Nov 29, 2023
So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. (Ephesians 4:11-13)
How do these diverse living stones of God’s creation—that is, his
people—fit together into a unified whole that we call the church, a
spiritual house, or the body of Christ?
The diversity of humanity across the ages and different continents and languages and personalities is, itself, a good gift of God’s creation. Like with the altars the Israelites were to build—no tool ought be used to deface the diversity of this God-created humanity as was done, for instance, through the tool of residential schools applied to indigenous persons. No: each person created in the image of God is to be treated as a person. That is, personally. Never abstractly. That is, never in such a way that someone is reduced to a uniform, mono-cultural “brick” of our own determination.
Lest we think this kind of issue only crops up at a governmental systems level in empires like Egypt or dominions like Canada, we should be mindful of the fact that there are a thousand ways de-personalization happens in everyday life, too. Whenever we treat someone as an object to be utilized, as a task to be checked off, or as a resource we must get something from—we have treated them abstractly. It happens when we treat the grocery store clerk as their role, rather than as a person with a name. It also happens when we merely transact actions and activities with our spouse, parents, or children, but don’t give time to seeing and hearing them as persons in the unimportant, unproductive, silly anecdotal experiences of their lives. Persons are not something to be used (and therefore to be molded into a form more amendable to our use), but people to be seen, known, and loved. They are not bricks, but "living stones."
So if we cannot coerce a useful uniformity out of this mess of diverse people—how does a coherent church ever get built? The answer is the gifts Christ gives.
While some of those gifts are named here, not all of them are (other lists can be found in Romans and 1 Corinthians, for instance). But the larger point is that all of Christ’s people are gifted in diverse ways and are called to use those gifts to serve the purpose of building up this body of “living stones” until we become the unity that in truth, we already are in Christ. This is our “growing to maturity,” the final goal of which, is attaining the fullness of Christ which again, in truth, is already ours.
The use of these gifts are the means by which we become what we already are. It is the way that we “keep” the “unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace” that have already been given. It is the way we work out what Christ has already worked in.
What you will note about this work of growing to maturity and building one another up as living stones into the singular building of Christ’s church, is that it is a work of becoming more human and therefore, more Christlike. He is after all, the example we’ve been given of humanity in its “fullness.”
To do this work: we must begin by treating one another personally. Seeing one another not firstly as projects to be worked on or problems to be solved, but as the person who bears a unique gift and calling from Christ to build me up; a uniquely created and gifted person that I and the church are incomplete without.
The only way to receive that gift from the person I encounter, is through a personal relationship. That is, encountering them as the living stone they are and wondering together how we might build one another up and discover the unique places in the body we each hold. In this way, the body of Christ matures, our humanity is deepened, and not only the person in front of us, but also the person we ourselves are, grow together into the fullness of Christ.