Thursday, July 12, 2012

Will you be the one?

Churches are scattered like birdseed throughout the south. On a recent trip to Milledgeville, GA I passed no less than 46 churches in a 2 hour drive. 46!!! They were named things like, Unity Missionary, AME, Church of the Nazarene, New hope, Cool Water, Primitive, Church of Christ and Pathfinders Christian. So many little clicks for one general religion. It's apparently very important to have your own little sectioned off area of beliefs and to build a building so that others will come and share those beliefs with you. Maybe it's worship style or basic biblical principle that divides them all. Maybe it's the modern day version of the Tower of Babel so that we do not build a spaceship to heaven now that our resources are expanded and our knowledge vast.
It just struck me as amazing to see so many, yet so different a church in such a short period of time.

What if church had no building? What if church happened every day with the way we related to the hundreds of people we come into contact with each week? What if the members of all those churches I passed formed a chain, hand in hand. How long would their reach stretch? How much ground would be covered?
On another trip this past weekend to North Carolina, I was driving on I-26 and came upon a very bad accident. Two cars and a van were involved and none of them facing the correct direction anymore. All of them had their fronts torn off or were meshed with the center cable barriers. The police had not arrived yet and vehicles were still smoking, telling me that this just happened. On the ground people were sitting, covered in blood with t-shirts for bandages wrapped around their injured parts. All of this I saw in the 5 seconds it took me.....to just drive on by. I was on a schedule of course and what could I do? I came up with a slew of excuses as to why I did not stop. But sometimes, we don't know what we can do until we actually get into a situation. We have to first be available.
I think we keep ourselves so busy with our churches and our buildings and our programs, that we totally miss people in need as we speed on by staying on schedule, headed for our next church event. Jesus didn't have a building...he met the people where there was need. It would do us and our communities so much good if we kept this concept in our heads and became unafraid to help others. There is a song I used to sing in church called, "Will you be the one?"
I think of those lyrics while pondering these situations:
In a world full of broken dreams
Where the truth is hard to find
For every promise that is kept
There are many left behind
Though it seems that nobody cares
It still matters what you do
Cause there's a difference you can make
But the choice is up to you

Chorus
Will you be the one
To answer to His call
Will you stand
When those around you fall
Will you be the one
To take His light
Into a darkened world
Tell me will you be the one

Oh sometimes it's hard to know
Who is right and what is wrong
And where are you supposed to stand
When the battle lines are drawn
There's a voice that is calling out
For someone who's not afraid
To be a beacon in the night
To a world that's lost it's way

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