fire v. love

As many of you know, I participate in a weekly service project to some low income housing areas every Saturday. In doing that, I am often confronted with other forms of "outreach" or "service" by other Christian groups. I struggle with judging their methodology and I really do not intend to think that what I'm involved in is somehow better than others. That is not true - but I have to be honest in sharing that this emotion comes up from time to time.

Additionally, I have no issue with holding fast to Truth even if others find it offensive. At the same time, I find that it is often not necessary to start relationships with confrontation, they can be started with love and truth and then lead to appropriate times for confrontational truth. [I hope that last bit made sense]

Anyway, with these caveats, I offer this story written by one of our pastors about last Saturday's service project.

Fire vs. Love

This past weekend at Saturday Morning Missions got off to an interesting start and had an interesting finish. Greg, who was leading that day, and opened up with a story about a sign he saw outside another church on the way to outreach. The sign said:

“You think it’s been hot the past few weeks? Eternity without Jesus will be even hotter.”

The point was not to bash this other church…the point is that there is this ongoing struggle in the realm of evangelism. Do we scare people to God? Threaten them with hell, fire, and condemnation…or do we try to love people to God? With compassion, grace, truth, and love?

What really works? What is God really calling us to do? Does He want us to use fire or love? Or both? We’ll probably never have that answer for sure because we aren’t God.

But at Northstar, we’ve decided to go the ‘love’ route. This past weekend we went door to door to hand out school supplies and did a simple water outreach near the bike trail.

Our outreaches wrapped up at xxxx Apartments as one of our teams noticed a strange sign on someone’s door that they were going to knock on and see if they needed any school supplies. This particular Northstar team consisted of Gary (one of our outreach leaders), Nancy, (who doesn’t go to Northstar but comes to Saturday Morning Missions because she love our outreach efforts), and Carol (who lives in the lower income areas but serves with us to earn utility help from time to time).

The sign Nancy and Carol noticed ... said: “Don’t ask for nothen, don’t tough my property, just don’t knock at all!” Being a veteran of our outreaches, Gary came over and realized it was better for us not to knock. (okay, maybe that doesn’t take a veteran to figure out, but good decision none the less) Yet, as our team of three was leaving, the lady who lives in that apartment walked up the steps and opened her door. Before turning into her apartment she smiled and said ‘hello.’ Therefore, the NSV folks asked her politely if she wanted any school supplies. She was thrilled and took some for her three kids. She then laughed and pointed at her ‘angry’ sign.

“You guys know that doesn’t mean you? Right?” she said. “I love you guys. You can knock anytime.”

I found out later who that lady was. She is someone who has been burned by Christians who have told her repeatedly that she is going to hell. No mention of heaven, or love, or grace…just hell.

No wonder she has a sign on her door.

Fire vs. Love?

At least love gets you in the door.

And by the way, the lady with the angry sign has already turned in her Solomon Program application. I guess hanging out with ‘love’ for six months beats six seconds of hell on your doorstep.

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