Someone is reading your mail!

“But you are our letter, and you are in our hearts for everyone to read and understand. You are like a letter written by Christ and delivered by us. But you are not written with pen and ink or on tablets made of stone.” 2 Corinthians 3:2-3

In a very upper middle class church, with many wealthy families, which we attended before returning to live in our hometown there was an unusual family. The mother of six children was a person with a mixed racial heritage. Her father was a Cherokee, her mother had French and Maori heritage. (Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand) Her husband had long ago left her and at least two of her children had different fathers than the other four. Another member of our church who had once been a “gang member,” but was now an on-fire evangelist had introduced her to the church.  Mark and Mary (not their real names) made a very unusual couple. Mary wore very bright “in your face” clothes, and she drove a very big and ancient American “muscle” car, all chrome, fins, white wall tires, and belching oily smoke… most definitely out of place amongst the Porsche's, BMW’s and other status autos.  

I took an instant liking to Mary, partly I guess, because she so happily flouted the “rules.” She simply did not fit the image of nice white middle class New Zealanders. Mary and her family stayed in our church for about a year, always “skirting the edges” of “chuchanity” and never fully being taken into the fellowship. She told me one day that she was leaving, because she had found another church, in a small town well known for its “alternative lifestylers,” where she felt welcomed and part of a family. Our church became the poorer for her passing.  

Mary, by the way was not (yet) a Christian.

How many “almost Christians” have ventured into our sacred portals, only to be rebuffed by our preconceptions of “church culture?” How often do we chase people away from the sanctuary because they “don’t fit?”  I have observed this happening frequently. 

For most non-believers in the western world, we are their only image of what church and Christianity is all about! It has been proven time and time again that “friendship evangelism” is the most effective way to spread the gospel and get people “saved”  

It was Ambrose Bierce, the American author who made this rather scathing, but perceptive observation-  “Acquaintance: a degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.”

Have you ever noticed how certain smells or odours evoke memories? Whenever I cut or even touch Dahlias or Geraniums the pungent smell transports me back in time to the rambling mansion of my favourite aunt and her equally rambling garden full of those, and many other  flowers. Many people automatically associate Christianity with negative feelings or worse still, bad experiences at the hand of some “hypocritical Christian”

If we are to be effective witnesses in our world we had better learn to live the words of Paul as if they were factual! --“You are like a letter written by Christ and delivered by us. But you are not written with pen and ink or on tablets made of stone.” Get used to the fact that you are being watched. Allow people to check you out, where else are they going to find a living Jesus?      

I once spent some time with the co-chaplains of this country’s toughest prison; a husband and wife team, a more unlikely pair of pastors would be difficult to find. Their early experience of church life was a funny but revealing slice of “Christian paranoia.” She was an ex-prostitute who had been ravaged by drugs and alcohol and he had been in way too many street fights, and he had been her pimp. The prisoners (some of the most notorious in the country) loved them…. and many became Christians as a result of this couple’s unique ministry. It was always interesting to watch this couple walk into a church unannounced! The paranoia had not subsided very much over the years.     

“But you are our letter, and you are in our hearts for everyone to read and understand.”

 "You are like a letter written by Christ and delivered by us."