People or Churches

Too many times we get more impassioned about what happens to our building, which we call church, than we do about the people we are called to minister to. Here is a good story taken from July 09 Sojourners magazine by Alexis Torres-Fleming

We organized a march (around drug dealers and crack houses) one beautiful Sunday afternoon in November. A couple of hundred people showed up, and two weeks later drug dealers, in retaliation, torched our church. I went to the site and found a sea of people in the church weeping over a broken statue of the Blessed Mother, and weeping over the church. There were many more people there than had shown up for the march, and suddenly God said to me, “Why are you crying over this? I don’t live here. My real sanctuary is burnt every single day, desecrated in the bodies and minds and spirits of the poorest of the poor who live right outside these doors. When are you going to cry about that?”

What is more important to us our building or the people we are called to minister to?
Where do we invest our money, in building or in reaching the people we are called to?
Where do we invest our time, in the building or with the people?