Becoming Together
Part 3 of 5 - Being the Church Together
Why real discipleship is not becoming more religious, but becoming more fully human in the way of Jesus
TL;DR: In the first two essays, I said the church begins with love and belonging. But love and belonging are not the end of the story. They are the ground where something else can grow: a people learning the way of Jesus, becoming more fully human, and bearing the life of resurrection in the world.
"If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what it means to be human, look at Jesus. If you want to know what love is, look at Jesus. And go on looking until you're not just a spectator, but you're actually part of the drama which has him as the central character."
— N.T. Wright
Love And Belonging Were Never The Finish Line
“Jesus is who God always intended humanity to be and who humanity truly is—if only we will yield to God’s Spirit and relinquish the illusions of the serpent’s lies about who God is and who we are.”
— Greg Boyd
If Essays 1 and 2 named love and belonging as the beginning of church, Essay 3 asks what that beginning is for.
In the first essay, I wrote that we are loved before we are useful. In the second, I wrote that we do not have to earn our place at the table. Both of those claims are essential because without them there is no gospel, only religious anxiety.
But love is not the whole of it.
Belonging is not the end of the story.
Love and belonging are the soil where transformation becomes possible. They are where people stop managing impressions. They are where shame loosens its grip. They are where we can finally tell the truth. And once people are loved enough to tell the truth and stay, something holy can begin to grow.
That growth is what this essay is about.
Because church should not form people into religious performers. It should help beloved people become more fully human, more fully alive, more rooted in Christ, and more capable of love.
This essay is about becoming. About the process of becoming more fully human, more fully yourself, more fully alive, more fully rooted in God's love. It's written from the conviction that this becoming is possible. That healing is real. That wholeness is not a distant dream but something you can begin to experience now.
Are We Forming Pharisees or Disciples?
"Discipleship is not about believing the right doctrines. It's about becoming cruciform - taking on the pattern of self-giving, other-centered love that defines Jesus's nature and calls us to imitate."
— David Gushee
A church can be full of activity and still be producing the wrong kind of disciples.
That is the ache underneath this essay for me.
Too often, the typical church promotes a formational theology that quietly produces people who look less like Jesus and more like some of the Pharisees and other religious leaders who contended with him. I want to say that carefully. Not all Pharisees were self-righteous, just as not all Jewish people were involved in the arrest, trials, and crucifixion of Jesus. But the Gospels do show some religious leaders embodying a form of faith shaped by comparison, exclusion, and spiritual superiority. That is the danger I mean here.
There are people like us, and then there are them.
Us means the people who share our religious worldview, our class instincts, our politics, our family system, our culture, our unspoken preferences, our sense of who is in and who is out.
Them means everybody else. And if that sounds severe, it is only because so much church life has been built on exactly that pattern.
We measure discipleship by Sunday school attendance, small group participation, volunteer reliability, and institutional loyalty. None of those things is meaningless. But none of them tells us whether someone is actually maturing in love.
None of them tells us whether people are becoming more merciful, more openhearted, more grounded, more truthful, more able to love their neighbor, more willing to cross the road to heal the wounded, more free from fear.
We could be raising up Pharisees and calling them disciples.
That is what keeps me up at night.
Jesus Did Not Come To Make Us Religious Performers
“The apprentice does not learn by sitting in a classroom, taking notes, and memorizing facts. The apprentice learns by working alongside the master. The apprentice sees how the master approaches each task, watches their decisions, observes their values embodied in action, and gradually internalizes the master’s way of seeing and doing.”
— Lucy Peppiatt
The goal is not to become “our kind” of Christian.
The goal is to become more fully human.
A lot of us inherited a version of discipleship that is really just religious acculturation. Learn to talk like us. Believe like us. Act like us. Vote like us. Draw the same lines we draw. Fear the same outsiders we fear. Dislike the same people we dislike.
If you change enough to resemble us, then you can belong.
That is not the way of Jesus.
It is the way of anxious religion.
Real discipleship is not becoming more religious. It is becoming more fully human in the way of Jesus, together.
That is why I keep coming back to this quote:
“We are not human doings... we are human becomings!”
— Dick Staub
It names something the church often forgets. Discipleship is not behavior management. It is transformation to be more and more like the Human One.
Jesus does not make us less human. He shows us what full humanity looks like.
Jesus is tender in a way that is strong.
Truthful in a way that does not humiliate.
Courageous in a way that does not dominate.
Open in a way that still sees clearly.
He touches wounded bodies.
He eats with people on the edge.
He tells the truth without humiliating people.
He loves with a kind of freedom that religious systems rarely know what to do with.
In the Eastern Christian tradition, this is part of what the church has long meant by theosis. Not that we cease being human, and not that we become divine in some inflated sense, but that our humanity is healed, restored, and drawn into communion with the life of God.
God is not trying to rescue us from our humanity. God is trying to heal it, fill it, and bring it to life in Christ.
Humanity Begins in Dirt and Breath
"In the Hebrew, there's a little play on words between the human (“adam”) and the earth (“adamah”). Thanks to God's breath of life, the human of dust becomes a living being, literally an earthling."
— Danielle Shroyer
To become fully human is to remember what kind of life we were made for in the first place.
Genesis says that God formed the human from the dust of the ground and breathed into that earth-creature the breath of life. Adam in that story is not simply a proper name for one isolated man. Adam is humanity. Earth-creature. Dust animated by divine breath.
We come from dirt and breath.
From earth and Spirit.
From the intimacy of God stooping close enough
to breathe life into what was lifeless.
That image has never left the biblical imagination.
In Ezekiel 37, breath enters dry bones and death begins to move toward life again.
In John 20, the risen Jesus breathes on his disciples.
In Acts 2, the Spirit comes like wind and a frightened community becomes a living body.
This is the same holy movement. God breathing life into death. God raising what has gone numb. God making a people alive.
And what does that life look like when it ripens?
Love.
Joy.
Peace.
Patience.
Kindness.
Goodness.
Faithfulness.
Gentleness.
Self-control.
The fruit of the Spirit are not extra virtues for unusually spiritual people. They are the marks of resurrected humanity. They are what human life looks like when God’s breath is filling the dust again.
This is also why becoming human is bigger than private self-improvement. Through this new humanity, God is growing a new Eden, a new creation, the restoration of the shalom of Eden, so that things become what they were always meant to be.
Including us.
Discipleship is about becoming fully human, not about becoming religious.
Spiritual disciplines aren’t about transcending your humanity; they’re about becoming more fully human
Mission and witness aren’t about converting souls; they’re about inviting people into the reality of becoming human as God intended
Embodiment isn’t a problem to overcome; it’s essential to what it means to be human
Your particular personality, gifts, and vocation aren’t obstacles to discipleship; they’re the medium through which you become yourself in Christ
To be a disciple is to apprenticed by Jesus in becoming human, growing in love for God, for our neighbors, for our enemies, for ourselves, and for God’s beloved creation.
“The Way” is Not About Exclusion
“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians.
Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
Jesus as “the way” is not permission for an us-versus-them Christianity.
I think one reason the church keeps falling into this us-and-them pattern is that we misunderstand John 14:6:
I am the way, and the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me”
— John 14:6 (NRSVUE)
Many Christians have heard that as a boundary marker for sorting humanity into insiders and outsiders. It becomes a slogan that says our group has the right formula, and everyone else is lost unless they become like us.
But that is not the whole context.
Thomas says he does not know the way. Jesus answers by pointing to himself. Then a few verses later, when Philip says, “Show us the Father,” Jesus replies,
“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”
— John 14:9 (NRSVUE)
So the force of the passage is not, “Become part of our tribe.”
It is, “If you want to know what the Father is like, look at me.”
If you want to know the way to the Father, look at how I live, how I love, how I receive people, how I hold power, how I suffer, how I forgive.
Jesus is not giving them a password for deciding who is in and who is out. He is showing them what the Father is like.
The church’s calling is not to reproduce our subculture. It is to help people follow the Way of Jesus and become more fully human in him.
That also sheds light on one of Jesus’ favorite names for himself. Some translations keep “Son of Man,” while the Common English Bible often renders it “the Human One.” I think that catches something essential.
Jesus is the truly human one, the new Adam, the one in whom humanity is being healed and revealed. Jesus is the human prototype.
And that means the question is not, “How do we get everyone to become like us?”
The question is, “How do we help each other behold Christ clearly enough that our lives start looking more like his?”
We Become Human With Other People
“Man is naturally a creature inclined to community. Unlike wild beasts which shun human society, humans are born in such weakness that they require years of parental care. They possess language and reason for communication. The virtues themselves cannot be practiced in solitude—you cannot practice generosity toward yourself, or forgiveness, or humility. Therefore, the human who attempts to live apart from community is living contrary to their nature.” — St. Basil the Great
No one becomes Christlike alone.
This is where belonging comes back into the center.
Belonging is not the end of the story. It is the soil where transformation becomes possible. It is where people can stop performing. It is where masks can come off. It is where we can be loved enough to tell the truth and stay.
And that kind of becoming does not happen in isolation.
We become human and holy with other people, not apart from them.
We learn patience around actual people.
We learn forgiveness when someone wounds us and love asks us not to let resentment tell the whole story.
We learn gentleness when another person’s fragility matters more than our need to win.
We learn compassion when suffering has a face, a name, a hospital room, a kitchen table.
We learn honesty when a community is safe enough for confession.
We learn how to receive love when we are too tired to be impressive and someone remains.
Lucy Peppiatt describes discipleship as a gradual, relational transformation into Christlikeness through Word, Spirit, and community. That feels much truer to the life of faith than anything built on appearances.
“And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”
— 2 Corinthians 3:18 (NIV)
We become what we contemplate.
We become what we behold.
And if what we behold is Christ,
then the shape of our lives should slowly begin to resemble his.
At its best, the church is a people learning the life of Jesus together, not a place built to reward performance or protect the right tribe.
The life of a disciple is the process of becoming truly human.
The life of the church is the journey of becoming more like Christ together.
The mission of the church is to partner with God in the restoration of all things, including the renewal of humanity.
Formation Happens In Ordinary Life
"Christ is the model of humanity.
If you want to know what it means to be truly human, look at Jesus."
– Brennan Manning
Most spiritual growth does not happen in dramatic moments. It happens in everyday acts of love.
People often imagine formation as a specialized church activity.
A class.
A program.
A spiritual track for the extra-committed (i.e. If you attend class 101, 201, 301, and 401, you will be instantly a mature disciple of Jesus.)
Been there.
Tried that.
It doesn’t work.
Formation is not a hobby for serious Christians. It is what is already happening to all of us, all the time. The Spirit of Christ is shaping us to become more like Jesus, whether we realize it or not. It doesn’t happen automatically, it requires our participation.
The real question is not whether we are being formed. The real question is what is forming us.
Are we being shaped by fear? By outrage? By speed? By exhaustion? By the pressure to prove ourselves? By the habits of a culture that teaches us to consume, compare, and defend?
Or are we being shaped by the patient love of Christ?
That formation usually looks ordinary.
It happens when meals are shared.
It happens when someone checks in again.
It happens in care ministry.
It happens when grief is not rushed.
It happens when prayer becomes honest.
It happens when somebody says, “I’m not okay,” and the room does not go cold.
It happens in the slow, well-lived events of everyday life.
That is one reason I appreciate David Benner’s insistence that:
“true spirituality is inseparable from becoming fully human and deeply alive.”
— David Benner
If that is true, then spiritual formation is not escape from real life. It is learning to inhabit real life more honestly, more prayerfully, more compassionately, and more awake to God.
Gregory of Nazianzus wrote,
“What is not assumed is not healed; what is united to God is saved.”
— Gregory of Nazianzus
Christ takes up our humanity in order to heal it. Our bodies, our grief, our relationships, our wounds, our ordinary days. None of it is beneath the work of God.
Church Exists in More Than One Form
“I would live in a world of Christ-like humans,
but not one full of Christians, may God forgive me.”
— Kate Horsley
If institutional church has wounded you, your longing for real church is still holy.
I want to say this plainly for anyone who has been wounded by the institutional church and is no longer attending church in the usual sense.
That is okay.
Or maybe better: I understand.
Church exists in more than one form. It is not exhausted by a building, a denomination, a Sunday schedule, or an institutional structure. At its heart, church is a people who belong to one another because they are beloved, a people beholding Christ, following together in his way, and becoming more fully human in love.
That is closer to the early church than many of our polished modern definitions.
They had no denominations. No branding strategy. No tight institutional machinery. They had the Holy Spirit, a table, prayer, conflict, courage, mistakes, generosity, and a messy life together. It was not clean. But it was family.
Some people will find that life in homes, around tables, in small circles of trust, in recovery rooms, in prayer groups, in friendships, in communities of care and shared practice.
That is vital for those who have experience trauma and are easily trigger being in spaces containing institutional religion.
I am still in the institutional church because I feel called to participate with Jesus in its restoration and renewal. I feel called to help correct harmful theology, decentralize power, empower people into their calling, nurture safety and belonging, and keep pressing the church back toward its clearest vocation.
Our one job is to “Love everyone always.”
But if I were not called to that work, I honestly do not know where I would be today.
So if the institution has broken your heart, I do not think that disqualifies you from church. I think it may deepen your hunger for the real thing.
Who Are We Becoming Together?
“As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has-or ever will have-something inside that is unique to all time.”
— Fred Rogers
The real question is what kind of people we are becoming together.
That is the question the church should be asking, and too often does not.
The church often asks whether people are attending, staying busy, staying compliant, and staying inside the approved lines. But the deeper question is whether we are becoming more like Jesus.
Are we becoming more loving?
More truthful?
More merciful?
More able to cross lines of difference without fear?
More open to the Spirit?
More human?
We ask the question again,
Are we becoming more loving?
That kind of formation is slow. It is messy. It cannot be measured neatly. It will not always flatter the institution. But it is holy work.
And maybe that is the hope.
That church can become more than a system people survive.
Church can become a place, or a people, where all humanity is healed.
A place where belovedness is practiced.
A place where truth does not end relationship.
A people in whom the life of Jesus becomes visible.
Together.
Let’s Talk
Where have you seen church form people into fear or exclusion rather than love?
What helps you imagine discipleship as becoming more fully human, not just more religious?
If church is a people beholding Christ and following his way together, what might that look like in your life right now?
Next In The Series
Being the Church Together is a series about recovering the church as a beloved community of love, belonging, healing, formation, and shared life in the way of Jesus. The heartbeat of the series is this: church is not meant to be a place where people learn to perform religion. It is meant to be a people through whom Christ’s love becomes visible.
Next is Blessing Together.
If this essay asks what kind of people the church is meant to form, the next one asks what that formation is for. A community becoming more fully human in Christ does not exist for itself. It becomes a blessing through generosity, justice, healing, mercy, and love that takes flesh in the world.
“Christianity is an entirely new way of being human.”
— Maximus the Confessor
“Yes, Jesus was the template for what Godness looks like. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus of Nazareth. But the mystery of the incarnation is that he was also the template for what real, true humanness looks like. He’s the Son of God and he’s the “son of Adam.” If you want to know what a human being, fully awake and alive, ruling over the world as a conduit for the Creator God’s love looks like in flesh and blood — then look at Jesus.”
― John Mark Comer
“The American church, often captured by the values of broader culture, has become a platform for individual performance more than an academy for discipleship to Jesus. And it doesn’t take a social scientist to see that when the church becomes a stage on which a leader performs for an adoring crowd, it destroys both those in the pews and the performer on the stage. The church, stripped of the robust value of formation in community, is leaking its lifeblood.”
― Tyler Staton
Lovely, Paul! Thanks for this encouraging picture of a life in Jesus.