Go: LOVING PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE: A Call for the Church to Love as Jesus Loved

Someone is in the tree right now.

They are watching your church from a safe distance - curious about Jesus, drawn by something they cannot name, not yet ready to walk through the door. They are at the well at noon, because the morning gathering communicates, without a word, that their situation is not entirely welcome there. They are in the pool, waiting for someone to help them into the water, carrying the loneliest sentence in the Gospel: I have no one.

The question this book asks is not whether God loves them.

The question is whether the Church looks like it does.

In Love People Where They Are, minister and Navy veteran Robert L. Brandal Jr. presents twenty-eight cases before the Body of Christ - drawn from the Old Testament, the Gospels, and the streets, jail cells, rest homes, and hospital rooms where he has spent a lifetime in ministry. Each case builds the same unbroken argument: Jesus consistently, deliberately, and sometimes scandalously went to the wrong people first. Not the wealthy. Not the righteous. Not the clean, the spiritually safe, the leaders, or the proud.

He went somewhere else entirely.

He went to the hiding, the forgotten, the deceiving, the violent, the excluded, the exhausted, and the running. He went before they asked. He went before they deserved it. He went before they had done a single thing to earn the going.i
And then He said: Go and do likewise.
This is not a comfortable book. It is a call - to the believer who has forgotten what it felt like to be found, to the pastor whose institution has drifted from the posture of pursuit, to the person standing at the edges of the Church wondering if there is room, and to the one who was hurt by religion and has not yet been able to come back.
The verdict it asks for is not theological. It is personal. It is behavioral. It is the decision about what each reader is going to do differently - today, with the strength they have - for the people who are still in the tree, still at the well, still waiting for someone to look up.

"He came to where we were. He has never stopped."
- from the title page
Robert L. Brandal Jr. is an ordained minister and deacon