Leaving Home.

I love being in church buildings of all sorts: cathedral, fan-shaped auditorium, movie theater, storefront church, whatever. When I am in the places that God has desired His people to gather, the special places dedicated to His glory, I feel instantly at home.

About three years after I began attending Bronx Bethany, I attended a revival service there that ended around 1:30 in the morning. Not wanting to leave the atmosphere, I asked if I could hang out at the church until daylight. Pastor Sam answered: "You cannot stay here." And I knew exactly what he meant. His comment was not so much an indicator that I had my own residence to go to that night, nor was it an indicator of the church's inability to accommodate my request. Rather, he was prophetically pointing out my shadow mission: a desire to remain in the church without ever leaving it to become the reflection of Christ in the world.

The challenge of monastic strategy. During Sunday's sermon, Pastor Sam spoke briefly on the two types of monastic life found in our faith tradition: physical separation and psychological separation. As holiness people, we are conscious of the need to live a life unstained by the world. We understand that we are called to live a life separated to God. Physical separation was first modeled by early church fathers who sold their earthly goods and lived a life of subsistence alone in the desert, only occasionally leaving their monasteries to make statements of faith to curious pilgrims. Psychological separation, a more modern strategy, is marked by a Christian's unwillingness to interact with any person or system which is not also Christian. As our pastor noted, this is the type of person who has no non-Christian acquaintances (and even shows reluctance to converse with non-Christians they see on a regular basis).

But if we are called to "be a redemptive influence in the Bronx and in the world", then we must be willing to walk into environments and engage conversation where our redemptive influence is needed. So we leave our church homes and our church friends, and we share God's grace and mercy with persons whose lives cry out for His healing touch. As Pastor Sam shared (paraphrased here), we live a life of holiness not to be elite, but to be an example in order to draw others to Christ. If we have been transformed by the Spirit of Christ, then we will have the strength and the means necessary to be a redemptive influence in the world.