Imagine the scene...
You are sat in a nice church. Not extravagent or ornate. A nice church with nice people in a nice area.
Today you have a guest speaker, a new man in town. You sit facinated that this man seems to teach something you’ve never heard before and yet it so very clearly makes sense. Someone who clearly knows scripture so very well and deciphers it with such certain authority, not wooly and vague, humbly and not arrogant like so very many others. And what is more, you hear that he has been known to miraculously heal all kinds of sick people. Even lepers. By touching them!
You are nicely settled, in your nice church of nice people in a nice area, despite the fact that your guest speaker has attracted such a huge crowd that the place is packed more than you ever imagined possible. You are now aware of a scraping sound coming from above. Then you realise you have quite bad dandruff (despite the ‘Head & Shoulders’). No, sorry, it isn’t dandruff, it’s crumbling plaster. Someone is trying to break in through the roof! The roof for heaven’s sake!
Now you see four big oiks lowering in some cripple on stretcher. These blokes are wrecking your nice church full of nice people by creating a huge unsightly hole in the nice roof and then lowering in a cripple of all things. Now this visitor chappy may be able to heal, even willing to actually touch a leper, but bringing in some cripple who we’d rather not see in our kind of church through the unsightly, unplanned hole in the roof made by the equally unsightly oafsis not something you want to witness.
But this is odd. The nice visiting preacher man is not upset at the unusual changes to your nice church. He thinks the big blokes actually have a lot of faith. Faith that should be rewarded. He doesn’t even mind the cripple, even wants to help him. Maybe worth seeing...
You’ve seen this before. He says that their faith has made them well and off they go... But not this time. He’s declaring his sins forgiven! Who does he think he is? God?
Ahh
So. Question time...
How far would we go to try & get our friends to meet Jesus, have their sins forgiven & get healed?
How are the structures that surround our churches stopping this happening?
How do we “open up” church to those that still need Christ?
Actually, it would be rather good to be in a church that was “convertible”
