There were people from Tanzania, Mali, Ireland, Macedonia, England, Iran and Alabama here yesterday. A veritable smorgasbord of nations, all sitting down at our table and having lunch with us. You should have heard their stories. You should attend our church! There we have 11 nationalities represented . . . it is a little bit like I imagine heaven to be: multicolored and multi-ligual. Life together as a group of internationals just has so much more taste to, than the monochrome experiences I had in North America.
All Nations, represented around the throne is the way that heaven is described in the scriptures. But it is so rarely how our churches are here on earth. Especially here in the ethnic-hatred capital of the world, this is so true. In fact I have been party to keeping the ethnic churches/groups separate from one another. Why?
Because in this fallen world, you cannot grow churches up the social scale. You can only move down the social scale. In other words, we began a Gypsy church in Bitola, because Gypsy families started attending the Macedonia services. But when the Gypsy families started attending, the Macedonians stopped attending (I am generalizing here to make a point, not all families stopped coming because they had Christ in their hearts) and so in order to plant the Macedonian congregation, we had to get the Gypsy families out.
We are having a similar problem in Bosnia. The high class folks won’t come to church with the low class folks, and thus it seems to be everywhere in the world. I wonder what Jesus thinks about all of this silliness? I imagine that His heart breaks a bit every time this stuff happens within His family. I hope the joy He has in the multi-cultural International church offsets His sadness in the most segregated hour of the week.
All Nations, represented around the throne is the way that heaven is described in the scriptures. But it is so rarely how our churches are here on earth. Especially here in the ethnic-hatred capital of the world, this is so true. In fact I have been party to keeping the ethnic churches/groups separate from one another. Why?
Because in this fallen world, you cannot grow churches up the social scale. You can only move down the social scale. In other words, we began a Gypsy church in Bitola, because Gypsy families started attending the Macedonia services. But when the Gypsy families started attending, the Macedonians stopped attending (I am generalizing here to make a point, not all families stopped coming because they had Christ in their hearts) and so in order to plant the Macedonian congregation, we had to get the Gypsy families out.
We are having a similar problem in Bosnia. The high class folks won’t come to church with the low class folks, and thus it seems to be everywhere in the world. I wonder what Jesus thinks about all of this silliness? I imagine that His heart breaks a bit every time this stuff happens within His family. I hope the joy He has in the multi-cultural International church offsets His sadness in the most segregated hour of the week.
No comments:
Post a Comment