Playing Scrabble without the Vowels

I was chatting with friends recently and we wondered what being a Christian would be like without a community of believers to belong to. 

I found myself saying, “Being a Christian without a church is like playing Scrabble without the vowels.”

In just the same way that our hearts sink when our seven allocated letters are all vowels, perhaps we take church for granted sometimes. But try playing without them! So here are five advantages of being committed to your church – beginning with a, e, i, o and u.

A is for accountability. Being an active member of a church keeps us accountable to God and to our fellow believers. Every time I take Communion I am saying with all my brothers and sisters “Lord, we need more grace from you.” The New Testament is full of “one anothers” – love one another, encourage one another and accept one another but also admonish one another and forgive one another. We can’t do that alone. We need each other for true spiritual accountability.

E is for encounter. The Lord has pledged his presence when two or more gather in his name. Though we can of course meet with God on our own, Jesus never made a promise about it. Psalm 22.3 says that the Lord inhabits the praises of his people. We can meet with God when we worship together in a way that we can’t when we are alone.

I is for inspiration. Gathering to sing praise, to hear the word of God expounded with passion and to share spiritual gifts to build one another up is inspiring. OK, some Sundays are a bit more inspirational than others – such is life. But God has designed the church so we can learn, grow, be stretched and be challenged. Expect to be inspired!

O is for outreach. More outreach is done through the local church than through any other agency in the world. Messy Church and the Lunch Club (at All Saints’ Preston on Tees) and Godzone and the Community Lunch (at Saint Mary’s Long Newton) are just four of many opportunities that enable people in the churches I lead to meet with hundreds of people each month who don’t yet know Christ personally.

U is for unity. God loves unity; he is three persons but one God. We know that unity is important in any organisation; political parties that are divided are unelectable and football teams with a divided dressing room usually struggle. But when churches seek and find unity in the Holy Spirit there is nowhere better on earth to be. In fact, Psalm 133 tells us that God commands blessing on his people when they live and work in unity together.

When you’ve got all that, who needs ‘muzjiks’* on a triple word score?

* Muzjiks (meaning Russian peasants) at 79 is the highest scoring word in Scrabble apparently.