WIDE-EYED PARTICIPATION

The first person in the scriptures to name God is a woman by the name of Hagar. She was an Egyptian slave who served the patriarch Abraham and his wife Sara. You can read about her in Genesis 16. When she and her baby are sent off into the wilderness, she cries out to God to rescue them and God shows up and provides for their needs. Hagar names God El Roi, which means, “The God who sees me.”

The great story of the Exodus, when the nation of Israel was delivered out of Egypt and freed from slavery, begins with God saying to Moses, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.”

There’s this great encounter in the gospels between Jesus and a woman who had a debilitating condition that left her hunched over. Her ailment would have put her on the outside of her community, and people would have assumed that her condition was the result of a secret sin that God was punishing. In Luke 13 we are told, “When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.”

When Jesus saw her…you have to wonder how long it had been since anyone “saw” her…

We have a God who sees and we long to be a people who see as well. 

Taking up the invitation to participate in what God is doing often begins from a place of disruption—when our eyes are opened to something in our world that isn’t ok. 

This is one of things that makes the way of Jesus so counter cultural. Our part of the world is obsessed with comfort and security, and encourages us to get as much as we can, as fast as we can, and hold on to it for as long as we can. The way of Jesus calls us to not close our eyes when it comes to the injustice of the world, but instead Jesus beckons us to go looking for it. When Jesus invites us to take up our cross he isn’t calling us to simply endure the random trouble that comes our way, but to intentionally look for suffering in the world and then do something about it. 

We want to be a church that incites wide-eyed participation. We will be diligent in partnering with people and organizations in the Midlands who are working hard to change their communities and at the same time we want to be an epicenter of new and creative ways to bring good into the world.