This is another installment in a series that has been adapted from my 11-part CD teaching series on A. W. Tozer’s spiritual classic, The Pursuit of God.

Tozer anticipates that some reader may fear that private religion is being magnified, that the, “us” of the New Testament is being displaced by a selfish “I.” He replies, “Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other?” I think he is correct. If we really want to have communion together, the best thing is to stop trying to make it happen on the horizontal plane and start with the vertical plane. “So,” as Tozer continues, “one hundred worshipers meeting together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be were they to become “unity” conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship. Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified.” Having all the focus on God is not the enemy of worship or communion or community life; rather it is the dynamic of life itself.

As we look away to the Lord we carry Christ with us more and more. From this a more powerful communion of the saints occurs more readily than when we look to each other in an effort toward social action. As Dallas Willard says, many Christians try to measure ministry by the ABC’s: attendance, buildings, and cash.  A friend of mine suggests that success is often determined by the 3 B’s: buildings, budgets, and body counts. These are just two examples of how superficial such manmade metrics are. Concerning the practices of the early Jerusalem church, Luke records that “. . . everyone kept feeling a sense of awe . . . .” There is no indication that this response was the result of any building program, year-end budget challenge, or attendance rally. It was the result of God’s people coming to meet with their Lord.

It is my conviction that a church with only one hundred people, all of whom are tuned to the heart of Jesus Christ, will soon begin to manifest a greater unity, a stronger vitality, and a more powerful impact for the kingdom of God than with a church of 10,000 people who are only focused on projects, processes, and programs. Size has never impressed God. How could it? How could an infinite God ever be impressed with anything we think is big? Next to God, everything we do and everything we are is of no account. The only thing that impresses God is a heart that can’t get enough of him.

• The basis of horizontal (earthly) communion is vertical (heavenly) communion.

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