Following Jesus calls us into what can be a harsh reality. It’s a calling to give up all that we have and all that we think we are. It’s a calling to rethink how we value the world around us and the things for which we pour out our lives.

When we weigh the cost of discipleship and the insistence that we leave houses and siblings and parents and sources of income for Jesus’ sake, we all too easily envision a life alone. Western people have transferred our deeply individualistic way of viewing and interacting with the world to our understanding of Christianity. But Jesus reminds us that our thoughts of “going it alone” are not God’s thoughts about the Christian life.

God provides us with a new family—the family of those who, like us, have chosen to forgo the world’s way of reckoning family, of accumulating wealth, of attaining long-term security. Church is not simply supposed to be the place to which we head off on Sunday morning. It is supposed to be the community that makes possible our obedience to the impossible calling of Jesus.

The gospel faces all sorts of challenges today from those who claim to follow Jesus. Some of the most severe, however, are not acts of moral failing but the day-to-day tasks of the church to create a community with an alternative value system that makes itself known in the riches of self-giving love.

Are we the kind of people who can be family for those who have left family for Jesus’ sake? Can we be the kind of people who can create an alternative economy so that the pursuit of wealth no longer defines us as persons or as the people of God?