If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. (1 Corinthians 13:1)

In 1 Corinthians, chapter 13 is a new chapter, but it does not introduce a new subject. In 1 Corinthians 13, the Apostle Paul is still talking about unity in the body of Christ, as he does in the rest of 1 Corinthians. This means that when Paul tells us what “love” is in this passage, he is not speaking about love in general. Neither is he speaking about married love. He is not even directing us to have a certain attitude or emotion toward other people. There are no commands for us in 1 Corinthians 13!

Paul is doing the same thing in 1 Corinthians 13 that he usually does when he responds to the problems of the Church in his letters. Paul is preaching Christ. Paul is speaking of a perfect love which never fails, always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. This is not our human love. What is love? Love is a who. Who is love? God is love.

In 1 Corinthians 14:1, Paul commands us to “pursue love”. This means that our focus should not be on trying to become better at loving other people. Our focus should be on looking toward the love of God which comes to us through Christ on the cross. As 1 John 4:10 says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

For Paul, being spiritual is not about having extraordinary human talents such as linguistic skill, knowledge, foresight, or any of these things. Being spiritual is not even about having a loving attitude toward other people. It is about knowing nothing “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).

We tend to like it when celebrities become Christians because they have the power, finances, and exposure to influence many other people to become Christians. We assume that celebrities and powerful people would be the people whom God would be most likely to use to build the church. But because the way of love is the way of cross, the people who pursue love tend not to be people who have superpowers, but people who are weak, fearful, and foolish.

Among the attributes of love, at the very center of 1 Corinthians 13, we see that love “does not insist on its own way.” We see this aspect of love in the prayers of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and in the Lord’s Prayer. This means that love is not what happens when we do what we want to do with a loving attitude. Love is not even us giving up what we want to do and doing what other people want to do. Love is what happens when God’s will is what is done instead of our will.

But how do we know what God’s will is? God spreads the answer to what His will is throughout the whole congregation so that, in order to know what His will is, we need to seek God’s will together. Paul never put his faith and trust in talented leaders with loving attitudes to run churches under his oversight. Instead, Paul put his faith and trust in the whole congregation being brought together at the foot of the cross.

At the foot of the cross, everyone is available to be used by the Lord on any particular day for any particular purpose. There, everyone is responsible together for discerning the will of the Lord in unity. Church should not be set up as a hierarchy. Church has to be set up so that everyone is prepared to preach, pray, or die at a moment’s notice.

So, having one person or even a small group of people set up to lead the church and make the decisions is dangerous, deadly, and unbiblical. Paul never writes his letters to the pastor or to the elder board, but to the whole congregation. Paul believed that God is the one who leads throughout the whole congregation jointly gathered, and submitted to the Lord’s will. The job of pastors and elders is to point to the Lord and ensure that the congregational leadership is his alone, not usurped by…pastors and elders.

In the Church, the Lord Himself is present among us to lead.