Practice Makes....Family?

Today I heard a quote that really caught my attention referring to the differences between Christianity and Judaism.  It went something like this:

 “Christianity is a religion of belief, and Judaism is a religion of practice.”

 My first thought at hearing this was, “Has the Body of evangelical believers really lost everything tangible in their relationship with God?”

 Then I began thinking, what are the tangible parts of a relationship with God?  What practices and actions exist to add structure and protection to the God given life within a church?  What did the early church do together that is cross-cultural?

 So I decided to list a few:

  -Eating together (yum!)

         -Communion (together!)

         -Reading the Word together

         -Singing together/Playing music together

-Creating together

 (Obviously, I am not talking about the practice of feeding the hungry or clothing the naked, etc. although I see them as vitally important.)

 Sadly, I began to realize that in some ways, many of these things don’t seem to happen, outside of a Sunday morning.  Now, I know this could very easily become one of those blogs that is constantly stating “it’s more than just a Sunday morning routine, live it out in the week.”  Which I totally agree with, but we’ve heard that before.

 What I am really getting at, is that while eating together and reading together and singing together are not the substance itself, (someone could sing or read together and truly the practice would have no life it at all) they do come into play as practical structure for fellowship.  These practices as a body are truly what a healthy family does together!  Healthy families eat together and read together, and even sometimes make music together.  They are often united by a bond of blood, and if not by blood often a deep, unexplainable love.

 Is it coincidence that we as believers are also bound together by the blood of the Savior? Absolutely not.

 Shouldn’t these practices exist outside of a Sunday morning?  I believe they should. 

 Perhaps, the pendulum has swung to far.  We have gone as a society from highly structured religion (which really should not be a bad word), to an unpracticed shallow relationship. Is the balance perhaps that a practiced relationship should have structure as long as the structure isn’t the focus?

 So I say no, Christianity was not created to be void of tangible practice.  Quite the opposite, instead our relationship with God as a body is to be given structure and health by these practices.