God’s strange way of building a church
This is about me not you, but welcome to my world. I’m not very tolerant. Yes, I’m aware of it, and working on it. Let me explain. Every once in a while God seems to move someone across my path who is being a bit… weird. Not dangerous. Not heretical. Just enthusiastic, excitable, oddly calibrated. The sort of person who claps a half second too long. Who says amen when everyone else has moved on. Who looks like they are having a genuinely excellent time when the rest of us are maintaining respectable spiritual posture. They’re a bit like the Labrador that you have said the word, “walkies” to. That strangeness pokes and provokes me.
I’ve had my fair share of being called strange or weird but it’s other people’s state that makes me cringe! And almost every time, my internal reaction tells on me. It shows me there is still real work for the Holy Spirit to do in my life. Not on the other person. On me. I don’t need a mirror.
The passage that suddenly stands up, finding me in those moments is 1 Corinthians 12:12-26. Paul is speaking to a church overflowing with spiritual energy and social awkwardness. Gifts everywhere. Noise everywhere. People speaking, moving, interrupting, expressing. It was an eager and excitable congregation that would make most leaders hosting a morning meeting break out in a cold sweat! And yet, instead of telling them to tone it down or attend a seminar on emotional regulation, Paul does something more unsettling. He reframes the whole situation.
He says the church is a body. Not a committee. Not a carefully managed environment. A body. With parts that do not look alike, do not function alike, and do not always behave in ways that feel convenient. Some parts draw attention whether we want them to or not. Others operate quietly and then feel resentful that no one noticed. Some look impressive. Others look, by human judgement, a bit unnecessary. Yet Paul insists that God arranges the body as he chooses. Not as we would order it. Not as our preferences would design it.
That is where tolerance gets exposed. Because most of us are not irritated by sin when we meet strange believers. We are irritated by difference. Volume. Intensity. People who do not read the room and appear not to care that there is a room to be read. Paul does not call that discernment. He calls it forgetting how bodies work.
The eye does not get to vote the hand off the body. The head does not get to dismiss or chide the foot for being clumsy, sweaty or oversized; even when the foot keeps tripping over the same obstacle. That’s not all. He goes further; the quieter parts do not get to resent the louder ones simply for existing at full volume. Paul presses the point harder. He says the parts we consider weaker are not weird, but indispensable. God gives greater honour to the parts that seem less respectable. That includes the ones who make us shift in our seats.
What makes this uncomfortable is that Paul leaves no room for spiritual superiority dressed up as maturity. He does not say tolerate them because you are further along. He says you need them. Their odd wiring. Their unfiltered joy. Their inability to be cool. God uses that very strangeness to stop the church from becoming a social club for people who agree on tribal tone.
The Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by enthusiasm. He is not threatened by people who feel things publicly. Often our irritation reveals less about their lack of wisdom and more about our love of control and predictability.
Paul’s vision does not ask me to celebrate everything or suspend discernment. It asks me to surrender the quiet belief that my way of being faithful is the normal setting. And that surrender, irritating as it is, keeps turning out to be part of how the Spirit does his work.
So yes, I’m self-aware and know I’m still a work in progress. Maybe, I’m the only odd one in the room!