Being there

Listen while I tell you a story. A boy is born into a chaotic family, substance dependent, desperately seeking pleasure to cover up the deep hurt of being purposeless, unvalued by the wider community. Unemployed of course: who would want to employ someone with that sort of background?

And the boy grows up: moments of hope at school turn to despair when the support needed to scale the barriers is not forthcoming. Instead he chooses the easy route - finding moments of fulfilment in achievements that most would see as wrong: the striking graffito, the successful crime, the rush of the escape from the pursuing police.

Yet into that life did come new hope when a friend of his became a Christian and a true church emerged in his community. Not (as in his neighbourhood) a building full of people who reside far away from where the boy lives, wasting their efforts to prevent the burial of the stinking carcass that they call a church, but which serves only to confuse the people of that area about who I really am. Instead a true fellowship of strugglers came together, finding support and encouragement as they faced the siren call of their previous lives. Did they always resist? Is that your measure - expecting perfection from those whose besetting sins are deeply socially unacceptable? And yet from these ways they found the crutches to carry on, whereas your crutches are not so socially disdained, and so you feel able to overlook them.

Behold I am calling more and more to serve my lambs in such hard places. But I am calling out new forms of ministry, ministry that reaches these in ways that the traditions of my body inhibit. I have called my church to all nations - do you think I will be satisfied with merely the respectable, the comfortable, the visibly shiny? I seek to vindicate my gospel by bringing new life to the outcast, the rejected, the marginalised. For in such you see MY power released - for there is little human hope for them as they wallow in the cess pit that is all that they know.

So when you consider the priorities of your church, consider that boy. Remember that fellowship that I raised up. Remember, and consider whether your choices truly reflect that with which I am concerned, or merely your own agenda, your own comfort: your own children or my children? Will you listen with me for the cries of the despairing - or tune your ears to the business that you have chosen for yourself.