sheep

Sometimes I come up against something I’ve known for a long time, but it seems like a new truth. That happened to me this morning as I continued my reading through Matthew.

I was prompted by this excerpt from the first six verses of Matthew 10: “Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness. . . . These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: ‘Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.’”

I doubt of any of those lost sheep thought of themselves that way. Jesus sent his disciples to the towns where God’s law was read in the temples by rabbis who were trying to help the people live faithful lives. But until these devout people stopped looking for a someday Messiah and recognized Jesus in their midst, they were among the lost.

A number of years ago I attended a conference on church ministry and outreach, and something the presenter said has stayed with me ever since. He said that, as a generalization, you can divide your ministries into four areas by drawing a quadrant. The vertical line divides the people who go to church and the ones who don’t, while the horizontal line divides people with a saving faith from those who don’t have one. As a result, you end up with four quadrants: church people with a saving faith, non-church people with a saving faith, non-church people without a saving faith, and . . . people in my church who don’t have a saving faith.

His point was this: we do most ministry to support and encourage people of faith. The rest we call outreach, and it’s focused on the quadrant of non-church-going unbelievers. But what about “inreach?” Shouldn’t we have something for the people in our pews who haven’t recognized Jesus yet? They might be what we call seekers, but they can also be life-long attenders who are in church for other reasons than that they want to worship.

There are probably lost sheep in my church every Sunday morning. They may be meeting all the expectations they learned in Sunday School and Christian day schools, they may even have made profession of faith, but their hope is really somewhere else than on Jesus. Like the lost sheep of Israel in Jesus’ day, they could have all kinds of head knowledge of the Messiah but haven’t seen him show up in their lives.

He’s there, though. How can I help them see him? My church is named Immanuel, which means “God with us.” I’m serving on a committee where we talk about seeing where Jesus is among us, doing his transforming work, so I’ve privately started thinking of Immanuel as meaning “Jesus among us.” He is, in my church and every church, but can we see him working? And if we can’t, how will those lost sheep?

If they can’t see Jesus changing me, and hear me tell of it, how will they find him?