Our church recently celebrated more child dedications than anyone on staff can remember. Commotion and joy and reverence and tears from parents and children filled the stage. But if I listed the names of the parents and children, the list would mean nothing to you. None are famous. You could search the internet and learn a few tidbits, but the list of people would still probably seem ordinary. Just names.

That’s often how people receive the list of names at the end of Paul’s letters. Most of them aren’t famous across the New Testament. Their names are just names.

But since I’ve been pastoring for the last dozen years in the same church, that list of names from our child dedications means more to me than just names. I can tell you which parents struggled with infertility and brutal miscarriages. I know that when some parents stood on stage praying that the church would become their family, they did so because their own family wouldn’t talk to them. I know which parents adopted out of the foster care system. I know the meanings of middle names. Staying in one church for twelve years creates this sort of knowledge.

Sometimes, however, this knowledge can make the relationships between shepherds and sheep more difficult, not easier. It’s easy to love people and pastors when we don’t really know each other. Casual attendance might let us think of a church as friendly and the pastors as nice. But meaningful, extended time together can reveal sin patterns. Such time often shows us blind spots others cannot, or will not, see in themselves. Familiarity can breed contempt more often than love.

When I came to the end of 1 Corinthians, after preaching through the book slowly for a year, I never expected the letter to end the way it does. Long ago, the list of names had seemed blah. When I read their names this time, however, having spent so much time staring at their blind spots and sin patterns, I expected the apostle Paul probably couldn’t stand them.

I was very wrong.  

The Greatness of Their Gifting (and Their Dysfunction)

Certainly, the church in Corinth excelled in gifting. The supernatural power of the Holy Spirit worked through and among them. Several chapters explore the power exhibited by this young, precocious church.

In the early chapters, we read about their appreciation for strong, even supernatural, apostolic preaching. To use an old word, those in Corinth wanted preachers who had unction, preachers with authority and gravity, preachers who commanded attention. In later chapters, Paul writes extensively of supernatural gifts of miracles, gifts of healing, gifts of helping, gifts of administration. And, of course, they spoke in the tongues of men and angels and prophesied in the Spirit. Their lack of gifting wasn’t their problem.

Perhaps even more infamous than their supernatural gifting were their many struggles with sin. They struggled to affirm basic orthodoxy, with some even denying the resurrection (15:12). Others struggled with the wrong kind of tolerance and acceptance, with some even boasting how they tolerated a kind of sexual sin that, Paul reminds them, was not even accepted in their pagan culture (5:1). It would seem their church had husbands who had left the faith and left their wives, just as they likely had wives who had left the faith and left their husbands (7:12–16). When they took the Lord’s Supper, they so profaned the meal through drunkenness and disdain for the poor that Paul says their practice of the meal shouldn’t even be called the Lord’s Supper (11:20). And, yes, they loved good preaching, but they had favorite preachers to such an extent that they would look at good and godly teachers and say, “I can’t learn from that guy; I can only learn from this guy” (1:11–13).

In short, when Paul comes to the names at the end of his letter, he knows the people well. And what he knew concerned him.

The Greatness of Love

If you had been one of their shepherds, you might have considered moving to a new flock in greener pastures. Yet the last chapter of this letter strikes me as the most supernatural miracle within the letter.

In chapter 16, the Spirit of God causes Paul to care for them in ways I never would have expected. We read that Paul longed to spend more time with them, even a whole winter (16:6). We’ve all had extended visits from people that have left us feeling exhausted. Yet when some of their members visited Paul, we read how they refreshed his spirit (16:18).

Paul also writes about Timothy and Apollos, godly Christian leaders (16:10–12). Surprisingly, Paul wants those men to visit the church in Corinth and for their visits to go well. I say surprisingly because, in their culture of “I follow him but not him” (1 Cor. 1:10–17), those visits could have been seen as one big competition and caused more division. Yet Paul reminds the church how they all, together, are doing the Lord’s work.

Consider also what Paul writes in verse 15: “You know that the household of Stephanas were the first converts in Achaia.” If a group of people were the first ones to know the Lord, the first ones to plant a church, the first ones to be really important, then you might expect them to wear their importance as a badge. “Look at us,” they could say. “We were first.” However, Paul finishes the thought by saying that those who were first have “devoted themselves to the service of the saints.” The first among them became servants among them. How unlikely!

And in the final verse, his final thoughts that he wants to leave with the church, what does Paul write? At the end of the letter, Paul takes the pen and writes the last verse with his own hand: “My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen” (16:24). The word all in “all the saints” strikes me as supernatural. Some of the all were surely harder to love than others.

Many of us belong to churches that are nearly as frustratingly dysfunctional as the church in Corinth, causing us to wonder what hope exists for such churches and whether their light can shine in a dark world. In fact, sometimes, instead of being lighthouses that guide people from danger to safety, our churches can seem to be the ones causing thunderstorms and rocky shipwrecks. Maybe God should just remove their lampstands. Certainly, a church can become so dysfunctional that it is no longer a church, just as the Corinthian practice of the Lord’s Supper ceased to be the Lord’s Supper.

When I read the end of 1 Corinthians, however, I’m reminded that the greatest of all supernatural gifts, the gift of the love of God, really does change people. The love of God among the people of God can create the most surprising of all endings. In the middle of the letter, after a long list of sinful patterns, Paul then writes, “and such were some of you” (6:11). When we come to the final chapter and his list of names he knows so well, it would seem Paul really believes that being “washed . . . sanctified . . . [and] justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” actually changes people.

I think again of being on the stage at the front of our church with all those mothers and fathers and young children. Over time, it can be easy for us all to let our bitterness and cynicism grow toward one another. They won’t be perfect sheep, and I certainly won’t be a perfect pastor.

But I pray that the same supernatural power of love that worked among the church in Corinth would work among us. I pray that, inside the gospel story, our familiarity would flower love, not contempt. I pray that the parents and children and single people and widows and widowers and former drunkards and workaholics and legalists and the sexually broken would know the power of grace. And I pray that, together, we would grow up in Christ to such an extent that in sixteen or eighteen years those dedicated children will come back on the stage as high school graduates, and we could all say to one another as we send them out like arrows: “my love be with you all.”