cup a joe

Ponder this for a moment:

Nonetheless, when we say it is a flaw for the church to be attractional, we refer more to the stance the church takes in its community.  By anticipation that if they get their internal features right, people will flock to the services, the church betrays its belief in attractionalism.  It's like the Kevin Costner character in the film Field of Dreams being told by the disembodied voice, "If you build it, they will come."  How much of the traditional church's energy goes into adjusting their programs and their public meetings to cater to an unseen constituency?  If we get our seating, our parking, our children's program, our preaching, and our music right, they will come.  This assumes that we have a place in our society and that people don't join our churches because, though they want to be Christians, they're unhappy with the product.  The missional church recognizes that it does not hold a place of honor in its host community and that its missional imperative compels it to move out from itself into the host community as salt and light. (Shaping of Things to Come, The Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church.  Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch)

I've been told that if I only get my systems right, we would grow and be relevant.  The assumption is that we are small because we don't know what we are doing.  The reality is that we are small because we do not have the budget / staff / facility / programs that the one large church in our town has so as to successfully compete for the discerning Christian consumer.  But is that who we are supposed to grow a church with?  My soccer friends don't care about our systems.  They think the church is hypocritical and bigoted.  So to reach them do I need to do the same thing that all the churches do - the things that they don't care about?  Or instead, do I need to figure out a way to be salt and light to them?  The same hard truth hits us here in DeKalb.  Most of the people in this town don't care for anything that the church has to offer.  If they did, then they would be in church.  Our witness is irrelevant to them.  Because of that, we have made Jesus irrelevant to them.  An irrelevant Jesus - that is a pretty scary thought.

If we really wanted to be followers of Jesus, we would go to the place that he hung out at.  We would do the things that he did.  Jesus went to where the people were - he didn't wait for them to come to him.  Think about how Paul describes Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage  rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death - even death on a cross!  (Philippians 2:6-8 NIV)

So what would it look like if we took the same attitude about the lost?  We find comfort in the church.  We like the safe comfortable culture that we are apart of.  But what if we were willing to become uncomfortable so that others might find Jesus.  What if we became uncomfortable so as to became salt and light?  What would our lives look like?  What who the church look like?  Now that's something to really ponder...