THERE ARE NO UNIMPORTANT PARTS OF THE CHURCH by Megan Hill for Core Christianity
A Varied Menu
Every few months, my church gathers in the fellowship hall for a slightly different purpose: lunch. Each person brings a dish of their choice in addition to contributing items such as drinks or bread from a sign-up list. After morning worship, the pastor gives public thanks for the food, we all file into the hallway, and we wait our turn to fill paper plates at the laden tables. The routine is familiar. The actual menu is unpredictable. Some weeks it seems like everyone decides to make a pasta-themed dish, and our plates pile with zitis and spaghettis in binary red and white. Other weeks, in an unplanned act of synchronized health-consciousness, the salads take over space typically reserved for desserts. Usually, it’s just the reverse. Only rarely do we manage a perfectly balanced table, with veggies and meats in proportions that would make a nutritionist—or mother—proud. When it comes to fellowship lunch, you never know what you might eat. But you certainly won’t leave hungry.
The membership of the local church can feel a bit like the unpredictable offerings at a fellowship lunch. Our congregation’s gifts don’t always fit into a tidy organizational chart or appear to be evenly distributed. Sometimes the church has dozens of teachers; often it has few. Sometimes it has people who are able to give abundantly; often its members are just scraping by. It may have twenty nursery volunteers to every person who wants to do evangelism or twenty would-be organizers to everyone who is willing to make the coffee. Often it seems like a handful of people have all the gifts, and the rest of us barely have any. You never know what you might find on the buffet table of church-member gifts.
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Thankfully, the particular composition of the church doesn’t depend on us. Continuing the image of the church as a body, Paul writes, “But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (1 Cor. 12:18). The truth of 1 Corinthians 12 is that however it might appear, the people and gifts represented in our local church are exactly the people and gifts we need. A few verses later, Paul flatly dismisses any suggestion that some people or gifts are more necessary for the body’s well-being than others: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Cor. 12:21–22). Again he affirms, “God has . . . composed the body” (1 Cor. 12:24). This truth should give you confidence: your particular gifts have a valuable, God-appointed place. It should also humble you: your particular gifts are simply one part of the body, and you desperately need other people with their particular gifts (see Rom. 12:3). Finally, this truth should increase your love for the local church: the gifts in the body are exactly what God knows your congregation needs. Because of God’s sovereign choosing, no part is missing, and every part is valuable.
