Good luck with comfort

Sorry, it’s been a while. Here is what the past few weeks have boiled down to: I’m uncomfortable and I love it. For the past couple of months i’ve been meeting with different people who “want to get involved” in what we are doing downtown. After telling them what we do, all of the sudden, they’re not so interested. “Getting involved” for us means being a part of a community group that studies Scripture and then shares Christ with others. We’re a family. Love God, Love people. Pretty simple right? It’s not just a Bible study though. It means action. It means bringing the church TO downtown. This doesn’t mean we’re out on the street corner yelling out Scripture, it means we’re sharing a meal with a homeless person. Let me make this clear, not handing out food, but inviting them to dinner with us and hearing their story and sharing ours over a meal. It means we’re going and buying a car full of pumpkins and paint and going to the housing projects down here and painting pumpkins with kids. You can plan for months for a big event that might draw a few people, or with no preparation at all we can paint pumpkins and use sidewalk chalk for hopscotch and have 50 people show up in 5 minutes. (which happened). “Who are you with?” they asked. “We’re with Jesus.”

The problem is, this is uncomfortable for many people. Some people think that we’re crazy for going to the projects and hanging out with the homeless with our 15 month old son Gideon by our side. Hopefully he won’t be a comfortable Christian because of the life we are exposing him to. There is a tendency to become safe in our Christianity. Sitting around discussing the Bible and then doing nothing about it. Or listening to a message and then not doing anything about it. James 2:14 – 24 has some pretty bold things to say about that issue.

So when it comes to “getting involved” I’m becoming incredibly bold with people in letting them know that their hands will get dirty. The tendency can become to just try and “get people in the door” and then let them know what we’re really about. Lucky for us we don’t have a door. All we have is our faith with actions. “That’s very Jesus of you.” is what a guy told me yesterday that had heard about what’s happening. “I’d like to think so” I told him. It’s amazing to know that there’s a little bit of a buzz going around downtown about the church. Weird, we don’t use marketing and people still know!

The funny thing is, there are more people who aren’t Christians that want to be involved with our church than there are Christians. Hmmmmmm. Show people the love and truth of Jesus and they want to get involved. It sounds like we’re onto something. (sarcasm) I wonder what it is? (more sarcasm)

So where do we go from here? Who knows, but I do know one thing. We can’t fail.

Matthew 25:14-30 talks about a master who intrusted three of his servants with three different amounts of money. Two of them doubled their money, and one buried his and gained nothing. (which would have been the correct thing to do in Jewish culture.) Here is what I noticed. There wasn’t an example of a servant that had lost the money and had nothing to show for it when the master returned.

If God has entrusted us with the church, and has declared that the greatest commandment is to love God and then to love people, then I’d like to suggest that in redistributing God’s love to others we can’t fail. We can’t go to the master when he comes back and say, “we invested, and have nothing to show for it.” We can’t fail with love. The only thing that this parable suggests we can do wrong is bury it, become comfortable with it and not share it. If your faith is buried for safety, waiting for the Master to return, you might want to grab a shovel!