The Opposite of Love (1 John 4:7-21)

Those who trump up fear are at odds with God, whose primary action and identity is love. Preachers preach. Engineers engineer. Doctors doctor. God loves. Consequently, sowing fear against those who appear different is an act in direct opposition to God.

John says, “We love because God first loved us.” The way we typically read that passage is as an exhortation: “God loved us; therefore, we ought to also love others.”

But the older I get, the more convinced I am that it’s not an exhortation but a description: “God loved us; therefore, we are now capable of loving . . . where before we were incapable, bound up in our fear of losing our place to someone else.”

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What if LGBT Kids Had a Church That Loved Them?

By Derek Penwell

When I got to the office one time, I had a voicemail from a young man I’ve never met before. The message began, “My name is Benjamin. You don’t know me, but one of your colleagues referred you to me.”

He went on to say that he’d done some research on DBCC, and the ministry we’re involved in advocating for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people. He wanted me to know how much he appreciated our efforts, and how encouraging it is to hear about a church that actually cares for folks who’ve traditionally experienced only heartache at the hands of the religious establishment.

Felt good. Nice to have your work affirmed by a stranger … unsolicited. Put a smile on my face.

He proceeded to relate a bit of his story. He came out to his parents when he was twelve. Being religiously conservative, they did what they believed best—they put him in “reparative therapy”—”pray away the gay.” The whole thing damaged him so badly that he’s assiduously avoided church ever since. I could hear the bitterness in his voice.

Over a very short period of time, I went from feeling, perhaps, a little too self-satisfied at the initial compliment to feeling awful for this young man’s trauma.

Then he said something that struck me as both profoundly sad and strangely hopeful: “I can only wonder how my life would have been different if there’d been a church around that had loved me for who God created me to be, instead of trying to change me from what it feared I represent.”

I started thinking about the Suicide Prevention Workshop we held a couple years ago. Turns out LGBT young people are two and a half times more likely to contemplate suicide than their straight counterparts. More frighteningly, I found out that those same LGBT youth are eight times more likely to attempt suicide.

Why the significantly higher rates?

Bullying, of course. But bullying is something that frequently happens … to a lot of kids. Perhaps even more deeply than bullying, though, LGBT kids experience rejection and isolation at the hands of the very people kids are supposed look to to love them and keep them safe.

Their parents kick them out of the house at alarming rates, making homelessness among LGBT youth twice as likely as among straight youth. The churches they attend often brutalize them in the name of “love.”

Young people are dying at an alarming rate, in order to allow some folks to retain the purity of their personal sense of integrity. That this integrity costs the lives of children is apparently a price they are more than willing to pay.

I realize that the motive for this stringent vision of purity is rooted in what its possessors would term love. And, I should point out, there is something to be said for saying “no” in the name of love—addicts, for example, often require the love found in “no.” And those who affirm reparative therapy, I suspect, would prefer to see same gender sexual orientation as an addiction to be conquered.

Unfortunately, though, reparative therapy is not “AA for the gay.” For one thing, AA actually works, whereas reparative therapy, at least according to the medical and scientific community, does not.1 But the problem has less to do with the fact that reparative therapy is ineffective, than with the fact that it does damage.2

LGBT young people having to find their way without the people and institutions charged with caring for them struck me today as I spoke with a pastor about his church. It seems there are some young adults in the church who would like to have conversation about how the church can become a place of welcome to LGBT people. Apparently, the older people in the church think such a conversation would be dangerous, afraid people will get angry and leave. After all, there are so many more important things in the world.

As the pastor spoke, I thought about Benjamin. I thought about all the LGBT young people going through hell because the people they trust to watch out for them have belittled and abandoned them. And I wondered how life would be different if there were churches around that loved these kids for who God created them to be, instead of trying to change them from what church people fear they represent.

I pray to God we find out.

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1. To wit: American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychoanalytic Association, American Psychological Association, American School Counselor Association, National Association of Social Workers, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO): Regional Office of the World Health Organization. ↩

2. See above note. ↩

Why Knowledge of Injustice Without Action Makes One Part of the Problem

By Derek Penwell

Let us imagine that you live in a circle of eight houses, seven of which have fertile gardens in back -- enough to feed a family. Unfortunately, however, the eighth house has a patch of swampy land that makes growing a garden impossible. Consequently, the people that live there spend their lives on the edge of starvation.

In the middle of this circle of houses is a commons that everyone uses to supplement their own gardens. But the gardening done in the commons, split eight ways, is only enough to give each house a little extra produce to sell for “nice things.”

The sharing of the commons is a tradition that has been passed down to homeowners in the neighborhood for generations. Nobody even questions it. The commons arrangement is just the way things are.

However, one-eighth of the commons doesn’t give the family with swampy land enough subsist on.

But that’s the way it goes, right? Life isn’t always fair. There has to be winners and losers.

Then one day, you’re having a cookout at your house with the bounty harvested from the commons. You’ve invited over a friend, who just happens to be a surveyor. She’s interested by the layout of the neighborhood, and the almost perfect solution of a commons. She thinks this is a great idea.

On her way to the bathroom, however, your surveyor friend happens by an antique survey map of the neighborhood hanging in your study. She begins to inspect it closely, as supper is being prepared. As she looks, she notices that the commons isn’t really a commons at all. In fact, the land that the neighborhood has been using freely to supplement each one’s income is actually a tract that legally belongs to the house with the swampy land.

You immediately realize the implications of this discovery: For years, because of a longstanding tradition, everyone in the neighborhood has been fattening their pocketbooks at the expense of the family that lives on swampy land. In other words, you realize that you’ve been getting rich on the back of the neighbor who can least afford it. You have an epiphany: Your neighbor’s family has been starving, while the rest of the neighborhood has taken the proceeds for itself -- the proceeds that rightfully belong to the starving family.

You feel awful. But it was tradition. Nobody knew any better. That you probably should have been more compassionate toward your neighbor all along is beside the point. Now you know.

The moral question is: Having finally realized that you’ve been treating your neighbor’s family unjustly all these years, what are you going to do about it?

You could:

1. Stay quiet about it and keep the arrangement the way it is. It appears to be in your best interest economically just to keep your mouth shut. Why say anything at all if it’s only going threaten your otherwise comfortable existence?
2. You could privately admit to one or two neighbors that -- if it were up to you -- you’d just restore the commons to its rightful owner. You’re humane, after all, you don’t necessarily want to see anyone starve. But then you might continue by telling your friends that, though you’re personally pulling for the family with swampy land, you’re afraid that if you say anything publicly about the injustice, one of two things might happen: 1) your other neighbors might get mad and vote you out of the neighborhood association; or 2) they might just think the whole arrangement is falling apart and vote to disband the neighborhood association all together. And boy howdy! You could never live with yourself if you were the person who submarined such a great arrangement, which seems to meet the needs of so many people.
3. Or you could say, “Now that I know an injustice is being committed, I can’t keep quiet about this practice that threatens one of my neighbors, even if speaking up about it makes everyone else angry.”

Whatever you do, though, now that you know your neighbor is suffering unjustly at the hands of people among whom you live and work, morally you occupy a different place than before the surveyor pointed out the inequity.

So, let’s bring this home for the church folk:

If you happen to be a follower of Jesus who believes LGBT people have suffered injustice at the hands of the church, your response to that injustice -- whether you stand up publicly to speak against it or not -- (as difficult as it is to think about) is a moral question.

If you come to believe as a result of your faith that disproportionately imprisoning and killing young African Americans is an epidemic that is just a public manifestation of institutional racism, how you respond to the shooting of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, et al., makes a difference.

If in the course of your life as a Christian and a participant in the great American commons you become convinced that people arriving to participate in that commons from other countries deserve to be treated with dignity and hospitality, whether you choose to stand beside them in the face of hatred is not a matter of moral indifference.

“What will my congregation/denomination think if I publicly name this injustice?” is certainly a question worth asking. But the more pressing moral question has to do with thinking that that question is more important than “What’s my moral responsibility to people facing an injustice that threatens their dignity, their careers, their living arrangements, their ability to be parents -- and in some cases -- their lives?”

True moral knowledge of injustice without action makes you part of the problem. If you don't think so, ask the folks in the swampy land.

Judgmentalism: The New Heresy

By Derek Penwell

Judgmentalism.  It's one of the things Christians do best according to those outside the church. 

Unfortunately for the church, emerging generations find any kind of judgmentalism off-putting. Consequently, they tend to seek the broadest possible parameters for what previous generations would call orthodoxy.

Now, let me just say that some of what passes for non-judgmentalism is simply an unspoken social contract in which I promise to keep my nose out of your business if you agree to keep your nose out of mine. I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting Christians should approach faith and morality as a laissez-faire proposition—in which the church, to avoid appearing judgmental, agrees to keep its mouth shut about important matters.

What I am suggesting, however, is that no matter how the church feels about being labeled judgmental, it would benefit mainline churches to think carefully about the way they come across.

Growing up as a religious conservative (an Evangelical, I would have said) I took it as an article of faith that salvation was like an obstacle course. Once you began to move toward the goal, you couldn’t go back, and every step was a potential hazard, threatening to disqualify you from finishing.

I was convinced that having the right beliefs about God was of equal importance with doing the right thing. In fact, having the wrong belief might be even more problematic than doing something wrong.

If you screwed up and said “Dammit!” because you bent your dad’s driver trying to hit rocks in the back yard, you could always repent and ask forgiveness.

Wrong belief, on the other hand, assumed a kind of intentionality, a willfulness that was much more difficult to recover from. You couldn’t accidentally believe in evolution or that the Bible might contain some mistakes in it.

Additionally, I believed that among the barriers Christians must negotiate on the obstacle course of salvation the need to “save” other people was a high priority:

If you observe a toddler wandering into the middle of a busy intersection, you have a responsibility to try to protect the child from being hit by a bus. Looking the other way is sin of omission. In the same way, if you see someone boarding the express train to perdition, you have a responsibility to help jerk them back onto the platform. Not to do so is to have saddled yourself with the responsibility for someone else’s damnation. You get enough of those lost souls in your column and the sheer weight of them might just drag you down, too.

Now, I’m willing to admit that my description of my childhood beliefs doesn’t necessarily represent all of Evangelical Christianity. However, they were my beliefs, and they are often the same things I hear people describe as “what Christians believe.” It’s important to name the reality that “Evangelical Christianity” has largely become a placeholder for “Christianity” in our culture.

That Christianity has become known by many people more for its beliefs than for what it actually does is problematic for the church in an emerging world.  Part of the way I read the common charge against the church as “judgmental” has to do with the conviction on the part of emerging generations that Christians tend to believe more than they actually live.

That fact, turned back upon the individual is hypocrisy   (another post) —that is, “I believe this, but I don’t think that means I actually have to make it a part of my life.” 

Turned outward, however, that conviction about believing more than you’re willing to live, often expresses itself as judgmentalism—that is, “I believe this (and I’m right); and therefore, I’m holding you responsible for living up to my expectations.”

Hint: The combination of hypocrisy and judgmentalism is deadly for the church, since it communicates an inordinately high opinion of oneself and one’s abilities to determine what’s right—an opinion of oneself that isn’t mapped onto reality, and therefore, need not be taken seriously by the individual.

At the heart of the criticism of judgmentalism lies an accusation that Christians feel themselves superior.  In other words, when people look at the church what they see is a collection of overweening know-it-alls who assume that everyone is breathlessly awaiting a word about how to improve themselves.  Any deviation from “Christian expectations,” these observers believe, cannot but be met with moralizing opprobrium from those who “know the mind of God.”  Christians, on this reading, have nothing better to do than to think up rules for everybody else to follow—then set about in earnest being exceedingly disappointed in everyone else when the moral revival doesn’t take shape.

“That’s not fair.  I think people ought to live right, but I’m not the judgmental person you so sarcastically describe.”

In the absence of information to the contrary, I’m perfectly willing to concede that that’s not a fair description of you.  I don’t even know you, after all.  That’s not the point, though.  The people who believe you’re judgmental, probably don’t know you either.  As far as they’re concerned, if you’re a Christian, they already know as much as they need to know about you. 

Among emerging generations, “Christian” is metonymous with “judgmental.”  That is to say, for many people the sentence, “Derek is a Christian,” is a shorthand way of communicating that “Derek is judgmental,” since “Christian” is merely a placeholder for “judgmental.”  Whether it’s true or not, the perception is, for my purposes, what matters.

Why is it the perception that matters?  Because, as a very wise man once told me: “The difference between reality and perception is that reality changes.”  If you want perception to change, you must work not only on the reality, but also on the perception. 

Not only must the church adopt a positive understanding that it is called to be something for the world not just believe something about the world, but it must do so in a way that communicates its own humility.

After all, in our culture judgmentalism is the new heresy. 

And for Christians used to occupying the role of heresy hunters, being the target of the new hunters of heresy is going to be extraordinarily uncomfortable.

We're Christians, and technically we don't believe in karma . . . but, dang!

Collecting Presents for Family Scholar House

DBCC just delivered over 80 presents to Family Scholar House for single mothers and their children for Christmas. If you don't know this great organization, follow the link above to check out the wonderful work they do!

Sermon Podcast: Who's Calling the Shots Around Here?

We live in a world in which, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, Good Friday still trumps Easter—a world in which children die in the dry night, and single mothers looking for a way to feed their hungry families are told that they’re only reaping the harvest of their bad choices, and teenage boys in hoodies must walk the suburban streets in fear, and the elderly have to decide whether their medication or having heat is more important the month.

Death too often calls the tune to which, sad to say, so many of us feel compelled to dance.

But I’ve got news for you—regardless of how it looks to you at present, regardless of who you think is calling the shots, Jesus is almost finished with his Lenten journey. And while the path he takes will ultimately lead him to a garbage dump on the edge of town called the “place of the skull,” the truth of the faith we profess is that that dump—which too casually deals in the art of death—is not the final destination.

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Sermon Podcast: Where Jesus May Be Found

Jesus announces a new order of things in which the anawim—a Hebrew word applied to those who are the very lowest in society, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse, the homeless, the tempest-tossed, the folks who live out next to the garbage dump of life—a new order of things in which the anawim occupy the places of honor, finally get to sit at the big people’s table, no longer handed the crumbs and the leftovers.

Jesus proclaims a new realm—unlike the kingdoms of this world with which the Tempter enticed him out in the wilderness just a few verses prior—kingdoms where some have and others are left holding the bag, where a few get to steamroll their way to the front of the line and everyone else gets flattened, where some have food, and others are left to starve. Because the reign of God does not exist where some are welcome and others are not.

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Sermon Podcast: Bringing Forth Justice

And don’t you think the church—among the inheritors of this promise to Isaiah—is always in danger of missing this point, convinced as it often is that the reign of God will be established only when the church gets everything right?

It’s easy to forget that the church isn’t an end in itself; it’s a tool, chosen by God to bring about God’s purposes. We find it easy to believe that God’s work will be accomplished by the force of the church’s charismatic personalities or through the power of its innovative programming—when in reality, God’s work very often gets done in spite of what the church considers its strength, rather than because of it.

Why?

Because, according to Isaiah, the glory of God shines in bruised reeds and dimly burning wicks. If you want to do the work of God, recognizing your brokenness is a good place to start.

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Fairness in Kentucky: The Poll Results

"But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everlasting stream" (Amos 5:24).

Sermon Podcast: On the Way

It’s so easy for us to believe that our lives are defined by those events we call significant. The truth of the matter is . . . we live most of our lives in the in-between times.

Most of our lives are spent returning to our “own country by another road.” The problem with living from milestone to milestone, however, is that we’re always in grave danger of missing God on the way.

The magi looked up, saw a star, and launched their boats in the desert. They had their eyes focused on Bethlehem, on meeting the special child.

But once they’d finally reached their destination, they were almost immediately sent again on their way. Because, you see, for them, as well as for us, Bethlehem is not the end of the journey, but the beginning—not home, but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.

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Sermon Podcast: There's a New Kid in Town (Guest Preacher: Darla Bailey)

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Sermon Podcast: God with Us

With everything going quickly to seed, we needed a sign of God’s salvation. We needed a God who wasn’t afraid to jump in and get dirty hands. We needed a God who wasn’t ashamed to walk the roads we walk. We needed a God who wasn’t afraid to be with us.

And that’s something I think we still look for. With the sands continually shifting beneath our feet, with the uncertainty of facing life in our precarious world, we need a God who’s not afraid to be with us.

We need a God who embraces our humanity, and not only our humanity, but a God who embraces us in the midst of each of our weak and fallen humanities.

When we cry out in the dry night of our shattered existences, we need a God who hears.

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Sermon Podcast: Recalibrated Expectations

"From the very beginning, Jesus indicated that the reign of God he was going to inaugurate would be different—upside down. Notice, he didn’t say, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to . . . . those who are already pulling their weight. He has sent me to proclaim future political stability after we kick the pagan Romans out of our homeland, to give those who were once powerful back their power, to make sure the rich get their fair share, to knock down the Roman pecking order and reestablish the Jewish pecking order, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor for the folks at the front of the line.”

"No. Jesus brings good news of the coming kingdom to those who know they need it—the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed."

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Sermon Podcast: What If It's All Just a Dream?

"And for my part, I like to think Isaiah’s singing a song about a new day, a new world where the hope of God’s people will be met by the power of God’s saving hand—where those who’ve been cast aside, abandoned, 'othered,' left to die alone with no one to speak terrible and beautiful words over their lifeless bodies will 'come to Zion singing'; and 'they shall not hurt on all my holy mountain.'

"In a gray place where hopelessness seems to rule the day, in a flattened and dry land where walls are built, and where even in church, we often can’t see our way to welcome one another—we wonder how our perseverance in the struggle to follow Jesus, to live together faithfully makes any difference.

"Standing on tiptoes we peer with the eyes of hope into the darkness, awaiting a word from God about the dream of our deliverance from the desert."

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Taking Cues on Immigration from Jesus

I received a call from someone I’ve known since we were kids. Caesar, lived in the children’s home my grandparents established in San Luis Potosí, Mexico in 1964. I’ve also known his wife, Sophie, from the time she was a baby. She grew up in the home, too.

Some years back, Caesar came into the States illegally to work as a painter in Atlanta, leaving Sophie and their son, Caesar, Jr., in Mexico. Hard life, living in one country illegally, while your family lives in another country. Lonely. Anxious. Scared all the time you’ll be discovered, and sent back.

Out of the blue, Caesar called me and asked if I could send him a little money via Western Union, so that he could help bring his family to Atlanta. He explained to me how difficult it is living without the people you love the most next to you; how uncomfortable it is living in a country that takes every opportunity to tell you how much they wish you’d leave … “after you finish that last job for me”; how painful it is to contemplate having to return home to a country where you’re afraid the violence will swallow your family, leaving nothing behind but shattered lives and spent shell casings.

What’s a man to do? He’s got a wife, a son. All he cares about is keeping them safe, and making enough money to create a future he’s sure is unavailable to them back in their homeland.

Where does one start when speaking of illegal immigration?

It strikes me that the best place to start is with people’s stories, and, if you can manage it, with the pictures of people’s faces in your mind. Numbers, ideas, abstractions are a poor substitute for the thick description necessary to make another human being’s fears and anxieties, hopes and dreams intelligible.

But if numbers and abstractions are necessary to discuss illegal immigration, then o.k. Let’s talk about numbers and abstractions for a moment.

Of course, we must contend with the “illegal” part that presumably makes the “immigration” part unsavory to so many.1 “Why,” the thinking goes, “should we embrace people who’ve come to our country in contravention of our laws? That only encourages more lawbreaking, after all. After they get here, why should we expect them to pay attention to the other laws? Moreover, it sends a signal to our own citizens that we as a country don’t have the courage of our convictions about this being a ‘nation of laws.’”

This objection has the virtue of coherence. Incentivizing law-breaking requires us to walk down a fairly dangerous road—or, if you prefer, take a step down the metaphorical slippery slope. We would hate to wake up one day to discover that we had become a nation of outlaws.

However, the rhetoric doesn’t appear to be borne out by the facts. If you take 1986, for instance, the year that Ronald Reagan championed amnesty (“legalization” is the preferred term) for three million undocumented workers, as the base year, you find that crime didn’t increase dramatically in the aftermath. In fact, the following year (1987) saw an overall drop in violent crime—both as a percentage (i.e., number of violent crimes as a percentage of population–.61%, down from .62% in 1986), as well as, more importantly, total number (1,483,999 down from 1,489,169 in 1986). In other words, we had more people in the United States in 1987, but fewer violent crimes–all while working to assimilate three million “illegals” into American life.

In the twenty seven years since the 1986 immigration reform, the country has seen a dramatic decrease in crime–total crime in general, and violent crime in particular. The crime rate in 2011 (the latest year reported) was almost half the 1987 rate (3.29% vs. 5.57%). And the violent crime rate shrank from .75% at the high water mark of 1991 to .38% in 2011.

Now, someone might object that “just because crime fell after amnesty doesn’t mean that there’s a causal connection. They might be totally unrelated.”

True. Admittedly, there are a lot of moving parts in any analysis of why crime grows or declines. Recessions. Gun Laws. Lead paint.

However, if you wanted to make the case that issuing amnesty to those people who came here illegally didn’t make crime go down, you would certainly be forced to say that the argument that allowing “illegals” to “cut to the front of the line” undermines the rule of law, making the prospect of following the law less likely, doesn’t hold much water. It’s hard to take seriously the complaint that if you do X that Y will surely follow, when after doing X, you don’t get Y, but the opposite of Y. Not only is there no bright line of causation between amnesty and a rise in crime (either because of those who are undocumented themselves, or because the “rule of law” has been subverted by “turning a blind eye” to their law breaking), there isn’t even a correlation.

So why all this handwringing about amnesty as a “back channel [way] to reward illegality?” For people who came to this country and displaced whole nations, our talk of illegal entry as the ultimate barrier to citizenship betrays either a short memory or a stunning lack of irony.

More importantly, for Christians, an inability to figure out ways to talk about immigration that sound more like Christian reflection than a cribbed statement from the Minutemen Project is cringe-worthy. Reading Jesus say in the judgment of the nations that one of the criteria for adjudging faithfulness is the way foreigners (xénos) are treated (Matthew 25:35,43), then turning around and saying, as 63% of White Evangelicals have said, that illegal immigration “threatens traditional American customs and values,” betrays a debt to partisan politics that transcends the priority of Christian commitment.

Look, if you love Jesus, you better love the people Jesus loved And it’s difficult to modulate the imprecation to “Get the hell out of my country” into anything that sounds even remotely loving to the stranger.

After all, we’re not screaming at abstractions, we’re not dehumanizing numbers; we’re screaming at real live human beings who want nothing more than a chance to drag themselves out of poverty and keep their children safe.

Christians ought to be taking their cues on immigration from Jesus rather than from Caesar … unless, of course, it’s a painter from Atlanta, trying to borrow a few bucks to reunite his family. That Caesar’s got a lot riding on it.

This article originally appeared on The Good Men Project web site.

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1. I don’t have time to go into the “Yeah, but they take good American jobs” argument, or the “They sponge off the largesse of the American welfare state without contributing to it.”  ↩

Sermon Podcast: I Must Come to Your House

"Yes, Jesus loves Zacchaeus even though Zacchaeus is a horrid human being. But a part of that love includes accepting not only Zacchaeus’ unworthiness, but also his offer of that unworthy self in the service of others who are struggling not just with guilt . . . but with trying to find enough food to eat.

"God doesn’t need much . . . a few otherwise sorry folks, working assiduously to hide their true identities, but willing to come when Jesus calls, and ready to lay it all down for those whom Jesus loves. God can turn the world inside out with a few Zacchaeuses."

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Sermon Podcast: The Great Reversal

The great reversal.  Is that good news or bad news?  I guess it depends on where you’re standing when you hear it.  

If you're one of those folks who's always coming up roses, if you’re relatively certain you’ve got this whole God thing pretty much nailed down, if you think when God goes on a recruiting trip, God’s looking for somebody pretty much like you . . . watch out.  This parable suggests that God’s fixing to mess up your world.

If, on the other hand, you happen to be one of those folks just trying to make it through the day, one of those folks just trying to stay one step ahead of the man, one of those folks that the vagaries of birth seemed not to bless . . . pay attention. You're just who God has in mind.

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Sermon Podcast: There's No Place Like Home

We thought the safest place to be . . . would be . . . to be . . . where we’d been . . . where we used to be.

We thought if we could just recapture what was here before, we’d be able to handle what was happening now.

The message of Jeremiah, however, is that the safest place to be is the place where God has placed us—which is to say, where God has made a place for us.

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Sermon Podcast: Cast Your Nets

This week (10/6), church member and elder, David Sprawls brings the message.

This one is definitely worth your time!

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Woodbourne House: Vision and Stewardship

Remarks by Derek Penwell at the public dedication of Woodbourne House on September 30, 2013.

Generally speaking, when the church makes news something’s gone horribly wrong. Some group of Christians, brandishing bullhorns and grammatically dubious placards has elbowed its way into our living rooms by way of the cable news channels to inform us about what worthless reprobates we really are because we don’t believe _____ (X), or because we’re way too lenient when it comes to the issue of _____ (Y).

Then there are the scandals. We’ve witnessed too many shocking improprieties—sexual and financial—to deny it.

Christians have demonstrated an uncanny ability to avoid living up to what they say they believe. This kind of hypocrisy … of over-selling and under-delivering on our faith has rightly caused people to question our commitments.

Those folks who claim to follow Jesus need now, more than ever, to start living like he lived; which is to say, they need to start loving the people Jesus loved.

Of course, he loved everybody, but he had a special place in his heart for those living closest to the edge, those separated from the chaos of destitution by the thinnest of margins.

The author of 1 John says it well:

“How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action” (1 John 3:17-18).

Here at Douglass Boulevard Christian Church—beginning with the leadership of Lively Wilson—we’ve been asking ourselves over the past few years how we—who’ve been blessed with “the world’s goods”—can use what we have to offer life, and love, and justice to those whom Jesus loves. We’ve taken to viewing the resources we’ve been given as tools to be used to love people—not as artifacts to be curated in a museum.

We have this wonderful location, these beautiful buildings. Why not use them for others? Why not give them away?

I’m talking about seeing these resources as gifts that we can share with the community, not as heirlooms be covered in plastic and stored in mothballs. The buildings churches maintain are hammers—if they’re not being used to pound nails, they’re just decorations in a lovely toolshed.

And here’s the thing: If your church building is a tool, and if you spend more time polishing and oiling the stuff in your toolbox than actually making things—it is altogether appropriate for people on the outside to wonder whether you are a carpenter or merely a tool collector.

Woodbourne House is an instantiation of the belief that we’ve been given gifts—not so that we can keep them, but so that we can give them away in the service of loving those people whom Jesus loves.

Woodbourne House is our modest attempt at DBCC to extend the history and to honor the tradition of this faith community by giving to seniors in need of low cost senior housing from “the world’s goods” with which we’ve been blessed.

It is, finally, our effort to love “in truth and action,” and not just in “word or speech.”