09/03/2026
Joseph heard “they’re Christians” and assumed that meant they came with good intentions. That assumption broke Pastor D’s heart a little.
This weekend, several members of YVUMC attended a beautiful cultural celebration in Joshua Tree hosted by The Sunder Foundation. About five of us were there throughout the evening, simply showing up as neighbors, friends and members of this community. But there’s one part of the night we haven’t stopped thinking about.
Pastor D and Sunday’s liturgist, Joseph, encountered a group of men who had traveled from Los Angeles and were outside the event. Joseph is one of our youth here at YVUMC and also happens to be Pastor D’s godson, which makes what happened next feel even more personal.
The men approached the two of them and asked if they could pray for them. If you know Joseph, you can probably imagine his response: he thought it was wonderful. A group of Christian men wanted to pray with them? Of course. To Joseph, that sounded like exactly what Christians were supposed to do.
Pastor D understood pretty quickly that their intentions were different and got Joseph out of the situation before the conversation turned into something much uglier. On the drive home, they had a conversation Pastor D probably never expected to have with him: sometimes people use Christianity in ways that do not look very much like Christ.
Joseph was genuinely confused. Why would Christians travel all this way to condemn people who hadn’t done anything to them? Why would they look at a cultural celebration filled with music, food and community and immediately decide there was something evil about the people participating in it?
Later, Pastor D returned to the event and was approached again, this time more aggressively. He was told that what was happening there was “demonic,” among other things, and questioned about why he would participate. When Pastor D explained that he was also a Christian and a pastor, they seemed a little thrown off.
And somewhere in all of this, Pastor D’s messages from the Sundays surrounding that evening began to feel a lot less theoretical.
The Sunday before, Pastor D preached from the story of the Canaanite woman and asked us to consider: Who do we dismiss before we ever hear their story?
Then this past Sunday, Matthew 16:21–28 gave us another uncomfortable lesson. Peter loved Jesus. Peter followed Jesus. Peter believed. And Peter was still capable of getting it very wrong, so wrong that Jesus had to tell him, “Get behind me.”
That’s where this became more than just an uncomfortable encounter. It became a reminder that religious certainty is not the same thing as faithfulness. We can love Jesus and still misunderstand Him. We can quote Scripture and still fail to see the person standing in front of us. We can believe we are protecting something holy while our words and actions look nothing like the One we claim to follow.
Following Jesus requires enough humility to keep asking: Am I actually following Christ here… or am I simply convinced that I am right?
Jesus follows Peter’s correction by talking about denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following Him. The cross was never supposed to become something we use to frighten our neighbors. Following Jesus asks something much harder of us: humility, sacrifice, mercy, courage and love.
And perhaps one of the most profound theological questions of the entire evening came from someone who wasn’t trying to make a theological point at all.
Joseph simply couldn’t understand why Christians would want to treat people that way.
Maybe we shouldn’t become so accustomed to religious hostility that his question sounds naïve. Maybe we should become the kind of Christians for whom his expectation is completely reasonable.
The kind where someone hears, “They’re Christians,” and immediately thinks:
Oh good. They came to love somebody.
That’s the church we want to keep becoming.
So as you look through these photos from the evening, we hope you see more than just a beautiful celebration. We hope you see neighbors showing up for neighbors, people learning from one another, and a reminder that how we carry our faith into the world matters.
Because people may not remember every sermon we preach…
But they WILL remember what kind of Christians we were when they met us.
