Thoughts for the Day
Monday, 1st February 2021: The Church is one body
God 1 Corinthians 12 Christ The Church
Reading : Verses from 1 Corinthians, Chapter 12
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
Instead the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot were to say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body', that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear were to say, 'Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body', that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? .... As it is there are many members but one body.
(Church in Wales, New Revised Standard Version)
Thoughts
I have wonderful memories of helping prison chaplains and clergy in different Dioceses, on things like 'communication skills' and 'working as a team'. Frequently we carried out practical group activities, which some found difficult.
But are we any better at working together? St Paul gives us this picture of a body. This body represents the church. He points out that we need each part of our body, all parts are important. With Covid-19 raging around our world, and many churches being closed, it might seem strange to think about the church as a body, but now is the time to realise that every single Christian is important - each person is a part of the body of the church.
This goes to people in different situations around the world, but perhaps each one of us can contact someone to keep the links between the different parts of the body strong:
- Who can I ring, text or email this day?.
- Can I do this each week, and especially contact those who might feel 'on the edge'?
Prayer
Lord God,
help us to use this time
to reinforce the bonds of
our community in imaginative ways.
Help us to make sure that
no-one is left alone and isolated,
and not just leave it
to one or two people
to reinforce the bonds
that make us one body.
Amen.
As well as thinking about all the members of a church community being one body, we can also think of all the different churches as being one body. You might like to look up the following site to learn more about Ecumenism. My first job as a Deaconess was in an Ecumenical Church in Gloucester, with Baptists, Methodists, United Reformed, and Church of England all working together in one church. That was in the 1980s, and things ecumenical have continued to progress around the world since then: