Cigarette Smoke in the church

On Tuesday nights when I go to Disciple, our church smells like cigarette smoke. Why? Because on Tuesday nights our church hosts the local AA group and the room down the hall is filled with people who never set foot in the church otherwise. I love the fact that our church smells like cigarette smoke on Tuesday nights, but at the same time it bothers me. Why does the church only smell like smoke on Tuesdays? Why not Wednesdays? Or *gasp* Sunday morning? See, here's what gets me...all week long our church is used by a variety of community groups...AA, a quilting group, a ESL group, but as all these groups make their way through our building, we do very little to engage them. They use our space, and we're proud of ourself that we let some outside people in the building, but we don't do anything show them anything of the people and the spirit that makes NUMC what it is. What would it look like to run Celebrate/Recovery through our building? What would it look like for my friend Adam who is a teacher and a fluent Spanish speaker to help teach many of the immigrants English and offer them Jesus? What would it look like for us to run Angel Food through our building and offer low cost, high quality food to people in the area? Why don't we smell like smoke all the time??

I bet Jesus smelled like smoke, because Jesus hung out with some smoky people....I sure hope that we do, too...That Jesus will call us to a new level of smokiness that drives our custodian crazy...