One Foot in the World 1: Growing

Gum:               What I want to know is this: who are all these women?

Pauline:          Pauline.

Petrova:          Petrova.

Posy:                Posy.

Gum:               I brought entrancements home. I brought babies.

Sylvia:             Babies grow up, Gum.

Gum:               Yes, I can see that.

Ballet Shoes (2007)¹

Hey, you. Brother or sister in Christ of mine; dearly beloved heir of your heavenly Father; redeemed and resurrected home of the Holy Spirit – can I ask you to consider a slightly personal question?

Are you – you personally – actually growing in the faith at the moment?

 

I stuck ‘growing’ into the search box on my favourite stock photo website and thought this was too adorable an image not to include in this post.

Are you increasing in love for your fellow-believers? Are you serving them more and more wholeheartedly? Are you becoming more willing to encourage, to rebuke, to drop everything and help, to give up what the world would call your own for their sake? Are you getting holier in your conduct? Are you getting better at resisting temptations? Are you incorporating higher degrees of the spiritual disciplines into your everyday life? Are you praying for longer and with greater fervency than before? Are you understanding the scriptures in ever greater detail? Are you being spurred on by them to seek God more desperately? Are you getting bolder and more urgent in your evangelism?

Are you growing? And growing, moreover, at a fast enough rate for that growth to be discernible in you? Are you growing at a rate that makes you more excited by what God’s doing in you than frustrated by what he isn’t?

And if not, why not?

No, genuinely, though: why not? If you’re not growing as much as you ought to be, then what’s stopping you? If nothing is more important than living for Jesus, then your stagnancy in the faith is indisputably a Problem; what might you do about it? More to the point, what are you going to do about it? What needs to change?

I suspect some of you might be mumbling something about a need to read your Bible more and pray more and go to more churchy things. But you’ve kind of already tried that, haven’t you? You tried it, and you were determined, but somehow you still lost momentum and slid to the snail’s pace of growth that’s now become normal for you. Reading your Bible more and praying more and going to more churchy things wasn’t enough – and yet you could never turn round and actually say that, because these are the means of grace God has provided, aren’t they, so if they’re not achieving what they’re supposed to achieve in you, the only explanation is that you must be deficient in some way. Right?

But what does the Bible say is supposed to be causing us to grow?

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.²

Growth in the faith is the exact issue that’s being dealt with here. This is about how we grow from children easily frightened and led astray to adults secure in truth and unity. This is about how we grow into a closer reflection of the image of our Lord. This is about how the rest of the body grows up into the head. So what, then, makes the body grow? Well, it does. That last sentence is incisively clear: if the parts of the body are working properly, it ought to be building itself up.

In other words, adelphoi, if we are not growing, it’s because we’re failing each other.

A number of Christians I know have said to me at some stage that they don’t really feel as if they’re growing in the faith. Conversations of this type have always saddened me, and I think I’ve always nursed some measure of an idea that the person in question’s church context was part of the problem, but that was always under the unspoken assumption that it was kind of the individual’s duty to try to relocate to a better church context, just as it was the individual’s duty to be reading the Bible and praying more and so forth. Something different happened this Monday just gone, when I sat opposite a slightly younger Christian – a slightly younger Christian with whom I spend quite a lot of time in various contexts – and heard her express the same sentiments. Of a sudden, instead of looking at her and wondering what she ought to be changing in her life in order to grow – how much more Bible she ought to be reading, and how much more she ought to be praying, and which different churchy things she ought to be going to – I looked at her and was assailed by this sudden jolt of conviction. This is my fault. This is because I’m not doing my job properly. I am failing my sister.

Now, obviously it’s not just my fault if a fellow-believer I know well isn’t growing, but as surely as I don’t bear all of the blame, I bear some of it. What needs to change if we’re to grow? We do. We the members of the body need to start working properly so as to build one another up in love. And how do we do that? Well, the answer to that is as plain as day from that Ephesians passage I quoted above: through the exercise of our higher giftings. Let the teachers teach, the shepherds shepherd, the prophets prophesy; let the evangelists preach the good news, and the apostles be sent out to found new local manifestations of the one universal Church. Let each of us undertake the work of ministry for the building up of the body of Christ.

If you’re not exercising your higher gifting, why not? Because nobody’s ever told you you have one, let alone what it might be? Because you’re still under the impression that ministry is the prerogative of those paid to do it, not your mere little untrained self? Because the church context you participate in doesn’t see room for people like you to do that job (*cough* women in teaching roles *cough*)? Do those not strike you, on second consideration, as just more ways in which the collective of your fellow-believers is failing you, as you are failing them?

You know what I think? I think, for all our knowing in our heads that Jesus deserves and demands our everything, we’ve still got one foot in the world. We’re happy to take our ticket to salvation, and we’re even happy to make some substantial lifestyle adjustments – read the Bible and pray more, et cetera³ – but we’re not happy to demolish those worldly structures that get in the way of our ministering to our fellow believers as we have been called to do. We take the thing so far but no further. We’re not prepared to rock the boat.

But look, brother, sister, if you’re not growing, then the boat needs to be rocked. You’re never going to bring about growth in yourself by yourself: God gives that work to the body at large. He gives the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, for the building up of the whole Church. If you’re not growing, that’s because your church community isn’t working properly, namely because they’re not exercising their higher giftings; and if they’re not exercising their higher giftings, then, for the sake of one another and of the glory of God, we need to be tearing down whatever worldly interference it is that stands in their way.

Footnotes

¹ Pauline and Posy are both impossibly irritating; Petrova is a darling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOjT_89i4P4.

² From Ephesians 4: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=eph+4&version=ESVUK. You’ll notice I’ve stuck to the ESV today. More of my thoughts on this passage, to fairly similar effect, but slightly less intense and with a Harry Potter analogy attached, are in ‘Mere Muggles’, under March 2018 in the box on the right.

³ Since having watched The King and I last week, I keep thinking of it every time I say ‘et cetera’. On which note, here’s a video I didn’t know I wanted to exist until I saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zwRHAKMvrQ.