The Genuine Conversion of the Unchurched Social Misfit

What do you say to someone when a member of their family dies? Or maybe a better question is: what can you say? I found myself without words a few weeks ago when Janet’s aunt died in a car accident. Janet is one of the members of our church. I could tell she was broken up, because as she cleaned the front walk of our church (she works for us cleaning the church) you could see her fighting to hold back the tears. “I guess I just need to be strong,” she muttered almost unintelligibly. The accident was a terrible thing. Her aunt, who basically raised her like a daughter, had lost control of a car, drove over the side of a ravine and drowned. What do you say to a person when something like that happens? I guess the only good answer is that you cannot say anything. There are not magic words you can share to help ease the pain. Most likely it is going to hurt for a long time and leave a scar that may never completely heal. I found myself without words to share with Janet in this time of hurt. The only thing that I could do, which was probably the best thing I could do at the time, is stop looking for magic words and just cry with her.

Janet has an interesting story. Many of you know that for a little over two years Angie and I have been pastors of a church here in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It has been hard work but now we are starting to grow at the rate we hoped for in the beginning. One of the things that surprised me is how many people from other churches flocked to our church when we first started. I guess one of the reasons was because we were new and our message was different then many of the other churches in town. Many people felt they were to congregate with us despite our encouraging them not to switch churches.

Now if you know anything about us we love reaching lost people. Sometimes I wish I had a secular job just to be around more unsaved people. We believe that some people will decide to congregate with us because they feel God is telling them but there are plenty of unsaved people in our city that don’t attend anywhere. In the middle of all of this starting of the church we kind of got hungry for real genuine conversions.

When I came to the Lord I was a junior higher that had very little experience in church. I could probably count the times I had attended a church services on one hand. I was pretty much an unchurched social misfit. Unchurched because I had hardly been to church. A social misfit because I did not know how to fit into normal church culture. So when our neighbors started filling up their station wagon carting all of us to church it was a different experience to say the least. We did not know when to stand, when to sit, what was tithing or even what was the difference between the New Testament and the Old Testament. I can still remember one Sunday when all of us had gotten new hats that were in style at the time and wore them to church. Everyone looked at us strangely because, of course, everyone (except us I guess) knows men don’t wear hats in church! They even tried to explain the reasons to us but it did not make sense to us so we just keep wearing them.

Although we were unchurched social misfits the saving factor for us was that we had a sincere desire to know God. Church culture was foreign to us but a loving God was some how attractive to us. So in a short amount of time we started giving our lives for the Lord and here we are today. I laugh as I look back at how we were because no one would have picked us for the church’s dream team but man did we love God. We were illiterates when it came to church culture. We socially disqualified ourselves because we did not know how to act in church. We broke all of the unwritten church protocols. All we had going for us was we were genuine converts. My first church had a lot of grace for us. We were born and raised in that small local church.

I mentioned that the story of Janet is an interesting story because the other day, before the accident, my wife was talking with her asking how she came to the Lord and to her surprise Janet said with a smile on her face, “I came to the Lord in this church. I had been attending church for about a month and one day when I heard the alter call it just made sense. I understood that God loved me and wanted to have a relationship with me and I just went down front and gave my life to Jesus.”

Wow! Just hearing that testimony put enough gasoline in my encouragement motor for a few months. To think that our church could be considered the intersection where a person came face to face with the knowledge that God loved them and wanted to have a relationship them. The place where they can look back and say, “that was the moment that my life was changed forever. That was the place that I met God.”

I guess since we have become pastors of this Bolivian church we have a wonderful opportunity. We get to celebrate the good events with our Bolivian congregation and cheer when the good times come. We also have the uncomfortable but still blessing to be able to cry with them as the tough times come. In the middle of both these extremes there is the satisfaction that someone met God as a result of something we have been able to build.