Sermon on the Mount challenges author to examine community
WINNIPEG, MB - A new book by a local urban missionary, pastor and church planter explores what it means to live out Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount through the lens of St. Francis of Assisi as well as Little Flowers, a worshipping community in downtown Winnipeg.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci, who along with his wife Kim forms the core leadership of Little Flowers, is the author of The Cost of Community, which is being released by InterVarsity Press this month.
Arpin-Ricci says he was inspired to write the book when Little Flowers spent half a year going through the Sermon on the Mount and exploring what it means to live those teachings.
At the same time, he had been researching the life of St. Francis of Assisi.
"What I believe set St. Francis apart as so effective both in his day and continually today was the fact that he was quote-unquote 'naïve' enough to believe that Jesus meant what He said when He told us to live according to the Sermon on the Mount," Arpin-Ricci says.
"As Francis did that, he went from this obscure son of a cloth merchant in a small province in what was not even Italy yet to the most widely known saint in the Christian world."
It was a revelation for Arpin-Ricci, who was raised believing that the Sermon on the Mount isn't something Christians are called to live out.
"And yet, every person I came across in church history who tried to [live out the Sermon on the Mount] seemed to have a monumental impact on the world."
Arpin-Ricci adds that St. Francis inspired people like Gandhi, who toward the end of his life read the Sermon on the Mount several times a day.
At Little Flowers, a community of roughly 45 people in Winnipeg's West End, living out Jesus' Sermon on the Mount teachings finds a multiplicity of expressions, Arpin-Ricci says.
He adds that the title of the book touches on what he believes are the two critical dangers that the Church in the West faces: materialism and the idea that following Christ can be done individually.
For Arpin-Ricci, following Jesus means living in community, and it means sacrificing one's own desires and wants in order to help one's neighbour.
"Our identity in Christ is essentially communal, and that in itself is pretty costly," he says. "Anyone who has lived in community…knows that it's a wonderful but costly choice to make."
Arpin-Ricci says that mission and community discipleship are often separated into different categories, but when the members of Little Flowers tried to live out the teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, they found themselves mixing all three and doing genuine relational outreach in the community.
"It's been beautiful to see the kinds of people who are least often seen darkening the door of a church are often quite common in Little Flowers," Arpin-Ricci says. "There's something to that because it wasn't done as a strategy. We didn't say, 'We're going to target these people and bring them in.' We just decided to try to follow Christ as He taught us to and do it together in community and see what happens, and mission was born of that."
It's been very hard, he adds with a laugh.
"It's inefficient; it's messy; it doesn't always look good in a PowerPoint presentation, but there are these moments where you glimpse the power of God outside of our control and you just go, 'This is why we're doing this.' It's often in the times of most brokenness that we discover those things."
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