Comfort Zone: Stretching Beyond Your LimitsSample

Community is a good thing. We are wired to spend our lives surrounded by other people. When that doesn’t happen, we miss a part of what it means to live fully. It’s difficult to find a worldview anywhere that disagrees with the idea that we need each other.

The Christian faith affirms this idea, but then adds a unique twist. It says that our means for having a fulfilling life is not Christian community. From a Christian point of view, community is not an end in itself. The purpose of Christian community is to function as a vehicle through which God pours love into the world. When it’s ignored, Christian community doesn’t work—at least not in the way God intended.

When a Christian community detaches itself from what God is doing in the world, it begins to grow stale. This could happen to a small group, a medium-sized church, or a large denomination. When it focuses only on itself, it starts to lose its reason for existence. At North Point, we call this an insider focus. An insider focus is one of the most common “spiritual illnesses” found within Christian community.

Like all illnesses, it has some symptoms. You’ll know your Christian community is probably suffering from an insider focus when:
• Little things become inordinately important.
• Decisions are made based on the “needs” of the church.
• A desire to “go deeper” becomes more important than the desire to love and serve those outside the community.
• Things start to get a little boring.

You should know that every Christian community occasionally experiences some or all of the above. However, if the above list begins to describe the way things usually are in your community, then there may be a problem.

The good news is that the problem of an insider focus has a simple solution. It consists of figuring out how to love and serve those outside of your Christian community. That being said, while the solution is simple, it’s not necessarily easy. A church that has maintained an insider focus for a long time may struggle to change its focus to something outside of itself. But no worries! God is all about that kind of change. You should ask him for some help. He likes to answer those kinds of prayers. And he often answers them through the efforts of people just like you.
 
John Hambrick
Director of Starting Point