19 days into Advent and I feel like it’s time for HNAC Alison to make an appearance. That’s my hypothetically not a Christian self.

Who, let’s face it, is just me unfiltered.

HNAC Alison would be outraged by what I wrote yesterday.

“You are judged for not having children?! This is why I’m never coming to church.”

I think HNAC Alison would herself be childless and would enter a church with the goal of peppering with questions the first unsuspecting married, non-working mother she could find:

“So do you have a roof over your head? Eat food? Wear clothes? Yes, yes and yes, right? Of course. So who pays for that? Your husband, right? I haven’t got one of those. How am I supposed to pay for them?”

She’d have to pay for them of course. She works to live, if nothing else.

“If I couldn’t afford to buy clothes and started walking around naked, you lot would be the first to complain!” she’d cry and then walk out of the building wishing to engage no further with anymore illogical reasoning.

Or maybe that was just what I wanted to do one time I saw the fear on someone’s face at church when I said that I worked full time.

You know at church, everyone’s different. There will be people who attend church who come across this post and are horrified at this mentality that I’ve experienced. They are not like that at all.

There will be others who might need to meditate a bit on it.

But this is the thing about church. It’s not all the same. We’re not all the same. There are plenty of people in church who have had experiences that I don’t know about and that I can’t relate to at all.

That’s quite a normal thing. Because everyone’s different.

When we invite people along to church at Christmas or anytime in the year, what are we aiming to do?

Are we trying to make people like ourselves or show them how to be like Jesus?

It should be the latter. Yet often it feels like we are trying to make them fit into a particular culture. A particular way of doing things that we like.

But Jesus doesn’t expect us all to be the same. It’s always been like this. Look at who visited him as a baby or his mother when she was pregnant. They weren’t all the same.

Elizabeth was an older woman who was Mary’s cousin.

The shepherds were in Bethlehem and probably a fairly scruffy crew.

The Magi were from far away and most likely used to quite opulent living.

As we invite people to church this Christmas or meet visitors at church, let’s not expect them to be the same as us.

Single. Married. With Children. Without Children. Divorced. Remarried. Working. Full time. Part Time. Unemployed.

And so on.

You don’t have be the same as someone to be able to connect with them. You just need to remember that we’re all sinners in need of connecting with God.

We are different but we can connect on that point, if that alone.

Yours finding the common ground,

Alison