#7 Could we create a home for church refugees?
I feel like saying to the American church: “Give me all the people you don’t want.”
According to the 2015 book, Church Refugees, by Dr. Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope, church refugees are NOT people who are lackadaisical about faith. Instead, the people the church chews up and spits out are often the people who care the most, who work the hardest, who love the deepest.
Give me those people.
Please, give me those people.
I would love to gather together church outcasts and misfits because I think this is the group that could shake our nation.
According to Packard and Hope, church refugees:
- wanted community and got judgment
- wanted to affect the life of the church and got bureaucracy
- wanted conversation and got doctrine
- wanted meaningful engagement with the world and got moral prescription
(page 28)
Something inside me screams when I read that.
I want to find a way to put folks like that in a room and together create something better.
So that’s #7. #6 next time. The ideas are only going to get bigger.
Dwight
PS. A few people on Facebook said they liked my new book. I wrote it for my four young adult children. It’s about developing a spiritual foundation and it has some fatherly advice about relationships, health, money, and so on. You can find it here.
Mountain photo: Kalen Emsley, Unsplash
