Recently I was in a meeting where one person shared a burden on her heart. She wondered how we could know if someone was hurting, seeking, wondering, joyful and needed to share.
Programming church people immediately want to develop a program. Let’s have a mentor program where everyone is assigned someone to look after! Oops, who does the assigning? How do they know whom to put together? Is there accountability? What if there’s the wrong match and it lights a fuse? Or we have a formal program of another sort to bring people together.
But in Acts 2:42 and following it is recorded: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common… Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”
Dallas Willard in “The Spirit of the Disciplines” says that early church members really did organize their lives differently from their neighbors. And the neighbors noticed.
What if—-what if we could develop not a program but an environment where we devoted ourselves to teaching, to prayer, to sharing together, to caring for one another? Wouldn’t that attract people? Wouldn’t that be the kind of place where people ask “how’s it going?” and really mean it. And get an honest response? And start a healing dialog?
Wow. I wish.
Faith Venture 
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