The minister in a small town who stopped one Sunday at a café to eat something and had his Bible and sermon notes to read through. A man sitting in the corner yelled out “are you a preacher or something?

“Yes” he said,” I preach at the Christian Church here in town.” 

He got excited and said,”Hey, I’m a member of that church.” 

The church was small and the preacher knew all the regulars .. “I’ve been preaching there for about three months and I’ve never seen you there.”

The other man looked a bit puzzled and said to the Minister ..  “I said I was a member of that church.  I never said that I was fanatical about it!”

The church may be seen as old fashioned or boring, but it still is God’s plan. Let me quote Philip Yancey “Yes, the church fails in its mission and makes serious blunders precisely because the church comprises human beings who will always fall short of the glory of God. That is the risk God took. Anyone who enters the church expecting perfection does not understand the nature of that risk or the nature of humanity. Just as every romantic eventually learns that marriage is the beginning, not the end, of the struggle to make love work, every Christian must learn that church is also only a beginning.”

The church with all its foibles is still filling the gap that no one else seems to want to step into.  The church should and has to provide a place for grace. It is a place where the past does not dictate the future.  It is a place where acceptance is first and foremost.  Grace, the unmerited favor of God. It is the free offer to the hopeless for hope.  It is a free offer of love to the most unlovely. It is a free offer of peace in a world trying to pull itself apart.  The one thing the church should do is offer grace .. that wonderful God quality that lifts people up to a new life full of hope and joy.. something that can change their lives forever.

I am just trying to discover why people who need Jesus the most don’t like being around us? Why do we make them feel so uncomfortable, so out of place? In what ways is God calling us in the church to be a more grace-full community when the wounded are in our midst? If only we could share the truth of Jesus to more people in the words of John 1:14 “The Word became a human being and lived here among us. We saw His true glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father. From Him all the kindness and all the truth of God have come down to us”. That’s the message of the church that people need to hear.