I believe that every Christian needs to have a balance of his focus in three areas: Personal Relationship with God, Community within the Church Body, and Intentional Testimony to those without the Church Body. Whether an individual Christian or a church we need to fight becoming overly focused in one of these areas and allow this to cut down on the effectiveness of the church team or our personal life.
1) Personal Relationship with God: No Christian can be truly saved unless they have a relationship with God. Jesus said that in the last days people will come to him and say I never knew you even though these people thought they were Christians. We need to constantly be pushing ourselves do a deeper walk with God. Begging God to place his desires in our hearts and asking God to woo us back to himself when we feel ourselves fall into apostacy. As God becomes real in our lives we are able to live the Christian life as God intended in holiness, purity, integrity and so much more all while bearing the fruit of the spirit.
2) Community within the Church Body: Although at times I think most of us our envious of the monks who get to spend their whole lives in solitude without the continual stress that other people invariably bring into our lives, God has not designed humans to live in solitude but in community. We can often get the idea that most of the problems around us are a result of the people around us. We forget that God has designed that most of his work on earth gets done through people. Many times rather than changing us directly, God uses the people around us to change us. When we react to the people around (i.e. walk out on church because of people we can't get along with) we are really running from the tools that God wants to use to bring change into our lives. As Christians I believe we are called to live in intimate relationship with God but in a community where God not only speaks directly too us but also through the lives of the people around us.
God has designed that the spiritual force of humanity here on earth in the current age be the church. In ages past it was the nation of Israel, but this was changed as a part of the new covenant and with this change many of the rules of following God changed as well. Under the Old Covenant people's sinful natures were held in check by government which used force and even death to cause people to follow God's plan for their lives. In the New Covenant God has offered to give us a new heart so we can live above the sinful nature without needing external physical punishments go keep our evil hearts in check. However, just because the role of the community around us may have changed since the Old Covenant we are still in desperate need of a community around us to "keep us in check," not through external punishments but by motivating each other through love and good works, confessing our faults to each other and praying for each other, etc... It is this body that keeps us strong through spiritual battles and calls us back when we wonder astray. This is the team that builds us up when we are discouraged and gives us a place to serve with our spiritual gifts and thus feel fulfilled.
3) Intentional Testimony to those outside the Church: This team has a much greater purpose than to simply make each other feel good though. The fault that some Christians have fallen in to is that the church is all about making a group of people feel great and upbeat and to enable them to live life to the fullest (i.e. living the American Dream). I strongly believe that any person and any team without a purpose bigger than itself will eventually fall apart. We need an external focus in our personal lives and we need and external focus in our churches.
Any Christian who is going to live a Biblically balanced life must be looking for ways to serve those who have not yet developed a relationship with God. Although man's primary purpose is to be in relationship with God, part of this relationship means sharing God's heart for the rest of humanity. God has designed life on this earth that his primary way of reaching lost people is through people. He could have chosen other ways but he chose to use people. God placed structure to equip people to fight the spiritual battle for people's souls but in the end the purpose of the church is to expand the kingdom of God.
Conclusion: Many churches along the way have fallen into one of three ruts because the Christians in the church put too much focus on one of these areas. In some churches Christians find it easy to be very individualistic where everything is done on an individual level (i.e. I live what God has called me too and you live what God has called you too. Not that we shouldn't each live out our own calls, but I believe the things God calls us too will not be offensive to the other believers serving beside us if we are also respecting community the way God intended.) In some churches there is too much focus put on the body. These are the party churches. "The church that plays together stays together." It's a real tragedy that these teams that get along so well totally forget that there are people heading into an eternity in hell every day. In some churches there is too much focus put on the task of reaching out to lost people around us. These churches develop programs and put people in places of serving who do not have the call or the personal relationship with God to fight the battle at this level. The Christians in these churches can live lives of duty rather than joy and eventually become burned out.
God help us as we individually try to balance the Christian life as God intended us too and as we encourage our churches to become balanced in their focus as well.
Note: These thoughts are not my own but were stimulated by hours of LiMiT training at Beaver Lake Camp.
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