Luke 9:46-48
46 An argument arose among them as to which one of them was the greatest. 47But Jesus, aware of their inner thoughts, took a little child and put it by his side, 48and said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me; for the least among all of you is the greatest.’
I think that we are limiting this scripture a bit when we take “child” too literally. Replace the word children with “someone new to the faith” Let read that again.
46 An argument arose among them as to which one of them was the greatest. 47But Jesus, aware of their inner thoughts, took “someone new to the faith” and put them by his side, 48and said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes this person new to the faith in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me; for the least among all of you is the greatest.’
I don’t think a church has to work all that hard to be welcoming to other church people. I mean church people kind of know what is going on. They know we worship in the sanctuary, they know what a fellowship hall is; they know that the bulletin is the thing we use to guide us through the service; they know what a narthex is. If they are really spiritual grown ups they should be excited if they have trouble finding a place to park, if the church is crowded or they stumble over all the little kids running around. If there are mature spiritually, they shouldn’t care one tiny bit if the parking lot is cracked or the ceiling leaks or the bathroom smells funny.
Honestly, I don’t have a lot of patience for lifelong Christians who visit and have complaints about practical things. If they are lifelong Christians, they should, by now get that it isn’t about their comfort. If a lifelong Christian comes to worship here, and I call them later in the day to see how it went and they say, “I didn’t feel very welcome; the person next to me didn’t even speak to me.” I want to say, didn’t occur to you that perhaps that was there first time in any church, why didn’t you welcome them?
But what about someone new to the faith, someone who is truly seeking to fill that God shaped hole in their hearts, what if they come here? They may not know words like narthex and fellowship hall, they may not understand all those “churchy” words we use. What’s more, they may have spent their whole life living solely by the standards of the world. Think about this for a moment, do you judge your church differently than you would a nice restaurant? Say someone took you out for a nice dinner and while you were there, you were checking the place out to see if it would be a good place to invite your spouse for an anniversary or a new acquaintance you really wanted to impress.
What would you look at?
You would look at the appearance, the service, every little detail. Before you even got inside you would take note of the building and the parking lot. If you were ignored when you walked in, you would notice, if you had to wait an hour for your table, you would take note. If there was a stain on a table cloth, spots on the silverware you would see that. If the waiter seemed confused or dropped your plate, points would be deducted.
But we wouldn’t judge our church that way, because as Christians, we know that this stuff is not important. Right?
‘Whoever welcomes this person new to the faith in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me; for the least among all of you is the greatest.’
Think about it, those new to the faith have no other way to judge our church except by the standards of the world. Remember the effort we would put in checking out a restaurant? They are thinking about trusting their life in our hands. They are thinking in one way or another about surrendering their life to God, they don’t know what that looks like yet and they are using whatever criteria they can think of to see if we are a safe place to do that.
In the church we do a lot that it “good enough for church.” We do that because we are trying to be good stewards of the church’s money and we do it because we realize that the gospel calls us to something more than appearances. But, I think that there is a theological problem with that in that we should really give our best to God. More importantly though, there is an evangelistic problem with that.
‘Whoever welcomes this person new to the faith in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me; for the least among all of you is the greatest.’
We need to look critically at every single thing we do. Are we doing "good enough for church" work? Or, are we doing good enough that someone may trust us with being part of the most important decision of their life?
Something to think about.
2 comments:
We worry how our house looks when guests are expected. Often we are fretful it will not be as nice as we would like, after all, the cats and the dog DO still live here. Sometimes we say "well, I have done what I can. Either I have guests and dog hair or no guests at all." We still try to do better than 'filthy' and fall short of 'spotless'. (We do love Spot so!)
I really love that comment. It gives me an opportunity to clarify something. We should do all we can to make the church as welcoming as possible BUT we shouldn't stop being the church in order to do that. That means if something is broken and ugly just because we haven't been bothered to fix it, we should get if fixed. But, if something is a mess because we are hosting Sea City or because we have lots of boxes of relief supplies for an upcoming mission trip, we shouldn't apologize for that. There is something attractive about a church that shows obvious signs of being used for church work.
Thanks for the reflection!
Post a Comment