Table Fellowship: Setting the Table 3

Again, from "Setting the Table" - “One of the most significant benefits we offer our employees is the opportunity to work for a company that stands for something well beyond serving food in a comfortable environment. I make it very clear to all new employees that they’ve joined a company that chooses to take an active interest in its community, and that we rely on members of our staff to step up and participate as citizens within that culture.” p.250

One of the stakeholders in what we do as the church is the community around us. This is one of the major foci of being a missional church. We are a sent people to the communities in which we live. Certainly we are called to present the Good News and call people into a relationship with Jesus Christ. What is always the question is our methodology. So much of evangelical Christianity has seen itself as "over-and-against" existing culture. We have the "culture wars", "humanistic values", and the like. This has proven to alienate more people than it collects.

Somewhat mistakenly, Christians have tried to fit into culture. Let's show others how much alike we really are. We build churches that feel more like the local shopping mall than places of worship so those we're trying to reach will feel at home. We have seen churches remove religious symbols in order to be unoffensive. We've seen churches try to act like everybody else, nothing is shocking or wrong or ? This too is a betrayal of our calling. We are actually the ekklesia, the called out ones. Not called to stand in judgment over, nor to show how similar we are, but to show the difference the Christ makes.

What is that difference? As I have noted, it first takes the posture that we are for the world and its inhabitants, not against it. We are at the very best, in the world but not of it. We get our sense of worth and wholeness not from worldly success or ideas, but from the God who made us. This is what we bring to others. Not in judgment, but in humility.

How do we become the servant of the world as Christ was? Lesslie Newbigin in his seminal book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, writes that one of the marks of a missional church is that "It will be a community that does not live for itself but is deeply rooted in the concerns of the neighborhood.. It will be the church for the specific place where it lives, not the church for those who wish to be members of it - or, rather, it will be for them insofar as they are willing to be for the wider community...The congregation may be so identified with the place that it ceases to be the vehicle of God's judgment and mercy for that place and becomes simply the focus of the self-image of the people of that place. Or it may be so concerned about the relation of its members to Good that it turns its back on the neighborhood and is perceived as irrelevant to its concerns."
The local congregation must be perceived in its own neighborhood as the place from which good news overflows in good action. P.229

Humility is marked by this, that I live for others, not for myself. The is the mark of love, of ministry, of Jesus. It keeps us living rightly. It keeps us safe - for ourselves and for others. What could be more different from the world than a people acting selflessly like Jesus? We become a community for the community. A small bit of yeast in a pile of flour.