Church Is a Group Project

Around this time of year, twenty-two years ago, I found myself in a precarious situation.

I had just moved from my home state of North Carolina to Washington, DC, to start graduate school at American University. It was my first apartment of my own. I was learning the Metro. I was learning to keep walking when a rat darted out of an alley in front of me, which felt like an unmistakable omen that I was not in North Carolina anymore. Looking back, I had no idea what I was getting into. But I got my first real clue in my classes that fall, because in two of my three courses, the professors opened the semester by assigning group projects.

If you've ever been a student almost anywhere in the world, you probably just felt your shoulders tense up. On paper, group projects sound fun. You're not solely responsible for the finished product. When you're a kid, you get to go over to someone else's house. When you're older, you get late-night brainstorming sessions over pizza, interrupted by gossip about whatever's happening on campus.

But what actually happens? More often than not, group projects are a lesson in stress. You don't control the final product. The effort is wildly uneven, and one or two people end up doing most of the work. You get paired with people who annoy you, or with people who simply disappear.

That September, I got both kinds of group project.

In the first class, I was paired with a genuinely lovely guy who would go on to become a real friend throughout grad school. What I didn't know was that he was going through some serious personal challenges, and to cope, he basically vanished from campus. I did the entire project by myself. He resurfaced later and apologized profusely, but it scarred me a little. I remember thinking, Is this what graduate school is going to be?

In the second class, something different happened. I developed more-than-friendly feelings for a woman in my group, who was, of course, straight. Instead of a simple friendship, that group project initiated me into about five years of the ups and downs of unrequited love.

So I want to say out loud something many of us have felt in our hearts at one time or another: church can feel a lot like a group project.

It can feel precarious, like being stuck with a random collection of people who refuse to act the way you want them to. It's a community whose output you cannot quality-control. And as we begin this new series on 1 Corinthians, I want to be clear right from the start: this is exactly the experience the Apostle Paul is addressing. He is writing into the beauty and the precarity (a big word for the big feeling of vulnerability) that lives in every single church.

Where We've Been, and Where We're Going

All year long at The Table, we've been circling the theme of re-enchantment. Back in January, we walked with the prophet Jeremiah and asked how to stay faithful in seasons of disorientation, how to let our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh, and how to survive the Fridays and Saturdays of our lives until Sunday comes. After Easter, we talked about what we're invited to steward on the ordinary Mondays of our lives: our time, our privilege, our power, our community, our money. This summer, we read the parables of Jesus through the lens of Afrofuturism and asked what they might say to us about imagination. So now we've survived the wilderness, opened our hands, and reignited our imaginations. This fall, we're camping out in Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth to ask two questions.

First: What does a re-enchanted, tender heart look like up close to the messiness of other humans?

Second: How do we stay faithful when we run into the very real issues of rivalry and status, church conflict, embodiment, sex, singleness, marriage, divorce, and so much more?

And a bonus question: What does following Jesus look like when you're in close proximity to people you didn't choose and can't control?

We're calling this series Hot Takes (credit to Anthony, who is much cooler than I am). The church at Corinth had some provocative ideas that threatened to shape the wider movement of early Christians, and Paul writes back to their hot takes with pastoral care and correction, drawing them back to their foundation in Jesus. Of course, to the mostly Gentile (non-Jewish) Corinthians, Paul probably seemed like the one with the hot takes. But his were attempts to call them back to timeless truths.

In the opening verses of the letter, 1 Corinthians 1:1–17, I want us to see three things: who we are, what holds us together, and what threatens that.

A Little Background on Corinth

Paul founded this community around 50 or 51 CE. He understood his calling as bringing the good news of Jesus to the Gentiles and planting small communities of Jesus-followers all over the Mediterranean world. According to Acts 18:11, he stayed in Corinth for about a year and a half, laying the foundation of this church before moving on.

Corinth was an interesting place. It sat about 40 miles southwest of Athens on an isthmus between two ports, which made it a wealthy commercial hub. The Romans destroyed the original Greek city in 146 BCE, then refounded it as a Roman colony about a century later.

Don't miss this part: many of the people who resettled Corinth were formerly enslaved, because the city offered a kind of upward mobility that neighboring cities didn't. In Corinth, a formerly enslaved person could even be elected chief magistrate. In other words, Corinth was a city where you could improve your status. Hold onto that. It matters for the whole letter.

It's also worth remembering that these early Christians met in house churches. We live in a world shaped by megachurch tastes and styles, so it's easy to forget that the first churches were tiny, maybe 30 to 50 people, basically however many could fit in the home of a wealthier member. All told, there might have been 200 Christians in a city of 50,000 to 100,000 people, surrounded on nearly every street corner by statues of Roman gods.

That's the world Paul writes into. His concern is to de-form the Corinthians from the culture around them and re-form them into the great story of God revealed in Jesus.

Who We Are: Called to Respond

Paul opens his letter, in effect, by saying, I know who I am, and I know who you are. He is "called to be an apostle," someone sent out on a mission. And the church is "called to be saints" (1 Corinthians 1:2).

In Paul's language, "saints" doesn't mean spiritual superstars. It means people who are claimed and set apart, like the priests and sacred vessels in the Jewish temple, which were set aside for a special purpose. Their assignment is to lean intentionally into a belonging that God started, a belonging that pulls them outside of themselves. Paul reminds them that they belong with "all those in every place" who call on Jesus's name. Even if there are only 200 of them in the whole city, they're part of something much bigger. And that belonging requires a response.

Some of you know I come from a church tradition that knows a thing or two about call and response. Growing up, I heard it everywhere, not just at church. You'd hear it at ballgames, too. Somebody would shout, "Give me a J!" and the crowd would shout back, "J!" And on down the line until someone asked, "What does that spell?" and everyone hollered, "Jesus!"

(Yes, I did try this in the sanctuary. No, nobody stood up. Y'all just let me do it alone. That's fine.)

But whether it was Sunday morning worship or a Friday night basketball game, when we did call and response, we knew we were caught up in something larger than ourselves: something communal, something embodied. That's what Paul is reminding the Corinthians. They have heard the call of the good news, and the good news asks for a response of thoughtful, discerning obedience.

"You are called to be saints. Not people of exceptional performance, but people of excellent love."

So, Table Church, here's the question: What will your embodied response be this week? What will you do on purpose? And what will we do, intentionally, together?

What Holds Us Together: Grace and Peace

Next, Paul offers a line he returns to again and again in his letters: "Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 1:3).

This is the glue. Grace grounds and surrounds our life together. Grace is gift. Grace is what we don't earn.

And peace, what the ancient Israelites called shalom, is more than the absence of conflict. It's the flourishing that happens between things, the electricity in how people and creation relate to one another when everything is as it should be. That's what the church is meant to aspire to.

As someone who helps lead the preaching team here at The Table, I think a lot about which words we use in our sermons and which ones we don't. My sense is that justice comes up a lot. Grace comes up less often.

I get why. We're a church that cares about taking sides. We care about structural equity. But that raises a real question for a community like ours: What do we do with a scandalous word like grace? How do we take seriously the things we don't earn and consistently need from each other?

I'll be honest: I don't fully know the answer. But I notice that Paul pairs grace and peace over and over, as if he believes you simply cannot have shalom without grace. So if we want shalom in this community and in this city, we might need to start talking about grace a lot more.

"It is impossible to have the world of shalom apart from the presence of grace."

What Threatens Us, and What Comes First

By the end of this opening passage, Paul names what threatens everything that holds them together. He's gotten a report from "Chloe's people" (1 Corinthians 1:11). Scholars debate who they were; some think they were enslaved members of her household, others think they were members of a church she led. Either way, they've reported divisions. People are lining up behind their favorite leaders: I belong to Paul. I belong to Apollos. I belong to Cephas. Some are even saying, I belong to Christ, as a way of one-upping everyone else.

Paul's response is sharp: "Has Christ been divided?" (1 Corinthians 1:13). In other words: Has Jesus become a commodity? A brand you wear?

Paul urges them to be "knit together." The word he uses is the same one used for mending a fishing net, which is exactly what Jesus's first disciples, the fishermen, would have done. He also hints at trouble around eloquence and knowledge, gifts that in a status-conscious city like Corinth could easily become tools for climbing over one another. We'll dig into all of this next week.

But here's what surprised me this week. Before Paul offers any correction, before he names a single problem, he gives thanks. "I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus" (1 Corinthians 1:4).

At the moment when it would be easiest to see only what's wrong, Paul takes time to name the treasures of this messy group project. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about this in his classic book Life Together. He warns that if we only complain to God that our community is petty and disappointing, we actually get in the way of God growing it. What looks weak and trifling to us, he says, may be great and glorious to God.

Relationship books tell us something similar: appreciation you never express does very little for the person you love. And you are my partners in Christ. So let me go first.

I give thanks for you, Table Church, because of the grace God has given you to be clear-eyed and still hopeful. You see how deeply the American church has become entangled with the pursuit of power, and yet you have not given up on this group project. I give thanks that you are a community of energy and optimism, and that so many of you are younger than me, with many years ahead to lead the church forward. I give thanks that we are single people and families, married and divorced, children and people heading toward retirement. And maybe most of all, I give thanks for your flexibility as we pursue Jesus together.

There's so much good to name here, so much grace to emphasize. Over the next several weeks, we're probably not all going to agree on every topic this letter raises (which, honestly, is going to be fun). So let's let appreciation ground us.

"What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God."

The Beautiful Surprises of the Group Project

Church sometimes does feel like a group project. Precarious. Frustrating. But when I look back on those two group projects from that September twenty-two years ago, there's something else that needs to be said.

The guy who ghosted me? He really did ghost me. He also lent me his entire collection of jazz CDs, all in one of those big zippered folders. (I know.) I had never been exposed to jazz before. Because of him, I discovered music that felt like God had made it just for me.

And the straight woman I fell for, the one whose friendship got complicated for years? She was also the person who helped me name, for the first time, what I had never been able to say to myself: that perhaps gay love lived inside godly love.

The people I didn't choose and couldn't control became the people through whom God gave me some of the greatest gifts of my life. So may we be a church that truly understands who we are. May we understand what holds us together and what threatens our fellowship. May we stay open to the beautiful surprises of this group project assigned to us by Jesus. And may we learn, actively and out loud, to thank God for it.

This week, try this: name one person in your church community, or any community you didn't fully choose, and tell them specifically what you're grateful for. Don't just think it. Say it. Then join us as we keep working through 1 Corinthians together in Hot Takes. You can follow along and find more resources at table.center.