Earlier this month I was in Virginia Beach for school and got to stay with some cool guys there. On Wednesday of that week, I went with Landon Tucker to his Singles’ group Bible Study that he leads worship at regularly. While we were there, they played a DVD teaching from Francis Chan (www.francischan.org). He is a pastor in California and is speaking at different engagements, I think he speaks at Passion stuff… Anyway, he shared a bit of a challenging time in his ministry in the local church. He shared a text from Luke 6:26, “Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”This verse is related to verses before in the same sermon, “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.” (Luke 6:22-23) Francis meditated upon those verses while his church and ministry were growing and asked some haunting questions, such as, “If Jesus lead a church, how large would it be?” And, “Would Jesus come to this Church?”There is an interesting challenge in these questions that probably will take more than the space in several blogs. However, it cuts to the heart of some issues that we are facing today. Seriously, if Jesus were on the Earth today and gathered believers together which formed a “church”, what would He be concerned with and who would come to be a part of His fellowship?Would you and I be apart of it, understanding the possibility that we would be hated, ridiculed, reviled, spurned as evil, and all would not speak well of us?Here’s a crazy thought… maybe instead of the different things we look for in a church (worship style, programming, size, denomination), we should be looking for a place that is receiving the most hate mail (not in regards to false teaching); a place that is so dedicated to doing Kingdom work that they are “politically disruptive (because it [Christianity] loosens the cement which binds the national culture) and religiously narrowminded (because it makes exclusive claims for Jesus).” (John Stott).
