According to Wheaton College professor Wayne Martindale, C. S. Lewis, the creator of the Narnia Chronicles, “had no natural fondness for church-going. He found the sermons often dull, and he disliked hymns and organ music, which he described as “one long roar.” He felt like “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”[1]
Yet Lewis discovered the joy of church attendance and the fellowship that is only experienced in the context of Christian community. Lewis wrote an essay on church membership, reminding us that the word ‘membership’ is of Christian origin, but has been taken over by secular usage and emptied of its original meaning.
Today people associate ‘membership’ with paying dues, meaningless rituals, silly rules and handshakes, and having your name inscribed on some dusty roll. But in New Testament times, church membership involved serving as a vital part of a living body. It involved the integration of one’s whole life, voluntarily, into the life of the community of faith. And you and I have the opportunity to experience that same kind of community, or fellowship, today.
In his bestselling book, The Purpose Driven Church, Californian pastor Rick Warren outlines five essential purposes of the church:
- Magnification: celebrating God’s presence and power in public worship and private devotion;
- Membership: connecting with others who follow Jesus – finding my place among God’s people;
- Maturity: growing deeper through spiritual practices, and discovering biblical principles to live my best life;
- Ministry: discovering my gifts and serving others – putting faith into action in my world;
- Mission: sharing the good news of Jesus with others – finding a purpose to live for beyond myself and my small world.
All this is grounded in a beautiful mutual commitment between the person who follows Jesus and their local church community. [2]
Genuine Christian fellowship involves loving one another, laughing and crying together, welcoming newcomers, caring and sharing, teaching and learning, bearing one another’s burdens.
In the beginning, the first church had no established guidelines or traditions, no textbooks or manuals to help shape their activities. They did not even have the New Testament writings, but they experienced rapid growth and met the needs of the moment in amazing and creative ways.
Acts 2:37-47 describes the birth and early life of the first church. The Apostle Peter gave a powerful evangelistic challenge to the multicultural crowd in Jerusalem for the Day of Pentecost, and many responded and turned to follow Jesus. It was a major miracle!
It seems that those who pledged allegiance to Jesus were immediately baptised, or initiated into the new Christian community in a public expression of their faith. Their baptism was a sign of their identification with Christ, their desire to live a new life in the power of the Holy Spirit, and their integration into the new Body of Christ.
For the members of that first fledgling church, life was never the same again. Their lives were shaped by new priorities: a devotion to the new teaching of the Apostles, fellowship, worship and prayer. God worked amazing miracles, and the people of the church made radical sacrifices for their brothers and sisters, empowered by their new joy in God and the realisation of what God had done for them. And God kept on integrating new converts daily into the new community. As people became Christians through evangelism, they were baptised and integrated into the life of the church.
In the same way, God wants to see people today respond in positive ways to Jesus, and find a warm welcome into a new spiritual family of people who seek to follow Jesus. How do we ensure that this integration happens smoothly and consistently? I want to share three integration boosters and three integration busters.
The first integration booster is a sense of common identity. Christianity is not only about believing the good news about Jesus; it’s about belonging in God’s family. Ephesians 2:19 reminds us that because we are Christians we are “fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household.” We belong to God, and we belong with others in God’s family.
Second, integration requires mutual encouragement. Hebrews 3:13 exhorts us to “encourage one another daily,” and I’m sure that was an important part of what occurred in the gatherings of the first church.
Encouragement may take place through a church service, but we can also encourage one another one-on-one, face-to-face over coffee, or while walking, or by letter or phone or social media. An encouraging word, or a short note, expressed at the right moment, is a small investment of time and energy that has the potential to produce a multitude of fruit in someone’s life.
Third, integration produces partnership, or mutual commitment within the body of Christ. How highly do you and I value the fellowship of our Christian brothers and sisters? How would you rate your partnership in shouldering the challenges and burdens of this local congregation?
Luke’s description of the first church in Acts 2 is a description of an effective integrating community: at once astonishing, inspiring, and challenging. It was, in fact, a revolution of love. In his book, Caesar and Christ, historian Will Durant suggests that
[Jesus was] not concerned to attack existing economic or political institutions … the revolution he sought was a far deeper one, without which reforms could only be superficial and transitory. If he could cleanse the human heart of selfish desire, cruelty, and lust, utopia would come of itself, and all those institutions that rise out of human greed and violence, and the consequent need for law, would disappear. Since this would be the profoundest of all revolutions, beside which all others would be mere coup d’etat of class ousting class and exploiting in its turn, Christ was in this spiritual sense the greatest revolutionist in history.[3]
Fellowship in a local community of faith is an invitation to participate in the revolution as we follow Jesus and support one another.
Integration of the individual members is crucial to the local and global effectiveness of a biblically functioning community. A growing sense of identity and encouragement, and a growing willingness to engage in partnership and sacrifice, are gifts in themselves, and each quality further strengthens and deepens the fabric of fellowship at the heart of the faith community.
But such fellowship can also be harmed. Things we say and do can disrupt and ultimately destroy the integration of God’s people. I want to highlight three integration busters.
The first is gossip, defined as “idle talk about the affairs of others.” Proverbs 16:28 says, “a gossip separates close friends,” and you may have personally experienced the tragic truth of that statement. Discourage gossip at every opportunity; refuse to listen to it, refuse to pass it on. Gossip is a pernicious evil that feeds on itself, perverting the truth and destroying the reputations of people and churches.
A second integration buster is jealousy. Jealousy erects walls between people who should be friends, and has the potential to consume not only emotional energy but also material wealth.
A third integration buster is a spirit of independence or autonomy. The healthy, natural integration of new people into a community may be disrupted simply because we’re all doing our own thing rather than functioning as a well-disciplined team.
A spirit of independence will not build a strong, healthy, integrated church. It will do just the opposite. As Rick Warren observes, “people who are uninterested or unwilling to learn your church’s purpose, strategy, and the meaning of membership are failing to demonstrate the kind of commitment that membership implies.”[4]
On the other hand, Paul Tournier writes: “I am convinced that nine out of ten persons seeing a psychiatrist do not need one. They need somebody who will love them with God’s love … and they will get well.”[5]
I want to conclude with a poem by Mary Oliver titled “Wild geese.” It’s a poem that speaks of belonging and grace as the natural order of things. You belong here. We belong together. Here is the poem:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on …Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.[6]
Sermon 833 copyright © 2025 Rod Benson. Preached at North Rocks Community Church, Sydney, Australia, on Sunday 2 November 2025. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Christian Standard Bible (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020).
References
[1] Wayne Martindale, “C.S. Lewis, reluctant churchman,” Touchstone, Summer-Fall 1988, available at https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=02-04-019-f
[2] Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church: Every Church is Big in God’s Eyes (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 117.
[3] Will Durant, Caesar and Christ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944), 566.
[4] Warren, Purpose Driven Church, 317.
[5] Quoted in James Bryan Smith, Embracing the Love of God: The Path and Promise of Christian Life (Englewood, CO: Renovaré, 1989), 146.
[6] Mary Oliver, “Wild geese,” in Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 347.
Image source: https://kenaqgardens.org/species-spotlight-canada-goose/
iDigress 