Who Are We?

On the first Sunday of my time as locum at Christ Church, I mentioned in my sermon how the people of Israel often misunderstood the nature of their identity as God’s chosen people. The problem, I said, was that they thought their identity was about their superiority, that God had chosen them because they were inherently better than other people. They had forgotten that God had called them to be a blessing to “all families of the earth….” (Genesis 12:3)

This amnesia led some of them to despise those who were outside the community of Israel. That led some of them to define themselves simply as “not one of those people.”

That amnesia can infect our churches as well and lead us to see ourselves simply as not like those Roman Catholics or those Baptists or…. The challenge is to discover how we are called to be a blessing to the community in which God has placed us. Or to put another way, what would the wider community lose if we weren’t there? How, specifically, has God called our church to be a blessing to others?

At Christ Church we often point, rightly, to the Thrift Shop as a blessing to others, but resting on our laurels is hardly appropriate. The world today needs God’s love and we are, not the only channel, but certainly a channel through which God’s love can flow. It’s our task to listen and discover what new adventures in becoming a blessing await us.