#ReExamine 1 Corinthians 13
NOTE> Ask yourself, your team, your congregation: If this (*) is true...now needs to/can we change?
Daniel K. Williams is a historian working at Ashland University and the author of The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.
The church exists as a local expression of the family of God and it’s Jesus’ plan for training his disciples to love one another and become more like him.
Love can’t be practiced effectively in solitude. We can pray and read the Bible alone. But we can’t practice loving other people if we’re not in relationship with them.
*Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 13 to an entire congregation—not to a single Christian individual living in isolation. There were times in Paul’s life when he was isolated from the community of believers and unable to worship with others, like when he was in prison. But even in isolation, he prayed fervently for other disciples and longed to be reunited with them.
One cannot read the first few chapters of 1 Thessalonians without realizing that Paul was a man who intensely longed to be with other believers—to pray with them and to share their joys and sorrows in their walks with the Lord.
As evangelicals have rightly noted, God’s Spirit and gift of salvation are not defined by church walls. But without an embodied community of believers, we’re limited in our ability to learn how to love other followers of Jesus. We’re hindered in our capacity to experience the unity with other Christians that Jesus prayed for just before his crucifixion. And we’re less likely to experience the blessings that come with being part of a local expression of Jesus’ Bride.
Early American evangelicalism may have been a reaction against unconverted ministers and spiritually dead churches, but it should never have become a movement against church itself. And maybe now, amid a “Great Dechurching,” we can rediscover a robust evangelical theology of the church.
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Hey. I love this as I think Love is a central doctrine that is objectively missing. I written a bit about how Paul makes the bold statement that love is greater than faith, a statement sorely missing from the theological discussion of....the last centuries. One can not read anything in the NT, I'd suggest, without this central frame.