I recently had a conversation with a woman who shared about the experience her husband and she had in a local church…
“We started to attend the church because of a support group for adoptive parents they had. We were never really into church, but we both had some religion in our backgrounds. We really liked the opportunity to be fed spiritually. However, after a few months we realized that the message of the church was in order to be fully accepted into the community we needed to sign up to participate in all these activities the church had going on. We just couldn’t make that commitment. We’re already very committed to helping others and do so in many ways in the community; from adopting needy families at a local school to serving in leadership of various community organizations that are meeting the needs of people. We just felt like these community activities we were involved in just didn’t count to the church and our community service would never be valued by the church.
I wonder if this is the message we send to people through our church. Do we value people that serve the community as much as we value people that serve in programs in the church?
