Tag: mission

Aliens and Strangers

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment

 

          It isn’t on the top of the New York Times best-seller list.  It isn’t featured on holiday book lists for Christian stores.  It is a topic that gets scant attention in church literature, and not much focus in a lot of sermons and preacher podcasts.  It isn’t much discussed in leadership team meetings, and might only get mentioned in the narthex after church in a gossip session, oops, I mean as a “prayer request.” I am talking about ministry to people who are “different”. That is, the stranger, those that are not in the mainstream. It may be the depressed and withdrawn teenager, the gay individual, the one who is shunned for not being cool, or is just not “right in the head” in some way, the ones who dress differently, and, of course, the unattractive, the not very smart, the inarticulate, the social misfit, and sometimes even the handicapped. Or they might be actual persons from other cultures and nations. The list could go on. My point here is that in building a ministry, these people are usually not included. After all, we don’t perceive that they have anything to offer us.
 

          This is, quite simply, contrary to the gospel of grace that we preach. A persistent theme throughout Scripture is that of the alien. God told the Israelites to remember the stranger because they once were aliens in Egypt (Exodus 23:9; Leviticus 19:33). Jesus ups the ante by telling us to actively love such persons (Matthew 5:43, 22:39). Paul takes this further by exhorting believers to show hospitality, which is, literally, the love of strangers (Romans 12:13).

Here are some questions that ought to penetrate our ministry paradigms: Am I in touch with my own strangeness and alien nature? Do I have the capacity to see the image of God in others very different from me? How can I become a voice for the voiceless? Will we struggle to be hospitable to all people?

James said that true religion consists of caring for orphans and widows (James 1:27). The reason he points these two out is that, when we minister to these type of people, they have absolutely no means of reciprocating and giving back. So, here is grace at its finest: just as God in Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, so we can mirror the very character of the Lord in extending ministry with no strings attached to those who are in need.

Perhaps we need a different evaluative grid of our personal and corporate ministries. How about if we base our measurements in grace? Who are the strangers God has placed in your life? How may you show hospitality to them?

Why Does the Church Exist?

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment

 

          Well, it ought to be obvious, right?  The church exists to meet my needs and expectations, and not to bore me to death.  Or maybe it exists to be the guardian of truth, and to never change anything, especially the worship style!  Rarely do we say this out loud, but often this is the bottom line of why we think the church exists.  Too often it comes down to personal preferences and homogeneous thinking, sort of like joining a good book club or a zumba class.
 
         

          Rather than being locked into such pragmatic concerns, a classic definition of the church that has existed for most of its history is that the church is the continuing presence of Jesus in the world, called and blessed by God to be a blessing to one another and to the world. The church is not a voluntary society of like-minded individuals that have come together for their own interests and happiness. Instead, the church is a group of people who have been called by God and joined to Christ with the Spirit’s direction and enabling.

Here are some important implications of this definition –

1. It is God who makes a person a member of the church, and not my individual choice.
2. People often leave a particular church because they see it as a voluntary society which is not meeting their interests and making them happy.
3. The church exists to further God’s glory and interests, not mine.
4. Jesus wants his church to continue his ministry and presence outside the church walls and programs.
5. The gospel is the good news of God’s hospitality (literally “love of strangers”) toward us.
6. The church is made up of called and redeemed people who are to be a community of hospitality, extending grace because we have first received it from Jesus.

The list could go on, but the point is that the church exists not for me, nor to promote itself. The church is to have an outward focus of extending forgiveness and reconciliation in the world. The questions to ask, then, are “how can we be a blessing to others?” and, “what does it mean to be the presence of Jesus?” Not, “what’s in it for me?” or “how can we get more people to give more money?” as if church were some sort of Scrabble game of personal point grabbing and no holds bar winning.

No, I’m not some crotchety spiritual curmudgeon who bemoans the lack of genuine involvement in church while totally oblivious to the needs of church members around me.  It’s just that the whole focus of church is not that I or any individual joins a church; rather, God joins me to his church.  The action is God’s.  And because it is all about God, it ceases to be about us.  When it is about Jesus, then the amazing grace of God surprisingly forgives and meets the deepest needs of our lives.  Church then becomes a place of incredible blessing as God himself shows up to offer authentic unity, real reconciliation, and spiritual cleansing.  And those are things that transcend time and immediate needs for entertainment.  Thanks be to God for his indescribable work!

The Seven Deadly Words of the Church

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment

“We’ve never done it that way before.”  Any church leader or board who has this as their mantra is on a one way road to death.  I know that’s a harsh statement, but sometimes we need eye-opening statements to shake us from our denial about how things are really going.  Jesus did not just change people’s lives; he changed the systems that kept people in bondage.  If we have no substantive spiritual growth, and no real evangelism occurring, our church system is giving us what it is set up to do.

 
When Jesus came to Jerusalem and took a whip to the existing system of buying and selling and money-changing, needy people came and filled-in the space where the vendors were.  Praise to Jesus by the children could now be heard.  Jesus, as he has done so many times before, healed the blind and the lame.  The Jewish religious establishment of Jesus’ time forbade anyone who was lame, blind, deaf, or mute from offering a sacrifice at the temple.  The picture here is one of needy people streaming to Jesus to be healed so that they can worship God along with everyone else.  By engaging in his healing ministry, Jesus was attacking the establishment by making the way clear for all to come to God, which was God’s design for all nations and peoples to do in the first place.  Jesus will not tolerate a system that practices profiling based on anything, whether it is age or disability, when it comes to worship.  He wants no obstacles to anyone who wants to come to God.
 
            Any time any existing system is challenged, there will be those who push back because they benefit from the way things are.  It is a myth to think that when a church changes something, whether it is a new program, cutting an existing one, or introducing different ways of doing worship or ministry that there ought to be 100% acceptance.  When the American Revolution began only about 25% of the people believed that a revolution ought to take place.  Most were either loyal to Britain or thought fighting wasn’t the way to go.  After the revolution, you would be hard pressed to find an American who didn’t rejoice over it.  The chief priests and the teachers of the law were incensed and angered by the systemic change Jesus brought.  They especially didn’t like the accolades that Jesus received for cleaning house.  At its core, the real reason the religious leaders didn’t like it is because it challenged their authority, and they were jealous and envious of the praise Jesus received.  They tried to dress up their indignation and hide their intense anger with a question that was designed to point toward the fact that Jesus ought not to be receiving such praise.  But Jesus sloughed it off, identifying himself as the promised Messiah.
 
            Jealousy and envy stand in direct opposition to the values of God’s kingdom, which prizes humility and mercy toward others.  Proverbs tells us that envy rots the bones (14:30), and the Apostle James tells us that envy and selfish ambition is unspiritual and of the devil and accompanies every evil practice (3:14-16).  The real culprit behind the religious establishment’s system, as well as our own conflicts and disagreements is sin.  But in order to try and appear better than we are, people often confront another with something that is not the real issue. 
 
            Back in the Old Testament, Numbers 12:1 says, “Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife.”  Miriam and Aaron were the siblings of Moses, and they had a problem with a black woman (Cushites were Africans) being a part of the assembly and of the family and worshiping along with the Israelites.  But the very next verse tells what they said to Moses.  Instead of coming clean about what their real problem was, they attacked Moses with a different issue which wasn’t the real issue for them:  “Has the LORD spoken only through Moses?  Hasn’t he also spoken through us?”  Even the issue they raised was really one of jealousy and envy.  They were acting like the chief priests and teachers of the law in Christ’s day, and Moses was a Christ-figure, exhibiting humility and trust through the situation.  God acted by making Miriam a leper, a person who would be excluded from the assembly, and left her to ponder how it feels to be treated as Moses’ wife was.
 
            Jesus was all about alleviating any and all obstacles for all people to the worship of God.  He cared about it enough to attack a system that fed on obscuring what real sacrifice was, and taking on the establishment that prevented certain persons from coming to God in prayer.
 
            The way for us has been made clear through the death of Jesus.  He has removed the old system and replaced it with the new.  Hebrews 8:13 says that “By calling this covenant ‘new’, he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear.”  What is more, Christ’s death has made us clean, and as white as snow, having purified us from all unrighteousness.
 
            It is not our job to put limits on people on how they might serve or worship God according to race, ethnicity, class, disability, age, or gender.  The New Covenant demands it be so.  Jesus insists on it.  And, so, we ought to be a beacon of hope for all who are coming to God and desire to offer their sacrifice of service or praise to him by eliminating any system or rule or practice which conflicts with Jesus’ ministry.
 
            It is an act of grace to be the voice of the voiceless, to work for change that brings people closer to God.  It is the grace of humility that helps us to keep questioning what we do, and don’t do, so that others will be blessed through our church.  We must keep exploring the frontiers of church ministry because we do not exist for ourselves.  Ego and hunger for power can get left at the door.
 
            May we be like Jesus, and be active and proactive in making the way clear for others to come to God by first having God clean out our own hearts.  May the seven deadly words of the church be replaced with a new set of seven life-giving words:  “We are always changing to reach people.”