Any community filled with people who are callously suspicious of one another or of newcomers, will turn out to be a very ugly community.
We see this kind of ugliness irrupt in the first community on earth immediately after Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. They distrusted each other and they distrusted God. They blamed, accused, and displayed a kind of callousness in their relationships in order to cover their own shame and sense of loss. In their pride, they lost the humility to consider others better than themselves and to curiously seek to know the heart of God and to know each other’s hearts.
As a people being transformed by the gospel of God’s redeeming grace, Red Tree promotes beauty, not ugliness in our community life. One way this core value will blossom to reality is when the people of Red Tree repent from a calloused, “know-it-all” approach to people and instead take a curious approach.
This means the hard work of getting to know one another and understanding why a person believes or lives the way they do by spending time together and curiously asking questions. This means the humble work of admitting that we actually do not have the ability to size people up because of the way they dress, the bumper sticker on their car, the place where they live or what their family looks like.
It means obeying the heavy biblical command to consider others better than ourselves and to realize the possibility of being enriched by them as we learn from them, or mesmerized by them as we learn about them and the road they’ve traveled. No place on earth should be as curious and un-calloused as the Christian church.