A Serving Community

This Lent, I’m exploring Five Characteristics of Christian Community in series of sermons as well as reflecting upon these themes here. You can listen to the sermon on a Christian community being a serving community here. Service. Servanthood. Often people have a general sense that this is the sort of thing churches are doing or should be doing. The Church today has a mixed reputation on the street. Some bring only negative stereotypes, but others have a sense that even if churches are filled with old odd people or they believe in strange things, they do some good things. In fact, this is true! To some extent, every local church should be a center for community service.

However, the Church serves in Jesus name. The church serves as part of its faith commitment. The church serves and individual Christians serve, because of the Great Commandment of our Lord, “Love God, Love Neighbor” (Matthew 22:34-40). Churches and Christians can fall into two ditches along the serving highway. First, if we are not careful, we can give the impression that we are only helping people or doing good things in order to get people “saved” or to up attendance numbers at our Sunday services. Serving must be done in the spirit of Jesus which is a spirit that serves first and foremost for the sake of the person or the sake of the community’s betterment. No one enjoys being anyone’s project. If you are going to help, help because it’s what we should be doing as Christians and help because it’s the right thing to do.

Second, if we are not careful, we can give the impression that we are simply nice people who like to do nice things for others. In fact, we serve others in Christ’s name. In fact, what motivates our compassion and sustains us along the weary road of fighting poverty, reducing violence, empowering women, and a thousand other good causes, is our faith. There is an art to serving others in Christ’s name in a way that avoids the first ditch and the second. We don’t need to knock people over the head with our faith, but neither do we need to apologize for it by barely acknowledging why we do what we do. It takes trial and error, wisdom and grace, to avoid the first ditch of giving the impression that serving is only a means to an end and the second ditch of giving the impression that we are generic nice people doing nice generic things.

What did you hear in the sermon, in the text, or this reflection? What would you challenge, what would you add? What are you still wondering about?