Three The Serving Community

Communities become others-centered when they are steeped in the narrative of the kingdom of God. They know that their community is an outpost of the kingdom of God, a place where grace is spoken and lived for as long as is needed. The value of a church is not in its longevity but in its love. The success of a church is not in its size but in its service to the people and the community. We are a people founded by a person who never established a church or built a building or led a finance campaign to build impressive buildings. Our leader just came and served and then died for the good of others. I suppose that would be a pretty good mission statement for a church, but one I am not likely to see: “We exist to serve others and then die, just like our Founder.”

Paul told the community at Philippi how to live with one another in day to day life: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3-4 niv). I once taught a class using this verse as the main text, and a woman raised her hand and said, “I don’t think that is very good psychology on Paul’s part—to ‘consider others better than yourselves.’ That is just bad self-esteem.” What she failed to understand, I believe, is that it is possible to have a high regard for others and a proper self-image at the same time. She assumed that to think of others as better meant to think badly of yourself.

The problem arises because we are not used to thinking of someone as “better” than ourselves. Notice also that in the second verse Paul encourages them to “look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (v. 4). He knows that we are naturally going to look to our own interests, and he does not say that is bad. He is just asking us to look out for the interests of others as well. The best way for me to grasp what Paul is saying, and to live it out, came to me a couple of years ago while I was writing a sermon I was going to give for a wedding. I thought about what has helped my own marriage. I thought about how amazing and wonderful my wife, Meghan, is, and I scribbled down the world treasure. To me, she is a precious treasure. Then a thought came to me: Treasure your treasure.

My wife is a great gift to me, a person of sacred worth. When I set my mind and heart on that reality, it is easy for me to treasure her, to love her, to look out for her well-being and to sacrifice my own desires at times in order to care for hers. My children are also sacred and wonderful treasures. Sometimes I forget that and find caring for them a chore. Then I remember, and suddenly caring for them is less a duty and more of a privilege. It is a matter of seeing, seeing the beauty and worth of a person, that increases our desire to serve. “O God, help me believe the truth about myself—no matter how beautiful it is,” wrote Macrina Wiederkehr. While there is certainly truth in her prayer, I like to change the wording: “O God, help me see the truth about those I meet today—no matter how beautiful they are.”

The core narrative we choose to live by will determine our behavior—my needs first or your needs first. A friend told me about something that happened to her recently. She runs in social circles with a non-Christian woman with whom she has tried to establish a friendship. She has invited this woman to lunch on several occasions, but the woman has always had an excuse for being unable to meet with her. She tried several times to invite her by calling the woman’s secretary. The secretary, feeling badly, finally said, “I may be out of line, but the last time I wrote a note to her with your lunch request on it, she took it, wadded it up and said, ‘That is never gonna happen,’ as she tossed it in the trash. You are a nice person, and I don’t want you to keep getting treated this way.”

My friend said she was hurt by this story, as we all would be. But she lives deeply in the kingdom and turned the matter over to God in prayer. About a week later she happened to be in a restaurant, and the woman came in with a friend. She told her waiter, “I would like to pay for their check when they are done.” She was busy completing some paperwork she had brought with her but looked up to see the woman standing in front of her.

“I just wanted to say thank you for buying our lunch. That was very kind,” the woman said. “I know you have been persistent in trying to meet with me. I am sorry. I want you to know that.”

My friend explained her action to me this way. She said, “You know, I don’t expect that we will get together any time soon, but that was not why I did it. I bought her lunch because I have been praying for her, and I had a chance to do something nice for her. I think God gave me that opportunity. Whether or not we become friends and God uses me to reach her, I don’t know. All I know is that I had a chance to do something for someone else, and it felt good to be able to do it.” She is living by a new, strong, true narrative: “Your needs are what matters most.” She is peculiar indeed.

Now there’s one caveat to all this: Though many of us, myself included, do not run the risk of overserving or being too concerned with the needs of others to the neglect of our own, there are many people who are—and those kinds of people are also likely to read a book like this one. We need to have balance when it comes to the issue of serving others and taking care of ourselves. I have many Christian friends who are so focused on serving others that they neglect their own needs, and sometimes the needs of their families. One woman confessed that she had burned out and left the church when she was younger because she had been told that serving others was our constant duty as Christ-followers. So she did and found herself worn-out and discouraged. Another man shared that for many years his own family “only got my leftovers,” because “I spent all of my energy caring for people in need and neglected them.”

I encourage balance when it comes to serving others. We need to be aware of the condition of our own souls and bodies, and to take care of that first, without feeling any guilt about it. We can only give when we are grounded and rested. We also need to be mindful that some of the people who need us the most are those we seldom give our time to, which is often our families and friends. They may not be in a condition of great need, but they need our time, energy and love. Again, we need to find balance. It is possible to spend too much time caring for our own needs, and it is common to see people spending too much time caring for the needs of others. I believe we can strike the right balance if we listen to the leading of the Spirit and are open to the discernment of others who can see things we may not see.

I was once with Dallas Willard, speaking at a conference in California. I opened the evening session with a talk about God’s grace in human transformation. After a break, Dallas got up to speak. He opened with these attention-catching words: “I am going to tell you what is the single most important task of a Christian, especially those who are in church leadership.” There was a moment of silence as we waited to hear what he believed was the most important task of a Christian. My mind raced for a moment—what could it be? I have heard Dallas teach for hundreds of hours. I thought he might say “Scripture memorization,” because I know he believes it is very transforming. He leaned in to the microphone and said, “The most important task we have, especially for those in church leadership, is to pray for the success of our neighboring churches.”

I was stunned. The most important task? I could easily come up with a dozen things I would assume were far more important for Christians, especially pastors. What about caring for the poor? What about spending quality time with God in solitude and prayer? What about sharing our faith with nonbelievers? No, according to Dallas, the most important thing we can do is to pray for the success and well-being of the other churches in our area. I pressed Dallas later to explain what he meant. He said that when we pray, genuinely pray, for the success of the churches that are in our proximity, we are breaking the narrative of selfishness and entering into the mind of God, who is also praying for the success of those churches. The practice, he said, puts us in sync with the kingdom of God.

He encouraged not only pastors but entire churches to do this. Recently I was preaching at Highland Park Community Church in Casper, Wyoming, and the pastor did just that. He listed a few churches in the area and asked God to bless the work of their hands. He named the churches and even mentioned some of the ministries within those churches. It was a beautiful thing. It changed the atmos-
phere of worship; it connected us to something larger than ourselves; it helped us see the beauty and power of the kingdom of God. I asked one of the pastors about this practice, and he told me they do it every Sunday. I told him about what Dallas had said. I said, “You all are doing it! Keep it up.” He blushed a little bit, but I wanted to affirm what he was doing and what it was communicating to the people.

When the architect paused to think about his answer during the committee meeting, he was choosing to live out the true narrative found in the teaching of Jesus and in the Epistles. The narrative teaches us that in the kingdom of God we are not competing with anyone. The narrative that says we are competing with others—
especially other churches—is a false, illusory, fragile narrative that moves us further from God and ourselves. The architect wisely sought a space of grace, as I call it, where he could distance himself from the false narrative and discern the truth he encountered in the narrative of Jesus.

He had a space of grace, a pause in which he was able to speak from a Christ-centered place. The key here is that we learn how to find those spaces of grace in which we examine the narrative we are going to adopt. It is a slow process. But if we continue to reboot our minds and stay with the substantive narrative of Jesus, we will move closer to God and to ourselves, and the fruit of the Spirit will begin to flow out of us. So how did the architect answer the question, “Can we build a building that will help us compete with the church down the road?” He said something like this:

I said to the minister who was presiding at the meeting, “So, how did the others in the group react to his answer?”

“That was the amazing part,” he explained.

The pastor concluded, “Changing the spirit of a church meeting from a worldly focus to a kingdom-of-God focus is no small feat. It was practically a miracle.” As a veteran of many church meetings, I knew exactly what he meant.

The good and beautiful community of apprentices is made up of people learning how to put the needs of others ahead of their own. This is peculiar behavior in our world. It shows that we are maladjusted to the narratives of this world that tell us to “look out for number one” and that say “winning is not everything—it is the only thing.” It shows that we are maladjusted to self-seeking, racism and aggression. How do we live this out? Where do we live this out? It begins, I think, by changing the way we see other people. If we see others—whether in our family or on the freeway—as merely human, it becomes easy to see them as either obstacles or opportunities to further our own happiness.

The key is to put on the mind of Christ and to see others as he sees them: treasures. Then we will naturally move to treasuring them, which makes putting their needs ahead of our own not only possible but likely. We live and move in different circles, and have different relationships with the people in our lives: family and friends, coworkers, fellow Christians, and strangers and acquaintances. It is easier, for example, to treasure my family, but that does not mean I do it well. It is harder to treasure the person who is being rude in the hardware store, but that does not mean it is impossible. This week I would like you to engage in several ways of treasuring the treasures all around us.