- Most ministry situations Jesus encountered were messy. Blessed is the local church that embraces the messiness.
A friend of mine was counseling a new pastor with a whopper of a first problem.
Some children had begun enthusiastically attending Sunday school and church services. Unfortunately, they had bedbugs and maybe some lice and it looked like other parasites: the worst case of small critters on kids most people with experience had ever seen.
Every Sunday, after the kids departed, someone sprayed and did everything else possible to disinfect the facilities. Despite their best and nearly heroic efforts, it was thought that the kids were spreading their problem throughout the church.
Certain laypersons wanted the pastor to deal with it…as in, run the children off. The pastor’s dilemma: What should I do?
#1 – open your Bible.
“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them…”; no mention of the youngsters’ need to be sanitized and get up to local church specs first.
What kind of gospel do we have?
Without waiting for them to come to the Temple, Jesus waded out amongst the demon-possessed, the lepers, the immoral, and the disenfranchised. At its best, the Church has followed that lesson: Francis of Assisi kissing lepers, John Wesley preaching in prisons, William Booth housing the homeless, and Amy Carmichael rescuing children from temple prostitution.
Many people know that famous verse, John 3:16. But have enough of us memorized 1 John 3:16-17?
“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?”
And the well-known, if neglected, passage in Matthew 25:
“‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
What might the Jesus-shaped response to the infested kids look like?
The pastor decided to go to the children’s home and get a sense of the situation, despite the obvious risk to his own person.
Having established rapport, perhaps on a second visit he would lead with compassion and gently offer the church’s assistance, to partner with pest-control professionals and find clothing and medical care resources for the children and their family. Volunteers would continue to be trained with cleaning protocols inside the church.
Through preaching, at board meetings, and in private conversations, the pastor could both teach and model sacrificial hospitality and begin establishing a fresh paradigm of ministry based on Jesus’ example: We will run to the sound of the pain in our community….and when the pain runs to us, by God’s grace we won’t flinch.
What started out as a church hygiene issue could well launch that congregation into a new trajectory of increasing Christlikeness.
Most ministry situations Jesus encountered were messy. Blessed is the local church that embraces the messiness.
