The Comfortable Gospel: Why Following Jesus Takes Us to Uncomfortable Places
On a blustery winter morning in Center City Philadelphia, something happened during communion that revealed everything about who we really are and who Jesus calls us to become.
The Moment
I was pastoring two campuses with some friends at the time: one in the heart of Rittenhouse, one on the Main Line near Villanova. Sunday service had just begun at the city campus, and we were preparing to serve communion. As was often the case, a couple of neighbors from the streets came in seeking refuge from the cold, from danger, from the world beneath the city in the SEPTA tunnels most people didn’t even know existed.
Sam was one of these regulars. A tall, slender Black man weathered by years on the streets, he would sit in the front pew to my right, observing the congregation. He moved with the unpredictability of someone carrying trauma: whether from street life, mental illness, or both, I never quite knew. What I did know was that some of our younger mothers instinctively drew their children closer when Sam was near. He was welcome at our table, but we all felt the tension of it.
As the service was about to begin, Sam looked at the communion elements arrayed at the front, and in what seemed like a moment of pure pragmatism, he walked forward and took a generous drink from one of the communion cups.
There was a gentle gasp. A couple of knowing glances. Maybe a smirk or two.
But what happened next was even more revealing. As we prepared to move through the five communion stations, all eyes tracked that cup. Which station would it be assigned to? And once people realized which one, they avoided it like parents keeping their distance from a child with a bad cold.
I found myself smiling and chuckling at the irony. And maybe, I want to be honest here, at the discomfort.
What the Moment Revealed
Here’s what struck me then, and strikes me still: we had several hundred accomplished people in that room. Doctors, lawyers, venture capitalists, bankers, entrepreneurs. Mostly suburbanites who’d moved into the city to start new adventures and build new lives. Good people, most genuine Christians or at least curious and seeking. Yet sharing a communion cup with a homeless man was not on most people’s wish lists.
The uncomfortable truth is this: we don’t mind the gospel of radical welcome in principle. We like the idea of the radical kingdom where the last are first and the broken are beloved. We admire Jesus for eating with tax collectors and touching lepers. But when we’re asked to do it? When the uncomfortable, unpredictable, slightly dangerous person sits in front of us? We hesitate. And please understand that I am a participant in the we.
Maybe that hesitation is worth examining.
Jesus Went to Uncomfortable Places
Here’s what I’ve come to understand:
following Jesus doesn’t offer us a comfortable gospel. It offers us something far better. But it costs us our comfort.
Look at Jesus’ ministry. He didn’t gather the respectable at his table. He went to people. To Zacchaeus the corrupt tax collector, climbing a sycamore tree just to get a glimpse of him, and Jesus responded by inviting himself to his home (Luke 19:1-10). To the Samaritan woman at the well, a woman living in shame, divorced five times, and he asked her for water and offered her living water (John 4). To the demon-possessed man among the tombs, violent and dangerous, and after healing him, he didn’t keep him at arm’s length; he restored him to community (Luke 8:26-39).
To the woman caught in adultery, paraded before him by men eager to stone her. Jesus refused to condemn her, but called her to transformation (John 7:53-8:11).
Jesus moved toward the uncomfortable. He didn’t cross to the other side of the road to avoid the leper. He touched him. He didn’t keep himself ritually pure by ignoring the bleeding woman who touched his robe. He turned around and healed her, calling her “daughter” with tenderness (Luke 8:43-48).
This wasn’t safe. This wasn’t sanitized. This wasn’t comfortable. The religious authorities were scandalized by his table fellowship. “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them,” they muttered (Luke 15:2). As if it were an accusation so obvious it needed no elaboration.
It was. And it is.
The Cost of Discipleship
Here’s what I think many of us have missed: becoming a disciple of Jesus means becoming like him. And Jesus went to uncomfortable places. He ate with the wrong people. He touched what was considered unclean. He spent time with people society had written off.
If we’re serious about following him, we can’t simply admire this from a distance. We have to do it ourselves.
This doesn’t mean being foolish about legitimate boundaries or real dangers. Jesus was wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove. But it does mean this: discipleship requires us to intentionally enter the discomfort that comes from radical hospitality.
It means entering places where the culture is profoundly different from our own. Eating foods we’ve never tasted. Walking streets that smell unfamiliar. Making friends with people who look nothing like us, whose accents are different, whose stories are shaped by struggles we’ve never known. It means sharing bread (literally and figuratively) across every barrier we naturally erect.
It means understanding that Sam, sitting in our front pew, weathered by the streets and uncertain in his movements, is not a problem to be managed. He’s a person in whom Christ dwells. He’s someone Jesus died for, just as surely as he died for the lawyer in the third row and me as a minister and missionary.
When we resist that reality, we’re not protecting ourselves. We’re protecting our comfort. And comfort, if it’s preserved at the cost of gospel community, is not actually comfort; it’s exile.
Why This Matters (Even If You’re Skeptical)
Let me speak to something I think many of us feel but don’t say: This sounds beautiful in theory, but isn’t it risky? Don’t we need boundaries? Don’t we need to be careful?
Yes. And also yes.
But here’s what I’ve learned: the gospel isn’t reckless. Jesus wasn’t naive. He knew the danger of Jerusalem. He knew his disciples would betray and abandon him. He also knew that the way of the kingdom would require a radical, unreasonable, boundary-breaking love that refuses to let barriers stand between God and people.
That’s not sentimental. That’s revolutionary. That’s the kind of love that changes not just individuals but entire communities. That breaks cycles of isolation and shame. That shows the world that the gospel is real.
And frankly? It’s intellectually satisfying in a way that a safe, comfortable Christianity never quite is. Because a gospel that asks nothing of us, that never makes us uncomfortable, that never pushes us into situations where we have to trust God rather than our own preparation and control sounds less like good news and more like a therapeutic self-help product.
But a gospel that calls us to follow a man who moved toward the leper, and the demoniac, and the woman at the well and the tax collector’s home? That asks us to do likewise? That’s a gospel worth believing in. That’s a gospel that makes sense of Jesus’ claim that he came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34). Not because violence is the point, but because following Jesus divides us from our old allegiances. To safety. To sameness. To the kind of comfort that costs us our souls.
The Transformation Happens in the Discomfort
There’s a reason I love that communion moment. It wasn’t really about Sam. It was about us.
In that moment, we had to confront something true about ourselves: we prefer our gospel sanitized. We like knowing exactly who we’re sharing with. We’re comfortable with welcome in theory but uncertain about it in practice.
And that discomfort? That’s where transformation begins.
I know this because I’m still learning it. These days I don’t pastor a church in the city and on the Main Line anymore. I travel the world trying to help Concentric ministry leaders create disciplemaking movements. But I still office in Philadelphia two days a week, and I walk about a mile from my wife Teresa’s office to my desk near City Hall.
And that walk has become my daily reminder of how far I still have to go.
I pass people in disheartening places: young and old, worn and strung out in the middle of methamphetamine trips, homeless men and women lying on the street. I sometimes pass a homeless man in a wheelchair who has lost both legs. And I confess this: I instinctively cross to the other side of the street from many of these ‘fellow journeyers’ through this messy world. The irony isn’t lost on me.
My prayer, as I write these words, is this: “May the Holy Spirit prompt me to cross the street when he wants me to do so: with compassion. A smile. A sandwich. A gesture of Christ-shaped humanness. And may I respond with obedience to that prompting.” Because transformation isn’t something I’ve arrived at. It’s something I’m being invited into, again and again.
When you eat new foods, you expand your palate. When you walk unfamiliar streets, you understand new geography. When you make friends across cultural barriers, you learn that the categories we use to divide people are far thinner than we thought. And when you break bread with someone radically different from you, you discover something that communion is meant to teach:
we all come to the table broken. We all come beloved. We all need Jesus.
This is what the early church understood. This is why Jews and Gentiles sitting at the same table was revolutionary. It was not quaint or nice. It was revolutionary. This is what Paul confronted when Peter withdrew from eating with Gentile believers. The gospel had created a new kind of table, one where the old boundaries could no longer determine who belonged. The cross had created a new family, one where sameness could no longer determine who belonged.
That’s the gospel. Not comfortable. But real.
When the Gospel Works
A year or so after that communion table moment, our church celebrated officially moving from church plant status to an established congregation. We threw a street party: food, a bouncing house, kids’ activities, and a pie and chili cook-off. People from the church and the neighborhood tasted and voted for their favorites.
My wife Teresa entered her famous sweet potato pie.
As people walked through tasting and comparing apple pie, pecan pie, cherry pie, and the other entries, Sam made his way down the tables. When he got to Teresa’s entry, he looked at the label and with sour disdain told her, “I hate sweet potatoes.”
Teresa smiled. “You should try a bite. You may be surprised.”
He took her challenge and worked his way through the remaining six or seven pies on the table. A few moments passed. Then Sam came back over to Teresa, and with a smile on his face, he dropped his voting ballot into her basket.
She won his heart and his stomach. And she won the pie contest that year because of Sam and the affirming votes of others.
I want to be more like my wife: engaging everyone, loving without calculation, contagious in her words and her smile, just like I envision Jesus.
The Invitation
So here’s my question for you, especially if you’re skeptical or struggling with what this looks like in practice:
What if the discomfort you feel about radical hospitality is actually the Holy Spirit at work? What if it’s an invitation, not a warning?
What if following Jesus means actively seeking out the people and places that make you most uncomfortable, not to prove something about yourself, but because you’re learning to see the world through his eyes? Because you’re becoming like him?
I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s worth it.
The gospel has always been dangerous and beautiful at once. Jesus proved that. And if we’re going to claim to follow him, we have to be willing to let him lead us into uncomfortable places, toward uncomfortable people, with bread broken and welcome offered, no matter the cost to our comfort.
That’s not a comfortable gospel.
But it is the gospel Jesus invites us to live.
