What are our ambitions for our church? Is that a good question to ask at my first service at a ‘new’ church?
Typically, people say, we want to attract more members, especially younger people. Or we want our worship to be more lively. Or – well, you add in other examples.
Wouldn’t a better ambition than all of these be to say, we want our church to be Christlike?
Because it sounds to me like that’s what Paul is encouraging the Philippians to set as their ambition. He loves that church, and he wants the best for it. So far he has told them how he is sure God is at work among them and he has encouraged them with ways to bear their suffering for the faith.
But at the root of all of this is that he wants them to be Christlike, and especially to demonstrate that in their relationships with one another.
The quality of our relationships is so important. I don’t know the latest research in the UK about why people leave the church, but recent studies in the United States show that forty-two percent of all church leavers gave ‘hypocrisy’ as a reason for leaving. It was the top reason.
Now I know there is that witty rejoinder to people who say they want nothing to do with the church because of all the hypocrites where we say, ‘There’s always room for one more,’ but I think we should dwell on the issue for a moment. Hypocrisy means that our words and our actions don’t match up. In terms of our relationships, it means we talk about love but then don’t love one another.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what a lot of those American church leavers had experienced.
I therefore think it’s important that we give a priority to Christlike relationships, and in today’s reading Paul tells us what that will involve.
The first sign of Christlike relationships that Paul describes here is unity:
Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.
Christ is united with the Father and the Spirit; we are united with Christ and experience the fellowship of the Spirit; it’s only natural for Christians to experience unity of love, spirit, and mind.
What makes us one? Well, it’s not simply being members of the human race, because sin has fractured that unity. It’s unity in salvation by grace through faith in Christ, a salvation that comes to us from the Triune God, whose mind is authoritatively revealed to us in the Scriptures.
We don’t necessarily believe all the same things as other Christian traditions. We may differ on things like who may be ordained as leaders and our understandings of the sacraments. But if we hold together on salvation, the Trinity, and the supreme authority of God being revealed in the Bible, then we can have a united relationship that transcends our differences, even when those differences mean our unity is imperfect.
But Paul wasn’t thinking about our wider ecumenical debates of today. They didn’t exist then. He was addressing a local church. He wants them to hold together on these basic issues and live out their faith as one people.
Are we a church where we can count on one another when the chips are down? Are we a fellowship where we will speak well of one another, even when we disagree on secondary matters? Or are we just a collection of snooker balls, who bounce off each other every Sunday morning?
I grew up in an increasingly multi-racial church in north London. When my grandmother, who lived with us, died, our church friends rallied around. The West Indian and West African members of our house group treated us the way they would have treated bereaved friends at home. They turned up with meals they had cooked for my parents, my sister, and me. They came and took domestic duties off my mum. They did everything they could so that we as a family could spend time together, talking about my grandmother and grieving her loss. What a profound experience of united love that was. I shall never forget it.
If you know your Methodist history, you will know that the preacher who got John Wesley preaching in the open air was George Whitefield. However, later Wesley and Whitefield had deep theological differences. And one day, one of Whitefield’s followers spitefully asked him whether he would see Wesley in heaven.
But Whitefield’s reply was a model of Christian unity. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘but that will be because Mister Wesley will be far closer to the throne than me.’
How do we practise our unity in Christ?
The second sign of Christlike relationships is humility:
3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.
As we go on to hear in verses 6 to 11, the Jesus story shows that he is the very example of humility, in giving up his status and position in the Incarnation and the Cross. If Jesus, with his ranking in the universe does it, then how much more us?
Yet too many churches have members who jostle for position, like James and John wanting to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand in glory. Too many Christians have the pathetic ambition to be a big fish in a small pond. I see it in church members full of self-importance and ministers chasing the ‘big jobs’ in the church nationally.
How sad that building for God’s kingdom and its vision of a new creation where earth and heaven will be renewed is too small and unsatisfying for these people. Yet what could be more rewarding than playing our part in God’s eternal purposes?
At the other end of the spectrum we have people who so undervalue themselves that they see themselves as worthless. This too is not humility.
What are we looking for, then?[1] The American pastor Rick Warren put it well:
Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. Humility is thinking more of others. Humble people are so focused on serving others, they don’t think of themselves.[2]
And CS Lewis described it beautifully:
Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.[3]
You know what? I think those words of Lewis sound rather like a description of Jesus. We are looking for people who are thinking about others above themselves. And so the challenge is to ask whether that is a predominant characteristic of people in our church.
Finally, the third sign of Christlike relationships is servanthood:
The final verses of the reading may (or may not) be taken from an early Christian hymn, and they tell the Jesus story – from pre-existence with the Father through the Incarnation to the Cross and Resurrection, the Ascension and eventually the Last Judgment.
It’s a story we often tell in the church with the purpose of describing what Jesus did for our salvation. And that’s right. But it’s not what Paul does with it here.
In this case, Paul tells the Jesus story not to call people to Christian commitment, but to show us what living as a Christian disciple looks like. It’s ethical.
So we hear that Jesus ‘did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage’ but ‘made himself nothing’, took on ‘the very nature of a servant’, and ‘humbled himself by becoming obedient to death.’
And maybe ‘servant’ is the most important word in that cluster. For a servant was ‘nothing’ in that society. A servant had to be obedient. And so on.
If we want to look like Jesus, then we will serve others.
This is such a contrast to much of what we see promoted in our culture, where the talk is of self-fulfilment, meeting our own needs, charity beginning at home, and so on. The Christian church is meant to look different from this.
But sometimes we too imbibe the values of the wider world. We turn the church into a consumer organisation where the job of the church is to please me and give me what I want. This is not the spirit of Jesus.
I’ve been told to my face by people in the past that my job as a minister is to please everybody. Well, no it isn’t. That isn’t servanthood. That’s capitulating to consumerism.
I’ve also been told when arriving to take a service as a visiting preacher that I was there to entertain people. But that is an attitude that is all about taking and not remotely about giving. Therefore it is the opposite of servanthood. And once again, the church has become infected by the world.
I once knew a church where a minister called people to take on certain jobs to serve the fellowship. But people replied, ‘We don’t do these things. We pay others to do them for us.’
We need to recover the call to imitate Jesus who served. It was by an attitude of servanthood that he transformed the world. Let’s stop assuming that this is something that is done by others.
It means we take Jesus and his example seriously. He is not our comfort blanket. He is our Lord and Saviour.
If we serve one another, copying (however imperfectly) Jesus, then alongside our humility and unity there will be something distinctive about us that differs from so much of what the world offers and yet encapsulates what so many people long for.
This is central to our true identity as church. Let’s make sure we’re about this Jesus work.
[1] Both of the following quotes were found in Aaron Armstrong, C.S. Lewis on Humility: What He Wrote is More Powerful Than What He Didn’t
[2] Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), 149
[3] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins Publishers) 128
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