On Wednesday mornings every six weeks or so, I’ve been leading the men who gather for prayer through a series on apologetics, that is, the means by which we Christians defend the faith. This morning, we discussed the most important apologetic, the church community.

The Apostle Paul wrote that the church is to be “a pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). Immediately preceding that charge, Paul wrote of qualifications for church leadership and of proper roles within the church. The implication: a rightly functioning church community upholds, proclaims, and defends the truth. What truth? Consider the immediately following passage: “[Jesus] was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.”

Paul is saying that a rightly functioning church community proves the incarnation of God in Jesus. The question is, how? For that answer, we look to John.

In his gospel account, John records Jesus praying to the Father on behalf of the church “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (John 17:20-23, emphasis added).

So how does the church prove that Jesus was God incarnate? By extending that incarnation, by displaying the same oneness and unity of purpose with God that Jesus did. Just as Jesus proved God by his life, so the church now is called to prove God by its life. Just as through Jesus, the world met God, had dinner with God, interacted with God, so now through the church, the world is invited to do the same. In this strictly defined sense, we are the new Jesus—the body of Christ, indeed.

Here, then, is a dangerous question: Does our community, our oneness, our means of being Christ to the world, look anything different than the brotherhood and unity of say the average frat house on Greek row? I would venture to say that most fraternities at the U-dub or other universities throughout the country have tighter unity and single-mindedness than most local churches. For us to be different, we can’t just out-unity them. We must out-community them. Fraternities are false communities because everyone in them is the same. Fraternities represent the world’s proclivity to make out with mirrors, to love only those that look or speak or act just like us.

The rightly functioning church, a community of gospel-ed people from every ethnic, socioeconomic, and educational background, forms a multi-colored, multi-textured mosaic that is unexplainable apart from the unifying power of grace. Only when the great equalizer of grace is preeminent does the lure of cultural affinity become subservient. In this kind of true community, we love one another not because we are the same, but because we share the same story—sinners, saved by grace. And therein, the incarnation of God in flesh continues. We prove Him to a watching world.