The Family Math

Enjoying a meal together after we finished our book study.

You’d think after meeting nearly every Sunday for two years, plus spending time together during the week, that our group would be fairly comfortable around each other by now.

We’re getting there, I think.

Part of it comes from having so many varying church traditions ingrained in us. It can be hard to break free of those and be comfortable with who we are in Christ, outside the confines of an institution and having a specific institutional role, like Sunday School teacher, small group member or whatever. We are also having to learn to love and accept our brothers and sisters where we are because this type of fellowship doesn’t work if we’re all secretly judging each other. That doesn’t exactly nurture openness.

What do I mean by where we are? Basically that we all have different backgrounds, different gifts, even different beliefs, but we are all unified under the headship of Christ. He is the vine. We are the branches. He’s the head. We’re all a bunch of body parts, and we aren’t all elbows.

Ultimately this whole thing has been a big experiment for us, with a lot of trial and error. I think that’s probably the way it always will be. But, like I told Bobby recently, we are learning what it means to work out our faith together.

Our group recently completed a book study of Pagan Christianity. We actually saw a couple more people join the fellowship at the beginning of it, and as we’re starting a new study this weekend, we will welcome another couple. The group’s ever-changing, but the core and the focus are becoming clearer, I think.

Throughout the Pagan study, there were starts and stops, but in the end, it was clear that we had started learning to actually communicate with each other. Disagreements weren’t the end of the world; even criticizing the book was fine.

We’re learning.

So where do we go now? We are starting a study on the follow-up to Pagan Christianity, which is called Reimagining Church. Pagan was designed to sort of deconstruct ideas about the institution, and Reimagining is supposed to provide a glimpse at what organic fellowship should actually look like.

It’s a slow process, and it’s hard not to get frustrated with it. It’s hard not to get frustrated with each other.

But we’re learning.

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If you’ve been following my series, you may have some questions about the idea of organic church fellowship, and I’d love to try to answer them. The next couple of weeks I will be posting some thoughts from a brother and sister that we are in fellowship with, but after that I’d love to do a post with answers to some of your questions. Leave them as a comment here, or if you want them to be private, you can email mistymath (at) gmail (dot) com. Looking forward to hearing from you!

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New to the series? You can catch up by reading Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6. The purpose of this series is to share my experience with organic church fellowship, never to tear down other folks. This is part of an ongoing series I post on Fridays.

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