people for a reason, ‘that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light’ (1 Peter 2:9). The phrase in italics picks up on a passage in Isaiah, where God talks about ‘the people I formed for myself, that they may proclaim my praise’ (Isaiah 43:21). People were praising God for what he had done for them; for his wonderful acts in saving them and making them his people. And it’s the same here in 1 Peter: God is the one who has called us out of darkness into his wonderful light. He’s the one who has shown us mercy in Jesus. And so we are to declare how good he has been to us. We are to declare his mercy and his kindness. God wants this new people he has chosen to belong to him to be people who praise him for it. That’s one of our purposes as church, to tell each other, and to tell the rest of the world about God’s goodness in Jesus. Institutions don’t do that; buildings don’t do that; committees and sy...

Table of contents

• God’s new community
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 : A breed apart
• 2 : We are family
• 3 : Which way is up?
• 4 : What does it mean to belong?
• 5 : Concrete love
• 6 : All you need is love
• 7 : Follow your leader
• 8 : Making it work
• 9 : Painting a picture
• Further reading