Covenant Community
Thriving churches
The vision of our family of churches is to be thriving churches, advancing the kingdom. We want to be churches that are characterised by thriving!
Thriving community life: Churches that are fun to be a part of, where relationships are characterised by love, care, and commitment. Churches where men and women, young and old, of a variety of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds are growing as disciples of Jesus and using their God-given gifts to serve one another.
Thriving devotional life: Churches with Spirit-filled worship and passionate prayer, and a deep commitment to Scripture. Churches that embody Christ-like values of humility, integrity, generosity, and grace.
Thriving missional life: Churches where people can explore questions of faith and experience God's life-changing power, and which regularly see people become followers of Jesus. Churches that look beyond themselves, seeking to multiply the life of God through planting churches and reaching the lost.
The blueprint:
What does thriving look like in practice? Well, the Bible gives us an example:
“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”
In Acts 2 we see the early church thriving, and the Kingdom of God advancing. Luke, the writer of Acts, describes a church community living radically differently to the culture they found themselves in. We see wholehearted devotion to God and one another, lived out through generosity, fellowship and worship. And through all of this the Holy Spirit is working powerfully through signs and wonders, and bringing people to salvation.
We've drawn out these seven key indicators of a thriving church from the passage, which we'll be exploring over the course of the series:
Covenant community
Communion
Signs and wonders
Generosity
Hospitality
Worship
Mission
The Acts 2 church is our example, this is our blueprint of what a thriving church looks like. Hopefully this image of a blueprint is helpful. When you're building, you build to the blueprint. As we build, as Lifehouse grows, we want to be a church that looks like the community we see in Acts 2.
As you are building, you check against the blueprint to see whether you're building correctly - is it level? Are the measurements correct? We want to be asking questions of ourselves as we explore these seven topics, to help us 'measure up' against the blueprint:
Where are we living up to the Acts 2 blueprint?
Where are we falling short?
What steps do we need to take to come back into line?
Fellowship
We’re starting this new teaching series by looking at what the Bible calls fellowship. Fellowship isn’t a word we use very often these days – it means a deep, trusting friendship between a group of people. I would describe fellowship as a covenant community. A community who have committed to love one another and seek Jesus together, united by our relationship with Jesus.
We were never called to follow Jesus on our own. Modern culture, particularly in Britain, Europe and North America has this individualistic mindset which is so alien to the way of life the Bible calls us to. In the Bible we see whole households, large family units, come to follow Jesus at the same time – encountering Jesus is a communal thing. Since the creation of the world God has been building his family. When we accept Jesus, that isn’t simply an individual decision. We are forgiven, we are justified, but we are also adopted into the family of God – we are a part of this immediate family, here in Lifehouse, and the global church, and the family of God throughout the Old and New Testaments. We are united through the blood of Jesus into something bigger than ourselves.
And the truth is we need one another. The writers in the New Testament use images of the church – one body, made up of many parts, a temple made of living stones, to show how we are united as a church, and how each person has an important part to play. If one person suffers, the whole church suffers with them. If one person is missing, the whole church is the poorer for it. There is an interdependence, a reliance on one another, a collective way of being as church, that God is calling us to rediscover.
And this unity, this togetherness, it’s not dependent on how we’re feeling or on our circumstances. In a wedding ceremony, the couple vow to have and hold, to love and cherish one another for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Marriage vows are a commitment to love and demonstrate that love to your spouse no matter how you are feeling.
Another example is in caring for children. There is an often unspoken promise that we will love our children even when they have done nothing to deserve it. Our love, our care, isn’t dependent on their behaviour, their actions, or whether they reciprocate that love. We love them because they are our child, they are ours to care for, and we will love them even when it is hard.
This is the kind of love which characterises a thriving church. This covenantal love, this promise to hold on tight to one another, to cling together, to love one another even when we’ve done nothing to deserve it, this is what we are called to be, Lifehouse. To love one another even when it’s hard. To run after one another, like the father running out to meet the prodigal son, we are called to pursue one another in love.
On the night he was arrested, Jesus says this to the disciples:
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Command. Must. This is not an optional extra to the kingdom of God. Far from it, we see here that love is the key defining, identifying characteristic of disciples of Jesus.
These words of Jesus will change the church. This will change the world. Truly loving one another as Jesus loves us – sacrificially, loving one another even when we’ve done nothing to deserve it. By that the world will know that we are Jesus’s disciples.
Love is our metric for success. Love is how we measure whether we are a thriving church or not. Love is our defining characteristic as disciples of Jesus.
This is not an easy ask. This isn’t some fluffy, sugar coated version of love that loves one another when we’re at our best and we’ve had a wash and we smell nice. This love is aching muscles and sweaty, tired bodies from carrying a sofa up three flights of stairs. This love is dirt under our fingernails and snotty noses and eyes red from crying. This love is feeding our hungry neighbour when our cupboards are bare and our bank account is empty.
This love is hands pierced by nails, pinned to a cross, a body twisted in pain, struggling for breath as he gives up his life so that you and I might experience this love and share it together. This love begins and ends and sustains itself through the life, death, resurrection, ascension of Jesus Christ.
Jesus changes everything. The love of Jesus is our metric, our measurement of our discipleship, the question we are asking – how did I love like Jesus today?
Love one another humbly
“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature[b] of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.”
Our relationships with one another are to be characterised by the same submission, by the same humility, by the same servant heartedness that Jesus demonstrates to us. That means putting one another first, it means putting someone else’s needs ahead of our own.
That might mean biting your tongue and not saying something hurtful in the heat of an argument, even when you’ve thought of the ‘perfect comeback’.
It might mean choosing to submit to a leadership decision that you don’t really agree with
It might mean swallowing your pride and readiness to defend yourself when someone is expressing that they’ve been hurt by you, and simply listening to them and apologising for your part in a disagreement, no matter how small
It might mean choosing to let go of feelings of hurt pride or offence, and choosing to forgive and think the best of the person who offended you.
It might be as simple as when you feel like you haven’t seen someone in a while, being the first one to pick up the phone and reach out.
All of this is a choice. It doesn’t happen by accident. Submitting to one another and practicing humility is a deeply intentional thing. And it only works if we all do it. A community where some people are submitting and some people are trying to get their own way becomes an exploitative community quite quickly. This is where covenant comes into it. As we commit to loving one another in humble submission, as we all pursue that intentionally together, community becomes a safe place where people can be vulnerable and honest with one another.
Love one another vulnerably
Over the last week I’ve had several profound revelations of the love of Jesus, through community, as people have shared their pain and their sorrows with one another. Sharing deep stuff, sharing stuff that’s going on in our hearts, is difficult, it requires vulnerability and trust in the people around us. But we were able to share what was going on, we opened our hearts to one another. And we listened, we didn’t gloss over it or make light of what was going on or try and view it from a positive angle. We sat and we shared, and we cried together, and we ministered to one another and prayed together. And at the end of our time together the problems hadn’t gone away, the circumstances hadn’t changed, but we had encountered Jesus in the midst of it all.
That started because one person was brave enough to share what was going on in their life. Vulnerability is being honest with one another, it’s not plastering over the cracks and putting a fake smile on and going “God is good”. God is good, but life is hard, and sometimes people are hard, and it’s ok to bring that before God and bring that before community and express pain and express need.
Expressing need is tricky because it forces us to admit that we haven’t got it all sorted. And we on our own are not enough to meet our needs. And that goes against everything our culture would tell us about being adults. In a culture where being strong and independent and self-sufficient has become an idol, choosing to depend on other people and invite them into your areas of need can feel like admitting weakness. And that’s hard. But I think in fact if we start doing that it will change society.
Admitting emotional needs is hard. Admitting physical needs is hard. And I think we often fall into the trap of thinking if we ask someone for help we need to offer them something in return, like “oh if I cook for you will you paint my door” – that’s not how this should work. Our relationships as a covenant community, as God’s people, are not transactional. We give of ourselves to one another without expecting anything in return.
Love one another open-heartedly
Finally, being a covenant community means loving one another with open hearts. Being open hearted to everyone. Without borders. Where anyone can be invited in and made welcome. To be in and out of one another’s homes on a regular basis. The picture God gave me here was of community like an open plan office – without barriers or division, where everyone can come and go and connect freely.
Hospitality has a key part to play in that. We’re ok at hospitality, but we want to be excellent. We could do better than where we are. Hospitality is our culture of unity put into practice. Where better to show our unity than over a shared meal? Whether that’s a Sunday roast or a McDonalds. It doesn’t have to be in your home. It’s great if it can be, but it doesn’t have to be.
Our blueprint for a thriving church, the Acts 2 community, is a melting pot of different people and backgrounds, and we see throughout Acts that the church grows and grows in rich diversity and unity. The church is called to be a foreshadowing of the great multitude from every tribe and tongue who will one day worship God in heaven, in great diversity, and in perfect unity.
This isn’t an instruction for church leaders, this is a call on everybody. If you feel like you haven’t seen somebody in a while, don’t wait for them to invite you. A phone works both ways. Invite them round your house. Invite them out for a coffee. Invite them to go for a walk and bring a snack.
This is a vulnerable thing too, especially inviting people into our homes. We might not be able to afford to put extra food on the table. Sometimes the answer there is trusting in God’s provision. Sometimes the answer is being honest with one another and asking your guests to bring some extra food with them. I love a bring and share meal for that reason. Everyone brings something, so it isn’t the host having to provide all the food.
This openness, this practice of hospitality, of having people in and out of our homes and welcoming them into our messy ‘real lives’, has been one of the most precious things for me about this covenant community we are part of. And what’s more, I think it is one of the most effective witnesses to people who don’t know Jesus yet. Christian hospitality is counter cultural, and people notice. Let’s welcome everyone in to see how this covenant community behaves.
God is doing something amongst us in this season. He is calling us to love him, and to love one another more humbly, more vulnerably, more open heartedly than we have before. I’m so excited to see how this covenant community is transformed by the love of Jesus over the next few months.