Sermon Title: For Better AND For Worse
Scripture: Ephesians 2: 19-22

The primary problem people have with the church is with the people.

“Membership in a local church means joining your imperfect self to many other imperfect selves to form an imperfect community that, through Jesus, embarks on a journey toward a better future, together.”
- “Jesus Outside the Lines: A Way Forward for Those Who Are Tired of Taking Sides” - Scott Sauls

The church may be faulty but that is no excuse for your not joining it, if you are the Lord’s. …for the church is not an institution for perfect people, but a sanctuary for sinners saved by grace, who, though they are saved, are still sinners and need all the help they can derive from the sympathy and guidance of their fellow believers.
- “The Best Donation,”- Charles H. Spurgeon; delivered April 5, 1891

The Christian life cannot be an individual affair. The church is necessarily plural.

The purpose of the cross “was not just to save isolated individuals, and so perpetuate their loneliness, but to create a new community whose members would belong to Jesus Christ, love one another and eagerly serve the world.

“Most people who have lived on planet earth have simply assumed that the good of the individual should take a back seat to the good of the group, whether that group is a family, a village, or a religious community.”
“When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus’ Vision for Authentic Christian Community” - Joseph H. Hellerman,

One of the ways Western individualism informs how we think about church is that we conceive of “fit” in terms of how a church fits us. But what if we have it backwards?

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” Ephesians 2:19–22

“The biblical image of the people of God is that we are stones being built together into a dwelling place. A dwelling place requires not one big stone but many pieces of stone, interlocked and fortified together. It’s not that the stones must lose their individuality or their unique textures or shapes; the image is not one of identical bricks or prefab concrete blocks. It’s just that only together do individual stones achieve the structural purpose of becoming the household of God. Each of us has unique gifts, but none of us is gifted in everything. Together our unique shapes complement each other and create a more structurally sound “building.”
- “Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God” - Gordon D. Fee

Individualistic faith shrinks our experience of God and saps the full power of the Spirit in our midst. We thrive most when we live out our faith in the presence of the family of God—in all its weirdness and wonderful diversity.

The Beautiful Messiness of Family Life
1. we share our stuff with one another;
2. we share our hearts with one another;
3. we stay, embrace the pain, and grow up with one another; and
4. family is more than “me, the wife, and the kids.

“When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus’ Vision for Authentic Christian Community”
- Joseph H. Hellerman,

“Should we think of friendship as preserving its voluntary character and thereby vulnerable at every point to dissolution if one of the friends grows tired of or burdened by the relationship? No. Brothers and sisters in Christ should be more strongly bonded

than that. What I and others like me are yearning for isn’t just a weekly night out or a circle of people with whom to go on vacation. We need something more. We need people who know what time our plane lands, who will worry about us when we don’t show up at the time we said we would. We need people we can call and tell about that funny thing that happened in the hallway after class. We need the assurance that, come hell or high water, a few people will stay with us, loving us in spite of our faults and caring for us when we’re down
- “Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian” - Wesley Hill,

“Every Christian is not called to marriage, but every Christian is part of a family. Christian family life means laying aside our own personal kingdoms and building a “household of God” beyond our nuclear families, with our kinfolk in Christ.“
- “Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel” - Russell Moore

Contemporary Western culture values privacy and personal domains where doors are shut and blinds are closed. But a church family should be characterized by open doors and porous understandings of “home.”

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