Stay and Grow: What the Bible Actually Says About Why You Can’t Grow Alone

This Community arc has covered what Christlike community is — family around the table — and how it works: sharing joys and sorrows, and confessing to one another. Each of those asks you to be vulnerable, and it is fair to ask why you should bother. Paul’s answer in Colossians starts with who you are.

New life begins with Jesus. You are raised with him, your life is hid with him, and he is your life. The patterns Paul lists next — the ones he says you walked in some time, when you lived in them — do not get the final word, and they are not your identity. That does not mean you will never struggle with them again. It means you do not have to live in that prison anymore.

None of those stay private. Your flesh affects your family and your church family, and the people closest to you see what still needs to change before you do. That is why community is a mirror: how they are affected by what comes out of your mouth tells you how much sanctifying is left. Then Paul names the new life, and where it gets practised.

Every one of those virtues needs another person to exist. You cannot forbear nobody. You cannot forgive in the abstract. And “one another” runs right through the passage: forbearing one another, forgiving one another, teaching and admonishing one another, called in one body.

Someone has said that the only thing worse than leaving the church is staying and never growing. A believer who is poured into every week, through sermons and Bible study and small group, but never opens up to anyone is like a stagnant pond: everything flows in and nothing flows out.

We tend to look for growth on the mountaintop. Real growth shows up in ordinary responses — on the Monday morning, the Wednesday when someone cuts you off, the Thursday argument with your spouse. One of the clearest tests is correction. When your spouse, your child, your pastor, or a parent tells you, “This is wrong,” does your flesh answer, “Do you know who I am? I have been a Christian longer than you”?

Pastor Amos is honest that his own two areas are driving and his children. He did not think he had an anger problem until he had kids. It sounds trivial, but that is the point: people and their reactions show you where you really are. You can look good on Sunday, sing loud, and have plenty of verses memorized, and still have no obedience where the rubber meets the road.

So when you keep your church family at a distance, you put a ceiling on your growth. You might know a scripture about patience, but you need to meet someone who needs your patience. Patience is easy on a Sunday morning with your best spiritual face on. It is harder on a Monday night after a long day, when you share something painful and the other person brushes it off. Growth is learning to be patient with someone who treats your brokenness like an inconvenience.

The same goes for humility. You can have known a verse about it since you were three years old.

That verse has to meet someone who will not apologize, who talks down to you, or a sibling you were once close to and now have a wall with over something you have both forgotten. You do not get wounded in isolation. In a church family you will get hurt, and at some point you will hurt someone else. That is where you find out how much like Jesus you really are.

Colossians 3:13 gives the response: forgive as Christ forgave you. The hardest sentence for an adult is often, “I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?” — and its partner, “I forgive you.”

That is not the same as pretending nothing happened. When serious wrongdoing occurs, protection and accountability have to be there, and Matthew 18:15–17 gives the church a path when someone refuses to make things right. Pastor Amos was clear that putting someone out of the church should be far rarer than many churches have made it, and that even then the call is to love and pray for them. Restored trust and restored leadership may not come back. A place in the family can.

Jesus is the model here. He called the twelve first of all to be with him.

They shared life, meals, ministry, questions, mistakes, and correction. And within the crowds and the twelve, Jesus had three who went places with him the others did not — not because they were better, but to show in his humanness what a close circle looks like. The pastor cannot be in everyone’s circle. Everyone in the church deserves to be in someone’s.

It also takes time. We live in a microwave culture where a page that takes five seconds to load makes us angry. Spiritual growth is called a discipline because it is not a miracle of the moment every time. If you tried the practice of solitude two or three times and quit, the same temptation is waiting with community. Some people attend a church for years and are still not known by anyone.

• If you are married, talk with your spouse; if you are single, talk with God: who in this church do you want to be my community?
• Start manageable — one other household, or one or two people. Keep the whole circle small enough for real connection: no more than 20, including kids.
• Set a rhythm of once a month. Start simple: what have your highs been, what have your lows been, and can I pray over those lows with you?
• Reach past the same ten people you talk to every Sunday. Somebody in the room has never been invited to anyone’s house.

Do it for someone else, too. Opening your home may feel like a small thing to you, and you will have no idea what that relationship does for the lonely, anxious person on the other side of the table. Stop asking only how the church can help you, and start asking how you can help someone in it grow.

And when a move comes — military orders, a new job, a new school — none of this means guilt for leaving. If God moves you, go. But make it a spiritual decision, and bring the people closest to you in your church into it rather than dropping it on them as news. Where will you worship? Where will you serve? Who will help your family follow Jesus where you are going?