Our faith was intended to be lived out in community. I don't mean closed communities hiding out and trying to remain safe, but real, living, growing community. When the church, started, Acts 2:46 says, "Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts," but then it adds that God was adding to their number daily.

There are two lessons here. First, is the fact that this was not a closed community. It was a living, growing community. We must be careful to maintain churches that are easy communities to enter. By that I don't mean that we lower the bar. Someone recently tweeted, "As groups become focused on themselves, they leave little relational space for the comfortable entry of new people." Churches can quickly become closed systems rather than missional communities even as we continue to think of ourselves as open, loving and welcoming.

The second lesson is very American in it's application. We are very individualistic. As such, we have tended to develop an individualistic view of our faith. We don't like crowds unless we can get lost in the crowd. We think of our faith primarily in terms of how things are between "me and God." We often live under the illusion that we can live out our faith perfectly well on our own. We neglect the fact that most biblical imperatives have little to do with personal issues, like whether I drink coffee (still a sin in the eyes of some), or whether I watch TV (anathema in the view of others), or even whether I sip a glass of wine in the evening (a sin to still others). What the scriptures do speak to is love and forgiveness, service and evangelism, ministry and forbearance. These are things that can only be worked out in community.

Father, as I think through this passage in Acts, I realize that even as long as I have been a believer, and as long as I have been in ministry, I still have an awful lot to learn about your church and how you would have me live out my faith. May I be biblical in the practice of my faith.