Communities That Behold

The local church is designed by God to be a community that beholds Him together. Humans are made to live in community because God Himself lives in community, but community was never meant to become a goal in and of itself. When community becomes our goal, we become self-centered, and satisfaction becomes elusive. When we make community the ultimate goal, we can have a very full social schedule, yet be incredibly lonely and unfulfilled.

Discovering True Community
People find the deepest experience of community when they gather around something bigger than themselves. When people fully commit their lives to a cause bigger than themselves, they discover a unique intimacy among themselves and willingly choose to make significant sacrifices. For example, people who defend their country together in a war experience deep community and intimacy in their unit that is not replicated by their experience afterward in “peace time.” The experience of being joined together in a cause bigger than themselves with an absolute commitment (even to the death) creates the deepest experience of community.

Community that is centered on community will never produce true intimacy, deep love, unusual sacrifice, and a sense of purpose, so beholding must be at the center of our churches. Too many churches are inwardly focused on community and trying to pursue an elusive goal of fellowship and meaning through self-centered ways. The answer is to abandon our self-centered focus and refocus our congregations on beholding Someone greater. When we do this, it will unlock an experience of community that many have never experienced.

The Role of Imitation in Learning and Leading
Human learning and developing are based on imitation. The most obvious example of this is the way children imitate their parents, but people in any social environment imitate each other. While we think of education as an intentional process, the vast majority of human learning comes through imitation. We are wired to learn by imitation in every area of life, so we are transformed primarily by gazing at the person of Jesus and imitating Him.

Not only is learning imitative, it is relational. As we behold Jesus, we also experience Him through the Spirit and the other means of grace we have identified. Over time, we not only discover who Jesus is, we develop a relationship with Him. The greatest human transformations come through relationship, and discipleship must be the same. We must have a relationship with Jesus by the Spirit and a relationship with each other. Both are enabled by the Spirit, and when we engage in both, we behold Jesus together, and our thinking is transformed.

The primacy of imitation in human learning must also guide our understanding of leadership in the church. We learn to be like our leaders as we copy them. Effective learning is basically all about sitting at the feet of those who relate better than we do, and learning from these sages how to do this through imitation. Any parent of teenagers already knows that teens don’t do what you say; they do what you do. And Paul knew it too.

Paul states explicitly on several occasions, and then everywhere implies, that his converts should copy their leaders. We are called to imitate. In fact, we imitate one another all the time. But Paul is especially concerned to have people imitate him! Exhortations to imitate both him and his trusted followers stud his letters.

My Personal Journey
Over the years, as I have served in the prayer room as a prayer leader and sometimes as a worship leader, I have come to realize that ultimately it is about stepping aside and allowing the people to behold Him and to focus on Jesus. The focus is not on how good my prayer leading or my skills are (though it is important, but that is not the primary thing). This understanding has reshaped my approach to leadership and community.

Running a quarterly prayer gathering and serving weekly in the prayer room has taught me that the most profound moments of connection and transformation happen when we collectively turn our gaze toward Jesus. It’s not about the eloquence of our prayers or the perfection of our music, but about creating an environment where others can encounter Him deeply.

I remember one particular prayer gathering where everything seemed to go wrong. The slides to display the lyrics failed, and our carefully prepared setlist was rendered useless. In that moment, we decided to stop relying on our plans and just sing worship and praise Him. What followed was one of the most powerful experiences of God’s presence I have ever witnessed. People began to pray and worship spontaneously, not led by a schedule but by the Spirit. It was a clear reminder that our role is to facilitate an encounter with Jesus, not to orchestrate it perfectly.

A Lesson in Leadership and Humility
Another aspect of my journey is the realization that when a ministry is built on “community” alone, it often gives room to drama and internal strife and struggle. However, if we build with the desire to behold Jesus as a community, it is His leadership that transforms us more into His image. As leaders, it is not about showcasing our abilities but about being humble and broken enough to realize that it is ultimately God’s leadership over the people.

There was a time when tensions were high among some members. Misunderstandings and personal conflicts occasionally happened behind the scenes, like gossip, not really in the venue itself. But God brought us all together in unity in the context of worship and beholding Him. This experience underscored the importance of keeping Jesus at the center and allowing His leadership to guide and transform us.

Biblical Discipleship Through Beholding
Beholding God must be the central focus of discipleship. You will probably adopt specific rhythms, habits, or disciplines as aids to discipleship, but whatever you adopt, it must be designed to enable you and those you disciple to behold God. As a church community, you should carefully develop your rhythm of life together so it leads to beholding. Every aspect of ministry in the church should flow from beholding and should lead people to behold.

The expression of life together as a church can vary quite a bit. Services and meetings may be structured differently in different contexts. Beholding is not a model; it is a value. The New Testament gives us a lot of liberty in how we structure our meetings and gatherings, but our activities should be designed to enable beholding. Structures can be helpful, but they cannot become the goal. The goal is to gaze at the Divine Human.

In many church communities, discipleship has been reduced to education. People do Bible studies and consider that discipleship, but it is not. It is information and education. Learning the Bible is valuable, but it is only effective if it leads to transformation. People are not discipled because they know what Christianity is. They are discipled when they are becoming like God. We cannot lower the definition of discipleship, or we deprive God of what He wants—a community of people engaged in a process of transformation in order to become like Him. The church is not a gathering of people who know information about God—she is a people being formed into His image.

Cultivating a Rhythm of Life
We need to carefully examine our rhythms of life as individuals, families, and church communities and ask ourselves: Does my way of life maximize my opportunities to behold Jesus, and does it lead me to become like Him?

People are most transformed by their rhythm of life and their community. For example, an infant learns how to become a person by experiencing their community and imitating it. As they behold, they are transformed. This is the fundamental human method of development, and it extends to spiritual life as well.

Information is not enough to transform people. Transformation requires a context. That context is the church. It is the place where biblical culture is demonstrated. When we are immersed in that culture, we are transformed, and so biblical discipleship must take place in a community.

In many cases, our Christianity is awkward because we have learned information but not lived it out together in community. We know what the Bible says, but we have not let the Bible comprehensively shape our lives, and we are trying to live out the Bible’s commands without the context that shapes that obedience. We must adopt biblical culture as our native culture. As we reshape our rhythm of life together, we will find that the resulting culture accelerates our transformation and makes it possible to become more like Jesus.

Many aspects of your current life are reflections of the contexts you are immersed in. There are aspects of your life you cannot choose, but if you want to be transformed, you must make decisions with the aspects of your life you can control. Your rhythm of life now will determine who you are in ten years. If you intentionally shape your rhythm of life individually and in community, you will be more like God in ten years than you are today and know Him more intimately than you do now.

The most powerful thing about having a rhythm of life is in doing it together as a community. When a community lives with a certain rhythm of life, that rhythm transforms them and creates a culture. When a community lives with a certain rhythm of life, they become a witness and an evidence of the reality of the things they are living for. When a community lives with a certain rhythm of life, it creates a context for the activity of the Holy Spirit, and the community becomes something bigger than any one person.

The rhythms of a community are not a task list we use to evaluate who is holy and who is not. They are a way of life that shapes our culture. A person must be immersed in a culture to be transformed by it; therefore, our churches should be welcoming environments that expect people to grow in a process. Our rhythms of life should be welcoming to seekers, new believers, and mature believers. We do not consider children failures because they do not yet imitate every aspect of our culture. We joyfully include them in our families, knowing they need to be immersed in our way of life to grow.