How Will they Know

“Everything your church needs to be what God wants it to be is already in your midst. Open your eyes to the people around you. Stop wishing and hoping, and do the best you can, with what you’ve got, for Jesus Christ today.” Rick Warren, in The Emerging Church by Dan Kimball.
I have been thinking about this powerful quotation for the last month while doing research for our evangelism committee. And the conclusion I have reached is somehow both remarkable and obvious. “Open your eyes to the people around you.” There are certainly a lot of people around. Our building is surprisingly full of people all the time, if we are only willing and able to see them as part of our church.
How do we really feel about having the many groups and communities using the building? Do we see them as purely a source of income? Do we even see them as potential Christians? Do we see them as members of our community, just they way they are? I keep running into the idea that early Christian communities contained both the initiated and the uninitiated. (One source of this was a quote from Bishop Itty’s address at the Convention.) How we see ourselves, especially where we draw the line demarcating ‘other’ will have a lot to do with how we present ourselves to the groups in the building and how we present ourselves to strangers who come through the door.
We need to take some time to think about our attitudes towards the people who meet in this building. They have a right and responsibility to the building and my perception is that they would love to have an invitation as well. We might want to think about opening the boundaries with regards to the building- who has permission to use it and even who has permission to be on the committees about the building. And lastly I suppose who has the responsibility to provide care and money and maintenance on the building.
Dan Kimball had something else important to show me. While teaching a class on Acts he said to his students, “The church is the people of God who gather together with a sense of mission (Acts 14:27). We can’t go to church because we are the church.” Our little group of parishioners is the church at St. David’s and no matter how much we love this building, it isn’t the church, we are. We don’t need this parish beyond its ability to provide comfort and safety for all the people who use it. We don’t need this property beyond its ability to give us space to focus and feed our mission – to witness to the love of God and to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ.
We need to re-imagine ourselves in relation to this building. Semantics are powerful. Calling the groups who meet here outsiders denies them the right to be here. And it keeps them separate from the church, separate from us and ultimately, separate from God. If we see them as tenants, how will we ever imagine them as members of the body of Christ, how will they ever imagine that our God is the God of Unconditional Love. Every community that uses this building is contributing to the lifting up of the broken and hurting world. Every individual who meets here for any reason is searching for God’s love and worthy of joining our family.