“Who’s coming with me? I’m going to the pub.”

After several years of pulpit ministry, I knew how to preach about the lost. I knew how to structure a Sunday around the Great Commission. I knew how to rally a room to “go into all the world.”

Then go home.
Sit in my lounge.
And not know a single lost person.

I was preaching mission. But I wasn’t living it, not even close.

And one day, standing behind the pulpit, calling people to go make disciples, I heard the Holy Spirit whisper something that made me squirm.

“You first, David.”

The pulpit is the easiest place in the world to appear spiritual. You can say all the right things, run the meetings, lead the prayers, but if your feet never carry you into messy places… it’s all a show.

And I was the lead actor. My life was neat. Polished. Safe. I loved telling other people to go out there. I just never did it myself.

So one Sunday, I stood up in front of the church and said, “You’re going to hear rumours this week… that your pastor was seen pub crawling. I am here to tell you that the rumours are true! Who’s coming with me?”

Now let me give some context. These are not your polite, civil British pubs. The places I was talking about were filled with very rough crowds. The kinds of characters that “decent people” generally avoided.

That first week, a handful of guys joined me. We drank Coke, for those of you wondering. (Not that it matters.) We sat in pubs, bars and shebeens (informal pubs in the townships of South Africa). We had driven past some of them for years but never dared to enter.

And then suddenly, everything changed.

There, obscured by the thick cigarette smoke, foul language, sticky floors and bar fights, we discovered that Jesus was already moving. And we had been too sanitized to see it.

I met men who hadn’t set foot in a church for decades because they knew they would be rejected. I met women who carried shame like a second skin but were desperate for hope. I met broken, beautiful people. And they weren’t hard to find. They were just waiting for someone to come to them instead of making them come to us.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me… to proclaim good news to the poor… to set the oppressed free.” (Luke 4:18)

Jesus rarely waited for people to show up. He went where they were. He wasn’t worried about His reputation. He wasn’t afraid of the religious crowd wagging their fingers and shaking their heads. He wasn’t waiting for people to clean themselves up before He called them family.

The Church has spent far too long polishing the stage and hoping the world comes to us. We’ve obsessed over our songs, our sound, our seating. Meanwhile, there’s a world out there bleeding. And they’re not coming to our polished services.

They’re waiting for us to go.

When (or if) they do come, they won’t come clean. They’ll come messy. They’ll come drunk. They’ll come high. They’ll come promiscuous. They’ll come angry and defensive, testing the waters to see if this place will judge them like everywhere else has.

I sat once with a man in a pub who told me he was too far gone. He listed his sins like an accountant closing the books on his life. I smiled and said, “You’re exactly who Jesus came for.” He laughed.

Then he cried.

I want us to brace ourselves because the most unlikely people are going to walk through our doors. They’re going to look wrong, smell wrong, talk wrong. And they are exactly the people God is after.

It’s time to drop the drama and self-obsession. We’ve spent too long debating the colour of the walls and the style of worship. We’ve gossiped over leadership decisions and held silent grudges about petty things.

Meanwhile, there’s a world out there dying. Here’s the brutal truth in my country. South Africa has just 63 million people:

• One person is murdered every 20 minutes (72 a day).
• One in four households don’t know where their next meal is coming from.
• 27% of kids under five are chronically malnourished.
• Suicide is one of the leading causes of death for those aged 15 to 29.
  
  

And we’re arguing about the colour of the church carpets!

The stakes are staggering, and the battle is brutal. We can’t afford to play church anymore. We don’t have time for our insecurities and offenses. The Kingdom is calling us out of comfort. Out of safety. Out of ourselves.

And into the pubs. And the streets. And the shebeens.
The broken places where Jesus is already waiting.

So, who are you called to go to? Where is your “pub”? Who are you scared to welcome because they might mess up your clean church life?

Get over it.
Get over yourself.

And when you do, you’ll find Him there, already working, already loving, already redeeming the most unlikely of people. The ones who remind you what grace really looks like.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back in places that make the church crowd nervous.
You’re welcome to join me.

The mission is waiting.
Let the adventure begin.