Falling In Love With Our Communities

Isn’t it amazing what love can do to a normal human being?  Take the 16 or 17 year old guy.  His whole life has been about himself.  He’s never done anything very unselfish, let along sacrificical, nor has he given any lavish gifts to anyone.

And then SHE comes along!  He’s head over heels in love and he’s opening doors for her, showing her unusual courtesy, caring about the the odors that emanate from his body (finally!) and even giving her outrageous gifts.  His friends are amazed and his parents are slack-jawed.

I’ve been speaking to congregations all over Wisconsin about changing their paradigms from “our church is for us” to “our church is for those who aren’t here yet.”  Anyone who has tried to bring about such a change in a congregation knows that it’s a big challenge. It’s natural to focus on ourselves.

Shaming people into loving the lost ones of their communities doesn’t work very well.  Have you noticed?

Ed Stetzer, Executive Director of the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism at Wheaton College presents an alternative plan in his great paper, Exegete Your Culture.  After scolding pastors a bit for falling in love with some ideal community that they have in their heads or some ideal church which they have in their heads, he introduces the concept of falling in love with our own communities.

His illustration is our international missionaries.  We’ve all seen the presentations from those who have been “home” on furlough.  We’ve watched the slides or videos depicting miserable people in miserable places and silently prayed, “Lord, please don’t send me there; I could never love those people.” 

After the presentation we’ve talked to the missionaries – normal people who have sacrificed much and adapted themselves profoundly to reach the people of their assigned field – and have been amazed to discover that they’re not feeling “at home” at all; they’re actually missing the place and the people they’ve temporarily left behind. 

There’s only one explanation for this: our missionary friends had fallen in love with the people they had given themselves to serve.

Stetzer insists that we can all do this, right where we are, and we can help our people to do the same.

It’s a wonderful concept. 

People in love don’t have to be shamed to act lovingly; they just do it.

I confess that I’ve only begun to think about pray about how to make this work in our own contexts.  Let me suggest a few ideas and then invite you to get back with me with whatever has worked in your own churches and communities:

• Praying regularly and specifically for the not-yet Christians of our communities would help to change our hearts,
• Giving sacrificially to local mission projects would help our hearts to follow our treasure,
• Getting to know the people-needs of our communities in “up-close and personal” ways – such as ride-alongs with law enforcement officers – would be good for us,
• Resisting the temptation to isolate ourselves from unbelievers by truly getting to know people well would be helpful, because generally speaking, to know people is to love them,
• Serving the lost of our communities in hands-on, messy ways has an amazing affect on our hearts.Here’s my illustration: While changing his diaper, I used to sing tearfully to our foster baby, who had been in our home for nearly two years, “How am I supposed to live without you; after I’ve been changing you so long?”  We did have to give him up and nearly thirty years later we still miss him.

I’m sure that falling in love with our communities is not really a new concept or it wouldn’t be a true one, but maybe it’s an old concept which we need to embrace in our own time and place.  Let me know what’s helping you to fall in love with your community.