I’ve been giving updates on our church in North Carolina’s international city of High Point. Embrace is a multi-cultural church with no official members. And I love that about our church! Let me tell you why.
We had an unmarried couple in yesterday’s Sunday service with a young two-year-old. They have been attending regularly and are loved and accepted by our people. Their son loves our church! We also had a Filipino lady whose boyfriend had recently died. I was able to spend some time with her and many of her friends, both before and after his death. Like many Filipinos, she’s Roman Catholic, but I made it clear to her and her friends that there are no barriers between us, neither was I concerned about making them Baptists.
What matters to me is meeting people where they are and, by God’s grace and through the work of the Spirit of Christ, seeing them enter into and grow strong in a life-changing relationship with Jesus.
And I see that happening in Embrace Church.
While Embrace, as the name implies, is an open-arm church welcoming all, it is not a church for everybody. It is not for those who prioritize right doctrine above right relationships. Neither is it a church for those who believe Christianity is a religion of morality, emphasizing a rule-based faith that turns people into cookie-cutter clones who walk alike, talk alike, vote alike, etc.
Embrace is a church that welcomes all people. Like Jesus.
When the self-righteous religious leaders asked Jesus why he enjoyed fellowship meals with sinners (which in that day was paramount to accepting someone), he answered by saying that only the sick needed a physician.
I read an article recently that stated that the point Jesus was making was that his sole purpose in hanging out with the “sinners” was that they were sick, and he wanted to heal them, wanted to convert them. I don’t doubt that Jesus desired to see these people come to a life-changing relationship with God, but the thinking expressed in this article was a classic adventure in missing the point.
Jesus said what he did to these self-righteous religious leaders, because they were just as sin-sick, if not more so than the people they looked upon with such disdain. The problem was they didn’t recognize their own need!
We opened our worship service Sunday with a familiar hymn - “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” It is a hymn, the words of which should humble each of us, whoever we are, and whatever our relationship with God: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. Take my heart, Lord, take and seal it. Seal it for Thy courts above.”
As Christians, when we come to recognize and confess the truth of this great old hymn, we will discover a great truth about our Lord, and that is that Jesus meets us where we are in order to lead us to where he is calling us to be.
Wherever we are.
We all come to Christ the same way. We all come to Christ from wherever we are. “Just as I am, without one plea.”
As we embrace people wherever they are and whoever they are, we will begin to see our dying churches (and there are many) revitalized, filled with people who need to hear from us the words of Jesus, who said, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
Salvation begins when we remove the barriers of condemnation and self-righteousness, recognizing our own tendencies to waywardness and wandering, and embracing others, all others, who, when push comes to shove, aren’t so different from us after all.
In Christ,
Dan
Check out my podcasts from Church on the Edge and my books on Kindle.
You can listen to my weekly messages at Embrace Church, High Point.
He is the ultimate "come as you are" Savior. He doesn't ask us to get cleaned up, fix ourselves first. That's what he uses the Holy Spirit for...afterwards!!