To be safely gathered in

We were out for morning coffee. There weren’t any unoccupied tables, so we joined a lady sitting alone. We soon got into conversation and passed a pleasant half hour. At some point ‘church’ cropped up (we were sitting 50 yards from an attractive, 15th century church building). I mentioned that I had frequently attended there and the lady told us that she had a friend who went to the nearby Methodist Church. ‘They do lots of good work there – they fill up shoeboxes with things for children who don’t have much’.

I suspect that for many people the notion is that church is akin to other socially active organisations like The Lions or Rotary Club but with the difference that God is the patron. For others, church will bring to mind buildings, religious ceremonies and God-type things that they’d prefer to keep at arm’s length!

The word ‘church’ has, at its root, the meaning of an ‘assembly or gathering of called out people’. This hits the nail on the head. Church is a term describing a community of diverse people, each of whom has known the call (or summons) of Jesus to come to him and be brought together with other similarly called people.

Jesus uses, by illustration, a farmer gathering in his harvest where people are the wheat. He uses a similar farming analogy with himself being the good Shepherd who is out calling his wandering sheep and gathering them into his flock. According to Jesus, that which isn’t harvested is chaff, which farmers consider as rubbish to be burned. Sheep that are outside the fold are vulnerable to rustlers and wild animals.

Consider these warm words taken from the Gospel of Matthew: ‘When he [Jesus] saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.”’

The workers are those who proclaim Jesus as the promised Messiah and are indeed relatively few, so I’d say listen up when you hear them!

In this harvest season are you ready to be safely gathered into it like wheat into the barn or sheep into the fold?’