Go and change the world

Last week we talked about imperfect community.  After preaching it, I started thinking about the most perfect community I knew.  The last time I was in the states I had the best boss ever.  She's just the funniest, most intelligent woman ever.  We were at a big group meeting talking about how to make churches better and someone started talking about how we all need to be perfect communities.  Someone made the point that no community is perfect.  My boss smiled and said, "We do have one church that is pretty close to a perfect community."  She paused for dramatic effect.  Our minds went to the biggest and best churches in our area as we tried to think which church she was thinking of.  She said the name of a church we had never heard of.  "It has six members, and it's about as perfect as a community can get.  It's so perfect that there is no room for anyone else.  They are shutting the doors and selling the property this year.  It was perfect while it lasted."

We stopped having a silly conversation about how to make our communities more perfect, and we started a difficult, joyful, painful, and exciting conversation about how to make our communities more open.

the string and scissors exercise.

In one of my favorite theological books which is packed away somewhere, the theologian writes about churches that missionaries planted in Africa.  And he writes something like, "We preached the Gospel that Jesus saves, and we gathered people into churches - but we didn't preach the rest of the Gospel.  We didn't preach what people are supposed to do with the Gospel, how the Gospel changes people, how the Gospel calls us to change the world - and because of this, our churches in Africa are like holding pens for cattle.  They are filled with Christians just waiting to die and go to heaven."

What a tragedy this is for churches in Africa.  As AIDS destroys millions of families, as human rights abuses continues to lead the way, as dictators gather child armies - our churches are much too often content to sit in silence and wait for the promised paradise of death or at best to wait for foreign aid to come and save the day.  What a tragedy for our fast growing churches, that they often have little good news to share with those around them.

We too often believe that the Gospel is only a Gospel of salvation.  But, salvation from what?  From the devil? From hell?  From ourselves?  From this world?   

We are not a "holding pen" we are not waiting to die so that we can experience heaven.  As a Christian community, we actively work to make the world better.  We pray "on earth as it is in heaven" and we act to make that so.

Let's go out into the world today.