GodReflection:
A global shift took place during my lifetime. The world is on the move. In my neighborhood reside multiple nations. There is a sense that the nations are literally within the reach of my hands. I need to pray they are within reach of my heart.
As a twenty-two-year-old youth with training wheels, on my first day in the streets of a foreign country I began a new assignment. It didn’t take long to see 
that I was the oddball in the sea of normal. Everything was different. I mean everything was different. Language, culture, food, transportation, stores, you name it, whatever I encountered, there was no familiarity.
So here I am this morning decades later, in my Texas metropolitan city home with neighbors from all continents and numerous nations. New to both language and culture they must feel like I did when as a young beginner, I arrived as an immigrant resident of São Paulo, Brazil.
When we reflect on Jesus, his church, worship, and the vast cultural differences among our neighbors. We must always be alert to the fact that our comfort zone can be a fence that hides Jesus from new arrivals who reside with us.
As I write this morning, I feel pains of conscience in three areas. Is it possible, as Jesus’ students we might all need to improve how we reflect his image to welcome our new immigrant neighbors as 1) we meet casually, 2) meet intentionally, and 3) provide for them worship places that are warm and inviting?
Casual contact in our city is commonplace. Throughout the routine of daily life, I find that I am in a 
continual encounter with the different.
When I pick up a telephone, go to the store, seek medical care, enter a restaurant, walk on the street, call for house maintenance, or automotive repair; whatever the task, there is a high possibility I will meet someone who doesn’t speak nor act Texan.
As Christians we are to greet difficult accents with warm smiles, empathetic hearts, and loads of compassion. WOW, I still have some room to grow here.
Intentional invitations must increase. Ok, let’s be truthful. Intentional invitation must start. What if we make progress through warm greetings each week with the immigrant neighbor who we meet casually each time we go to buy groceries. Where might an invite to coffee or lunch lead? Wouldn’t that take us out of our comfort zone! WOW, I still have some room to grow here.
Let’s do better in our efforts to provide warm and welcome space to worship the Holy. Some years ago, on this blog I used furniture as an analogy to examine the warmth of our worship space. I told the following story.
As my young parents worked to get a foothold in life, their newly formed family moved through four starter houses prior to the purchase of a wood framed military army barracks. They would turn this skeletal house with a roof, a wood floor and four outside walls into a solid home.
Interior walls were constructed, paint was applied, landscape evolved, and piece by piece furniture was acquired, all coated with love and filled with welcome to make up the familiarity I took for granted. The well-maintained house still stands out in the old neighborhood. The table, chairs, folding couch, and bookcase bed headboards that I remember are long gone. It is no longer my home. Someone moved in their furniture.
I find the changed furniture analogy helps me understand the worship life of being church. Some churches are like homes where grandparents have lived for multiple decades. They are comfortable places for the occupants who have lived there over the years. However, for newly invited youth and our new neighbors from other nations, the furniture seems stale and out of date. It’s fine to visit but who would want to live there?
So here I am trying to feel at home in Jesus’ family that always evolves. I discover to my discomfort, that younger generations continue to update with new furniture. New furniture isn’t my furniture. However, I find nothing in Scripture that support my preference to toss the new furniture out brought in by new occupants.
What I refer to is not disobedience, dishonor, or defiance to The Holy. Rather, too often my traditional “holy furniture” does not invite those of other nations and those of a younger age to be at home.
Surely, it must be a sin to make Jesus boring and to hide the joy that surrounds God’s gift of free grace. It is far easier for me to be a participant in the comfort of the stale and outdated that
keeps newer generations and other cultures from finding Jesus.
It is far harder than I want to recognize for me to re-decorate with furnishings that make a multi-cultural world from diverse nations and assorted cultures feel at home so that together we might praise the Father.
Jesus, the cross, and the inspired text, are my north star to navigate my task of loving God and my neighbor. Should my definition of spiritual furniture, rather than the God’s Holy presence, be what is most important to me when I assemble with His children for family worship?
Is it possible for me to become more like Jesus even as others changed my furniture?
The church survived many centuries prior to our current definition of music and the way we like to hear our sermons. I suspect if we allow the Spirit to indwell us and guide us, the Holy has the power to cloth the Good News in its original joy and freshness for both the young and the diverse. Let us not hide God’s gift behind our old furniture preferences.
I look with great anticipation to the time when furniture will be eternal and all of God’s children find that His presence makes the furniture secondary. Once again, I find that right Jesus makes right doctrine.
As I close today’s post (way over my wordcount) I want you to know my intent is not to make you or I feel shame or guilt as we deal with change that comes with life on God’s globe. Rather, my aim is to encourage each of us to reaffirm to Jesus our desire to do a better job at his challenge to love all our neighbors as God has shown love to us.
Stay tuned.
Dr. Gary J. Sorrells
A GodReflection on The Foreigner Among Foreigners—Maybe I Should Be The Friend?
God Reflection 
Very good thoughts Gary and truly pertinent. Change is not easy for any of us, nor is it easy to welcome the stranger. Yet, that is clearly what God expects of us individually and as His church, just as you so ably pointed out. Thanks for helping us focus on what God expects and for encouraging us to meet His expectations!
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