Pilgrimage Ponderings
No One's on the Porch
I've been thinking a lot today about an image for a Wesleyan understanding of evangelism. It's not my idea. I read about it somewhere (just can't remember where). Picture a big house with a big front porch on a big wide street.
The way I understand it, the house represents the people in the family of God. The porch is where faith seekers greet followers of Christ and decide whether or not they want to come inside. The porch is where people come to recognize God at work in their lives before they even knew it, which Wesley called prevenient grace. When they decide to say "yes" to journeying as a follower of Jesus, they step through the door into the house. Life in the family of God is where they learn to grow in grace and "go on to perfection."
The problem I see with Church today is that there are a lot of people in the house having fun with each other, and there are a lot of people on that big wide street. But no one's on the porch.
By "no one" I mean that the people in the house do not often step out onto the porch to get to know the folks who might be on the porch, invite them in, and show them where the front door is. The rest of the "no one" is all the people on the street that walk by and wonder what is going on in the house, but since there's no one on the porch, they seldom walk up the steps to check it out.
What happened to our porch?
kathy griffin: While surfing, I just came upon your blog, not even knowing that you had one. From one pilgrim to another, I have enjooyed reading your ponderings and encourage you to keep it up. I particularly liked your comments about Wesley's analogy of salvation. It seems in the UMC we talk alot about "radical" hospitality but unfortunately, I haven't seen anything radical yet about our hospitality. I wonder what "radical" hospitality would look like? After traveling around this summer, I didn't see much activity on other church porches either..And I'm not so sure that I can even agree with you that I see much fun going on inside. Maybe that's a place to start because what I have seen is that when something good is going on inside, there is usually a line of folks outside waiting to get inside. Maybe if the people on the inside really followed Jesus' command to "love one another as I have loved you," we wouldn't need programs, strategies, and campagins to teach us how to evangelize. We could just love them! (10/11/08)