Has our church become Dismembered?

[Woody]

“Oh. Really? He throws that medicine up?” Dr. Smith stopped typing on the computer and turned to me. “Does he keep any of it down?”

“No, within a half hour, he empties his stomach. Poor guy. And he knows this med makes him puke — he fights it.”

She thought for a minute, fingers tapping the keyboard lightly.

“We can try a couple of different things. One med is easier on the gut, but you have to give it every 6 hours day and night. You would give the other one every 8 hours so it’s easier to manage especially through the night, but it’s expensive and vomiting is a frequent side effect. Either one will work. Which one do you prefer to try?”

My children’s best doctors talk with me in this manner every time we visit. We each respect the expertise of each other – I respect their medical training, while they respect my knowledge of my child and the way his or her condition behaves in them.

Good doctors ask me questions, listen to me, and work with me to develop a plan that fits our family. They recognize that each patient and family is different, with different challenges and different strengths. They build a team of everyone who has a piece of the puzzle, pulling in specialists, therapists of all kinds, teachers, even and in-home helpers, to create the best plan of care. We all contribute our best to the plan to provide best for the child, and it works (most of the time – when it doesn’t, I know that they’ll listen and work with me to find another way. We work together as a team.

This is how the body of Christ ought to work, too. Whether I’m at the hospital with one of my kids or working alongside other Christians, I revel in the way we all complement one another and I think of this passage in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27. (For the sake of space, I’m not quoting the entire passage, but you can read it here.)

You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ.

…I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.

But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, “Get lost; I don’t need you”? Or, Head telling Foot, “You’re fired; your job has been phased out”? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the “lower” the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. …

…The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part. (The Message)

But as I listen to friends, read comments here, and watch what is happening in our local churches, I seem to be in the minority. Too often, those who don’t fit into our uniquely western, 21st-century squeaky-clean categories of biblical personhood are treated like parasites on the Body of Christ.

They are marginalized, deemed useless and unnecessary.

Dismembered.

We have cut off the ones who don’t fit into our tidy little boxes, the ones who, by choice or by providence, aren’t your typical church-poster-child.

The never-married and the divorced.

The childless.

The anorexic, bulimic, and obese.

The less-educated.

The new (or not-so-new) Christians bound by bad habits, poor choices, addictions, and destructive life patterns.

The alcoholic.

The abused.

Those who look or sound different because of illness, disability, or country of origin.

The homosexual.

The Church is supposed to be the ultimate melting pot of sinners-becoming-saints. It should be the one place on earth overflowing with grace, where the last shall be first, the weak shame the strong, and the foolish shame the wise.

Instead, our churches don’t seem to know what to do with the weak, the foolish, the grace-needy, the sinners struggling to break free.

Do they fear guilt by association? Or are they consumed with maintaining Photoshopped perfection?

We who can, hide our sin battles and oddities behind small talk and safe prayer requests, afraid to reveal the ugly truth. Those can’t either don’t come at all or are ignored or shunned until they leave.

Dismembered.

We have forgotten that no matter what a person’s strengths, history, and struggles, each believer is already part of the Body because God put us there. They cannot, they must not, be amputated.

For the Body of Christ to be healthy, we must accept and value each person as they are, and offer a hand, a boost, a shoulder to cry on, a safe place to be real, compassionate accountability.

We must not try to make ears or eyes or hands out of everyone and cut off those who can’t be it. If we do, we will cripple the church and cripple one another.

We need each other.

Galatians 6:1-3 says, “Live creatively, friends. If someone falls into sin, forgivingly restore him, saving your critical comments for yourself. You might be needing forgiveness before the day’s out. Stoop down and reach out to those who are oppressed. Share their burdens, and so complete Christ’s law. If you think you are too good for that, you are badly deceived.” (The Message)

It is not our place say to any part of the body of Christ, “Get lost!” or “I don’t need you” or “Thank God I’m not you.”

http://deeperstory.com/dismembered/

[Gail]

I enjoyed that! :)

[JawgeFromJawja]

Woody,

I just came across your topic "Has our church become Dismembered?"

It is so beautiful and so true on multiple levels. You have great insight into medicine and theology.

This is priceless:

"Good doctors ask me questions, listen to me, and work with me to develop a plan that fits our family. They recognize that each patient and family is different, with different challenges and different strengths. They build a team of everyone who has a piece of the puzzle, pulling in specialists, therapists of all kinds, teachers, even and in-home helpers, to create the best plan of care. We all contribute our best to the plan to provide best for the child, and it works (most of the time – when it doesn’t, I know that they’ll listen and work with me to find another way. We work together as a team.

This is how the body of Christ ought to work, too. Whether I’m at the hospital with one of my kids or working alongside other Christians, I revel in the way we all complement one another and I think of this passage in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27. (For the sake of space, I’m not quoting the entire passage, but you can read it here.)

You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ.

…I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it."

Oh, that all medical people and religious officials realized this in the depths of their being.

I tried to send this note as a PM. It seems you are quite inundated in that area - an error message to that effect cropped up immediately.

God's blessings,