Written by Dawn Rutan
I hadn’t read any C.S. Lewis for a while until I picked up The Weight of Glory recently. He has two essays in there that are closely related. In “The Inner Ring” he talks about our desire to belong to some select group of people, and the perils of seeking the wrong kind of clique. He advises that the best kind of Inner Ring is that which happens accidentally—“four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship.”
Then in “Membership” Lewis addresses the complexities of individualism and collectivism within the Church. He writes,
“The very word membership is of Christian origin, but it has been taken over by the world and emptied of all meaning. In any book on logic you may see the expression ‘members of a class.’ It must be most emphatically stated that the items or particulars included in a homogeneous class are almost the reverse of what St. Paul meant by members. By members he meant what we should call organs, things essentially different from, and complementary to, one another, things differing not only in structure and function but also in dignity…”
Reading the two theses together got me thinking about what it means to belong. From our earliest childhood, we all desire a sense of belonging—in a family, a classroom, a group of friends, a society or club, etc. And some folks go to great lengths to fit in with a particular segment of people. Gang membership is peer pressure taken to extremes. Usually the members of a group have something in common, even if it just the kind of music they listen to or the shoes they buy. Facebook is built on the desire for people to belong to a circle of friends, acquaintances, or dog-lovers.
Lewis draws out a couple points worth considering. First, often our desire to belong is not so much that we have a lot in common with a group of people, but that by being on the “inside” we can feel superior to those who are outside. We may not even know or care what Society X does, but it gives us a feeling of power to know that we are members of an elite group.
Second, the Church is founded on an entirely different idea of membership. It was never meant to be a social club for like-minded individuals to belong to and therefore feel superior to those on the outside. In fact, there is nothing we can do to earn our membership in the body. We are chosen entirely on the basis of what someone else did for us—by Jesus’ death on the cross. We have no reason to feel superior when we realize what sinners we are. We have no merit of our own.
And as Lewis states clearly, members of the Church are not a homogenous class with every person looking, sounding, and serving in exactly the same way. Instead, we are unique organs with unique functions within a Body. (See Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and Ephesians 4.) My role, appearance, location, and relationship to the other organs is not going to be quite the same as any other member. Lewis also points out that our value is not innate in our humanity, but it is conveyed to us by virtue of our place in the Body. God doesn’t go around looking for people able to fill a particular role. “There is no question of finding for him a place in the living temple which will do justice to his inherent value and give scope to his natural idiosyncrasy. The place was there first. The man was created for it. He will not be himself till he is there.”
These truths should impact us deeply as Christians. We should take great comfort in knowing that we belong to something far greater than ourselves. We shouldn’t feel the pressure to conform to some random standard of society in order to belong, but should have the most secure sense of belonging possible in Christ. In addition, we ought to be humbled to realize that we didn’t do anything to earn our place here, and no one else has to earn their right to belong either. In fact, we don’t really have any say in whether another belongs or not. That decision is entirely up to God.
May God forgive our prideful, judgmental, exclusionary approach to “doing church!”
“Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (Colossians 3:12 ESV).
