Inviting Outsiders

Gay Brunt Miller, Spring Mount

God’s Spirit is moving among us! And I believe that it is as Blaine Detwiler describes “God’s unruly Spirit” causing a deep sense of restlessness in my own soul.

I love the church…from my local congregation, Spring Mount Mennonite Church, to my conference work that connects with congregations, conference related ministries and partners in mission. I love my connections with Mennonite Church USA and the amazingly gifted sisters and brothers I am learning to know through that work. I eat, sleep and drink church—it’s both my vocation and my passion. I’m grateful that God has put me here, in this time and in this place.

However I am also sensing this growing restlessness. A restlessness that upsets the complacency I may feel because church is my life. Isn’t that enough?

The rub seems to come when I realize that everything I do for God and the church is within the literal and/or figurative walls of our church community. My growing sense is that our church walls are sometimes a little too cozy, too familiar and too safe. Work within our church walls is important but if that is the only place we see our mission we fall short of God’s heart and vision for the Good News that the church is to be in world that desperately needs healing and hope.

I recently attended a memorial service for a young woman, Vicki, who died of a drug overdose. Vicki committed her life to Christ a year ago, and God did some amazing things in her life…but one night she made some bad choices that resulted in her death.

When time was given for people to share memories about Vicki, a friend from her church, Tina, shared the incredible change and transformation she had seen in Vicki after she committed her life to Christ. Tina gave clear and passionate testimony to the power of God in Vicki’s life.

During lunch I talked with Tina. I learned that the church she attends is focused on ministry for 20-somethings, a group often missing from our congregations. I asked Tina how her congreagtion reaches this group. “You have to go out and bring them in,” she replied, “they are not likely to walk into a church on their own!”

I pressed her for more details and after some hesitation, she told me of her most recent ministry: to reach out to exotic dancers! She shared how desperately these women long to experience real love–how they are used and abused by men who tell them that they “love” them, but that love is merely lust for their bodies. Tina knows the depths of their pain and despair–she had been one of them.

In Matthew 9:10-13, Jesus is eating with “tax collectors and sinners.” When challenged by the Pharisees about this, Jesus replies, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” I like the way Eugene Peterson paraphrases that last sentence in The Message: “I’m here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.”

In “At the end of ethnic Mennonite life,” Michael King invites us to grapple with the nitty-gritty of reaching beyond the Swiss-German ethnic heritage in which many of us have grown up as Mennonites. This heritage is noble and valuable. Yet how can we widen this wonderful foundation to become the church of Revelation 7:9-11, where all nations and tribes, races and languages join with around the throne and the Lamb? Who can we reach out to and invite to come in?

Not all of us are called to reach out to exotic dancers, but God has called us to reach beyond our comfort zones, to “go out and bring them in.” Jesus was not content to focus his entire ministry on those inside the church in his day. Nor should we be.