If you’ve been with us at Park over the last couple of weeks, you know we’ve been doing a series of messages called “Community Agreements.” The community agreements are set in the wider context of our strategic priority of Welcome and Belonging. More to the point, they provide a way to live into the ideal of welcome and belonging as a person and as a church (discipleship, if you will).
We’ve looked at Do No Harm, Do Good, and this week, I’ll wrap it up with the third agreement, “Stay in love with God.” I hope you’ll join us. And, if you missed the messages on the first two agreements, you can find them on our YouTube page.
Today, I’ve been thinking more about the community agreement to do good, which Pastor Annie Taylor preached about last Sunday. As she mentioned, the fully involved version of doing good is this: As you have opportunity, do good of every possible sort, and, as far as possible, to all people.
Doing good reminds me of something Desmond Tutu once said. It is not only about doing good but also about something else. “We are made for goodness,” he writes. “We are made for love. We are made for friendliness. We are made for togetherness. We are made for all of the beautiful things that you and I know. We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders. All are welcome: black, white, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, gay, straight, all, all, all. We all belong to this family, this human family, God’s family.”
Well said!
We do good because God has made us for such a thing. I wonder what it would be like to own that — to own that goodness personally, to own it as a church, to own it in the everyday relationships we’re part of, to own it when we’re tempted to go down a road that is, well, not so good. What would it be like to enter each day with the sacred awareness that God has made us for goodness despite all the not-so-good things going on in the world?
Much love,
Pastor Gregg
P.S. In last week’s Weekly Word, I offered you a prayer based on Romans 12:9-21. It can help us make doing no harm, doing good, and staying in love with God a part of our spiritual awareness and journey. If you’d like to access it, just click here.
