The World Is Our Parish

            A couple of weeks ago, our parish facebook page got a “like” from a man in New Delhi, India.  If you’re reading this, my friend, welcome!

            Maybe it shows my age, or maybe it shows that I’m kind of a hick at heart, but I can’t get over the awesomeness of this.  It is amazing to me that a kid who has lived his whole life in small towns in South Dakota can preach a sermon or write a blog post, fire it through the internet, and have it read by somebody in New Delhi, India.

            It makes me realize, yet again, how, in this day and age, we need to re-think exactly what our ministry is and who it is we’re reaching.  It’s easy for us to start thinking of ourselves as just people in little churches in small towns.  When we think of ourselves that way, we can think, well, there’s really not much our church can do to make an impact on anything or anyone. 

That may not cause us to lose our faith, but what it can do is cause us to lose our enthusiasm.  We can lose our desire to go out and take chances.  We can lose our willingness to do new things, to innovate, to take risks to bring people to Christ.  We can start thinking of our ministry as being limited to those who are already within our walls, rather than thinking about all the people we might be able to reach who are beyond our walls, maybe beyond our community, maybe even half-way around the world.

The thing is that reaching beyond the immediate community should be something that all of us, as United Methodists, do instinctively.  It comes from John Wesley.  Wesley got into trouble with his church, the Anglican Church, because he would go beyond the borders of his parish to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ.  When he was criticized for that, he famously responded, “The world is my parish.”

As United Methodists, the world is still our parish.  That’s true whether we’re in big cities or small towns.  It’s true whether we’re in a big church or a small church. 

After all, after Jesus was crucified, all of Christianity was one very small church.  Basically, it was eleven people.  If those people had decided they couldn’t do much, or that they should just focus on the people they already had in the town they were in, nothing would ever have happened.

Jesus told us to go and spread the gospel.  He did not limit that to the people in our immediate vicinity.  He told us to go and make disciples of all nations.  That’s what those eleven people in the first Christian church decided to do.  That’s what we’re still supposed to do.

The world is our parish.  That’s as true for the Wheatland Parish as it is for any other parish.  Let’s keep looking for ways to go and make disciples of all nations, just like Jesus told us to do!