The most formative years of my spiritual life–as a congregant, as a leader, as a pastor–have been spent swimming in a pond where it’s common to hear something along the lines of, “It’s all about relationship!” It punctuates sermons. It graces the covers of church bulletins. You hear it in pitches for membership classes or small groups. It’s probably all over bumper stickers and Instagram feeds. That sells pretty well, I think.
Now, to issue a rebuttal against myself before I even begin: yes. In the sense that everything and everyone is connected to everyone and everything else (including God) in some sort of relationship, yes. The whole project of God sending Jesus, the Messiah, is “to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.” (Eph 1:10) Read that as, “to put absolutely everything and everyone back into right relationship under Jesus.” In the biggest, broadest senses I can think of, it is indeed all about relationship.
To issue yet another preemptive self-rebuttal, it’s not not about relationships. Christianity is fundamentally a communal faith. Anyone going it alone with some over-developed, hyper-spiritualized version of American rugged individualism really needs to take a closer read of the Scriptures and do a little old-fashioned repenting. That’s pure silliness.
The thing is, as a church slogan I’m coming to feel that phrases like “It’s all about relationship” can be quite misleading. When it justifies us overvaluing our relationships within the church so that we ignore relationships with those outside of the church. When it makes the purpose of the church more about us than about them. When it causes us to do everything we can to preserve these relationships as they are, to the exclusion of others, or to the neglect of the broader mission of God. When it makes my highest values the warm fuzzies I get from friends that are just like me.
Warm fuzzies never advanced the kingdom of God one inch. And they also never last very long.
As I wrote somewhere else, relationships are not the mission–they are the context. In the local church, close relationships are only good when they truly get us closer to the mission of God. When they exist because we are united in a purpose larger than our cliques.
As C.S. Lewis explains in The Four Loves: Lovers stand face to face, fixated on one another; the very goal of the relationship is the relationship. Friends, however, stand side by side, fixated on a common interest. The local church exists not to form relationships in which we fall more and more in love with each other, but in which we fall more and more in love with Jesus and his good purposes for this world.
