As my brother Jay and I were sitting next to the pool, with a couple of his friends, it came out that I was a pastor. Jay said, "Don't worry, he's different. Tell him Danny, tell him about what you do..."
I love that. I love that my little brother sees what we're doing and knows that there is something different about it. So, I told his friend about Doubt on Tap. I told how we get together and talk about things you can't discuss in polite company. I told him that we talk about God and stuff.
120 seconds.
Yelling over two princesses splashing in a pool.
The response, "I would check out a church like that."
Alan and Deb Hirsch wrote in their book, Untamed (Shapevine): Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship
that Jesus' holiness attracted people far from God and for some reason ours repels them. One of us is doing something wrong and it wasn't Jesus.As I move more and more into the culture of our city and further away from the institutional church culture, I am starting to learn that what made Jesus' holiness so attractive was that it was a lived holiness. He lived it our everyday in the marketplace, the bars, and neighborhoods. He was holy when surrounded by "sinners and tax collectors", the key here, is that he was holy among them.
We as the people of God need to move out of our holy huddles and move into the neighborhood. Eugene Peterson says it well in his translation of John 1:14ff in The Message, "
The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
true from start to finish.
One of the things I love about the The Antioch Movement is that we are moving into the neighborhood. We seek to live on mission everyday. It's not about getting people to a worship service or getting them to meet the pastor. It's about followers of Jesus living out the holiness of Jesus every day, wherever they are, all the time.
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