The Church as Refuge

Today's Scripture

Psalm 68:5-6 — "Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. God settles the solitary in a home; he leads out the prisoners to prosperity, but the rebellious dwell in a parched land."

Galatians 6:2 — "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ."

1 John 3:18 — "Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth."

The Big Idea

A church's convictions about life are only as believable as its waiting arms. If we say every child is precious and every mother matters, then the church must become the safest place in town for a woman in a crisis pregnancy — safer than the clinic, safer than the internet, safer than silence. Today is about what that actually takes.

Reflection

The God who takes people in

When God introduces himself in Psalm 68, he does not lead with his power, though he has it, or his glory, though it fills the heavens. He leads with this: Psalm 68:5-6 — "Father of the fatherless and protector of widows... God settles the solitary in a home."

Think about who is on that list. The fatherless — children without a man to provide and protect. Widows — women the economy of the ancient world had no place for. The solitary — people with nobody. God puts his own name next to the very people whose situations look most hopeless.

David says it even more personally in Psalm 27:10 — "For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in." Take me in. That is door-opening, room-making, place-at-the-table language. It is who God is.

So here is the test of any community that carries his name: does it take people in? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a prison cell near the end of his life, sketched his hope for the church of the future:

"The Church is the Church only when it exists for others... The Church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Not dominating. Helping and serving. A church that exists for itself — its buildings, its reputation, its comfort — has stopped being what Jesus founded, no matter what its sign says.

A girl in the parking lot

Picture a Sunday morning. In the far corner of your church parking lot, a nineteen-year-old sits in her car with the engine off. She took the test on Tuesday. She has not told her parents. The father of the baby stopped answering her texts. She has driven here because some leftover instinct from childhood says church is where you go when you are drowning.

She is watching people walk in — the families, the diaper bags, the easy laughter — and she is doing the math every desperate person does: If they knew, would they still want me?

Whether she opens that car door depends on what kind of community is inside. Galatians 6:2 tells us what kind it is supposed to be: "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." Bearing is a weight word. It means the load actually moves off her shoulders and onto ours — rent money, doctor visits, a place to live, someone beside her when she tells her parents, childcare while she finishes school.

And notice what Paul calls this: "the law of Christ." Not extra credit for unusually nice Christians. The law — the family rule of the Lord who bore our burden first. A church can have perfect doctrine and a beautiful building, but if burdens never actually move from one set of shoulders to another, it is breaking the one law Jesus left in his own name.

Be honest about why this matters for the abortion conversation in particular. Research into why women seek abortions keeps finding the same things: not enough money, no support from the father, fear of losing a job or an education, no one to help. In other words — burdens. A woman rarely walks into a clinic because of a philosophy. She walks in because she is carrying more than one person can carry. Galatians 6:2 is not a side topic to this plan. It is the strategy.

James will not let us spiritualize this. James 2:15-16 — "If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?" A pamphlet and a promise to pray are "be warmed and filled" in modern dress. John says the same: 1 John 3:18 — "let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth."

John Chrysostom — a famous preacher in the fourth century whose name means "golden mouth" — aimed this straight at comfortable congregations:

"Do you wish to honor the body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. Do not pay him homage in the temple clad in silk, only then to neglect him outside where he is cold and ill-clad." — John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew

You cannot decorate the sanctuary and ignore the girl in the parking lot. According to Jesus, she is where he is waiting to be found. And some churches have learned this. They keep a fund for emergency housing. Families in the congregation foster and adopt. Retired women mentor new mothers; men teach young fathers how to be one, sometimes for years past the birth. None of it is glamorous. All of it is Romans 12:13 — "Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality" — with a calendar and a budget attached.

Why she expects judgment instead

But be honest about why she is still sitting in the car. Somewhere along the way, churches earned a reputation: the place where you must have it together. Where pregnancy out of wedlock is whispered about. Where shame is the unofficial second sacrament.

That reputation is a theological failure before it is a public-relations one, because it gets the gospel exactly backwards. Tim Keller compressed the real gospel into one sentence:

"The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

A church that believes that sentence cannot look down on anyone, because nobody in the building got in by being good. Martin Luther's last written words, found on a scrap of paper after he died, said it for all of us:

"We are beggars. This is true." — Martin Luther, Last written note, 1546

A church is one beggar opening the door for another. The moment we forget that, we start sorting sinners into acceptable and unacceptable — and the sorting falls hardest on the sins that show. A pregnancy is visible in a way that pride, gossip, and greed never are. So the nineteen-year-old carries the congregation's whole theology of sin on her body, while the respectable sins sit comfortably in the pews. Bonhoeffer, who wrote a whole book on Christian community, warned what isolation does to a person:

"He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Utterly alone is exactly where shame wants to keep her — and exactly where desperate decisions get made. The community that lets people confess, be known, and stay is doing more to protect life than it realizes. And Bonhoeffer pressed the warning further, to the church tempted to quietly wish its inconvenient people away:

"The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Push away the inconvenient person and you may discover you have pushed away the Lord himself. The frightened girl is not a problem the church manages. She is a knock on the door.

And for her, the deepest fear is being found out — that if anyone knew the whole story, the welcome would end. J.I. Packer answers that fear at its root:

"What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it — the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

God already knows everything — the choices, the circumstances, the parts she has told no one — and his welcome stands. A church becomes a refuge when it learns to know people the way God knows them: fully, and without flinching.

Neither do I condemn you

If you want to see all of this in a single scene, watch Jesus in John 8. A woman is dragged before him — caught in sexual sin, surrounded by religious men holding stones, her shame made into a public spectacle. Jesus stoops, writes in the dust, and one by one the accusers leave.

John 8:10-11 — "Jesus stood up and said to her, 'Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?' She said, 'No one, Lord.' And Jesus said, 'Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.'"

Notice the order. Grace comes first — neither do I condemn you — and only then the call to a new life. The church keeps reversing it: clean up first, then we will accept you. Jesus never did it in that order, and here is why he could not be accused of going soft on sin: the stones she deserved, in a sense, fell on him. At the cross, the only man qualified to condemn took the condemnation instead. That is the gospel — not that sin stopped mattering, but that someone else absorbed its cost.

A church full of people who know that about themselves becomes, almost automatically, a refuge. Its invitation is simply its Lord's: Matthew 11:28 — "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Heavy laden is exactly what the girl in the parking lot is. The question today is whether the people inside the building will say, with their deeds and not just their words, what Jesus says: come.

Going Deeper

Find out — today, not someday — what actually exists in your community for a woman in a crisis pregnancy: a pregnancy resource center, a foster and adoption ministry, an emergency fund at your church. Fifteen minutes of searching will tell you. Then take one concrete step: a donation, a volunteer form, or a single question sent to a church leader — "If a pregnant teenager walked in this Sunday, what is our actual plan?" If the answer is "we don't have one," you may have just found your calling.