I've been thinking a lot about what Christian community looks like at the grass roots level. It's a conversation over coffee at Starbucks. It's a random act of kindness of a person that goes out of their way to do something for someone in need. It's starting a Bible study because there are people in your neighborhood who are asking questions about who Jesus really is in your life.
I don’t think it was by accident that I grew up in a multi-cultural area of Northern Virginia. It gave me a burden to share Christ without prejudice. My family grew up in a predominately white neighborhood until the 70’s. There were several international tragedies that occurred that precipitated an influx of international families into our neighborhood. We had Iranian families, families from Saudi, Arabia, and South America that became our friends and family. We shared life with them and they shared life with us. We would send Americanized dishes to them to sample and they would share their international dishes with us in the evenings. One thing my family desired was to share Jesus with these families. We didn’t knock on their door and hand them a religious track and then run home. We were fixing their bikes when they broke. We made meals when someone had surgery and delivered them to their families. We opened our house up to kids that parents who had to work late at night. We had bible studies in our living room for kids that wanted to know more about Jesus. We opened our side yard up to all the neighbor kids to play football every afternoon.
This all happened largely because of my family's transformation when we turned our lives over to Christ and invited the Holy Spirit to give us wisdom in who to reach out to in our neighborhood. Our house became a house of faith. The door was always open and the light was always on. Even today 47 years later, my family still gets a knock on the door and it will be a neighbor asking us to pray for them. Why? Because people saw that we genuinely cared for them and that our faith was real. They also witnessed that as we prayed, God answered our prayers, and we weren't afraid to testify of God's faithfulness in our lives.
What if our churches were like my house that I grew up in? A church that has relationships with all kinds, that doesn’t discriminate by the color of their skin, that doesn’t let boundaries get in the way of sharing our faith. A place where the members were actively reaching out to those in need. A place where people can come through the doors and sense the presence of God.
Pray and ask God to today what you can do to expand His Kingdom one person at a time, one family at a time, one neighborhood at a time. This is what I believe God desires Christian Community (The Church) to look like!
