Editor's Note: This is an excerpted adaptation of an assignment submitted in reflection of J.R. Briggs' presentation "Church: Good, Bad and Ugly."
Healthy personal involvement within the Church leads to communal involvement in which a community of believers share life together in Jesus Christ. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer stated in Life Together, "Christian brotherhood is not an ideal that we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate."
Healthy personal involvement in the Church results in communal participation in the reality of living in, with, through, and for Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer adds, "...love of others is wholly dependent upon the truth in Christ." Nonparticipation in community is a sentiment of the inability to love; that is, not living in Christ. Healthy personal involvement in a church, therefore, leads to a life of selfless loving. "Community and church are really messy. Community is not the absence of conflict - it is the presence of Jesus when it [conflict] exists," Briggs notes.
Practically, healthy personal involvement in the church cultivates renewal and redemption through committed relationships rooted in Christ and demonstrated by means of acts of service, discipleship, and the integration of Biblical teaching and daily living.
The local congregation becomes vitally necessary for the fulfillment of a life within Christian community as believers unite for the present implementation of the kingdom. The Church "bears and represents Jesus, who is the hope of the world," as Briggs addressed, which demands our active engagement in fulfilling its mission.
