The most powerfully prophetic thing we can do is build for a stranger's sanctuary.

Maybe you’ve been here before; it’s midnight - you’ve just travelled 11 hours from Florida, your kids are starting to wake up, and your door is locked. No big deal; surely it’s one of these 5,000 keys on the key ring. You try every single key, jiggling the lock like Houdini racing against time for the sake of life, as if there were a secret method to make the key miraculously work. No such luck. You call your neighbor with the only spare key; they show up in their pajamas and let you into YOUR house.

It is one thing to rely on a neighbor with a key, but have you ever relied on a stranger to let you in and make a sanctuary? Was it a time where you needed an emergency restroom? A time when the sky opened up with torrential rain and someone offered you a spot under their umbrella? How about a time when you’re running to gate B12 for a late boarding of a flight, and suddenly your toddler decides her legs no longer work, and a stranger carries your luggage so you can carry your toddler?

It’s funny, we think sanctuaries are buildings — but sanctuaries are solidarity with God.

In ancient Israel, as the Israelites wandered in the desert, the tabernacle served as a place of safety and comfort.

Set up.
Torn down.
Set up.
Torn down.

It was here, in that mobile sanctuary, that wanderers and strangers found their true identity - a home. Inside a sanctuary, the empire’s judicial justice loses its jurisdiction; there are no insiders and outsiders, only servants alongside servants. It’s a refuge for wanderers, painstakingly built as they wander.

Ancient civilizations operated on a quid-pro-quo basis: “I’ll bring you your spare key at 11 pm, but know that you’re going to owe me one” (In the ancient world, the “owe you one” was an introduction to someone higher on the socio/cultural ladder). This is the context of 2 Kings 4, where we read a Shunammite woman physically added a room onto her house for the wandering prophet Elisha. She didn’t merely clear space on her floor; she physically built a room. Her home was now his home too. I have come to find, through the leadership of the Shunammite woman, that...

Creating space means clearing a schedule, while making room means building a sanctuary.

When Elisha tried to tip the scales back to transaction by offering connections to the king, her response cut right through it: “I have a home amongst my people.”

How often are we guilted into doing things in churches? Churches have become so dependent upon volunteers to function that they’ve forgotten the larger paradigm of sanctuary building - giving away the keys for people to be owners and co-builders; “I have a home amongst my people.”

The church doesn’t need volunteers just to keep a religious institution surviving. After all, we’ve never been called to survive. In fact, this very well might be our demise. Instead, Jesus invites us to discover cornerstones, builders of the church, and feeders of sheep. Volunteers fill a rotation; builders physically build a sanctuary. Churches need to disciple individuals whose faith is so rooted and real that they see Christ himself when they look at the exhausted stranger on the porch, rather than viewing them as a burden. If we do that, then something powerful will happen in the church. People will be unleashed, owning the faith they once consumed for profit.

Holy things happen when we recognize the divine in our midst.

And when you realize it is Christ standing in the rain, fumbling for some keys... you don’t just volunteer to hold an umbrella and clear some space on the floor - my mama taught me better…

You build a roof.