“The world can do almost anything as well as or better than the church,” says Gordon MacDonald. “You need not be a Christian to build houses, feed the hungry, or heal the sick. There is only one thing the world cannot do. It cannot offer grace.” MacDonald has put his finger on the church’s single most important contribution…
Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people. I think back to who I was—resentful, wound tight with anger, a single hardened link in a long chain of ungrace learned from family and church. Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace.
I do so because I know, more surely than I know anything, that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have ever felt comes solely from the grace of God. I yearn for the church to become a nourishing culture of that grace.”
Gordon MacDonald as cited by Philip Yancey in What’s So Amazing About Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997) 15, 42.
I spent this weekend teaching and preaching at Trinity EFC in Skowhegan, Maine, where the Skowhegan Miracle Homeless Shelter was founded by Pastor Richard Berry by faith and a fervency to live out the gospel and extend God’s love to the homeless and hurting.
Few churches dispense grace like this church of 60 members (that is not a typo) where they are on pace to see 300 people come to faith in 2013 alone in this “Shelter by Jesus” (that is not a typo either). I feel like I have been living in the world of Acts with them this weekend.