Relationships and Spiritual Growth

In my last post, I wrote about 2 ways I'm simplifying my relational life and encouraging people at the Springs to do the same: pursuing relationships close to me and merging my relational worlds. I'm not a social genius, and those who know me best will all say so. I can be very task oriented, I lack sensitivity at times, and I prefer time alone more than most. Brad, our community pastor, and my wife Elizabeth, are both fantastic relationship people. They are the kind of people others just like to be around. So why am I spending so much time talking about relationships? Because everybody needs them, not just the most socially adept. In fact, if I thought about it for very long, I'd have to conclude that God brought people like Elizabeth and Brad into my life because people like me need people like them. I think that's part of God's plan for the church: the introverts and the extroverts, the task-oriented and the people-oriented, all mixing it up for mutual benefit. When Paul said, "there is no Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free, for you are all one in Christ," I don't think he meant that we're all the same--we obviously aren't. But in Christ, it's possible for us to be one, and maybe we can't be whole unless we become one with all those disparate others. The United States didn't invent e pluribus unum.

I'm learning more and more that these kinds of relationships are keys to spiritual growth. As a church guy, I used to think that church programs were the key. I was raised on a healthy diet of church programs. I'm thankful for that, by the way, because each one represented at least one person who cared about me and helped me grow spiritually. But when Elizabeth and I started dating, she presented me with a dilemma. She grew up in a very small town where churches were under-resourced and had little to offer in the way of programs. She had come to faith in Christ primarily through the influence of her grandmother and some adults in her town who cared for her. She had never participated in a discipleship program or an evangelism program or gone through leadership development or been to Christian camp like I had. But anyone could see that she was more kind than I was, and more joyful, and more patient, and more a lot of other stuff. She loved God and loved her neighbor in ways I did not. She still does. I knew 2 things from that moment on: that I was in love with her, and that church programs didn't make a person like her. They made a person like me: knowledgeable; "prepared." But neither of those things made the list of Jesus' benchmarks of spiritual growth. What is "spiritually mature"? Jesus was not vague about this: love God and love your neighbor. The rest, as it turns out, is window-dressing.