Dear Ray,
There is a question I find uncomfortable because it reaches into things I have loved: when we welcome someone into the church life, are we receiving a person who belongs to Christ, or quietly waiting for that person to become like us?
I do not mean agreement about Christ Himself. I mean the smaller expectations that gather around our fellowship: familiar expressions, an approved manner of speaking, recognizable meeting habits, and an instinct for knowing which questions may safely be asked. These things can become so familiar that we stop noticing them. Someone arriving from outside notices them immediately.
I have been considering this alongside the struggles described in Acts and Galatians. They help me see how easily something precious can become entangled with something inherited.
The Jewish believers in Jerusalem truly loved the Lord. Their history, Scriptures, worship, and hope had prepared them to recognize Israel’s Messiah. We should not speak as though their Jewish identity were itself a spiritual defect. Jesus was Jewish. So were the apostles. God had worked through that history.
The conflict arose when some insisted that Gentile believers must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses. A practice belonging to Israel’s covenant life was being imposed as necessary for Gentile acceptance. The question went to the heart of the gospel: was the grace given in Christ sufficient?
Acts 15 does not present Paul standing alone against an entirely mistaken Jerusalem church. Peter testified to God’s work among the Gentiles. James supported receiving them without imposing circumcision. The apostles and elders explicitly disowned the unauthorized teaching that had unsettled them. There was real fellowship and a shared defense of grace, even amid disagreement.
Yet agreement did not remove every pressure. In Galatians 2, Paul describes Peter withdrawing from table fellowship with Gentiles at Antioch because he feared the circumcision group. Paul confronted him because that conduct contradicted the truth of the gospel. The issue had become visible at a table: people who had eaten together were being separated.
That troubles me more than an abstract dispute. Peter knew that God had received these believers. Yet fear of other believers affected whom he could comfortably sit beside. A person can possess light and still find that the expectations of his own circle govern his response.
I wonder where that happens in me.
Can I receive a brother whose language sounds unfamiliar? Can I recognize Christ in a sister whose way of praying does not resemble the way I learned? Can someone question a practice without my inwardly moving that person farther from the table?
This brings me to the Christian fellowship we have known as the Lord’s recovery, shaped in part by the ministries of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee. I remain grateful for what I have received there. That gratitude is one reason the question matters. Something genuinely given by the Lord deserves to be distinguished from the expectations that accumulate around it.
I want to be careful about assigning those expectations to a nationality. Every Christian community takes shape through particular languages, histories, families, personalities, and institutions. Chinese believers are not all alike, any more than American believers are. Respect, control, loyalty, fear, generosity, and ambition can appear in any culture. Naming an ethnicity does not explain a spiritual problem.
The question is closer to home: what have we learned to expect from one another, and have those expectations acquired an authority that belongs to Christ?
Respect for experienced brothers can be beautiful. It becomes troubling when an honest question threatens a relationship. A shared vocabulary can help us communicate. It becomes restrictive when we cannot hear the same reality expressed in different words. Regular meetings can sustain fellowship. They become a misleading measure when attendance tells us more about a person’s standing among us than the actual condition of that person’s life.
Consider a simple possibility. A believer visits and speaks, somewhat awkwardly, about learning to forgive someone. He does not use our expressions. He may describe the experience in words borrowed from another Christian tradition. Do we listen for the work of Christ in him, or immediately begin translating and correcting him?
Correction may sometimes be needed. But if our first response is to repair his vocabulary, we may miss the person standing before us. We may teach him how to sound acceptable before we have received what Christ has given him to share.
The danger is that we may have difficulty distinguishing the revelation of Christ from the cultural container in which that revelation reached us.
I do not think the answer is a church without practices, teaching, or order. People who share life will develop habits. They will arrange times to meet, learn songs, explain Scripture, and make practical decisions. Paul himself gave churches instruction. Freedom in Christ does not mean that every preference is equally helpful or that nobody may be corrected.
But a helpful arrangement must remain open to examination. We should be able to explain how it serves people and why we practice it. When a custom becomes a test of spiritual belonging, something has shifted. A servant has begun occupying the place of a master.
Paul’s different responses concerning Timothy and Titus help me here. Acts 16 records Timothy’s circumcision in connection with ministry among Jews who knew his family background. Galatians 2 records that Titus, a Greek, was not compelled to be circumcised, even under pressure. The outward action cannot be judged apart from what it means in the situation. Something freely undertaken to serve others becomes another matter when demanded as the price of acceptance.
Perhaps we need that freedom: enough love to accommodate others, and enough clarity to resist turning accommodation into a requirement imposed on everyone.
I also need to apply this to myself. Dissatisfaction with familiar church patterns can develop its own culture. Those who question an institution can begin measuring one another by how strongly they criticize it. We can demand our own vocabulary of freedom and regard quieter believers as compromised. Then we have recreated the same pressure under different words.
I do not want agreement with my concerns to become another entrance requirement. A brother who loves the meetings I find difficult may still supply Christ to me. If my critique makes that impossible, the critique itself needs to come under the Lord’s light.
What I long for is fellowship spacious enough for genuine difference and grounded enough in Christ to remain truthful. We could ask questions without assuming disloyalty. We could receive correction without surrendering conscience. We could honor those who have served us without making their every preference binding upon those who come afterward.
Paul’s travail was that Christ would be formed in the believers. That brings me back to the living purpose beneath all our arrangements. Are people becoming more able to live in Christ and love one another? Can the quiet person contribute? Can the unfamiliar person be received? Can we recognize grace before it learns our accent?
Ray, I am thankful for the table at which we have been fed. I simply do not want us to mistake the familiar manners around that table for the Life that feeds us. Christ has received people whose histories and expressions differ from ours. May His welcome become real in the way we receive them.
With love and respect,
Brent
