Three: Doing Life Together

What you do in your private time is nobody’s business but your own. But for goodness’ sake, clean yourself up and act like a Christian when in the presence of other believers.

—J. C. Ryle

You’ve gotten through your first modern worship service, and if everything has gone well, you now have a whole waitstaff of church personnel at your beck and call, ready to help you out on your journey to somehow become even more awesome than you already are.

Wow!

We don’t want to jump to any premature conclusions, but we can say with some confidence that you’re gonna be such a perfect Christian. We just have a really good feeling about it. And with a full team of pastors and leaders who just want to love on you and affirm your lifestyle choices, no matter how unbiblical they may appear on the surface, you’ve got all the support you need to reach out and claim perfection.

Unfortunately, there’s a major obstacle that prevents many believers from discovering their limitless potential. The sad fact of the matter is that your Christian life isn’t lived alone. It’s lived in community with other Christians, who inevitably don’t follow Jesus as well as you do.

Sucks, right? Totally. We know you probably want to run away to your safe space, well out of reach of your fellow disciples of Christ. We understand. Those chumps can only bring you down. But unfortunately there’s really no way around it.

Take heart. With some guidance from us, your life lived in the community of your fellow believers can be redeemed. In fact, if you’re really committed to perfection, you can exploit their fellowship into a vehicle for your continued advancement toward holiness.

Let’s pull back the curtain and let you in on a little secret: one of the tricks to being a perfect modern Christian is to make sure you never let anyone get close enough to your life to see what a mess it is below the surface. The key to true Christian authenticity is to look authentic without actually making yourself vulnerable. Share stories of being late to things because your children insisted on praying for their grandparents or other precocious but nonthreatening explorations of God’s love, and be sure to call your family life “beautifully messy.” But keep any actual mess, shortcomings, or failures well hidden.

If you’re a real Christian, then you’re on board with us so far. Therefore, there’s only one surefire way of projecting an image of perfection to those around you: doing life together.

“Doing life together” is a term Paul used frequently in the New Testament that is perhaps better translated from the Greek as “just hanging out and doing whatever.” Take a hobby that you enjoy, be it playing board games, shooting guns, or driving R/C cars around, call it fellowship, and presto, you’re doing life together. So long as you have a favorite pastime, you’re ready to redeem it for God’s glory by labeling it as doing life together.*1

Just check out the handy table below if you’re ever in doubt that what you’re doing counts as fellowship that grows you in your walk with Christ.

Activity Does It Qualify as “Doing Life Together”?
Watching sports Yes.
Texas Hold’em Tournament Definitely doing life together.
Chillin’ in Azeroth with your World of Warcraft clan Oh, heck yeah!
Ladies’ bunco night You’d better believe it, sisters!
Bible study Dangerously close to authentic connection—steer clear!

Looks just like doing whatever you want while getting spiritual points in the process, doesn’t it? You’re catching on.

Now, the secret to properly doing life around lesser Christians is to redeem everything. Redeeming everything means you’re constantly relating whatever activity you and your buddies are doing to God and the gospel. This is a high-level move that can take some practice to get right, but it’s totally worth learning how to do when you consider all the spiritual accolades you’ll garner from your fellow Christians.

Let’s say you’re playing Settlers of Catan with some folks from church. While most people would just enjoy the game without trying to find some kind of connection to Jesus, most people aren’t as spiritual as you. You need to show people how in tune with the things of God you are by drawing analogies and illustrations from absolutely everything that happens in the game to what Christ accomplished for His people on the cross.

For example, after making an ordinary resource trade in the game, you could say something like, “Man, isn’t it cool how I selflessly traded you my last remaining lumber card so you could build a road? That’s just like how the Lord traded the Lamb of God so He could make a way for us to connect with Him.” Then hit everyone with one of your very best, ultraspiritual looks of pensive meditation, drop your gaze to the floor, and take a deep breath, broadcasting your incredible connection with the things of God to these plebes who are just trying to enjoy a board game.

Pepper each round of play with these kinds of comments, and everyone around you will know just how saturated you are in the Word of God.*2

Or take another seemingly secular activity like golf. To the untrained eye, golf is just a way to relax and enjoy God’s creation while expressing creativity and using the bodies God gave us to honor Him. But to a superspiritual Christian like you, golf is a springboard to loudly let everyone around you know how much more you love Jesus than they do. Whenever you sink a putt, pause for a moment, tear up, and then say, “You know, sinking this left-to-right four-footer just reminded me of how, in a way, God gave us Jesus’s perfect golf performance. And Jesus took our 48-over-par score as if it were His.”

Man, that’s good stuff.

And these ideas are just off the top of our heads. With some creative thinking, you can totally redeem all kinds of activities to the glory of God. And everyone around you will be able to glean some deep wisdom from your insights.

Christians who are still a lot more carnal than you might be annoyed by these kinds of comments, but they just need to be sanctified more thoroughly. Be patient and show them some grace. They’re still works in progress. One day they’ll be as holy as you are, and then they’ll be able to make all the superdeep, gospel-centered observations that you can.

The key to the successful redemption of mundane activities is to never be content to just enjoy the good things God has given us. Everything must be explicitly Christian or else someone as devoted to Jesus as you are can’t find any joy in it. Watching baseball games, going on a bike ride, playing Super Smash Bros.—all of these activities and more can become valuable rungs on the ladder to the summit of righteousness, as long as you’re able to find some kind of connection to the gospel to assuage your guilt for having even a modicum of fun on this earth.

An advanced form of doing life together is to get the church to sponsor a hobby by labeling it a ministry. There’s even the possibility of conning the church into buying all your expensive hobbyist equipment as a ministry expense! For example, if you’re into guns, work your way up the ministry ladder until you’re the head of the men’s ministry. Then schedule multiple trips to a shooting range throughout the calendar year, and you’re golden. You can now buy guns and ammo on the church credit card!*3

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before you can possibly work yourself up to that level of spiritual cunning and brilliance, you need to start with the basics, and that means joining a small group that meets at someone’s home. You can only fly under the radar and hang out with Christians on an unofficial basis for so long before the church will drag you into these smaller, more intimate gatherings.

Again, there’s really no way around it, so just stiffen that upper lip and take care of business.

If you want to be a good Christian, a small group is an absolute must. Your new church should have come up with a really cool, relevant name for small groups. Something like Life Groups, Oikos Collectives, Dotcoms, or Hub Groups is ideal. The name should definitely mask the fact that the group is essentially a Bible study—after all, this is the twenty-first century, people.

The small group is an ingenious invention, first introduced by Martin Luther during the Protestant Reformation. According to legend, the great reformer asked four or five people from his oikos if they’d hang out, drink some beer, and listen to his wild-eyed rants about peasants and the pope and stuff from seven to nine every Friday night. Thus the very first small group was born.

Small groups allow your church to have tens of thousands of members but still make you feel as if you actually know people at the church. The church gets all the perks of having a massive operating budget and sprawling campus, but it doesn’t actually have to disciple people or foster real connections on Sunday mornings. It’s a real lifesaver for the megachurch pastor who no longer has to make an effort to get to know all the lesser members of the body of Christ.

When you arrive at your first small group meeting (early, of course), the host family will warmly greet you and invite you to make yourself at home. We recommend an immediate inspection of the premises to ensure the place is going to meet your lofty standards. Don’t worry, they’ll be expecting this. March straight over to the fridge and scour that puppy high and low to make sure they don’t have any alcohol. If they’re crafty (pun!), they’ll have hidden any beer or wine high up on a shelf in the garage. So feel free to give yourself a tour of the home as you search every nook and cranny for the slightest evidence that they treat themselves to the devil’s drink on occasion. If you find so much as a small plastic bottle of cooking wine, excuse yourself and leave at once. Your Christian perfection is at stake here.

Your next stop should be their movie shelf, where you can make passive-aggressive comments about the kinds of secular movies they own: “Oh, you own every season of Game of Thrones? Could you give me directions to a small group nearby that actually loves Jesus?” Perfect Christians never miss an opportunity to judge other Christians on issues of conscience, and dropping some scathing remarks about their movie collection is a moment God prepared before the creation of the world for you to get a leg up on those spiritual failures.

After you’ve demonstrated your superiority to the small group’s hosts, the slightly-less-spiritual members will eventually arrive, and you’ll finally be able to get down to business.

Your church’s small group meetings are the ideal place to show off your spiritual muscles and assert your superior spiritual acumen in front of your fellow churchgoers.

To conduct yourself properly in a small group, answer every question the group leader asks. Every one. Even if you have no idea what the answer is, don’t let on that you’re completely clueless. Just raise your hand and start talking about absolutely anything at all. Lead the group off onto as many completely unrelated rabbit trails as possible. When the group leader corrects you or suggests that your exegesis of Battlestar Galactica’s awful ending to season four just isn’t relevant right now, boldly declare that his take on the Bible passage you’re discussing is only his interpretation.

If you want to take this maneuver to the next level, seize the initiative and question everything the group leader says. Shake your head, furrow your brow, and write furiously in the margins of your Bible whenever he or anyone else makes a truth claim. When someone takes the bait and asks you what’s the matter, just say, “Oh, nothing. It’s just that when I was young and naive, I used to think that way too. But if that’s where God has you on your journey right now, that’s fine too, I guess.”

Let no statement, no matter how innocuous, pass without weighing in. Those around you can really benefit from your discernment and wisdom as you mercilessly thrash them with your feigned knowledge of the Scriptures.

Sample Small Group Conversation

SMALL GROUP LEADER: So it’s pretty cool here that Paul shows how God is both just and the justifier of His people through His display of righteousness on the cross. Does anyone have any questions about that?

YOU: Yeah, I do. I mean, your interpretation is, shall we say, interesting. But I think it’s really about how we shouldn’t judge people for their lifestyle choices. If you really knew your Bible, you’d know that this passage means “judge not.”

SMALL GROUP LEADER: Where is that in the text?

YOU: Whoa, bro. There you go again with being judgmental. I just have a burning conviction in my heart telling me that the text means “don’t judge people.” But if your interpretation is right for you, then that’s cool, man, as long as you’re okay with being a fundamentalist.

By this point, the rest of the small group should be nodding in approval, in awe of your biblical knowledge and how full you are of the love of Christ. You can capitalize on this on the spot by group-texting all of them a link to your blog, where they can read more of your innovative, edgy takes on Christianity. Heck, if you play your cards right, you might even be able to stage a mutiny against the small group leader and start your own ultraexclusive small group for only superspiritual Christians.

But for now, when the study finally comes to an end, after you’ve stretched it out with all your holy-sounding interjections, it’ll be time to close in prayer.

This might sound boring on the surface, but hear us out: praying among other Christians is an awesome way to grow in perceived righteousness. Here are a few simple tricks to help you pray in public.

Praying with Power

  • Use the phrase “Father God” like it’s going out of style. After all, God might forget that you’re addressing Him if you don’t keep dropping “Father God” in there. Plus, it just sounds super-righteous. Think of every “Father God” as a spiritual point, and stack those babies up.

  • Say “just” every other word. This communicates to the Christians around you that you speak their language. Using the word “just” is one of the signs of a true believer, according to the New Testament, so sprinkling the word throughout your prayer will have the added benefit of reaffirming your assurance of salvation. Ninety percent of any good prayer is comprised of the three words “just,” “Father,” and “God.”

  • Take on a Puritan persona throughout your prayer. You can either memorize old Puritan prayers or just mimic their ultraholy vocabulary. Above all else, you don’t just want to sound like a laid-back dude talking to his heavenly Father. Nope. You want to impress God with thy thees and thous.

  • Pray for almost three hours so everyone sees how holy you are. Muttering something about your gratitude to Jesus for thirty seconds is no good. A minimum of three hours of prayer will definitely get you to the next rung on the ladder of holiness.

  • Correct other people’s prayers. If the girl who prays before you asks for healing for her grandmother, make sure you say something like, “Father God, while healing for Jane’s grandmother would be nice, I’d like to ask for something more: for You to be glorified in whatever outcome You see fit.” Constantly one-upping your fellow believers in holiness is a foundational element of solid corporate prayer.

  • Pray two or three times just to keep the group on their toes. Just when everyone thinks the prayer circle is done, jump in there again with another few hours of prayer. Wait until everyone else starts to open their eyes and sit up straight, and then just keep right on going with something like, “And Father God, we just want to lift up before you now the people in Uganda, and just, also Father God, just the people in Zimbabwe, and also Father God…”

  • Use big, bibley words, even if you don’t understand them. We’ll let you in on a little secret: the rumor from on high is that God doesn’t hear prayers that don’t use phrases like “imputed righteousness,” “penal substitutionary atonement,” and “the eternal submission of the Son.” So don’t be afraid to drop the J-bomb (justification), the H-bomb (hamartiology), or even the rare M-bomb (Melchizedekian priesthood). If you don’t know what these things mean, don’t worry, because nobody else does either.

Of course, this all assumes you’re regularly attending a small group in the first place. While you want to join such a group in order to appear spiritual, you also want to minimize your attendance so your spirituality points go up while you do absolutely nothing. It’s a careful balancing act.

As the start time for the small group meeting looms closer and closer each week, begin looking for possible excuses to miss it. Is there the faintest outline of a cloud on the horizon? Say you’re going to stay home due to the impending inclement weather. Want to go to a midweek sporting event instead? Say you’re taking a break this week in order to “spend some time with the Lord” (uttering a prayer for your favorite baseball team at the game totally counts!). The key is to come up with the most spiritual-sounding justifications to avoid genuine connection while still blessing the group with your presence on occasion to keep up appearances.

Be careful, however. By actually getting up close and personal with other Christians, who are undoubtedly much further from Christlikeness than you are, you run the risk of making an actual friend who wants to hang out or grab a coffee or even meet up for discipleship. You attend group one too many times this year, and someone is inevitably going to break into the discipleship danger zone.

While this is a very serious situation, as it can cause your carefully constructed facade of Christianity to come crumbling down, you can leverage it to your advantage and come out looking even holier than before.

Don’t worry! We’re here to help you navigate these tricky waters. If you do ever end up getting dragged to coffee, dinner, or—shudder—a one-on-one Bible study with a friend from church, do not panic. We can help you with that.

It is of the utmost importance that you never allow any conversations to go beyond surface level. Keep your fellow believers at arm’s length. You must prevent any kind of genuine connection at any cost.

A large part of this will be comprised of using the right Christian buzzwords and insider language to clue them in that everything is totally fine in your life.

We’ll let you in on an insider secret: gaining the praise and accolades of your Christian friends isn’t so much about walking the walk as it is talking the talk.

Paul reiterates this idea in his letter to the church at Ephesus: “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” (Ephesians 4:29, ESV). The Bible also tells us that we ought to let our speech be “full of grace, seasoned with salt” so we will know how to answer those who oppose us (Colossians 4:6). Keeping an eye on our speech is important for Christians, because we know that we will give an account for “every careless word” that we speak (Matthew 12:36).

The proper application of these verses and others like them is that you should try really hard to sound spiritual in your interactions with other Christians.

Therefore, whether you’re dealing with Christians from your superawesome you-centric church in a small group setting or a one-on-one environment, you’re going to want to learn the language of true disciples: Christianese.

Christianese is an ancient dialect of English that traces its roots all the way back to the 1950s. It’s a secret language known only to the superspiritual. When you can successfully carry on a full conversation in Christianese, you’ll know you have at long last entered the upper echelons of Christian spirituality.

To get you started, see below for a helpful translation guide containing some popular Christianese phrases.

Christianese Phrase English Translation
“I’ll keep that in prayer, brother.” “I have no intentions of praying for you. In fact, I’ve already forgotten what it is you were going on about. Why are you still talking?”
“Lord willing.” “I’m gonna do it whether the Lord wants me to or not, but I want to sound like I’m trusting God in this situation.”
“Bless her heart!” “We are so much holier than that spiritual failure, it’s incredible.”
“I’m just really focusing on dating God right now.” “I’m not interested in you, but I don’t want to hurt your feelings, so I’m gonna play the God card.”
“I’d love to have you over for some fellowship soon.” “I run a home-based business and I’m going to try to sell you stuff for the duration of our relationship.”
“I just don’t really feel called to that ministry opportunity.” “That ministry sounds suspiciously like work and involves little to no glory or acclaim, so I’ll wait for something a little more glamorous before I’ll hear the Lord’s still small voice calling me to serve.”
“I’m just waiting on the Lord right now.” “I am still living with my parents.”
“I really feel like this is God’s will for my life.” “I’m sick of people pointing out all the glaringly obvious flaws in my life plan, so I’ll just slap the handy ‘God’s will’ label on it to silence the wisdom of my critics.”
“We just invite your presence into this place, now, Father God.” “None of you heathens were clapping during that last song. Get it together, people.”

Memorize lots of bibley-sounding phrases, and season your conversations with them liberally. The perfect Christian will sound like a walking, talking Bible dictionary, effortlessly weaving totally meaningless words and phrases to accomplish the underlying purpose of impressing all his believing friends.

While we could go on and on coaching you on all the ins and outs of keeping up appearances among your brothers and sisters in Christ, we’ll mention a final and essential element of doing life together: select a really holy-looking Bible to carry around.

We’ll deal with the appropriate Bible translation a little later on. For now, the most important thing is to choose a massive, ornate Bible. We’re talking one that’s so heavy you need a caddy to carry it around for you. It definitely needs to have the words “Study Bible” embossed in gold on the cover, preferably the Ryrie, MacArthur, or Reformation varieties for maximum impact on those watching you. It should also have your name stamped on the cover. Not only will your Bible be returned to you if it gets misplaced, but a name imprinted in gold is as good as getting your name written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

It’s total assurance of salvation without having to worry about looking for the fruit of the Spirit in your life.

Make sure to bring your Bible to every church event, even ones that don’t seem to require an expensive study Bible the size of a compact car. A Bible app on your phone will not do. Well, maybe for those spiritual weaklings around you. But if you do end up needing to look up a verse, how will people know you’re reading the Bible and not just knocking out a few levels in the latest mobile game?

For you, O great Christian, bringing your Bible to even the most secular-sounding events lets everyone know that it’s spiritual go time. It is on like Donkey Kong whenever you’re around. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to a church-sponsored baseball game, barbecue, or 5K run. Like a trusted sidekick, your largest, fanciest study Bible should be with you at all times.

Now, friend, you have mastered the art of doing life together. Let’s check in with the Holiness Tracker and see how you’re doing.

Holiness Progress Tracker 5000
Holiness Progress Tracker 5000

Whaaaaaat?! You’re nearing David himself, the man after God’s own heart! You’re still a way off from the truly Christlike people, but we’ve gotta say, we didn’t really expect this kind of a performance out of you. You’re amazing!

*1 Note that the activity only counts as doing life together when you do it with fellow believers. If done with non-Christians, you can call it evangelism and get even more spiritual credit! Awesome!

*2 When they stop inviting you over for game night, count it all joy. You’re being persecuted for Jesus!

*3 As a bonus, owning a gun nets you at least five hundred spiritual points (a thousand if combined with a concealed carry permit), as long as you’re in a more conservative church. You get even more points if you become a member of the NRA and purchase a massive bumper sticker that says something like “Gun Control Means Using Both Hands.”