Everyday Church

It is so important for Christian leaders to mobilize followers of Jesus to build authentic relationships with people who are not following Jesus. In a post-Christian culture, people want to know if you are the real deal or not. Hypocritical Christianity, as always, will not cut it when it comes to advancing the kingdom of God. This is especially true in a society that is increasingly hostile toward Christianity.

I read a good book recently. In Everyday Church: Gospel Communities on Missions, authors Tim Chester and Steve Timmis point out that, "We need to do church and mission in the context of everyday life. We can no longer think of church as a meeting on a Sunday morning. We must think of church as a community of people who share life, ordinary life. And we cannot think of mission as an event that takes place in an ecclesiastical building. Of course, there will always be a role for special events, but the bedrock of mission will be ordinary life. Mission must be done primarily in the context of everyday life."

My goal as a pastor is to mobilize the church I lead to build meaningful relationships with all kinds of different people. We can't afford to live in a comfortable Christian bubble, spending most of our time with people who believe as we do. We must engage culture and intentionally build relationships across cultural boundaries and belief systems.

The Journey of Life

I was involved in a great conversation tonight with my church small group about purpose in life, desires, passions, and heaven.  It was so much fun!  I think it is so important to slow down and reflect as much as possible about our hearts and the many different ways that God has designed each of us.  Reflections about the meaning of life... the ups and downs... the joys and the sorrows... the desires of our hearts... are best done in authentic community.  If our lives are a journey, then we need to have other people along with us on that journey. 

I have had many people come along side me during my journey, and I experience great joy in investing in the lives of the kids I am mentoring, as well.  My mentees have plenty of adults in their lives who tell them about all of their needs, all of their shortcomings, and all of their problems.  But, as a mentor, I serve the function of being an adult who builds them up, helps them dream, and encourages them to pursue the journey of life with all of their hearts.

And so there are two basic perspectives to live by in this blog post.  First, God has designed each of us to live a passionate life of adventure in real community with people who are dedicated to lifting us up.  And, second, we all have a responsibility to invest in the next generation of young people by helping them to live from their hearts in a passionate, adventure-filled journey in relationship with God and one another. 

A Summer Night in Homewood

Last night we arrived home from a weekend out of town, and Julie asked me "I wonder how long it will take the kids in our neighborhood to find out we're home? Ten, or maybe fifteen minutes?" Like clockwork, about ten minutes later a group of seven or eight boys and girls stopped at our house to visit. We were still unpacking our car, so we stopped what we were doing and chatted for a while to catch up on everything that had happened in our neighborhood while we were gone. One boy had a birthday, hence the reason he had cake icing smeared on his face. One kid had a new bike, and he had to tell us every detail about it. That group of kids left, and we went inside to put Kyra and Sierra to bed. While I was tucking Sierra in, she said "Dad... I'm so happy to be home. I missed our house and I missed everyone." With the kids snuggled in to their beds, Julie and I settled into our summer evening ritual of sitting on the front porch to reflect on our day. We greeted people as they walked past. We talked to our neighbors. A kid from our Monday night group saw us and stopped by for a freezie pop. The combination of the warm summer breeze, the good conversation, and the unpredictability of who we might meet next made for a fun evening. We were both happy to be back at home and in our neighborood with our community again.

The story I just told is not the picture that most people have in their minds about Homewood. Most people in Pittsburgh think of Homewood as a dangerous place that reasonable people should stay away from at all costs. However, this story captures well the countercultural and radical call of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The message of the world, especially in America, is that we should make our lives more comfortable. Good people distance themselves from the poor by becoming upwardly mobile and living out the American Dream. Success means more money and more power and bigger houses and bigger toys. Meanwhile, that worldly message is crushing people (including many Christians in America who are desperately trying to do whatever it takes to achieve that lifestyle). Authentic community... the kind that we read about in the book of Acts in the Bible... the kind that Jesus Christ modeled for us... is nearly impossible to find if we choose to distance ourselves from the poor and choose to live in a world of individuality and consumerism. Christians around America are moving into gated communities at an alarming rate, doing what they think is best in distancing themselves and their families from brokenness in the world when in fact they are going in the complete opposite direction of Jesus' radical call to live out the gospel in a broken world. In fact, even if a community does not have a gated entrance, many American Christians choose to live in places where the society has been set up so that they do not have to interact with any poor people where they live, where they shop, where they go out to eat, where they go to church, and where they work.

My point is that it is extremely difficult to experience authentic community, the kind that the early Christian church experienced, by living in places that promote individuality, consumerism, racial discrimination, and class discrimination. The interesting thing is, people will go to amazing extremes in order to live in places like that. They'll take on crazy mortgages, work crazy hours, and sacrifice in crazy ways in order to reach the lofty heights of... there being no poor people around them to interact with, everybody having the same skin color and socioeconomic class as them, and intentionally distancing themselves from being able to live out Christ's call to be his hands and feet to people who have been marginalized by this world. My life is not perfect, but I have found that I have experienced greater community in Homewood than I have in any other place I have lived during my lifetime (which has mostly been in the suburbs). I love living in the inner city. I love having people stop over to visit with us all the time. I love knowing my neighbors, and not having to force those relationships. I love that God has put me in a position to be an extension of the body of Christ to meet people's needs as those needs arise in a neighborhood that is largely rejected by the successful and powerful people living in Pittsburgh. There's no place I'd rather be.

If this post is challenging you, I might suggest a few questions for you to ask yourself. Have you chosen to live in a neighborhood that buffers itself from poor people, where the majority of people there are the same as you racially and socioeconomically? How about where you choose to shop, worship, and work... does everyone seem to look the same as you racially and socioeconomically? Is your lifestyle radical, or do your values pretty much look like the values that the world promotes and embraces? Have you, maybe unintentionally, distanced yourself from people in need in order to pursue a more comfortable lifestyle? Are you engaged in deep, meaningful relationships with people in need? If you are struggling with the answers to these questions as I do, my advice would be to go back to the Bible and read the Gospels and Acts through in order to challenge yourself with how countercultural Jesus' life was and how countercultural the lives of early Christians were. Those examples are far greater than anything I could ever share about my own lifestyle. After all, the point is Jesus, not me. The point is that followers of Jesus should be living in ways that are different than the world's measures of success. When we enter a relationship with Jesus, our lives should never be the same. We now live according to biblical values, not worldly values. I hope all Christians can come to experience the joy that is found in living a radical, sold out life for Jesus that does not conform to this world.