Christian

What is a good church? One of the leaders in a former church that I had an association with said that “busy people are happy people and busy churches were happy churches”. For him a good church is one which has a packed program every week. That means that the premises are used every night of the week and the members never have time to get bored or for idle hands get into trouble. In some ways that sounds right but then I remember that his family had broken up and his life at work was a disaster because he was a perfectionist in everything and had little time for the imperfections of others. Then I remember that the church is cluttered with the casualties of this kind of philosophy. The result of this is to make the church inward looking: pre-occupied with keeping the machinery of the church going to the neglect of those outside the church door. If the church of Christ is to more like Christ then the balance between being inside and outside the church building has to change. For Jesus Christ the task was to help the outsiders become insiders. The way to do that is not by providing ever more programs but by getting alongside people.
A good church is one which encourages and equips the members to be involved in the community where they live. A good church is one which has a desire to serve its community and to play the role of fellow citizens: our role is neither to sit in judgement nor to be patronising in doing things for the community, to make it a better place. Our role is to be like Jesus and to work with and not for or in the place of the community. There are lessons that we can learn and lessons we can teach. There is no distinction between the sacred and the secular: the Hebrews believed that all of life was sacred and as the new Israel we too need to have a more holistic view of life and a less truncated view of the bible and the biblical story. Yes we want to be a better church but we will not be that by staying inside the church building, we need to get out there and get our hands dirty, if need be. The sad fact is that within one year of a person becoming a Christian they, usually, loose all meaningful contact with their former friends and then we wonder why we are losing contact with people who are outside.
The latest sensation on Yourtube is the story of Christian. He was a lion. Yes a lion. In 1969 two friends saw him in Harrods in London so they bought him for the equivalent of £3,000. Christian became their pet: they took him for walks through the streets of London on a lead and he played with them in the house and went in the car for drives. Once he got too big for the home they persuaded a local Moravian minister to allow him to play in an old graveyard. The fact that Moravians don’t have headstones was a great help: they say, quite correctly, that death is the great leveller, so the markers are laid flat on the ground. But pretty soon he became too big even for that and so they had to face the fact that they would have to provide a better living arrangement: the possibilities were either the Zoo or the circus and neither of these was acceptable to them. It was then that they came into contact with George Adamson through the actors, Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna the stars of Born Free. Adamson and his wife Joy were the people who had released Ailsa the lioness back into the wild in Kenya. Eventually Christian was introduced into the wild also. What is so amazing about this story is that after a year of being separated from his old friends he still recognised them when they returned to Kenya: on the film there is no hesitation once he saw who they were and the reunion is very moving.

What can we learn from this? One lesson is that the lion remembered because of the relationship that was built up between him and the two men. We cannot build relationships with people from a distance: Jesus came to be among us. When our churches learn that lesson will people not sit up and take