All of us who have lived for any period of time in Alabama know that we have no shortage of churches. On nearly every street corner, we can see the familiar steeples sitting atop our church buildings. In Birmingham alone, we have over 2500 church buildings. Many of us have found transformative encounters with God inside the walls of these buildings. We have met the risen Christ within the walls of our churches and have been challenged to become his disciples and to do his work. These walls have been a sacred place for many of us. But as important as these walls are, they can also blind us to God’s children who are outside our walls. They can blind us to those who are longing for the touch of Jesus on their lives. Some of God’s children are intimidated by these walls; some have no way of getting to these walls; and, sadly, some have been kept out of these walls. Too often, these walls can become an end in themselves. It is easy to spend so much of our time and our resources maintaining the walls, the steeples, the sanctuaries, that we don’t have the time, the money, or the energy left to minister to those outside the walls and reach out to the community. We lose our creativity. We forget that the church is not the building, but, rather, the people who are called to carry on the work that Jesus began.
We strive to be a different kind of church, a church without walls. The early Christians did not need high-steepled buildings or elaborate sanctuaries to have meaningful encounters with Christ. Instead, they met in one another’s homes, they shared meals together, they sang together, they prayed together, and they worshipped God together. By our standards, they probably would not have seemed very successful. They did not have a large meeting place. They did not have a building campaign. They did not have a large professional staff. But they fed the hungry, healed the sick, loved the unlovable, and shared the good news of the gospel with all they encountered. Their resources were not bound up in maintaining a building, so they were free to share all of themselves with the community around them.
That’s the kind of church we want to be. Instead of spending our time and resources on a building, we worship in small house churches throughout our community. Just like the early Christians, we come together in one another’s homes to worship and pray, to study and listen, and to discern God’s call as to how we might best share Jesus’ love with our community. We are free to use our resources to minister to those around us. We are reaching out to children and youth by sharing God’s love with them and helping them know that God believes in them. We are trying to build partnerships in the neighborhood to address issues surrounding poverty.
And we would like you to be church with us. If you can dream bigger dreams than building campaigns and sanctuary renovations, if you can dream of seeing God’s kingdom come on Earth as it is in heaven, then help us live into this dream in West End. Our dream is not the only way to be faithful to the gospel, but we are convinced that it is a very good way. If you share that dream, then we invite you to join with us by making a donation, volunteering, or, even better, by becoming part of our community. May God give all of us the faith to live into the dream that is God’s kingdom.