Agape working up a sweat

    Creatures of habit we are, we are. Nowhere can this be observed more clearly than on the Lordsday with regards to the seating of the saints during worship. Now, I've been abundantly blessed to have grown up as a son of the Covenant and I've attended a number of congregations while doing so and while being married. And one thing that a person becomes acutely aware of is that one doesn't mess with a person's, or a family's, staked out plot of seat(s) in a worship sanctuary! Those seats become, in most minds and congregations, eternally fixed in the created order and are by their very nature sacrosanct, holy, set apart. As my wife would say, this is "functional fixedness" naked and unadorned.
     It must be said that this really is lamentable among God's people, and we should be up for battling this tooth and nail inside the Bride and her local congregations. Why, you may ask, would I say such a thing? Well, apart from the fact that the  "performance" seating arrangements in most churches encourage such behavior, I say such a thing because to intentionally, or habitually, continue to sit in the same seats/section week after week, with little or no exposure to other believers in your church, is detrimental to the genuine fellowship and agape of the whole local congregation.  Spiritual atrophy will begin to be the norm. The status quo (as I read recently, is Latin meaning "the mess we are in") will become the rhythm of the lives of God's chosen people. Maturity in the Spirit's fruits will wane and diminish in general, and soon the idea of “love” becomes only a nice, sentimental platitude to be dissected, sermonized, and stared at until Jesus comes again. Most importantly though, hovering above all that, is that we won't be actively portraying, nor living, as Christ's unified Body. Rather, we will display to one another – 52 times a year no less – that we really believe we are merely disconnected, autonomous body parts floating about in the seas of Anonymity and Isolation.

     I suppose it can be argued, that rich fellowship can and does happen apart from those you sit closest to during the worship service. I don't dispute that reality, because I've certainly experienced that myself, but it is not normative. A moment’s reflection tells you that before and after the worship service you will naturally talk, and stay talking, with those in closest proximity to you (hopefully anyway, and if not, that's another issue altogether).  But if you don't, our human tendency (me included) is to quickly seek out those we know and like best, or perhaps just more comfortable with (i.e. those with the least amount of "problems").
     So let’s say this happens, and you end up becoming engaged in a conversation  with the same circle of seats, or friends, week after week. This weekly situation can make it quite difficult, not to mention awkward, to endeavor to routinely fellowship with those other brothers and sisters in your congregation when they are not immediately around your seating circle.  This just happens, and of course that's fine as far as it goes.  But deliberate musical chairs week in and week out will help enormously in forcing you to meet others in your local body.
     And this, praise God, is what you and I were called into: a new life in Christ together, and not as autonomous individuals. This means that you and I, who were once Christ's enemies, are now unified in Jesus with all others across the globe, and have been lovingly placed under His feet in the mercy-seat, His footstool. All of us are called to come together as One Body on the Lordsday before the triune God – Father, Son, Spirit – being as the one loaf that is pictured in the bread of communion.  We have been sanctified not only as individuals, but also as the Bride, by the blood of Jesus pictured in the cup of wine. We are one Bride before His Throne in Heaven through the Holy Spirit, and yet interconnected individuals eating around His table as one family on Earth, being served by Christ the Archservant.
    That is us, and that is why we need to actually fellowship with all our family members. We are, within our local congregations and across the world, one family and one bread and are to be as yeast working through the culture around us and the saints in our midst as well. We are to cry with those who cry, and laugh with those who laugh. How in the world can this be obeyed apart from actually getting to know and love those people in the local loaf who are crying, or who are joy-filled? I hope you can see this has many ramifications, not least among them is an argument for smaller congregations which can actually accomplish such things in each others lives.
     Here's the bottom-line though: sitting in the same place week after week, inevitably speaking with the same people week after week is fine for lecture halls and classrooms, but by God's grace, really shouldn't be part of the ethos of the local church. Rather, it is to be and look like who the Lord ransomed us to be: one, connected Body of His. We, in His Church, need to be an image of His triunty, the One and the Many, living in community one with another.  When we act this way we are shadowing our Creator, our Master. We need to live this out in our churches, desiring to live with this framework from top to the bottom, from side to side, inside and out. We should be intentionally living in ways that show that forth, both as individuals and as the one, covenant Bride.
     The wonderful thing is that this kind of comprehensive, individual/corporate, agape living can begin in earnest -- as silly as it sounds -- simply by intentionally deciding to sit in different seats/sections of the congregation each week. This really is born-again, cruciform-centered living in sacred community as it should be.  It is a very practical, buttons-on-your-shirt theology, and yet, unfortunately very “radical” in our age of individualism, ease and affluence. But as Christ's people, members of one another called to be living sacrifices in His family/bread/body and world, we are not to say to one another, "I don't need you" (1 Corinthians 12:12-27), but rather by and through the Spirit say, "I do, and I need to".