Inside Out People

Part of it is because of the song I mentioned earlier. That is a big part of it, actually. It is people who are being changed on the inside and are then turned inside out for the glory of God and the good of everyone else. It is people who are about justice and praise, together, hand in hand, in one big Kingdom embrace.

But it also takes into account this growing hunch I have had for a couple of years that if we are truly serious about glorifying God and growing in our relationship with him and sharing his love with others (which is one way of summing up what it means to be a Christian), we should probably be spending less time in a church building or otherwise in the exclusive company of Christians and more time where we are needed.

We need to get out more.

Now, spending time in the building in which our church happens to meet is an essential part of our spirituality. Our singing and teaching and learning and MPACTing and fellowshipping is good. In our vision statement, we talk about drinking deep of Christ. We do a lot of drinking within the walls and under the roof of the big stone building at 1051 Landis Valley Road.

But what about flowing, which we also claim to be about, from campuses/communities to continents? We as C4/C2SM do a pretty good job at the continents part, I think, a week or two each year. But what about the other 50-51 weeks of the year, the other 350-360 days? Is God only concerned with these things when it is summer and it does not conflict with our family’s beach trip? Are we? And what about our community, our city? When was the last time we built a significant relationship with someone right here in Lancaster who is from another culture or a different faith? When was the last time any of us took a Saturday morning and went down to the soup kitchen to wash dishes or clean up spilled oatmeal after homeless people had eaten their breakfast?

We are beginning to see, I think, that as leaders especially, and as a ministry more broadly, we have failed to make much of an impact at all locally, outside the walls of our church building.

It is time for that to change. We are not sure what that is going to look like, but we have some ideas and we’re moving forward; we’re building the airplane mid-flight. Realistically, you should know that a lot of this depends on you, me, us. Real ministry is done by real people among real people, and it is messy. Messes may drive us crazy, but I think a mess is fertile ground for Holy Spirit work, so I am excited to see what God does in us and through us - and in turn, in and through others - as we seek to take these small steps of obedience together.

So, for the sake of this blog and this discussion, we - all of us who choose to be a part of it - are “inside out people” in training. As we drink deep of Christ in our homes and in our church building, we will also flow into the lives of real people in our community, our city, and throughout our world.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Big Idea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.