The World. It isn’t just a globe that you had in your 3rd grade classroom. The World is a concept in Christianity of the people that are unchurched. Surely, you’ve heard in a sermon words disparaging The World. “Those people out there need such and such because they’re part of The World.” For whatever reason, this has become one of the buzzwords for describing people who are living a life without accepting the grace of Jesus Christ. I’ve been guilty of it in my sermons in the past.
The Church has at its disposal several approaches to The World. One of the approaches is to ignore it. The model shares that we as believers are just passing through, and so The World is not our home. Because of this, our only lifestyle choice should be ministry – being an actor, selling jeans, operating a restaurant or serving as an engineer are silly professions. Ignore The World, make it through your 80 years and be done with it.
Another approach is to be just like The World. Blend in, make like a spy and infiltrate it by becoming exactly like it. The appeal is to be able to speak fluently in culture, to not make a fuss so that you could win more people to Christ. One of the problems that arises in this is that faith is confined to an hour once a week, and there is no engagement in missions outside the walls of the church. The World is 99.9% of the week, whereas faith and the church take up that last 0.1% of it.
Yet another example of how to interact with the World is to despise the World. Perhaps the most visible example of this is Westboro Baptist Church, a congregation that pickets the funerals of soldiers who have died in service in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anger, not engagement, is what defines this type of relationship with the World. Denouncing and criticizing are the name of that game.
Finally, the Church can, and I believe should, love the World. Yes, yes there are some things that we should be against, and yes there are things that we should adopt (cupcakes are unabashedly good), yet we must, in all our ways, have love be the driving attribute of the Church’s interaction with the World. We engage with the distinctiveness of the Kingdom of God. We are residents in the World, but should not be seeking primarily the approval of the dominant culture.
So I invite you to Love FC September 23-29. There are projects throughout Franklin County that reveal our love for the World (and that little blessed slice of it in Virginia called Franklin). Sign-up by going to www.rm-umc.org and clicking the Love FC tab. Indeed, let us “seek the peace and prosperity of (the World) to which I have carried you” (Jeremiah 29:7).
In Christ,
Pastor Will