In his book Hillbilly Elegy[1] J.D. Vance gives an insight into his family’s roots in the Appalachian culture of rural Kentucky. To get the story told, he writes in their home-spun expletive-laden vernacular. It’s obvious that he loves them fiercely.

After recounting his extended family’s difficulties in personal and heart-wrenching detail, Vance turns to the question of whether these difficulties can be ‘fixed’. As someone who knows these problems better than most, he concludes,

‘People sometimes ask whether I think there’s anything we can do to “solve” the problems of my community. I know what they’re looking for: a magical public policy solution or an innovative government programme. But these problems of family, faith and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most understand them) really exist’.[2]

So, if it’s not going to be government programs and politics what’s it going to be? To explain his answer, he tells us that before completing the writing of his book, he had lunch with another hillbilly young man who reminded him of ‘fifteen-year-old J.D.’ The same old issues were still prevalent in this guy’s life. Vance sees the lad’s future depending on questions like, ‘whether he can access a church that teaches him lessons of Christian love, family and purpose’[3]. He asks, ‘Are we tough enough to build a church that forces kids like me to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it’.[4]

It’s time we took this challenge seriously. I think enough time has been spent explaining away the church. After all, in the middle of a plague, a century after Jesus rose from the dead, the Christians were unwittingly making a name for themselves. Dionysius of Alexandria recorded, ‘Most of our brethren showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves… taking charge of the sick, attending to their every need, and ministering to them in Christ.’[5]

By the fourth century they were still at it. According to the pagan Emperor Julian, ‘The impious Galileans support not only their poor but ours as well.’[6] He urged pagan priests to imitate Christian charitable institutions because Christian generosity was attracting converts.

The modern historian Rodney Stark characterises these early centuries: ‘Members did nurse the sick, even during epidemics; they did support orphans, widows, the elderly and the poor; they did concern themselves with the lot of slaves. In short, Christians created “a miniature welfare state in an Empire which for the most part lacked social services”’.[7] And that gave rise to the vast spread of Christian care in expressions like hospitals.

This identifier of the Church has been seen both in the universal Church (throughout the world and the centuries) and the local church (where the accountability buck usually stops).

Why have we allowed sceptics to take over the question, “What about the record of the church”? That’s a line the church could pose!

Yes of course the church (then and now) has had problems – a group of people afflicted by problems ranging from hypocrisy to sexual deviation, grandiose leadership, theft, jealousy, and lukewarm namby-pamby commitment – and that’s just the first century! But this was going to be the first community in history where human beings could walk in the light, have fellowship with one another, and have the blood of Jesus Christ cleanse them from sin.

It was never meant to be a superhuman community – it was meant to be supernatural, in which sin was not swept under the carpet but found out and confessed. Indeed, our culture is indebted to Christian teaching for developing the very notion of hypocrisy.

You’ll be looking long and hard in the Bible to find the secret church structure that determines how we go about our social relationships – simply because it’s not there. But the New Testament gives a lot of attention to how we function – how we clump together – and very little about the structure of the church. In fact you might call it a ‘clumping manual’.

The ‘clumping’ guidelines (of which there are over thirty)[8] start by taking their cue from Jesus’ famous instruction, ‘A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.’[9]

New Testament writers then go on to develop a nuanced and powerfully insightful set of best practice – how the Spirit of Jesus can enable us to deal with ‘one another’. This ranges from (what you might expect) ‘accept one another’[10] to the rarer cases like ‘outdo one another in showing honour’[11] (that’s one of my favourites).  Then there’s ‘confess your faults to one another’[12] (oops – I don’t find that so easy), ‘put up with one another’[13] (again, a favourite).

We even get a good handful of things we are not to do with one another. We are not to ‘lie to an another’[14], we are not to ‘pass judgment on one another’[15] and we even have Paul’s very specific instruction to the Galatians, ‘If you keep on biting and devouring each other…you’ll be destroyed by each other’[16].

And – a couple of dozen more.

It’s time to get on with loving one another – and fiercely, don’t you think?

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[1] J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (London: William Collins, 2016, updated 2024)

[2] Vance p.238

[3] Vance p.255

[4] Vance p.255

[5] In Eusebius Ecclesiastical History (Book 7)

[6] Julian, The works of the Emperor Julian (W. C. Wright, Trans., Vol. 3, Harvard University Press. 1923)

[7] Stark, The Cities of God (New York: Harper One, 2007)

[8] Gene A. Getz, Building Up One Another (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1976)

[9] John 13:34,35

[10] Romans 15:7

[11] Romans 12:10

[12] James 5:16

[13] Colossians 3:13

[14] Colossians 3:9

[15] Romans 14:13

[16] Galatians 5:15