In our race to fill pews, have we neglected the very heart of the gospel? It's time to confront the uncomfortable truth about who we're really leaving outside our church doors.
In the modern church, the mandate to "go after the one" has often been misconstrued as an invitation to conformity. We've championed a model of evangelism that is more about manufacturing sameness than fostering genuine transformation. It's not just about collecting “souls”; it’s about healing them, restoring them, and embracing our shared humanity.
Jesus, the Good Shepherd, didn’t call us to recruit members into a social club of like-minded individuals. His life and actions tore down the barriers of us versus them. He crossed cultural lines and societal norms to reach out to those marginalized by the religious elite of His day. Yet, today, many of our churches have become echo chambers, where diversity in thought, appearance, and background is subtly discouraged if not outright rejected. It isn’t us versus them, it is us for them.
The Good Samaritan didn’t ask the wounded man by the roadside to first convert to his way of thinking or adapt to his lifestyle before offering help. He simply saw a human in need and responded with compassion and care. This is the model we are called to emulate—a model of love that is not conditional upon agreement but is a radical act of seeing the imago Dei, the image of God, in every individual, especially those whom society has beaten down and left behind.
We must ask ourselves, when did our efforts to grow our churches begin to overshadow our mission to heal the world? When did our strategies for expansion become barriers to the kind of deep, sacrificial love modeled by Christ? It’s time for us to reclaim the gospel from the clutches of cultural conformity and remember that the kingdom of God is not about securing our borders from the world, but about tearing down the walls we’ve erected to keep the world out.
Healing our shared humanity means stepping out of our comfort zones. It involves reaching across the aisles, listening to stories that make us uncomfortable, and loving those who live, look, and think differently than we do. It's about being inclusive in our love, recognizing that the true measure of our faith is not how many people we convince to be like us, but how many lives are transformed by the love of Christ through us. And as we do, we will experience healing from our wounds by those whose wounds we are healing. The wounded need each other in the restoration of the image of Love that formed us in the beginning.
The challenge before us is not to fill our churches but to empty them—out into the communities, across the divides, and into the places where Jesus himself would go. This is where true healing begins. Not in the sanctuary among the echoing affirmations of the like-minded, but out there, in the wilderness, where the one awaits discarded on the side of the road.
The Good Shepherd calls us not to be gatekeepers of a spiritual clique but gardeners in a wild, sprawling renewed Eden. Our call is not to prune for uniformity but to nourish for diversity, cultivating a myriad of fresh expressions of divine love and restoration.
As we participate in the restoration of all things, we may realize that we are the ones who are really being restored. As we leave the ninety-nine to reach the one, we might find that we are actually the lost one who is being found.
This is the work of the Tov Shepherd, who invites us to join in the divine dance of healing, restoration, and renewal. It’s high time we answer this call of the gospel, the tov news, not with reluctance but with the radical zeal of those who first followed the Rabbi from Nazareth. Let’s not just go back to church; let’s go forward following the Way of Jesus, loving everyone always!
Amen!