This past Sunday, our church had yet another killer conversation about living as citizens and agents in the kingdom of God (this is becoming a habit). It all started with a comment about our network-wide Christmas party (which is Tuesday night). The couple that was hosting it said that they had invited some of their unchurched friends to the party.
And they purposefully didn’t tell them it was a church event.
In the past, that would have sparked further conversation along the lines of, “Oh, dear. Are you ashamed of our church and ashamed of Jesus?” Not this time. Instead, it sparked a great conversation about church events. As the conversation continued, we came to the conclusion that separating church events from the rest of life isn’t a good thing to do! Why? Because it continues to encourage the compartmentalization of life instead of bringing all life under the Lordship of Jesus.
Think about it. We have church time, work time, home time, family time, football time, date time, TV time, dinner time–all these little compartments of time. It’s fragmented our schedules and thus fragmented our life. What happens is that the truly important gets pushed to the back burner while the urgent continues to dominate the schedule. We find that we “don’t have time” for the truly important. I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that we’ve really deceived ourselves. Our church is slowly realizing it.
As the conversation continued, we talked about how the life of the church should simply be life. In the New Testament, the church did life together. They didn’t “go to church” and then forget about the community for the rest of the week. The community–life–was their week. They ate together. They hung out together. They served each other. They loved each other sacrificially. They didn’t have to submit every event to the leadership for approval–they simply did it. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, and there were often problems (heck, they were imperfect people just like us, and that can get messy), but they committed all of life to being under Jesus’ Lordship.
So our Christmas party isn’t a “church event.” It is what will hopefully be the beginning of something revolutionary in the life of our church. We’re simply doing life together, and those outside the church who come to the party will experience the budding life of our community. Does this mean do everything “flying by the seat of our pants”? Yes and no. I’m hoping our church can get to the place where we can call each other up and say, “Hey, let’s do dinner tonight. Who’s bringing what?” I’m hoping our churches can continue to do life together after this Christmas party, no matter how many disciples and churches sprout up in our network. And I’ll continue to talk about and practice intentionality–that as we do life together, we intentionally bring others along to experience the life of our community and see the difference that Jesus is making in our lives. As we do this, we’ll be loving people and serving the world. Not through “church events”, but through Christ-centered life.
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