Building Community in the Church
Building on what he said (in the quotation here) about the communion of saints being in Christ — the communion of saints is not that I’m connected to you and you’re connected to me, but that I’m in Christ and you’re in Christ and we’re connected in Him — Jim Jordan makes an application with regard to our unity and community as the church.
Building up our community in the church includes obeying commandments (e.g., the “one another” passages in Paul’s letters). There are things that the church ought to be doing and there are good practices we can adopt. But those practices and our obedience to the various summonses we find in the Bible aren’t the source or basis of our unity and community. We aren’t together because we share these practices but because we are in Him, and if we want community to grow, we need Him to work: “We must go through Christ, and then we have communion with everyone else. If we have a lack of communion here, we must go through Christ to get it with others.”