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I was reading a newsletter this week from another church in which the pastor related how he had had a conversation a few weeks ago with a 27-year-old man. During the conversation, the pastor invited the man to church. His response was to tell the pastor that he didn’t care much for the church, and that he had given up on institutional Christianity, but that he was a follower of Jesus Christ. The man said he used to believe that the church was the hope of the world, but not anymore. But he did believe that Jesus was the hope of the world. Then he asked the pastor, “There are millions of people in the world starving, millions of orphans, preventable diseases killing children. There is unbearable poverty, and there are more than one billion people in this world who have never heard of Jesus Christ. Does your church care about that? What is your church trying to do about that?”

     I wondered how I would answer that 27-year-old man about Trinity. I am confident I could tell him that Trinity United Methodist Church does care about the hurting people in this broken world; that we care about those who have never heard of Jesus Christ. I am confident I could tell him that we are doing a lot. I would tell him about all the mission work we are doing beyond the walls of our church building out in the world. And when I got through, I hope he would say, “Hey man, that’s great. Well done!” But I am afraid he might say, “Well, that’s good, but it’s not enough.”

     I’ve been thinking about that lately. I think we should always celebrate the mission work of Trinity Church, both locally and around the world. I thank you for the financial support and hands-on work in which so many of our Trinity Family participates to help transform the world for Jesus Christ. God is doing great work through the people of Trinity and the list of mission and ministry outreach continues to grow. But as we celebrate, I can’t help but think of the words, “That’s good, but it’s not enough.”

     I have come to realize that, for the most part, the emerging culture likes Jesus but not the church.   There seems to be a disconnect between institutional religion

with the post baby boomer generations. I agree with Dan Kimball’s writing in They Like Jesus but Not the Church: “If you are a baby boomer or of an older generation and were born into a Christian home, you   probably have relationships with people who still share values and beliefs that are more in line with a Judeo-Christian world, and you might not see the change in emerging generations. If you are younger, were raised in a church, and surround yourself socially only with Christians, then you might not notice this as strongly either. And so it’s important that we think like missionaries. Instead of viewing our towns and cities as Judeo-Christian and feeling that everyone needs to automatically adhere to what we believe, we need to act like missionaries do when they enter a different culture. When missionaries enter another culture, they listen, learn, study the spiritual beliefs of the culture, and get a sense of what the culture’s values are. They may try to discover what experiences this culture has had with Christians and what the people of the culture think of Christianity. Missionaries in a foreign culture don’t practice the faiths or embrace the spiritual beliefs of that culture, but they do respect them, since the missionaries are on the other culture’s turf”. (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 2007, pp. 29-30)

     That’s what we are trying to do at Trinity. We have grown a lot over the past several years and the growth will continue. We can’t stop; we will not rest. We will never be satisfied as long as there is one hungry child, one child dying of a preventable disease, as long as there are orphans with no place to call home, as long as there are billions of people who have never heard about Jesus. I think everyone at Trinity wants to be a part of transforming the world by the power and for the glory of Jesus Christ. Beginning July 31, we will begin preparing for our fourth worship service with a preaching/teaching series based on Kimball’s book They Like Jesus but Not the Church. We will hear the younger generations’ perceptions of the institutional church, and what we in the church need to be aware of if we want to bring them to Christ, and if we want their generations to also be a part of transforming the world by the power and for the glory of Jesus Christ.

     See you at the reaching out place next Sunday. Jeff