What does it really mean to be a church that loves?

I’ve been working in mission for nearly twenty years across a variety of contexts and traditions. Membership of the Archbishops’ College of Evangelists has taken me to Anglican churches where the main question is nearly always one connected with how they can grow the church and look ‘outward’. Pressure mounts to come up with schemes and plans for outreach and nervous faces reflect the reality that many of the congregations I have worked with are predominately elderly and perceive themselves as having limited capacity. Often arguments ensue between the pioneers and the realists, and the word ‘should’ is banded around, sometimes weaponised in order to support one particular idea.

This week, Romans 13 popped up in the lectionary, a verse that I have worked with so often in situations like I have described, for a church that has learned how to love, will already have become equipped for most other things. And whilst yes, paperwork and planning is important (especially in the Church of England), without love as the key ingredient, our schemes just simply lead to disappointment.

Paul makes an astonishing claim in Romans 13: “Love is the fulfilment of the law.” At first this might sound as though love is simply a softer alternative to rules and commandments, but I think Paul means something much deeper. Love is not an escape from holiness; it is the very purpose towards which holiness has always been pointing.

Across the Christian tradition, theologians and mystics have recognised this. Augustine understood love as the ordering of our whole lives towards God and neighbour; Aquinas saw love as the quality that gives Christian virtue its true shape. Teresa of Ávila believed that the authenticity of prayer is ultimately demonstrated by the love it produces in us and John of the Cross spoke of the transformation that takes place as we become increasingly capable of loving with God’s own love.

So when Paul speaks of love, he does not mean simply being pleasant, polite or nice. Christian love—agape—is the costly movement of ourselves towards the good of another. It refuses to exploit, diminish, deceive or injure. It asks a different question of our lives.

Instead of simply asking, “What should I to do, or perhaps what are we allowed to do?”, love asks, “What does love require of me here?”

That question could transform the Church.

A church that loves welcomes before it judges. It makes space for people who are uncertain, wounded, different, searching or simply curious. It does not expect people to have everything sorted out before they belong.

A church that loves pays attention. It notices the person sitting alone, the family struggling to make ends meet, the neighbour who has become isolated, the young person wondering whether faith has anything to say to their life. A church that loves serves rather than seeks significance. It asks not, “What can we get from our community?”, but “What can we give?”

And a church that loves learns to love God together. Worship, prayer, Scripture, silence and the Eucharist are not escapes from the world, they are where we allow ourselves to be formed by God’s love so that we can carry that love into the world.

So this is one of the questions I usually begin with; What would love look like here?

Because a church that loves is not simply a church that talks about God’s love, it is a church where people encounter the love of Christ, are formed by that love, and are sent out to become that love for others.

That is what it means for love to fulfil the law. The Church becomes a people whose deepest instinct is not simply to ask, “What should we do?”, but “What does love require of us?”—and then to do it.