I don’t know if it’s “epiphanal”, but it’s something.
I realized in a recent conversation about the-way-things-work in our high school ministry, that we had been spending a considerable amount of energy and time formulating ways to communicate to the students in our community WHAT WE ARE NOT…
…boring
…irrelevant
…stale
… (despite all of our unsuccessful best efforts) uncool
We had slowly and inadvertantly stopped talking about the beauty of the church.
So, in a recent staff meeting, I had our team start by talking about why the church was beautiful. Why is it good? How is it the hope of the world? What is good about the church for a high school student living in South Orange County? Then we read this together…
It’s a place of welcome and laughter, of healing and hope, of friends and family and justice and new life. It’s where the homeless drop in for a bowl of soup and the elderly stop by for a chat. It’s where one group is working to help drug addicts and another is campaigning for global justice. It’s where you’ll find people learning to pray, coming to faith, struggling with temptation, finding new purpose, and getting in touch with a new power to carry that purpose out. It’s where people bring their own small faith and discover, in getting together with others to worship the one true God, that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
- NT Wright, Simply Christian
What does that story look like? That’s the one I want to tell. That’s the one I want to communicate to our students and through our students.
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