Excerpted From
Find Your People
by Jennie Allen
Building the Kingdom Together
If you are a follower of Jesus, you truly do have a significant purpose attached to every seemingly mundane part of your life. There is a weight to every human we see on the street, at the playground, at the store, in your apartment complex.
S. Lewis said it this way: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”
We carry weighty purpose into every interaction we have, and every human carries in them a weight of glory. When we understand this idea, we love differently. We view our daily work and encounters differently.
A friend who is a pastor in the underground church told me, “We have a saying in the Middle East that you don’t know someone until you’ve gone on a trip with them and you’ve eaten with them. It’s so true. The camaraderie. You don’t see that in the West. When, for example, COVID-19 hit the Middle East, me and the leaders all hunkered down in one house. The twenty of us with kids. You really bond when that happens.”
He continued, “True discipleship doesn’t happen out there; it happens in a home. True discipleship isn’t something you do once a week. It’s what you do every day because that’s when you get to know people. It’s when you’re with them during the good times and the bad times. When they’re sick and when they’re healthy. That’s what builds true family. The blood of Christ makes us family, but we need to experience it together every day.”
On mission together. Making disciples in our ordinary moments.
God built a longing inside each of us to be about something other than our own individual success. We’re going to be in heaven together forever with the people we love, so our goal in connecting isn’t just personal satisfaction, but to see people saved before Jesus returns.
If you want good friends, then run a race together, build a house together, cook a meal together, and do it all while working together for the greatest mission a human can have: giving God away.
It isn’t good for anyone to be alone and also isn’t good for man (or woman) to be idle! In the beginning and before the Fall, God gave us each other and then He gave us actual real-life, get-your-hands-dirty work to do.
Alone we want to escape or cope, but in community we help each other do hard things.
I am about to get up in your business—or God’s Word is, anyway. Here is what the apostle Paul said in 2 Thessalonians:
“We hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work.”
In other words? Get busy!
I asked my pastor friend why the Church in the West has lost the sense of camaraderie and connectedness that characterizes his community in the Middle East. He said, “Because the West is all about individualism, convenience, and being comfortable. Discipleship is inconvenient, uncomfortable, and very messy.”
My friend Ann said it this way: “I want to die working beside people I love with dirt under my fingernails.” Dirt under our fingernails, building a garden that goes on forever. Not a bad way to live.
Let’s get back to the simple way of following Jesus and making disciples. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just tell somebody about your God. Choose the line with the cashier instead of the self-checkout line, look her in the eyes, and talk with her. Put family and people back in your everyday life. And together fight back against this individualistic culture that has intoxicated us into thinking that convenience and personal achievement equal happiness, because they don’t.
Our time on earth is short. Our mission is crucial.
We have to get back to building the kingdom, messily, dirt under our fingernails—together.
Excerpted from FIND YOUR PEOPLE: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World © 2022 by Jennie Allen. Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.