2 Thessalonians 3

Today’s reading: Ezekiel 43; 2 Thessalonians 3

2 Thessalonians 3 highlights a pretty sharp contrast between Christian life and community in Paul’s day vs. today.

Two times, in this chapter, Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy instruct their readers not to associate with Christian brothers and sisters who are not willing to live faithfully. First it is in regard to those who are not willing to work for a living, but instead living idly, and the second is in regard to anyone unwilling to obey what they say in their letter. This is not like the Catholic practice of excommunication, kicking someone out of the church and declaring them condemned for their sin, but is a more extreme form of warning, as they say, “that he may be ashamed.” Being cut off from the community because you are unwilling to live by the norms and expectations of that community was intended to have a polarizing effect, forcing the person to stop, consider, and choose whether or not they really wanted their life to count for Christ.

This instruction assumes that they knew each other well enough to know if someone was living in idleness, or was obeying the things they had written, and also that their relationships in the church were important enough to be persuasive. To be honest, I don’t think either of these assumptions, let alone both of them, would apply to the vast vast majority of churches today, at least in the West…

We live such isolated lives from one another that, as long as someone puts on a good face when they show up to church and/or small group, nobody knows what the other 95% of their week looks like. In the rare churches where people are seeking to know each other deeply enough to be able to effectively encourage, challenge, admonish, and rebuke one another, still, relationships in the church are seldom primary relationships. We have relationships with family, neighbors, coworkers, and friends, and very often “church friends” would fall into a separate, lower, category of your favorite people to talk to when you’re there on Sunday mornings. So even if you were, as a church, to try to practice church discipline by not associating with those who are refusing to listen, rather than being polarized into making a decision about whether or not they actually want to live for Christ, the person can just go join that other church up the road that won’t ask any questions.

I don’t say all this to say that this command in 2 Thessalonians 3 is obsolete or that we shouldn’t bother trying to follow it, but to say that we, as a larger church community, need to do better here. We should be able to know each other well enough, and our “church friends,” rather than being the lowest category of relationships, should be the highest and most impactful to lose. In our modern, highly disconnected, overly busy, spread out world, we need to figure out how to build and maintain real community in the church that people want to be part of it and would think twice about sacrificing it for the sake of holding onto their sin.