The monastic Rule of St Benedict exhorts its readers to ‘Prefer nothing to the love of Christ’ – in other words, make him the sole object of your life, and lift nothing above him. Don’t let anything compete with Jesus for the devotion of your heart.

It’s what Jesus wants – he said that our love for our families should seem like hatred in comparison to our love for him. He wasn’t saying ‘don’t love your family’, but he was saying our devotion to him should out shine it by far. In consequence, loving Jesus also means that it spills out into love for others, so no one loses out – in fact, we love better.

In terms of the church, is there anything else that we exalt up there with Jesus? We all know the answer should be no, but I’m not sure that’s always the reality. I look at my own experience over the years and can see times when I’ve been guilty of the following:

Jesus plus my traditions
Jesus plus my denomination
Jesus plus my preferences
Jesus plus my culture
Jesus plus my favourite church programme
Jesus plus my pet topic

Thing is, if we build our church community around Jesus plus [whatever], we will spend more time maintaining the plus than you might imagine, because the plus becomes the thing that we’ve made the glue of our community. We become a very human community creation, not a spiritual creation. Pubs, community interest groups, sports teams, choirs, streets and villages etc can all build community that is good without God…we shouldn’t be surprised at this, it is very possible. It also means that the church can build community with community as the glue instead of God. It’s easily to become our ‘thing’ as opposed to the house God is building.

There are two things that can tragically flow from this:

1. You take away ‘the thing’ and people will quickly abandon because their ultimate loyalty wasn’t to Christ, but to ‘the thing’.

2. You can take away Jesus, pack him away in the basement, and much of the community will stay intact because ‘the thing’ is still there. Jesus wasn’t so central after all.

Makes me weep. I’ve glimpsed ‘church’ communities where Jesus gets a back seat. It’s quite possible for those communities of people to thrive and do good, but just because it ‘works’ and draws a crowd does not mean to say that what you are dealing with is ‘the church’.

The real church is not just those who gather in church buildings every week, nor even those who believe some religious stuff. The real church is those transformed and joined together supernaturally through Jesus, and who are held in him. We become the body of Christ, God’s building and it is among this people Jesus makes his home, and it is them that Jesus is building into a spiritual house. The consequence of this is that not everyone who sits with you in your place of worship on a Sunday is necessarily grafted in to the spiritual reality of the church – yet.

Is Christ, and Christ alone, enough for us? Are we brave enough to see what kind of house Jesus will build through those who have a wholehearted devotion to him? Jesus said he would build his church. It’s not really our job to build the church, we are so tempted to build with materials and ‘things’ that don’t last.

A community with the gospel message of Jesus at the centre that God is drawing together will stand against the gates of hell so long as they have Jesus. That’s when you know if you have a church or not

To prefer nothing to the love of Christ is more challenging that we may at first think. The Benedictines, in a time where being the church was turning into a state religion, stole away and founded ‘houses for conversion’ where the aim was to seek Christ above all else, and where life is conformed to what he wants. It’s surely what we need in our own day.

When everything else is stripped away, will be still be content with Jesus?