Two Sundays ago, our church embarked on what I anticipate being a life-altering experience for everyone who completes it. The study we are doing is called "The Hole in Our Gospel" and is based around a book written by Rich Stearns, who is the president of World Vision. The study focuses on what he percieves as the "missing piece" in Christianity today, or what he calls The Hole. This Hole is something that is mentioned in the Bible literally THOUSANDS of times and yet most churches ignore it completely or throw some money at it every now and again to check that box off the list. That Hole (or the brief, blog-length version of it) is the poverty and injustice existing in our world today that we aren't trying hard enough to combat.
I am so unbelievably excited about this...our church gave out copies of the book two weeks ago, and I was so into it that night that I had to force myself to go to sleep at 1 AM because I couldn't put the book down. This Sunday was the first night of a"young singles/college aged...whatever else you can call us" group at my house. After completing the first session I am just so blown away that I never saw Jesus's ministry to the poor in terms of something we should be doing...and I think most churches have missed this important fact as well.
Churches today often have an inward focus...sure we try to bring people into church, but that seems like a competition sometimes, so when preachers go off to their yearly conferences they can boast the most members or the greatest number of converts or whatever. Churches tend to focus mostly on discipling their members, offering new Bible studies and having more workers for the nursery, but when it all boils down, what good are those things accomplishing? There's nothing wrong with Bible studies or nurseries or church fellowships or spaghetti dinners, but there is something wrong if that's ALL we do as a church. The church has a whole other purpose, one that Jesus modeled during his earthly ministry, and that we are quick to ignore.
Jesus didn't do his ministry from a church home-base. He traveled around. He healed, He fed, He preached, but mostly, He accepted. He ate with the poor and the sinners, and society's underdogs. The people that everyone else overlooked or even looked down upon. And its fine for us to read those stories and discuss them in church, but our response seems to be just to throw some money at the hungry or the homeless, pat ourselves on the back for how much we raised, and go on with our comfy lives without ever being affected. I think until we wrap our minds around the fact that not only did Jesus help the hurting, but he commanded us to do the same, we're going to be missing an important piece of God's plan for us, and we're being disobedient as well. Throwing money at the poor in Africa is not going to fix the AIDS pandemic. Its going to take education and medical care, and people going over there, loving them, and saying "there's a way to live differently." Its going to take us getting up out of our comfortable homes and spending time with people who are different from us and getting really uncomfortable, but it will have a lasting effect on the world that will last long after we're gone from it.
I am so excited to see where this study and new understanding of scripture are going to lead both me and the church as a whole. I can't wait for session 2!
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