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Breathe
by
Wade Hodges
Do me a favor
and take a few deep breathes.
Thanks. Not
only do you feel slightly more relaxed, but you’ve also
helped illustrate the rhythmic nature of Christian
ministry. Like the act of breathing, the ministry of the church should
be a perfectly balanced combination of inhaling and
exhaling.
First, we are
inhaled by God; gathered into a people.
Just as Jesus gathered his earliest disciples
around him for the purpose of instruction and training, we
too have been gathered by God to hear the gospel and learn
to practice it as his church.
The very word church means “the called out
ones” or better yet, “those who have been gathered.”
A Christian then is someone who has been gathered
by God. But
there is more to being a Christian than just being
gathered.
We are also
scattered, exhaled by God into the world.
Jesus would occasionally scatter his disciples by
sending them out to minister to the surrounding villages
only to gather them again and have them report back to him
the results of their venture.
This scattering in the gospels anticipates the mass
scattering we see in Acts that is predicted by Jesus in
1:8 and realized in chapter 7 after the death of Stephen.
Each Sunday this pattern is repeated as the
gathered church is scattered back into the world.
What’s the
purpose of all this gathering and scattering?
The answer comes to us in the form of another
illustration from the body. As blood circulates through our body it enters the heart and
is pumped into our lunges where it is cleansed and
oxygenated, then it is sent back out into the far regions
of the body to fight disease and energize (Thanks to
Darrell Guder for this metaphor).
When we come together as a church, we come to be
cleansed and oxygenated by the gospel, which is proclaimed
in our midst through our singing, praying, preaching,
sharing, eating, and drinking.
Then we are sent back into the world to fight the
disease of evil and energize those around us with the
gospel we’ve been infused with at the gathering.
All this begs the question: which part of this
process is more important?
Which is more essential to the life of the church,
being gathered or being scattered?
Which is more essential to the life of the church,
inhaling or exhaling?
If you’re not sure, try this little experiment
with me. Take
a deep breath and hold it for a second. Now, without exhaling, inhale again, and again.
Now exhale fully. Without inhaling, exhale again, and again, yet again.
If you’re still conscious and reading this then
you’ve probably come to the conclusion that both
inhaling and exhaling are equally important to the body.
Yet what comes so easily to us as breathers is
often quite difficult for us as Christians.
The balance between gathering and scattering is
rarely maintained. When
it’s lost, the usual result is that as a church we stop
exhaling. We
make gathering our specialty.
We build expensive buildings that strain our
budgets so we can have a comfortable place to meet.
We judge the faithfulness of our fellow Christians
according to the number of consecutive gatherings they
attend without missing.
We thank God for giving us the freedom to gather
unmolested. Ultimately,
we reduce the sum of the Christian life to a regular
meeting of Christians on Sunday morning.
Meanwhile,
the world waits for us to exhale.
To scatter back into the soil of everyday life,
bringing some gospel with us as we do. It’s not only the
world that suffers when we stop breathing regularly, a
church that only gathers and never scatters eventually
dies. There
is a lake in the Middle East that is 1200 feet below sea
level. The
mineral rich waters that run into it from the Jordan River
have no outlet, except by evaporation.
There are no currents or flowing tributaries.
No movement in this lake at all.
Because there is no movement and no outlet, there
is no life in its waters, except for a few microbes.
What’s the name of this body of water?
You guessed it:
The Dead Sea. (Thanks Wayne
Cordiero)
Churches that only gather and never scatter become dead
seas. They
may by full of content, the gospel may flow into them
every Sunday, but if there is no outlet, they are devoid
of life, except for a few microbes that keep gathering
every Sunday because that’s what faithful Christians do.
To mix in yet another metaphor that I’ve learned
from Wayne Cordiero:
Each Christian is a sponge.
We can come to the gathering and learn a lot useful
stuff about God and the gospel, but once we reach our
saturation point, what we know about God needs to be
squeezed out of us and into the world.
Its only after we’ve been squeezed that we are
ready to come back and absorb more of the gospel at the
gathering. If you’re feeling stagnant in your walk with
Christ, if your faith right now seems lifeless, even
though you haven’t missed a gathering in weeks, then my
guess is that what you really need is not more soaking;
instead, you need a good squeezing.
You need the gospel to be wrung out of your life
and into someone else’s. Of course, none of this
diminishes the importance of the gathering.
The result of being scattered and having the gospel
wrung out of us on a daily basis is that it makes us long
for the gathering and the refreshment we find there.
Inhale-Exhale. Gather-Scatter. This is to be the
rhythm of the Christian life, until someday we are
gathered around God’s great banquet table in the New
Creation and are told that the days of scattering are
over.
Until
then—we breathe.
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Wade
Hodges is the senior pastor at Sterling Drive Church in
Washington. The
church website is: www.sterlingdrivechurch.com
and if you desire to email Wade his email is
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