The Online Body of Christ

Last night I received an E-Mail from a friend I met recently in blogosphere. She is new to the blogging scene and has one of the best blogs that I read. Each post encapsulates huge issues in our lives and turns them into bitesize pieces that we can devour and savour and then ponder so that we can come back later and be inspired again and again (no reference to belching please). I wish my blog was more like hers. Most of the time my blog reminds me of a bad Seinfeld episode (a show about nothing) while her blog is so well-crafted and has so much more depth of content. It has made me sit back and reevaluate my thoughts on why I enjoy blogging.

If we are striving to create community through blogging, then Christians who blog are part of creating an online Body of Christ. We are all part of a bigger whole. There are lots of people out there blogging, but as brothers and sisters in the Lord I believe Christian bloggers have so much more to bond us together.

This coming Sunday night I will be walking my students at the McKendree College Student Ministry through an exercise in using our spiritual gifts. During the exercise we will build walls out of piles of rocks. Each student will dedicate their rock, put their name on it, decorate it uniquely, bring it forward, and place it in the wall. The wall is one of my metaphors for the Body of Christ. It is the same for the online Body of Christ.

All of us would probably agree that it is important for the Body of Christ to use their spiritual gifts. God gave us these gifts for us to use in building His Kingdom; for equipping the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ (Ephesians 4:12, NASB). Just as in the local church, the online Body of Christ is a place where these needs should be met, communities are built, and something worthwhile can be made out of something useless. Ephesians 4:16 (NASB) in discussing the Body of Christ says,

From whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

This can ony happen if we each do our part and use those special gifts the Lord gave us when we came to know Him.

How do we do this in the context of the blogosphere? In some ways we are already doing this. There are a several blogs I read frequently that I can say are exercising the gift of teaching. They have taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way. I am amazed each day that there is such an incredible depth of dialogue in the blogosphere. There are a couple of blogs that I read daily because they are so encouraging to me and are exercising the gift of encouragement. Each of us in the online Christian community can fill the same roles that we do in the local body of Christ.

So, as I though about how much I wish my blog was like my friends blog I finally realized that as a member of the online body of Christ I am being exactly what the Lord wants me to be. The blogosphere allows me to be myself, to exercise those gifts that the Lord has uniquely blessed me with and to help build a useful wall out of useless discarded material. I shouldn't try or want to be the head, when my gift is to be the arm or the leg. The body would be incomplete without any one of us. Praise God that we each fill a need in His wonderful body.

I enjoy blogging because it allows us to be a rock in the wall of community