Build Up the Body of Christ

by John V. Upton, Executive Director

What is the BGAV essentially?  Why do we gather for an annual meeting and discuss business anyway?  Who does that anymore?  Well, there is no other answer to me than that we gather to do one thing, to do as we have been admonished to do by Paul in Ephesians 4, to “build up the body of Christ.”  I think it is important that we see ourselves for what we really are.

Think about it, Jesus did not use email.  He did not have a web site.  He didn’t make phone calls and never wrote a letter.  All of his communications were mono e mono.  He worked bodily, physically, by muscle and bone.  He spoke with tongue, larynx, lips, and lungs.

And he made great use with his hands, touching lepers, touching blind eyes and deaf ears, and taking children up in his arms to bless them.  With his hands he washed the dirt from the feet of his friends; seized tables of commerce in the temple and threw them down; and took bread, broke it, and passed it to prostitutes, tax-collectors, other outcasts, his friends, and literally multitudes. 

When his enemies came for him, his body was what they wanted.  They slapped his face, scourged his torso, punched his scalp, and ripped his feet and hands with spikes.  They hung his body until he screamed and died.  And when his followers reported he had been raised from the dead, they insisted he was a risen body, not just a spirit or ghost.  You could touch his wounds.  And he, after death, walked with them, broke bread with them, ate fish, and cooked breakfast.  So in life, death, and even beyond death, the gospel is 100% touchable, sensible, feet-on-the-ground kind of real stuff.

And then the body was gone.  No more face.  No more touch.  His great physical presence/body was gone.  That was the case until someone spotted it.  The spotter was Paul, and he wrote the news to the church.  He told them he had found Christ, and it wasn’t his spirit or a vision of him that he saw, it was his body.  He had found his body moving, working in this world.  When he told them where he had seen it, they were shocked.  You are his body.  You are the new body of Christ!

We, Virginia Baptists, are a part of the new body of Christ.  No single one of us, either in a church or as a church, is his whole body by ourselves, but each of us is part of that body.  Our cooperative work is Christ’s functioning body in the world.  And we are, in simplest terms, to be his body now doing in our time what he did with his body in his time.  We are to make life together – as concretely and as literally as we can – his body again in the world.

We each have a different part to play.  According to scripture, God gave each of us a different gift precisely for the purpose of making this body more complete.  Paul says each of us is indispensable.  No one’s contribution, no matter how small, can ever be devalued.  Every last one of us, gifted as we are with a unique Kingdom assignment, is a vital part of Christ’s living body.

If Christ could do with his body today what he did with his body before, what would he be doing?  He’d be preaching good news and release to the captives.  He’d be at worship and prayer.  He’d be feeding the hungry people and reaching out to the poor.  He’d be healing the sick and comforting the aging.  He’d be teaching.  He’d be gathering children and young people around him.  He’d be meeting with the lonely, the broken, the confused, and the grieving.  He’d be standing by people marginalized and oppressed by confronting misuses of power.  He’d be the maker of peace, calling us to break down our walls of suspicion, division, and hate.  He’d be working to transform lives, communities, and institutions.  He’d be giving himself sacrificially for the love of God and calling others to do the same.

Do we get the point?  As Virginia Baptists, we exist to do exactly what Jesus did as faithfully as we can do it and that is all.  We may often do it poorly, always imperfectly, but everything we attempt is toward this end.  In other words, we are to become more and more the body that does and is what the body of Jesus does and is in the world.

We as the BGAV meet annually to use every means possible to build this body of Christ up.  We gather to present a budget because part of building up the body requires money.  Does it mean giving to an institution?  In a way, yes, because the institutional stuff is necessary to make all these things happen.  And yet, we are not giving to an institution at all.  We are giving to an organic, living, working presence moving to transform what is here and what is elsewhere in the world.

May this building up of the body of Christ raise up a new spirit in us, and among us, which always comes when we offer our whole lives.