Jesus’ vision for the church: Hybels and Eldredge got it wrong… Bono got it right.

Most of us have an inadequate picture of the profound nature of what Jesus’ vision for the church is.

The now sadly disgraced mega-church Pastor, Bill Hybels, had a vision for the church.

Bill repeatedly said that the church was the hope of the world. When he took time to explain what he meant by that statement, his vision was primarily about the message the church had for people:

“The hope of the world is not government, academia, business, but the church because it is to the church that God has entrusted the message of salvation, which truly changes people’s lives and hearts.”

Bill Hybels

Bill was wrong... but Bill is not alone.

Our culture has predisposed most church people to think that our words and message are the most important thing.

We spend a lot of time and energy trying to get the words right which leads us in two unhelpful directions. Firstly we end up fighting with people who don’t endorse the same message we do. Secondly, we end up boring everyone silly because our words are not relevant to the real questions of their lives.

Jesus’ vision for the church is almost the exact opposite of our over-reliance on words. His vision is about bringing people together, not tearing them apart. Importantly, Jesus’ vision is radical, challenging, and extremely relevant to the real questions of people’s lives. It is by no means boring.

For 20 years I led a mission organisation and I often found more hope and life in the fellowship and faith I found in Fusion, rather than my local church.

I had a very limited understanding of why the local church is so important… and why it is so much bigger and exciting than I ever imagined.

There are 7 things in particular about Jesus’ vision that challenge and change the way you will see the church.

1: Jesus’s vision leads to caring deeply about the church

Let’s be honest. The church is peripheral to most people’s lives.

They might turn up when it suits them but the church has very little bearing on their day to day lives and they rarely feel strongly about it.

Jesus’ vision is that the church is right at the center of what is most important. The Apostle Paul asserts that God’s intent was:

that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms

Ephesians 3:10

Not only is the church the very center of God’s action in the world, but Jesus loves it.

For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault.

Ephesians 5:25-28

So in Jesus’ vision, the church is where the action is, and the church is worthy of the kind of love that you would give up everything else for.

This should be enough to show that most people have a faulty picture, but I hope the next 7 points will show exactly how faulty our picture has become and how remarkable Jesus’ vision actually is.

2: In Jesus’ vision, relationships are everything

The church that Jesus is wanting to build is made up of people whose relationships are so changed, and the way they live is so reflective of His character, that everyone around them would see the truth of His claims:

I am praying not only for these disciples but also for all who will ever believe in me through their message. I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me. I have given them the glory you gave me, so they may be one as we are one.  I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me. 

John 17:20-23

This vision for the church that Jesus unpacks in John 17 has often been misunderstood, mainly because it calls for quite a different kind of church than most of us are used to.

In the Western World, we prize individuality, and Jesus seems to be speaking directly against our most normal impulses.

Popular author John Eldredge is an example of someone who reads this text in a normal, but wrong, way when he says (in his book Moving Mountains):

The passage primarily focusses on protection and union with God. (It is not, as is often mistakenly used, a passage about church unity; the text is very clear that Jesus is talking about our union with him.)

John Eldredge (Moving Mountains: praying with passion, confidence, and authority) page 153

Eldredge is right, the text is very clear, but it is talking about unity in the church. It is talking about our relationships.

It is clear in English and in Greek. Simple reference works such as the NIV, or NET Study Bible Notes make it clear, as do more expansive resources such as the Word, Pillar, NIV Application or Expositors Commentaries.

It might not be comfortable, and it certainly isn’t what most of us think about when we think about church, but it is true. No matter how you look at it, Jesus has a vision for the church that involves revolutionary relationships that challenge the status quo.

3: While relationships are everything in Jesus’ vision, they can’t be at the expense of your individuality or the adventure to which you are called.

We don’t have many examples of groups where relationships are prioritized in a way that enhances and doesn’t squash individuality and adventure.

In Jesus’ vision, we are all individuals on an adventure, and that is how it is meant to be. From the beginning of time, God knew you were going to be here, and he had a particular job that he created for you to do:

For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago. 

Ephesians 2:8-10

At the end of His time on earth, Jesus said to his followers:

“As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.”

John 20:21

His work is now our work, and each one of us has a particular way His work is expressed through our lives. We are each unique, and it was always meant to be that way.

When the church focusses too much on the message it becomes boring and divisive because it is not respecting this critical truth.

There has never been anyone quite like you, and the adventure you are on with Jesus is unique.

For most rational people points 2 and 3 seem mutually exclusive. They are not.

What they are is a reflection of Jesus’ vision that the church would reflect the one-but-not-the-same kind of relationship that primarily found in the relationship of the Trinity.

4. Becoming the church of Jesus’ vision requires God’s direct intervention.

It’s a relief that Jesus tells Peter. “I will build my church” in Matthew 16:18, because as you hang around any church long enough and you will discover that it simply is not within the power, even of the most skilled leader, to produce the kind of one-but-not-the-same relationships that Jesus envisions.

Jesus is at work. Joining us together in him so the church can be the kind of place where God is at home:

You are members of God’s family.  Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord

(Ephesians 2:19-21)

5. Jesus’ vision for a one-but-not-the-same church is precisely how the church is at the centre of God’s action in the world.

The reason God is building all these different pieces into one church, is , that as we reflect the one-but-not-the-same life of the Trinity to the world, what we are actually doing, is making God’s wisdom known:

God’s purpose in all this was to use the church to display his wisdom in its rich variety to all the unseen rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was his eternal plan, which he carried out through Christ Jesus our Lord

Ephesians 3:10-11

This is why the church is so important. It is not about our message, it’s about who we are.

We are to be a reflection of the life of the Triune God. When people see us, they should see something different, not just hear something different. They should see ambassadors of a wholly different authority system, who live according to a wholly different pattern of life.

6. Jesus’ vision for the church requires a different kind of church leadership than we are used to.

It is normal to evaluate the effectiveness of church leadership by the numbers attending Sunday services. We normally look for a good performer.

In Jesus’s vision the purpose of the leadership of the church is to equip every member of the church to find their unique place in this wholly different way of life:

Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ.

Ephesians 4:11-12

Paul goes on to spell out a very different picture of leadership than the “good performer.” He calls the Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers, “ligaments” (important but not the main game) who help people become more like Jesus, more able to follow him as the head, and more connected to each other:

Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love. 

Ephesians 4:15 -16

In Jesus’ vision for the church, the most important measure is not how many people come on Sunday but how much we love each other, and that is what we should be grading our leaders on.

7. This one-but-not-the-same revolutionary way of life asks a lot of those people who call themselves Christians.

In Jesus’ vision, there is no such thing as a Christian who is not committed to a local church. There is no such thing as a Christian who is not doing the difficult work of getting along with people they find hard to understand.

When we are baptized, we are not only baptized “into” all that Jesus has done for us (Romans 6:2-4, Colossians 2:12), we are baptized “into” a church family:  

The human body has many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body. So it is with the body of Christ. Some of us are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, and some are free. But we have all been baptized into one body by one Spirit, and we all share the same Spirit.

(1 Corinthians 12:12-13)

The idea of being baptized into the church gives a profound weight to engagement with a local congregation.  Most of us pick a church that “feels right” and move on to something else when that is no longer true.

The Apostle Paul would have been bewildered by our consumer-like approach to church. As we understand the bible’s take on what the church is, we start to understand that we need to see our church as a body of which we are an indispensable part, despite the difficulties that always come when different people that come together.  

This is what Paul was often trying to communicate in his letters:

Yes, the body has many different parts, not just one part.  If the foot says, “I am not a part of the body because I am not a hand,” that does not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear says, “I am not part of the body because I am not an eye,” would that make it any less a part of the body? If the whole body were an eye, how would you hear? Or if your whole body were an ear, how would you smell anything? But our bodies have many parts, and God has put each part just where he wants it. How strange a body would be if it had only one part! Yes, there are many parts, but only one body.

(1 Corinthians 12: 14-20)

So we need to commit. We need to be ourselves, and help others to be themselves, rather than make them adapt in order to make life easier for us.

It is this “iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27:17) kind of fellowship that is right at the heart of what it means to make God’s wisdom known to the cosmos.

As you start to catch the significance of fellowship in the midst of diversity for the church, it becomes clear why relationship breakdown is such a big deal.

You can’t love God and hate a brother or sister in Christ. Our relationships are that important:

If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a fellow believer, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see? And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love their fellow believers.Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has become a child of God. And everyone who loves the Father loves his children, too. 

1 John 4:20 – 5:1

So what does all of this mean?

We need to start seeing the church not as a service to meet our needs, but a family for whom we bear responsibility.

As the book of Hebrews puts it:

Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near.

Hebrews 10:23-25

The way our culture has shaped the church is a pale imitation of what the church is intended to be.

The kind of church Jesus envisioned, not only has a message for the world, but changes the world through living a wholly different, deeper and more real life than those who haven’t yet discovered Jesus and his vision.

It has taken me 28 years of confusion, conversation, reading, and reflection to even start to cast off my default cultural assumptions about what church is meant to be… and I love the revolutionary truth that I am seeing.

The core truth that the bible is trying to communicate about Jesus’s vision for the church brilliantly captured by U2’s most famous song:

“One life With each other,
Sisters Brothers,
One life
But we’re not the same
We get to Carry each other”

“One” – from the album Actung Baby.

My heart rises as I see the church that Jesus prayed for. That’s the church I want to be part of.

How about you?