When do you show grace?

I read this past weekend about a ministry called "People of the Second Chance."  This ministry informs the work of a church one of the founders leads.   Mark Batterson mentions this church in his book All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life.  He has preached in this church a few times and writes that he has never seen so many people in a church that one would normally not expect to see there.  He says it looks more like what a person might see at a Vegas show or at a tattoo parlor.  Everywhere in the church is posted "It's OK to not be OK."  This is not a church that ignores sin, but it also believes that people don't have to pretend that everything is OK when it's not OK.  They want to offer grace to people before they change, not just afterwards, and isn't that the kind of grace we are called to extend to others?

One of the things I have found fascinating is that I seem to develop relationships with people who are not always living the kind of life I try to live.  When I worked on an assembly line I became friends with a biker who had the same job I had.  We were very much opposites, but we enjoyed one another's company and talked about everything.  After a time he transferred to another job on another shift, and I didn't see him for several months.  One day I ran into him and he began to talk to me about this church he was attending.  Of course, I asked for more details and learned that he had become a Christian.  A few years later I invited him to speak at a Biker Service we had at the church I pastored.  It was then I heard him say that one of the reasons he gave his life to Christ was because of the friendship he had developed with me.  The fact that I never judged him encouraged him to consider what I told him about becoming a Christian.

The same thing happened to me several years earlier on that same assembly line.  I was not a Christian but had observed several who were.  Their lives were radically different from mine.  There came a time when my life began to close in around me, and I knew I needed to do something different.  I approached these individuals and requested reading material and began to ask questions about being a Christian.  They never judged my lifestyle but extended grace to me.  After some months I did become a Christian but still had a lot of things to clean up.  Again, there was no judgment on their part.  Only grace, and that grace helped me make the changes I needed to make.

When do you offer grace to people?  Is it before they turn their lives around or afterwards?  Perhaps one of the reasons the church finds it so hard to connect with unchurched people is that they feel that we are judging them.  Yes, there are lifestyle choices we may not agree with, but didn't Jesus demonstrate that the way to help people overcome those choices is to love them unconditionally?  Is there anyone reading this who was perfect before they became a Christian?  I doubt it, and in fact we're not perfect now.  We all need grace, and if we are going to be the recipient of grace then should we not also extend grace to others?