Being Church for the community you serve

Mark has posted some great thoughts about being church and living shalom here Since coming to faith I have been committed to shalom and really it was as I explored and tried to live out a falteringly shalom lifestyle that I was drawn more and more into community mission and where we are now of Church on the edge, trying to grow church fom scratch with marginalised young people.

The community of God… will be a community that does not live for itself but is deeply involved in the concerns of its neighborhood. It will be the church for the specific place where it lives, not the church for those who wish to be members of it – or, rather, it will be for them insofar as they are willing to be for the wider community.
The Gospel in a pluralist society Leslie Newbiggin

Yet doing church from scratch confilcts in some ways with the need for us to become powerless, as we draw others into ur community who are not at the same place maintaining this call to be a community that does not live for itself becomes harder to maintain. Recently we have had a couple of conversations with the young people about our relatioships with other young people in the community. They are wary, guarded aybe even jealous yet they are part of the community we serve. As we leave at the end of the month to take a group on skate pilgrimage and rite of passage

and they enter more into our community is this a serving the wider communitysomething we need to ensure we hold a non negotiable, even though they are committing to christ, but to explore.

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