A compelling question for each local church:
What are you most interested in?In other words, what is driving Sunday morning?
Zechariah 7 can help us. In those days, the town of Bethel sent a delegation to the priests to ask for God's blessing and to see if they should fast on the 70th anniversary of Jerusalem's fall, as they had done for all those years. God's answer must have come as a surprise:
When you held days of fasting every fifth and seventh month all these seventy years, were you doing it for me? And when you held feasts, was that for me? Hardly. You're interested in religion, I'm interested in people.From God's point of view, is religion a series of motions we go through assuming that our posture will garner his blessing? Surely he wouldn't consider our Sunday services to be "religion." Aren't message (and worship), after all, mission critical?
Apparently not. It appears God wants our church energy directed toward people. Goodness, that's hard. People are messy. Their lives come with cost and baggage and needs--sometimes greater than church resources and our time and energy to minister.
If we are committed to being interested in what God is interested in, we face this challenge as he continues:
There's nothing new to say on the subject...the message hasn't changed...Treat one another justly. Love your neighbors. Be compassionate with each other. Don't take advantage of widows, orphans, visitors, and the poor. Don't plot and scheme against one another--that's evil.His message seems to be:
Teach who I am through loving people and treating each other justly. Then learning about Jesus will be attractive and worth investigating.Draw people into learning by loving on them first. That might set in motion a very different Sunday morning that extends all the way into the week. Love-led, needing all to engage, everyone equal in the eyes of this love. Then:
Church, what are you most interested in?
People.When this happens, God will give the church strength to live out its mission. And the church will give the people the strength they need to live loved.
Comments are welcome at feedyourstrength@gmail.com.
