Guest Blogger: Danielle Price

Hello, everyone. My name is Danielle Price, Lisa Price's eldest daughter. She asked me to fill in while she's out of town, and while doing the awesome job she does is a tall order, I'll do my best. :)

“The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ.” –1 Corinthians 12:12

                  I’m a bit of a science nerd. (I’m a bit of a nerd period, but that’s another story.) Up until tenth grade—when science classes became chemistry classes and seventy-five percent of what I learned in those classes was math—I loved science. When I was a girl, I spent hours poring over kid-friendly books about space, the natural world, and especially the human body.

                  Through reading those books, I learned a slew of interesting facts about the incredible organism we call the human body. Well-known things, like the fact hair is made from dead cells; obscure things, like the fact that fingernails grow at roughly the rate of continental drift (don’t ask me why I remember that one because I couldn’t tell you)—all of these facts managed to stick in my brain, and they are just as fascinating to me today as they were on the day I learned them. But the main lesson I learned was this: The human body is far more complex than even modern scientists realize; and the more we learn about it, the more complex it becomes.

                  Somehow, I managed to forget that when I heard that the Church is the body of Christ. My first thought was probably the same as everyone else’s: “Oh, that’s nice. Paul means everyone in the Church needs to work together. No eyeballs saying ‘Hasta la vista!’ to feet, no feet telling the spleen to go away—we’re all in this together.” And then I moved on.

                  But the more I thought about the Church, the more facts about the human body kept popping into my head. And the more facts popped into my head, the more I realized that the Church is and should be as complex as the human body.

                  Let’s look at blood as an example. Many of us think of blood as a single substance, an oozing red liquid that keeps us alive. But blood isn’t made up of one substance; it’s made up of four primary components: red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and plasma. Each of these components has a specific function: red blood cells carry oxygen, white blood cells fight disease and build immunity, platelets form clots when the skin is broken and thus prevent blood loss, and plasma carries all three throughout the body at the speed of a single heartbeat. Even that explanation is a vast oversimplification of the many functions those components perform.

                  Now, could God have made blood into one substance that performed all four functions by itself? Of course. But I believe God made blood into four separate, harmonious components for many reasons. One of those reasons is to provide his people with a picture of how the Church is supposed to be: many separate, different people all working for a common good.

                  Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

When Feet and Hands Attack

                  There are many things to love about the Church. But it is also made up of flawed human beings, working for the good of other flawed human beings, so mistakes are inevitable. One of the mistakes many Christians make is to believe everyone in the Church is called to serve God in the same way you are. 

                  Please don’t take my use of “you” as an accusation, because it’s not. I’ve been guilty of this before, so when I use the word “you,” I mean to include everyone, especially myself. I believe it is a trap that everyone succumbs to sooner or later. The most common way we succumb to that trap is by thinking, usually subconsciously, that our ministry is the only ministry that can bring people to Christ.

                  Say, for instance, that there is a young woman in her twenties and an older woman in her fifties. The younger woman is called to be a missionary to India; the older woman is called to serve the homeless at a local soup kitchen. In human body terms, the younger woman is the feet of Jesus, and the older woman is the hands.

                  Now, both ministries are important—vitally so. Both have the potential to meet the physical and spiritual needs of the lost, and both ministries are drastically underserved. However, rather than recognizing this truth, the two women look down on each other. The younger woman has a habit of telling the older woman about the terrible human trafficking trade in India, and pointing out how much those girls need to hear about Jesus. The older woman counters the younger woman’s thinly veiled criticisms with her own: She tells the younger woman about single mothers on the streets with no way of providing for their infants, and adds that they need hope as well as food. Both of these women are absolutely right—and both women are absolutely wrong.

                  Both of these women are called to serve God with their strengths, and both women are wholeheartedly devoted to God through their callings. But neither woman is devoted to the other, and neither values the other’s ministry as much as she values her own.

                  Now, is a missionary called to perform acts of service? Of course—we all are. Likewise, the one who serves the homeless is called to be a missionary to those she serves—as we all are. But feet are not made to serve alone. (I wouldn’t recommend trying to prove me wrong on this one. Technically, it is possible to serve the homeless with your feet, but if you try it, you will have a long line of hungry, angry homeless people demanding to know why you just used your dirty feet to ladle perfectly good soup onto the floor.) And it is unfair to expect hands to travel. (Again, they can, but that doesn’t mean they should. Missionaries who walk on their hands are unheard of for a reason.) Rather than the hands expecting the feet to act like hands and vice versa, the hands and feet should celebrate each other; for each is called to do what the other cannot.

How Do We Fix It?

   

               The answer is both easy and difficult: Stop expecting everyone else to serve Jesus the same way you do. This answer is easy because it is simple. It is difficult because it’s hard to judge others fairly when they don’t act the way we do. We take pride in our ministries, and so we assume that those ministries are the only ones that need volunteers. We take pride in our style of serving, and we use that as our standard by which to judge others’ styles of serving. Sometimes, we allow our jealousy to cloud our judgment, so we tell others to stop doing something we wish we could do ourselves. Other times, we aren’t jealous at all; we’re just a bit nearsighted.

                  We need to start leaving the judgment to God. That doesn’t mean we should stop confronting sin—that would be akin to the white blood cells in a body refusing to fight disease—but when a brother or sister in Christ is fulfilling his or her calling, we should celebrate the work they are doing, as well as the unique stamp they place on their ministry. Does this mean that we should act purposely bizarre to add “uniqueness” to the Church? No. Anything that takes the focus off God and places it on us should be avoided, but neither should we seek to snuff uniqueness out for fear that its mere existence will detract from the gospel.

Choosing Complexity

                  As believers, we have a choice. We can choose to embrace the complexity God has created in the Church, or we can turn our backs on that complexity. The latter would be a terrible mistake.

                  Think back on the human body. God could have kept it simple. He could have made the entire body a foot, or a hand, or a pair of lips; but he chose to make the human body all three and so much more.

                  It is the same way with the Church. God could have designed everyone in the Church to serve the homeless. He could have called everyone to be a missionary to India. He could have told every member of the Church to become a pastor, but he didn’t. He designed people to be different, and he called those different people to fulfill specific functions in his Church, in order that all people might hear the gospel. It is a beautiful and complex system, made even more beautiful when we embrace that complexity and work together in harmony.

                  If you’re still not convinced, imagine what might happen if your fingers decided they weren’t part of your body anymore. I rest my case.

“But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” –1 Corinthians 12:24-26