The Gentleman

My faith community is struggling right now. If your faith community isn't, I suggest you look into it. Struggle is an important part of faith. Without struggle we do not grow.

My community is struggling over love. And we are a community based around love, so I guess that is to be expected. 

We are good at loving some people. Of course its easy to love the suburbanite/post-suburbanite-urbanite, and our church does a pretty good job of loving them. But our facilities are purposefully (i thought) located in an area of town that has a good number of homeless people and people who live alternative lifestyles. Part of the thought process was that churches typically dont reach out to these people. 

So our struggle is the struggle of loving the less lovely. We are early in this discussion but we have already shared some great words.

One of the early great questions in our discussion has been very challenging. The community recently asked a homeless gentleman who is involved in the worlds oldest profession not to come back to the facilities. He was gentle whenever I was around him, but he had a history of theft and drug use at our facilities. He even used aggressive language with one of the staffers once.

This gentleman was removed from our community. How would the community respond if I started using? If I took the tip jar on my way out of the coffee shop? If I used aggressive, demeaning language with one of the baristas? I sincerely doubt I would be asked not to return to the building.

How can we break down the walls the we have built, only “providing Christ” to those who are appealing. Our community has reached out to the alternative lifestylers in our community through the coffee shop, art, and being available for rental.

But then there are the “dregs.”

How can we love the less lovely? How can we love this gentleman?

My faith community would still love me if I became the gentleman. They would spend the time, they would make the extra effort to help me redeem the areas of my life that needed redemption.

So why do we act differently towards the gentleman?

Because my faith community is just what it says it is, a community. A wise deacon, and good friend of mine, said this,

“the first step is humanization, the second step is equalization.  What I mean by that is we take a gentleman like (the gentleman) and we treat him as if he just drove down from (the local affluent suburb) in his SUV.”

We have built walls that we must tear down. When Christ talked about turning the other cheek and giving up the clothes on your back and carrying the roman soldiers pack he wasn’t saying let people walk all over you. He was describing a beautiful and strong revolution. We are not succumbing to other’s wills, we are aligning our will with God’s. And God’s will is for us to love, and love means sacrifice. It means sacrificing safety and comfort. I don’t want someone at the facility to get hurt, but I honestly think I’m willing to sacrifice that safety in order to bring the gentleman into our community.

When does the line of safety become the line of comfort?

When do we build our walls close enough that we may be injured? When do we stop building walls all together?

Community, true community, involves an abandonment of our love of comfort and a genuine risk of our safety.