“One day I was walking through a quiet neighborhood. I noticed a church building, or at least, I thought it was a church building. I wasn’t quite sure…What was throwing me off was that it didn’t have a sign out front and there was no information on the door,” begins Ryan Ahlgrim, pastor of First Mennonite Church of Richmond, Virginia. Ahlgrim asked a neighboring pastor and he verified that it was a church. This pastor told Ahlgrim, “They don’t want any visitors…They don’t want people who look different, live different, or believe different.” Ahlgrim says, “Let’s be honest. Maybe that’s what most of our churches are like.” Today’s sermon from Acts 8:26-40 challenges us to think about how welcoming our churches truly are to those who “look different, live different, or believe different.”
