Several years ago, an interesting thing took place in a congregation that I am familiar with.  A young man came to visit on a Sunday and his life changed forever.  The young man was around 20 years of age, came from a very difficult home situation, and had become involved in very abusive relationships with other men as a way to find love and acceptance. This young man was a mess.

He came back the following week, and the weeks that followed and in a fairly short time, he gave his life to Jesus Christ.

When he was asked why he did all of this, the young man said that he was more welcome at church than he was at home, and that he had been accepted for who he was by that church family as he had never been accepted by his “real” family. He still had quite a bit of baggage to work through, but his life had fundamentally changed for Christ.

Something that I’ve always thought was interesting about this story is that the church in the story had long ago abolished the volunteer position of greater, and that this particular congregation had, at that time, very few members in this guy’s age group, so as conventional wisdom would have it, this guy would not be likely to come back a second time.

On some further investigation, however, that church had no greeters because they didn’t need them; everybody was greeting everybody else.  Anyone who walked through the door was made to feel welcome by whoever happened to be in the entry way; people just like other people there and nobody needed to be told to greet a visitor. Visitors would feel Christ’s love in the place and they nearly always commented on this phenomenon.

This young man found himself in a community of faith where he could find healing for the hurts and pain that he had suffered all of his life; but that particular church didn’t have any counsellors or shrinks telling people what to do; they just showed that they cared about the guy because they loved Jesus. This young man was the first of many more, as it turned out, and not only were they changed, but the rest of that congregation was transformed by noticing how God was working right in their midst; using them as His instruments of healing and redemption.

No, don’t even say this is a fairy tale; don’t even say this is just a theoretical ideal!  It isn’t as unusual as you might think, for things like this are going on in many places out there, and this is a real story about real people who have real names and faces.

So, you know how a transformation like this gets started?  It gets started when one person realizes what it means to love Jesus, and is willing to share that love with others selflessly.  After a little while, others notice and begin to do the same, and something amazing begins to happen right in front of your eyes…

Are we willing to step up and be that person who starts things off in our own congregations?

Or, are we joining in where it is already happening?