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A few months ago I took some of my Geography students out to coffee to celebrate the end of semester. One of them had grown up in Housing Commission homes in Casino – a beef town in Northern NSW. Another confessed a rebellious childhood spent taking drugs and getting wasted at street races. As in, the real live Fast and the Furious. In Sydney.

I had no idea. I’d never known anyone who’d grown up so poor they lived in Housing Commission homes. I had no idea that street racing happened anywhere outside the movies. They thought I was sheltered because I needed to ask what “housos” and “nitro” meant. They were right.

By contrast, this: I’ve moved 25 times in my life. My parents are divorced. I have step-parents, step-siblings, step-cousins, and adopted parents aplenty. I’ve travelled. I lived for a year in Mexico City. I once knew the first woman to scale Mt Everest, who died a few years later falling down a crevasse. I’ve had a stalker. I’ve had emotionally dependent friends. I’ve had a drunken Irishman follow me to church.

I’ve had a lot of exposure to the world. A lot more than many Christians I know. On the Christian spectrum, I’m probably not sheltered. Not that I mind; my life is never boring.

It’s really a question of perspective. I don’t think either is right or wrong.

Hideout Selective Color 6486992451

However, in our evangelical churches, it strikes me that shelter has been elevated to the status of the “right” thing to do for our families and our community. We fight to protect what we have. It’s understandable. There is safety in the throng. A community with common values and standards is usually also welcoming of those who share such standards. There is friendship to be had, and a great deal of comfort. We can hear our own views reflected back to us. Our ideas about how the world works are never challenged or dismissed or antagonised.

And it’s not rocket science to say that no good can come from pursuing evidently harmful things in the name of participating in the world. The Apostle Paul says,

Do not be unequally
yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with
lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? … “Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you.” (2 Corinthians 6:14, 17)

It’s good and right to avoid the corrupting effects of sin. It’s kind and loving to want to protect our Christian community from manifest sin and evil. Who should wish anything other than that?

But our evangelical communities are not simply places of shelter. They are, for the most part, insular. The natural protective tendency has been manipulated into an attitude that looks only inward to those Christians around us. I see than many evangelical Christians don’t know how to watch, understand, process, and learn from the lived experiences of the largely non-Christian world. Or they do know how to, they just don’t do it. As a group, we have forgotten how to exist in the world.

Instead of looking outward to the world, we have dropped our gaze and have let go our message of grace and hope, replacing it with a heightened concern to protect the Christian community that has taken years to cultivate. In our own way, we are busy pursuing the same thing as the culture around us: a community that feeds back to us our own views about the world. We can almost completely avoid any kind of challenge to the Christian worldview. As theologian Miroslav Volf says, “Christian communities, which should be ‘the salt’ of the culture, are too often as insipid as everything around them” (Exclusion and Embrace, p. 39).

This is no longer shelter. This is insularity. And it is the first by-product of fear. And let’s be real: the world is scary. Turn on the news and you’ll see what I mean. There’s no point sugar-coating it. The world is scary and we all have moments where we’d rather be with people we love and trust instead of pursuing activities and friendships with people who exist outside our Christian communities.

The second by-product of fear is retreat. When we are afraid, we are less likely to engage with people outside our circle of safety. People are risky. They can hurt and wound us, as much as they can delight and enthral us. We are much more likely to retreat into our communities, our families, even our very selves when we are afraid.

But shelter is not finally found in the Christian community, even though there can be great comfort derived from the company of the Christian family. We who trust in the risen Lord Jesus have true shelter in the shade of the cross. Shelter is found in the irrevocable love of God, poured out for you and me.

We are free to permeate the society in which we live, without sacrificing our safety or our shelter. Our identity is not secured by the physical walls of the church, even though the people found within those walls often bring us great joy and comfort. Most people in the world are endlessly interesting; with unexpected things to teach us about this world we live in, but we’ll never know that if we don’t step out and live in the world. You’d be surprised what you can learn from those who are not like you.

Image: zeevveez

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