“Do Unto Others” Study Guide: Intentionality in the Life of the Church
Week 4: Church – Intentionality in the Life of the Church
“Do unto others as you would have them do to you,” that rule we were all taught as kids, sounds like such a simple principle to follow. But if most people pledge allegiance to that rule, why does it seem like we live in a society marked by spiteful division? Why do we struggle so much with loving our neighbors? As we move through the Do Unto Others Kindness Campaign, we’ll live into an intentional season of growing in kindness towards our neighbors. Our hope is that, through this campaign, we’re sending a message to our community that kindness is the most important behavior we can exhibit as we seek to de-polarize our communities and love our neighbors. Use this four-week study guide to explore the scriptural call to bless others, examining the Bible’s rich meaning behind the simple rule and how to model it in our day-to-day lives.
Focus Scripture: John 4:4-42
Prayer: God, as we conclude this study, we ask you for the courage to be intentional with those around us. Send us to the places we avoid. Love us so that we can love others. Give us the perception we need to see friends in enemies and to choose new paths. Amen.
Lesson: In the last session we examined the dual call to love both those outside our communities and inside our communities. Many Christians, we suggested, can accept the challenge to be kind to outsiders, but struggle to show kindness to other Christians. This complexity leads to a strange acceptance of the principle to be kind to all, but also a subtle dismissal of the same principle when it comes to those who claim our same identity but practice it differently.
In this final session, we turn our attention to the call of the Church. We will bring together the themes we have looked at thus far: chaos, fear, disagreement, and love. Jesus will show us that all those words go together best when they are brought under the banner of intentionality.
In John 4, Jesus was in route to Galilee from the Judean countryside. Between his starting point and his destination was Samaria, an area of land inhabited by a group known as the Samaritans. The Samaritans came about through a complicated history. After Assyria and Babylon exiled many of the Israelites as part of their conquest, those who escaped exile fled to the mountains of Samaria. As time passed, those people intermarried with local tribes and cultures. These Samaritans even developed their own form of Judaism, which they thought to be the true form. For all these reasons, most Jews detested the Samaritans and wanted nothing to do with them.
In John 4:4, the text says that Jesus had to pass through Samaria. Geographically, the route makes sense. What is not revealed, though, is that most pious Jews went out of the way to avoid the Samaritans. They would bypass the route by going East and then North, a significant detour. For Jesus to take the Samaritan Way was to intentionally choose a way others preferred not go.
Furthermore, Jesus not only put himself in a region others avoided, he also associated with people whom others dared not associate. In John 4, Jesus dialogues with a Samaritan woman – a shock to Jesus’ disciples. The woman approaches the same well by which Jesus is resting, and he asks her for a drink of water. This woman, too, was surprised that Jesus was talking to her, citing the differences between their people. However, Jesus extends the gift of living water to her – the abundant life he came to offer, not just to his own people, but those different than him, too. She then told her whole village, and everyone there came to embrace what Jesus had done.
This account in John is important for us because Jesus had to intentionally go out of his way in order to treat others the same way he would want to be treated. And the people to whom he went – the Samaritans – bore the traits of both outsiders (they were not “traditionally” Jewish) and insiders (they were still Jewish).
It begs the question for us today as to what impact Christians will make if we never associate with people whom we disagree, or if we never mingle with people of other cultures. Sure, we can all adhere to a principle of kindness, but what good does that do if we never have to engage that kindness with different people? What good does it do if we never leave our safe communities? Or as Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, “If you love only those who love you, what reward do you have?” (Matt 5:46).
Many of our churches have become ideological silos. Congregations can become places in which everyone believes the same thing. As soon as a pastor or fellow congregant introduces a different perspective or idea that creates conflict, it is easy and common to simply switch congregations. In pursuit of unity, we have instead pursued uniformity. Coupled with the intense individualistic pressures on our lives – busyness, technology, isolated social media connections – many Christians have created a personalized world in which they never have to rub shoulders with people who think differently or come from a different background.
What sense does it make to do unto others as we would have them do unto us if our worlds are entirely curated?
At the end of our journey together in this study, we must face a seemingly obvious reality: it takes intentionality to love well. Radical Christian love that makes an impact for the Kingdom will not just happen, and it definitely won’t come about by never leaving our enclaves. We can follow instead the model of Jesus, who went out of his way to find people different than him. Sure, he had his own efforts back home, and those efforts were important, too. But in his lifetime, he practiced love intentionally, meaning he actually got up and walked to the places in which different people lived. After his resurrection, he then commissioned his disciples to go unto all the world to share the message – to take a detour away from their home towns.
Churches today can change the world with kindness by intentionally associating with people outside their ideological and cultural borders, in addition to learning to get along within their own village. Our homogenous congregations are not the test of how well we love; that will require going to the very people we avoid. What good does it do the Kingdom of God if we only give ourselves the chance to be nice to people exactly like us in our like-minded congregations? Is it any surprise that so many of us sit in the comfort of those congregations and hurl insults at other people, all the while pledging allegiance to a message of love?
As the Church, we can work together. We can love together – both in the broader Christian family and outside of it. We can identify places in our communities that we typically avoid (maybe it’s a “rough” part of town or an area of poverty). We can do business – literal economic business – with people who lose opportunity to establishments in “nice” parts of town. But we can also look at the church just down the road… that church with the name that sounds so strange to us, with the message board that makes us cringe.
It’s all these people we ought to see when we hear that command, to do unto others how we would have them do to us.
The world is in chaos, but God calls us to be a blessing, just like Abraham and Sarah.
We have an opportunity to push through anxiety, trusting that some fear is just perceived.
First we might look to the people in our own villages so that we can invite others to a healthy home.
And then we can get up and go places otherwise ignored. Calling, Fear, Gospel, Church. — The Holy Spirit is more than capable of sending you on that journey. It may be more important now than ever.
Questions to Consider:
Describe your church community with no judgment. Do most people agree on big issues? Do people come from similar backgrounds?
What would it look like for your church to go places that are usually avoided in your community? Is your church doing this already
What might the Church miss out on if congregations are made of people who all think the same?
Think of an example from your life in which you intentionally went somewhere you didn’t feel comfortable going. Why did you go? What was the impact?
How do you balance the call to love those outside the community and those inside the community?
*This study guide was adapted from Cultivating Kindness through Scripture and Community: A Four-Week “Do Unto Others” Study for Adult Small Groups