What are we like together?
That question cuts closer than it might first appear. Because it is not merely asking about preference or personality — it is asking about obedience. It is asking about witness. It is asking whether the people who bear the name of Jesus are gathered in a way that actually looks like Him. The Character of Christ calls us to examine the person we are becoming — the qualities the Spirit is patiently working into us from the inside out. The Connections of Christ call us to examine how we relate — the healing, overflowing, Spirit-led, tender-hearted bonds that mark those who genuinely belong to Jesus. But neither character nor connection fully reaches its God-intended expression in isolation. Both are shaped in, sustained by, and sent out through Community. It was always going to come to this.
What matters to Jesus about community is not peripheral to the Gospel. It is one of its most powerful and most visible expressions.
The Church He Had in Mind
The word community can be received too easily in an age that speaks of it constantly while experiencing so little of it. The church, if it is not careful, can offer the same hollow approximation — people sharing a building, a service order, a schedule, and very little else. That is not what Jesus had in mind.
When Jesus called His disciples, He called them into a shared life — the koinonia of Acts 2:42–47, where believers devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. They met in homes. They ate together with gladness and sincerity of heart. They held things in common. Members were alive, active, and contributing — not as spectators to ministry performed by the gifted few, but as participants in a body in which every part was functioning (1 Corinthians 12:12–27). This was not a polished programme. This was a living organism, breathing with the life of the Spirit, growing the way Jesus said the Kingdom grows — quietly, from the inside, with a power that belongs entirely to God.
Jesus was deliberate about the kind of community He planted. In John 13:35, He staked an extraordinary claim — that the love His people have for one another would be the most visible evidence to a watching world that they truly belong to Him. Not a creed alone, not a calendar of religious observance, but a community. A people whose quality of togetherness would be one of the most arresting signs of the reality of Christ. And in John 17:20–23, He pressed further still — praying that the unity of His people would mirror the unity of the Father and the Son, and that this unity would be the proof sent out to the world that the Father had indeed sent Him. That prayer was not for the eleven alone in that upper room. It was for all who would believe through their word. It was for us.
That changes everything about how we approach what it means to gather.
The Approach
To guide our exploration of Community like Jesus, we will use four aspects of community as Jesus modelled it and the early church embodied it. These are not newly invented ideals. They are recoveries — of something the church has always carried within it, even when it has been buried beneath layers of tradition, institutional weight, and cultural accommodation. Each one will receive its own careful exploration.
Home. There is a moment in Luke 15 that tells us almost everything we need to know about the quality of welcome Jesus was after. The father sees the returning son while he is still a great way off — and he does not wait. He runs. He throws his arms around him. He calls for the robe, the ring, the feast (Luke 15:20–24). That is the posture of the community Jesus builds. Before Jesus spoke of going to prepare a place and of the Father's house with many rooms (John 14:2–3), He had already established among His disciples the quality of belonging that makes a place home. Home is not first a building — it is a quality of presence. It is the lived reality of Ephesians 2:19 — that we are no longer strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens with God's people and members of His household. The community of Christ, at its truest, is a place where every person who arrives is known, not merely recognised — where wounds are not hidden but held, where the table is set, and there is always room, and where no one is left to feel that they have wandered too far to belong.
Organic. Jesus never described His church in institutional terms. He reached instead for the world of growth — vines and branches, seeds and harvests, yeast and dough (John 15:1–5; Mark 4:26–29; Matthew 13:33). He understood that genuine community is not engineered from the outside but cultivated from the inside. It is a living thing. It breathes. It grows. It bears fruit not because a system demanded it but because the life of the Vine was flowing through every branch. This means that the community of Christ cannot be sustained by a structure in which all spiritual life is channelled through the activity of the few while the many remain passive and consuming. Every member carries the life of Christ within them. Every member is a branch. Every member is called to abide — and abiding produces fruit that neither programmes nor platforms could ever manufacture. Life is in the Vine. And when every branch truly abides, community grows in ways that can only be described as the work of God.
Simple. There is a table. There is bread and wine. There is the Word read aloud and prayed over. There are people present to one another — honestly, vulnerably, without performance. That is closer to what Jesus established than much of what gathers in His name today. He reserved some of His most searching words for those who had made the things of God burdensome and inaccessible (Matthew 23:4) — and some of His most tender for those weary enough to receive a different offer: Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28). The Sermon on the Mount does not present a sophisticated and complex system. It presents a life of radical trust in a good Father, lived out with integrity before a watching world. Simple community resists the gravitational pull towards complexity, performance, and the relentless need to impress. It returns, again and again, to the essentials Jesus placed at the centre — the truth that sets free, the prayer that moves heaven, the love that holds together, the witness that draws the lost home. Simple is not small. Simple is focused. And a focused community, surrendered to the Spirit, changes everything it touches.
Thriving. Jesus said He came that we might have life — and have it to the full (John 10:10). That abundance is not primarily material or numerical. It is the overflowing, irrepressible life of the Spirit marking a people genuinely connected to their living Lord. Paul's vision in Ephesians 4:15–16 is breathtaking in its scope — a body growing up into Christ in every way, every joint contributing, every part working properly, building itself up in love. This is not a picture of a passive congregation waiting for ministry to be delivered to them by the qualified. This is a community of fully alive disciples — each one built up, each one contributing, each one pressing toward maturity in Christ. Thriving community takes seriously the call to make disciples, not merely decisions — to see people not just converted but formed, not just added to a number but shaped into the unmistakable likeness of Jesus. Anything less is a settling. And a settling, however comfortable it becomes, is a long way from the full life He came to give.
What Matters to Jesus
Consider the moment when Jesus prayed the prayer in John 17. It was the night of His betrayal. The cross was before Him. Gethsemane was hours away. And in that hour, before He faced everything that awaited Him, He prayed — not only for the eleven in that room, but for all who would believe through their word. He prayed for us. And He prayed for our unity.
The unity of the church is a missional act. The community of Christ is a witness of Christ. And that witness has eternal consequences for the world's ability to hear and believe the Gospel. This places a holy weight on how we gather, how we belong, how we love, and how we treat one another in the ordinary, unobserved moments of community life. It is not a preference. It is not a personality option for those who happen to enjoy togetherness. It is an obedience. It is a Kingdom responsibility. And it is one of the most urgent and beautiful recoveries to which the church in every generation is called.
The resources have been given. The Spirit has been poured out. The Scriptures are open. The example is clear. What is needed is the willingness to gather differently — to belong more deeply, to resist the comfortable substitutes that keep us occupied but never bring us to the fullness of what Jesus intended for His people together.
He is still building His church (Matthew 16:18). And He invites us, in this season, to be built.
We'll begin by exploring what it means for the community of Christ to be a Home…
For His Name's Sake
C. L. J. Dryden
Shalom
Next Steps
Reflect: Read Acts 2:42–47, John 15:1–5, and John 17:20–23 slowly and in sequence. Ask yourself honestly — does the community I belong to reflect what I am reading? Where is there genuine life? And where is there a gap between what I see in Scripture and what I experience in practice? Sit with that gap before God without defending it.
Pray: Lord Jesus, you prayed for our unity on the night you faced the cross. That tells us everything about how much it matters to you. Forgive us for the ways we have settled for less than what you designed — for the habits of religion that have replaced the life of community, for the distance we have permitted where closeness was your intention, for the busyness that has kept us productive but not truly together. Build in us, and among us, something that bears your name well — something the watching world cannot explain away. For your glory, and for the sake of those who have not yet believed.
Act: This week, identify one relationship within your Christian community that you have kept at the surface. Take one deliberate step toward greater depth — a conversation over a meal, a genuine question asked and truly listened to, an honest word offered in love. Community like Jesus is not built in a moment. It is built one intentional, costly, Christlike connection at a time.
