Beloved Community

With Valentine’s Day coming up, I wanted to pause and reflect on love. Not just the hearts and flowers of the season, but the deep, committed love that Jesus speaks of when he talks about the Kingdom of God.

Recently, I’ve been reading We Make the Road by Walking by Brian McLaren with some friends. In it, McLaren invites us to expand our often narrow, Western understanding of the “Kingdom of God.” Rather than imagining the kingdom as a far-off place we go someday, McLaren, echoing Jesus himself, describes it as a lived reality here and now. A way of life shaped by the Spirit. A community marked by belonging, connection, justice, mercy, and love. He names it a beloved community or even a holy ecosystem—a living, breathing network where what happens to one affects us all.​

This vision also resonates deeply with the way the Bible Project describes the kingdom of God. They remind us that in Scripture, “kingdom” is not primarily about geography. It is about God’s reign. Wherever God’s will is being done, wherever love replaces fear, dignity replaces shame, and healing replaces harm, the kingdom is breaking in. When Jesus teaches us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” he is inviting us into that work now. Not someday. Not somewhere else. But right here.

As I reflected on this, I found myself returning to the name of our program, begun 32 years ago: Children of the Kingdom. What a gift that name is.

When we understand the kingdom as beloved community, it becomes clear that the children who come through this program are not merely recipients of care. They are full participants in God’s holy ecosystem of love. They are children who belong. Children whose lives matter. Children through whom God’s reign of compassion, justice, joy, and hope is already unfolding.
The photos below capture this so beautifully. You can see it in the love shared by our leaders, Veronica and Ratnakar, and the children they walk alongside each day. This is what the kingdom looks like. Not abstract. Not distant. But embodied, relational, and real.

This Valentine’s Day, may we continue to seek first the kingdom—the beloved community—and participate together in God’s dream of love made visible, here and now, as it is in heaven. 💕