Reflections on a Week in “Sin City”
“Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; Remove the evil of your deeds from My sight. Cease to do evil, Learn to do good; Seek justice, Reprove the ruthless, Defend the orphan, Plead for the widow.” – Isaiah 1:16-17
I just finished up a week-long mission trip to Las Vegas, Nevada where myself and 12 others helped with a church plant named Summerlin Community Baptist Church. Vegas is known as “Sin City” because of the widespread access to sin. It is interesting that even people who don’t believe in Jesus Christ or the need for the forgiveness of sin view Las Vegas as “Sin City”. It would be easy to spend the majority of my blog in crying out against the great “evils” that are readily found in Las Vegas. However, as I reflect upon the week spent in Las Vegas, my thoughts are taken in a different direction.
Rather than feeling the spiritual affliction that is so often associated with Las Vegas, I was refreshed and continue to be refreshed by the community of believers in the church in Las Vegas. The other members of the team and myself were given host families from the church to stay with. These families went above and beyond all that was asked of them. As we continued to interact with the members of the church throughout the week, the depth of the church’s love for the body of Christ was further revealed.
The only other church in which I have witnessed such depth of love was in Siena, Italy. Siena, like Las Vegas, was a very “spiritually dark” place and was a place of hard soil in terms of sharing the gospel. It continues to amaze me at how churches in some of the darkest places in the world also produce some of the strongest believers in terms of community.
Many church “strategists” speak of unity and community as if they are something that must be forced by the body of believers rather than recognizing it as the natural overflow of the sanctifying work of the Spirit of God. As the Holy Spirit works within the life of individual believers within the context of a community/church the natural result ought to be a spirit of unity and love among the believers.
Might it be that churches in many areas lack unity and community because it’s members aren’t serving alongside one another in the trenches of life? Are we too busy fighting over the color of the carpet that we have forgotten the purpose of the church? Hopefully, we can take the lessons learned from churches such as Summerlin and Siena and realize that the unity of believers is something that naturally happens in the process of sanctification. If community is not found in the natural interactions of the members of a church it will never be found on the back page of our church bulletins.
Leave a Reply