People are tired. They’re tired of working for unappreciative bosses (supervisors, teachers, pastors, etc.), tired of wasting time on repetitive tasks, tired of having to work a job to make a meager living. People are tired of the way things are — and they wish things could change.

I’ve had the chance to talk to a large number of people as part of the process of planting this new church. Many seem interested in the new church — but often because of the simple fact that they’re tired of their old church. (Lots of them have in fact been through several churches in their past.) They’re tired of “not getting fed,” tired of “too many glitzy programs,” or even tired of “spending so much money on staff and buildings.”

You know what I’m tired of? I’m tired of lost people going to hell.

Boy, that sounds self-righteous, doesn’t it? I apologize for that. In the “blog world,” one has to use rough, attention-grabbing language every now and then. But in this case, it’s true.

When people ask me why I’m planting a new church, I tell them that I have joined with my brothers and sisters to form a core team that believes that the only way we have a chance of communicating the gospel to a large (and growing) portion of our city’s population is to form a new church that is willing to go out and make relationships with them. These are the folks that will never think of setting foot in a “traditional church.” These are the folks who have either grown up so far from Christianity that they consider it to be a different culture altogether, or who have been part of a church at some point in their lives and vowed never to go back. These are the folks who are part of the emerging crowd in America called “the unreachables.”

So who are they, exactly? They are the people you work with, go to school with, see in the grocery store, pass on the street. They are the people you see in clubs and coffee shops hanging out with their friends. They are the people you see at public meetings expressing an opinion of solidarity about a particular topic. They are the people who know how to love and receive love back from their friends — but make no mistake; they belong to no church, and Christ is not part of their lives. The remarkable thing about these people is that some of them (I believe) understand the concepts of unconditional love and fellowship better than many Christians.

And I’m tired of seeing them get passed over by The Church. I’m tired of using the old “Christian” excuses to not seek these people out and get to know them (oh– they’re so RUDE, and they drink and cuss and promote things like promiscuity and abortion and they think gays are okay, and they’re always bagging the church and Christians. . .)

What would happen if an “unreachable” could truly receive love from a Christian person? In order to receive love from somebody, you have to trust them. You have to believe that they are looking out for your best interests — even if you don’t agree with them. To receive love from somebody means that you understand that your relationship with this person is based on much more than just one topic. It is absolutely possible for an “unreachable” to love a Christian — but the Christian has to truly love them as well.

Too often we seek relationships with lost people for nothing more than to have the opportunity to share Christ with them. If they reject Christ, then we usually shake it off and just move on to the next person. We even “spiritualize” it by quoting Bible verses to ourselves like Matthew 10:14 and such. And I’ve learned that a lost person can small a come-on like that from a mile away.

So what if our relationships with people didn’t depend on whether they accept or reject Christ? What if we can seek to get to know people because they are people and worthy to be loved and sought out. We can still make sharing Christ the #1 priority, but we have to do it in a way that communicates that we will still love them and seek them out regardless of where they end up with Christ. If they reject Christ, hopefully it won’t mean that they also reject us. That will hopefully lead to a second chance to share, and a third, and a fourth. . .

We’re in this for the long haul. Will we get tired? Probably — but I hope that our tiredness of seeing lost people go to hell outweighs our tiredness of seeking to build genuine relationships. Because the promise is that we will get loved back when the relationship is true, and I hope that we never grow tired of that.