It’s good news for people who don’t believe in Jesus. We have to be really clear about this. The good news for Person X is good news for the whole street. And if it is good news for the whole street, then it’s good news for the whole world.
If the gospel isn’t good news for everybody, then it isn’t good news for anybody.
And this is because the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and convince them to join. It is when the church gives itself away in radical acts of service and compassion, expecting nothing in return, that the way of Jesus is most vividly put on display. To do this, the church must stop thinking about everybody primarily in categories of in or out, saved or not, believer or nonbeliever. Besides the fact that these terms are offensive to those who are the “un” and “non,” they work against Jesus’s teachings about how we are to treat each other. Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor, and our neighbor can be anybody.27 We are all created in the image of God, and we are all sacred, valuable creations of God.28 Everybody matters. To treat people differently based on who believes what is to fail to respect the image of God in everyone. As the book of James says, “God shows no favoritism.”29 So we don’t either.
Oftentimes the Christian community has sent the message that we love people and build relationships in order to convert them to the Christian faith. So there is an agenda. And when there is an agenda, it isn’t really love, is it? It’s something else. We have to rediscover love, period. Love that loves because it is what Jesus teaches us to do. We have to surrender our agendas. Because some people aren’t going to become Christians like us no matter how hard we push. They just aren’t. And at some point we have to commit them to God, trusting that God loves them more than we ever could. I obviously love to talk to people about Jesus and my faith. I’ll take every opportunity I can get. But I have learned that when I toss out my agenda and simply love as Jesus teaches me to, I often end up learning more about God than I could have imagined.
And one thing to keep in mind is that we never arrive. Ever. One of the illusions of faith is that at some point we get it all mapped out and things get smooth and predictable. It is not true. The way of Jesus is a journey, not a destination. On a journey, the scenery changes. A lot. We can prepare for some things but not all. We make mistakes, figure it out as we go along, and try new things. Failures are really just opportunities to learn. If you are part of a church, is the dominant understanding of faith in your church that of journey or destination?
I am learning that the church is at its best when it is underground, subversive, and countercultural. It is the quiet, humble, stealth acts that change things. I was just talking to a woman named Michelle who decided to move into the roughest neighborhood in our city to try to help people get out of the cycle of poverty and despair. She was telling me about the kids she is tutoring and the families they come from and how great the needs are. Some other women in our church heard about Michelle and asked her for lists of what exactly the families in her neighborhood need. (One of the families wrote on their list “heat.”) They then circulated the lists until they found people who could meet every one of the needs. It’s like an underground mom-mafia network. Michelle told me at last count they had helped 430 families, and they are making plans to expand their network.
“Jesus lives; here’s a toaster.”
These are the kinds of people who change the world. They improvise and adapt and innovate and explore new ways to get things done. They don’t make a lot of noise, and they don’t draw a lot of attention to themselves.
Difficulty, Suffering, and Hope
To be this kind of person—the kind who selflessly serves—takes everything a person has. It is difficult. It is demanding. And we often find ourselves going against the flow of those around us. Which is why we are reclaiming the simple fact that Jesus said the way is narrow.30 We are honest about this, especially to our friends who wouldn’t say they are Christians. Very few people in our world are offering anything worth dying for. Most of the messages we receive are about how to make life easier. The call of Jesus goes the other direction: It’s about making our lives more difficult. It is going out of our way to be more generous and disciplined and loving and free. It is refusing to escape and become numb to and check out of this broken, fractured world.
And so we are embracing the high demands of Jesus’s call to be one of his disciples. We are honest about it. We want our friends to know up front that the costs are high, which is what is so appealing about Jesus—his vision for life takes everything we have.
In the accounts of Jesus’s life, often the larger the crowds get, the more demanding and difficult his teachings get. In John 6 he gives a teaching that is so hard to swallow, everybody but a few leave him. He is constantly trying to find out who really wants it. And so he keeps pushing and prodding and questioning and putting it out there until some leave and the diehards stay. We never find him chasing after someone, trying to convince them that he really wasn’t that serious, that it was just a figure of speech. He didn’t really mean sell your possessions and give to the poor. If anybody didn’t have a Messiah complex, it was Jesus.
This is what we are all dying for—something that demands we step up and become better, more focused people. Something that calls out the greatness that we hope is somewhere inside of us.
Not only is the way narrow, but it involves suffering. To truly engage with how the world is, our hearts are going to be broken again and again. Just this past week, I met a woman who is terrified her husband is going to beat her, and another woman who has a degenerative muscle disease that is causing her face to freeze up, and I can think of at least five couples who are splitting up, and . . . you get the picture. It is your world too. And so we are learning how to suffer well. Not to avoid it but to feel the full force of it. It is important that churches acknowledge suffering and engage it—never, ever presenting the picture that if you follow Jesus, your problems will go away. Following Jesus may bring on problems you never imagined.
Suffering is a place where clichés don’t work and words often fail. I was at lunch last week with a friend who is in the middle of some difficult days, and I don’t have any answers. I just don’t. I can’t fix it for him. I’ve tried. And we sat there and talked and ate, and I let him know that I’m in it with him. It isn’t very pretty and it isn’t very fun, but when we join each other in the pain and confusion, God is there. Sometimes it means we sit in silence for a while, not knowing what to say. And it is in our suffering together that we find out we are not alone. We find out who really loves us. We find out that with these people around us, we can make it through anything. And that gives us something to celebrate.
Ultimately our gift to the world around us is hope. Not blind hope that pretends everything is fine and refuses to acknowledge how things are. But the kind of hope that comes from staring pain and suffering right in the eyes and refusing to believe that this is all there is. It is what we all need—hope that comes not from going around suffering but from going through it. I am learning that the church has nothing to say to the world until it throws better parties. By this I don’t necessarily mean balloons and confetti and clowns who paint faces. I mean backyards and basements and porches. It is in the flow of real life, in the places we live and move with the people we’re on the journey with, that we are reminded it is God’s world and we’re going to be okay.
Central to reclaiming creation and being a resurrection community is the affirmation that when God made the world, God said it was “good.”
And it still is.
Food and music and art and friends and stories and rivers
