Close Encounters

I had a meeting a few days ago with some guys I have been trying to make contact with. One of the cool things about ministry on the edges is that there aren’t as many blocks to weird ideas. So far, no one has said to me, “that’s crazy.” And believe me, I have proposed some far-out stuff. So, these contacts are about brain-storming, about doing ministry in ways that are different not because they are so much new, but because they have been forgotten.

One of the guys, Ryan Koch, is a counselor and is looking for ways to bring counseling to some people who need it but can’t afford it—the very kind of people in our neighborhood. We are setting the groundwork for having a “counseling bank” where people can come, maybe on our mission night, and also receive some counseling. Hopefully that can take off, and make some use of the counseling students at the seminary.

The other fellow, Will Samson, is writing an interesting book on living a life of justice in the burbs. When I can remember the title, I’ll pass it on. It’s big stuff. Anyway, he and I have been in contact because in a totally random way we found we have a passion in common: getting good, nutritious food to the hungry and poor. In another blog entry I’ll tell you how I got into that (because it is an important lesson in the HOW of ministry with marginalized people), but for right now, it’ll set me off on an episode and I’ll get confused and this will make less sense than it does! Will is part of a sociology project that looked at food access in North Lexington. He has some great detail about what we already know on a general level: if you are poor, your access to food is not good, and what food you do get is more expensive. The simple fact is if you walk to the neighborhood grocery, you will pay a premium on goods you could get cheaper if you had a car. In addition, none of the grocery stores in our area had any fresh vegetables, and the only cheese they had was processed cheese product.

So a few months ago we started hatching plans to have a farmer’s market at The Rock La Roca. It will be a long process to get going, but I am hopeful it can work, because there are a lot of Africans on the North Side, a lot of Hispanics, and as I am finding, most of the Anglos have Eastern KY roots, and “garden food” is always a favorite. But it’s not going to happen this summer.

But here’s what is going to happen: we are going to garden and bring some fresh produce into our mission night so that we can add the good nutrition to what we offer. I think I have a lot of gardeners in the church. We’re going to have some cooking and nutrition classes. And I have initial permission from the elementary school principal (he is an awesome dude) to use the property behind the school as a garden.

Then, yesterday (Feb 7), Will, Ryan, and I got to talking about some guys who are doing what is called Community Supported Agriculture. That is an idea where a small farm sells “shares,” and once a week brings in the produce to people who have bought the shares. So one fellow, for example, sells a share for $400, and that gets you one bushel basket of picked-that-day produce once a week for twenty consecutive weeks. The basic idea is that a community would be related to a particular small farm. Some of you who have read Wendell Berry’s stuff are familiar with this idea of connecting an urban area to a farm, so that the connection between food, eater, and farmer is a close one. It’s clear as day: it would be awesome if we could connect our community with a farm—connecting families to good food, how to prepare it, connecting urban kids to a farm (because a lot of the farmers love to have people come out and work).

So anyway, I’ll write more about how and why I got into this, why I know it works, and how some of y’all can get involved if you want to.

We met on a day when I was fasting (and there we were talking about food!). After they left, it was time to break the fast, so I sat down with some Scriptures. I usually read Psalm 6 in breaking a fast. And then I’ll just read whatever else comes to mind. Well, yesterday it was Psalm 65, “Praise awaits you, O God, in Zion.” The verses just jumped out at me: “Blessed is the man whom thou choosest and causeth to approach unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts: we shall be satisfied with the goodness of thy house” (65:4). I began to think of a great banquet in God’s house, where every one is sitting around, not just eating, but being together, totally satisfied with the all-encompassing goodness of God.

But at the same time, I was having a hard time feeling that; I was wondering, “what does this mean for Melissa?” We talked about it a little bit, and it was one of those moments where you realize you’ve been having the same thoughts about the same Scripture, but we were led there in different ways. The Scripture was Job 13:15. I got there because I was wondering about being drawn near to God’s courts and thinking it really wasn’t happening. Melissa got there because, well, she likes Job. We spent some time rejoicing that the Lord had given us the same Scripture.

And then, these words, a wonderful poem of God’s amazing, bountiful, simple provision:

You care for the land and water it;
You enrich it abundantly
The streams of God are filled with water
To provide the people with grain
For so you have ordained it
You drench its furrows and level its ridges,
You soften it with showers
And bless it crops (Psalm 65:9-10)

So indeed, how foolish is it that there is earth and sun and rain but right next door, some are hungry, lacking good food? That one’s on us, I’m afraid.

p/g,

Aaron

In the Name of Jesus

Ok, so I don’t think I can rehearse the reasons why ministry to the poor really has to be ministry with the poor (or go too much into the difference), but I will tell you how I got there. I had good teachers: John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople in the late 4th century. And there was Bob Lyon at Asbury. I thought I was taking Greek, but it turned out we were digging hard into the meat of the New Testament, and what grace and discipleship will look like. And then there were the best teachers I had on this, the ones who made the point as Scripture came to life: Calvin and Arvilla Mynhier.

Calvin and Arvilla and their family were my first converts as a pastor. They had grown up under a very harsh fundamentalist faith. So when I stood with them in the pig-pen talking about grace, about Jesus dying for us precisely while and because we were sinners, and providing us grace even after we placed our faith in him, they were just shocked. They felt like they had to be good enough, and since they were poor (they are the most marginalized people I have ever met; their poverty is precisely the range of poverty defined by the New Testament—not necessarily economic, but one that infiltrates the social and personal aspects of life as well), God was not on their side. Or maybe some days they might think that “This is what it means when He said, ‘blessed are the poor.’”

The way I met them was classic. I was maybe two months into my first church. My mentor, Howard Willen, always emphasized visitation, and so as I didn’t know anything else to do, I started visiting, and if no one was home, I would leave a small card telling who I was and where the church was. Long story short, I had shown up at the Mynhier’s trailer and left a card. So anyhoo, one day I am at Fox’s store and this woman stops me and says, “Aren’t you that new Methodist preacher?” which is one of those questions you aren’t sure you should answer. But I was ready. Infant baptism? Free will? I was ready to answer any controversy a Baptist might start with me.

Well, all she really wanted to tell me was that she had a huge garden and could I see that the food got to the hungry? I didn’t know how it was going to get to the hungry, but if you’re Bob Lyon’s student and you don’t answer with a resounding “Yes!” to such an opportunity, well, you might know how to identify the perfect tense of a middle voice verb, but you weren’t paying any attention. So I said sure I would.

Now, back up. When we were moving into the parsonage, Pablo Shafer (a friend from Lexington who was helping us move) says in passing that the high ground behind the parsonage would make a good garden. Next morning, Robert Curtis is out there with a single-bottom plow and bam I have a 1000 sq. ft. garden. So as the summer went along, I had been taking vegetables with me on my visits, leaving them as a gift from the church. Everybody loved it, even atheists would open the door for me when they saw corn, beans, and tomatoes.

Well, Arvilla and Calvin were as good as their word and next thing I know, twice a week the parsonage porch looked like Kroger. Various kinds of tomatoes, lots of beans, all kinds of peppers, cukes, zucchini, corn. I realized pretty quickly that I was not going to be able to get it all out. So I took what I was not using up to the community service center, and it ran out of there, people were so happy to have the fresh produce.

That’s how it worked that summer. The next summer, we got a little more ambitious. There was an article in the paper that said at some point during the year, 20% of the children in Clark County were hungry. Well heck, I knew some of them, and I was pretty hot because the numbers say there are about 1000 Methodists in Clark County, and I said no way. If there were that many Methodists, no one would be hungry (see, in those days, I still thought that if someone had the guts to call themselves a Methodist, not only were they saved and sanctified, they were hard after ministering to the needs of people. I know, I know, I’m naïve.) Surely 1000 Methodists would have fasted until there was enough to eat (because Methodists are supposed to fast two times a week) and surely they would have opened their cupboards. But no. In my own church, some leaders said, “the poor are poor because they deserve to be.” The most decisive thing I ever heard Bob Lyon say was that the idea that the poor are poor because it’s their fault or they deserve to be “comes from the Evil One.” So, the battle lines were drawn, and the honeymoon was over, all because a poor family wanted to make sure no one went hungry.

One year, Calvin raised rabbits and pheasants, rigging up an incubator for pheasant eggs. “There won’t be no going hungry no more,” he said. And his tithes were pheasants and rabbits. Good eatin’.

So anyway. We realize we can do a lot more than a little gardening here and there. So we get a story in the paper about giving produce to the Community Service Center, about how we’ll come pick it if we need to, plant a row for the hungry, etc. Then we got organized into something we called the Food Security Coalition. Arvilla was there with us from the beginning. We got hooked up with other agencies, and pretty soon we were doing more than getting “garden food” to people. Sure, we had all kinds of people bringing food in (and I think I made the Community Service Center people a little frustrated with the bulk of stuff coming), but we were also showing people how to garden, doing nutrition classes, and then two women at the church (Frankie and Cynthia) started a food pantry so we had the whole range of good food to give people. Man, were we praising God for all He was doing through us. Over about three years, we did some good work.

But the powerful thing, the powerful lesson was not what we did, but how. See, in our initial phase of discipleship, we do ministry “to” the poor. That is, we have some program where we show up to volunteer, they show up to get something and bam we’re done. That’s ok, and indeed it has to be done. But where the Jesus life gets real is when you start to form a transforming relationship with the people you serve. And as you witness to them about faith in Jesus, and you call them to be disciples (that is, you don’t want them to just keep coming to you for help unless, God forbid, you like it that way), then they should be finding their own ministries, using their gifts for the glory of God.

Think about it. This work was Arvilla’s work. Maybe we were like Moses and Aaron, and I did all the talking, the up-front work. But it took her giving from her abundance, her desire to see the food spread out to the poor and hungry. How different would it be if I had thought, “their family is poor. I must minister to them because that will make me a good boy,” rather than the way God worked through it: He placed it in her to undertake this ministry, the hard work of planting and weeding and harvesting, and wondering what could happen if…

And now, here I am at The Rock La Roca UMC, looking to do the ministry that Arvilla and Calvin taught me, knowing it works, knowing that feeding the hungry is a process, a plan, a lifestyle in some way, a ministry that is a direction for a church, not a program among others.

In the end, there is no one who knows what ministry to the poor and hungry should look like except the poor and hungry themselves. Set them free in Jesus’ name and watch and learn.

p/g,

Aaron

It's All How You Look At It

When I take Melissa to the clinic, I try to read some, and because it is a scientific place, there’s usually some science magazines around. One of them had an article on Asperger’s Syndrome, a type of autism where the person can function, but has limited social skills. The article I read said something about kids with Asperger’s being able to judge as well as the general population a person’s trustworthiness by looking at their face. (Generally speaking it is assumed that part of the problem of Asperger’s Syndrome is the inability to read social clues in faces). And then it made some comment about how kids with Asperger’s Syndrome can see fine details in a picture, but will miss the whole. The example was that if you show someone with Asperger’s a large “S” that is made of nothing but small h’s, they will quickly perceive the h’s but not the larger picture they are making, “S.”

So, as things turn out, one of the boys I work with at the school has Asperger’s. Let’s call him Eddy. He’s a fun kid. I work with him on learning French, and he has an amazing ability to hear and repeat, even getting the accent right. Of course, you never know what he’ll ask you to teach him to say, like when he asked me how to say, “Farewell, my alien brethren…”

One day we got to talking about his science fair project—determining if body language can give a clue to whether or not someone is telling the truth. Interesting—people with asperger’s can still gauge trustworthiness and perhaps are more keyed in to details like aspects of body language that a person without Asperger’s might lose in seeing the “big picture.” It’ll be neat to see how it works out.

And then, we’re going down the hall and we pass some artwork. One class had put up construction paper with cut-out shapes glued on. Neat stuff, lots of colors. And then we saw why—there was a big poster of one of Matisse’s paper cut-outs. I was tying it back to our French lesson and remarking that the work is about 10 ft tall and 5 ft wide when Eddy says, “Look! Fish! A Seahorse! Jellyfish! Eels!” Now, if you have ever seen a Matisse cut-out, you know it’s fairly abstract. (A friend of mine gave me a print of Matisse’s “Winepress,” and it took me awhile to figure out why it was called that.) I look at the bottom to see the title. “Beasts of the Sea.” I asked Eddy if he had read that. “No,” he said, “but it’s a good title…”

p/g,

Aaron

Meditations in the midst

I have lots of stuff to put on the blog, but I have not had access to internet for my laptop, so... And since I don't feel like typing much, I guess I'll have to wait until I get around to putting stuff up.

On Wed Feb 7, Melissa and I had a moment where we realized that we had been thinking about the same Scripture: Job 13:15, "Even though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him." There was a time in my life where I thought something like this, "I am still going to place my faith in God even if it seems like He is not treating me so well." That's kind of ham-handed, but what it amounted to was a kind fo stubbornness, some way of thinking that said, "I have no one else but God." And in the end, we find that what seemed like a curse from God was really not, more likely it was a burden being lifted.

It goes back to what Melissa has talked about, being yoked with God and knowing that when it seems the hardest and roughest, He is carrying, as He always has, the most part of the load.

And then there was yesterday when we talked about the story in Mark 2 of the paralyzed man, where his friends lower his mat thru the roof so he can get to Jesus. Jesus forgives him his sins, and only heals him later. Melissa and I were both thinking, "well, there it is, the one thing you really need, forgiveness of sins." I can't tell you how hard that hit me, to hear her, of all people, say that. If there were a choice, would I not take the healing?

Maybe Hauerwas and Willimon are right. Maybe justice is a bad idea. maybe, as Melissa pointed out from Mark 2, God's promise in Jesus is GRACE, not justice. Justice is nice, but don't look for it from men. Take God's grace and live it. I wonder: if we lived lives of grace, how much more just would our justice be?

Preachers Together

from a few weeks ago...

Well, a wonderful day came out of messed up circumstances. Because of Melissa’s fall Saturday evening, the doctor said to keep an eye on her. No need to worry that it’s anything serious, let’s just wait and see.

I had planned on taking the boys with me to Lexington, to do some visitation. But with Melissa at home , maybe dizzy, I decided to stay here and do some work from home. But then, Melissa was feeling a lot better overall. So I asked her if she felt up to coming on the visits with me. She said she’d see, and anyway, if she couldn’t, we could cut it short.

We went to visit some of the Congo families, with an eye to letting John and Joe play with them. That worked out really well, to see that boys are boys everywhere, and language barrier is no barrier to play. And then, Melissa got to meet some people who have been serious prayer warriors for her. It was huge for everyone—the Congo kids bonded more closely with my boys than they could at church. And Melissa and a Congolese woman got to meet and find they have much in common, forming a friendship that will be important to both. The boys did not want to leave when Melissa said she thought she was really running down.

Haven’t we been praying that we would be preachers together? God is so good.

Geography of Love

Joe got a talking globe for Christmas from my parents. It tells you the country, continent, states, population, highest points, etc. He calls it a "glove" (long "o," and y'all have no idea how much restraint it takes for me to not go off on phonics and the rules of English...)

He has really messed with it a lot, more than we know. Because you'd be amazed at what he can find on it. He knows the two Congos-- he wanted to know them first because, "because that's where my friend Malippo is from..."

Now he'll say, "Daddy I love you all the way to Florida. Is that far?" "Daddy, I love you all the way to Turkey." or "all the way to Russia." or "all the way to Gulf of Mexico."

Not Sure What to Title It

This long illness and recovery of Melissa’s is just that—long. You get it in your head that there will be this benchmark or milestone. And to be sure there are some. But then there are setbacks, or milestones you reach without knowing you reached them. Melissa did really well in terms of the treatment. But then came the fall and going back into the hospital, and then two months of infection and now spleen removal, and even tho she gets past all of those things, it feels like it slows her down, and when do you get to the place where all the little and the big things are cranking like they should?

Melissa is very tired lately, most likely because of the combination of seizure medicines that have had their dosages upped. The long haul from being hospitalized in August, infection that ran through November and splenectomy has taken it’s toll. Remember her in prayer.

And permit me some stream of consciousness Psalmifying. Psalm 39 looms large these past few days. “I said, ‘I will watch my ways and keep my tongue from sin…’ but when I was silent and still, not even saying anything good, my anguish increased” (Ps 39:1-2).

This is one of those places in the Bible that reminds you that all the good intentions will get you nowhere unless they are united to faith in God. Faith for forgiveness of sins, faith for holiness. It’s all by faith in God’s ability to change our hearts. It has never relied on resolution.

Well, I was thinking about that, and what does it have to do with where we are? It got me to thinking about how much everything has to do with faith. The times I have cried or been burdened to the point of sorrow have come when faith flags. Not that it’s not natural to feel those things—it’s more that in me they tend towards pessimism, thinking, “well, the gig is up.” Fear of the unknown. Fear of having no faith.

Melissa is struggling with some really bad stomach cramps. Every night we’re praying and wondering, “when? why?” And there it is, Psalm 39, about sanctification, but really about faith. God says more than you think, it seems.

Walking Around Money

A couple of good books: Christine Pohl’s Making Room, a study on hospitality in the Christian tradition, and Amy G.Oden’s And You Welcomed Me, a collection of writings from the early church on the issues of hospitality. “Hospitality” unfortunately is hampering the cause; that is once it becomes a defined field of study and God forbid there are conferences on the subject, no one will pay attention!

I came away from the books very refreshed. Oden’s book has a section on the practice of hospitality, and there’s one thing that comes out clearly, something that has long stirred me, and has special value at The Rock La Roca. Across space and time, one can summarize the early church’s view of the practice of hospitality in this simple command: “do not go to the poor empty-handed.”

Rarely have we ever thought out our response to their poor in our midst. Most often, we decide we need to do something, and then we do… something. But then we start to have all the reasonable worries: shouldn’t they get a job? Aren’t we just teaching them to be dependent? Are we enabling bad behaviors? And pretty soon we develop “policies” to define when and how we “help.” This usually involves things like stipulating an amount that we will give, how we will judge the need, what is the process for delivery, etc. I want to suggest that these policies are totally about us, about protecting us, not about actually helping.

Here’s what I mean. If you decide you won’t pay more than $50 on a gas bill, for example, what is that about? Is it really about making sure someone “doesn’t work the system?” By the time someone gets to asking for help on a bill, it is way past $50, so you’re not really helping.

Then we decide that to be responsible stewards, we need to make sure that the need is actually a worthy need. Our mania for organization takes over and we ask that the person in need come in for an interview. I am not sure what that’s about either, because it is most assuredly not to start an on-going relationship with the person in need.

We have paperwork to file before we can get the money. Again, this is to make things easier for us. I readily admit to the difficulties of cutting a check on the spot. And indeed, you have to really beware of someone asking for money “right now!” But on the other hand, many needs of the poor come up because 2 days before rent is due, they have to repair a car or by medicine. If they could just plan it so it could fit the day we cut checks…

None of these ways of handling “benevolences” fits the pattern laid down for us by the early Christians. The emperor Trajan, when he was considering persecuting Christians asked Pliny to investigate. After checking it out, Pliny wrote back and said that the Christians have a weird religion, but they’re not enemies of the state. They take care of the poor. If someone is sick, they take care of them. If someone is hungry, others will fast until there is enough to eat. The early Christians were in a word, extravagant.

If we take into account the way we generally do things as churches, we’ll see something that ought to shame us: our charity ends up as a burden. If someone owes $200 and has to go to 4 churches to get the help, has to go to 4 interviews of people determining if the need is valid (4 different churches for a single mother taking the bus—you get the picture) and then having to balance when the different checks come… not really very helpful.

Let’s get challenged by something: you are working the system. You had way more than a $200 gas bill. The Lord paid it all. He did not give you $50 worth of salvation and then tell you to try Buddha or Mohammed or help a little old lady cross the street, and maybe it would all work out! It’s called grace. You’re working the system. You said you’d repent and lead a new life, but it’s hard and the old life keeps cropping up, and you need His mercy anew! Thank God He did not say, “they’ll become dependent on me. I dare not offer them salvation! They’ll just work the system to their advantage. Why don’t they just straighten up?”

You won’t find anybody more interested in making sure someone’s life doesn’t change if the church helps them. And that’s the key—most times we don’t really care or try to see that their lives change. But that is what we are called to. What if we decided to be graceful? What if we sought to meet needs thoroughly? Now, we won’t do that most times because, well, it’s crazy talk. But it is only crazy talk if we are not willing to follow through. And it’s our long inability to follow through that keeps our charity as no charity at all.

I have long wanted to have what I call “walking around money,” that is, some funds that are available to always be ready so that if someone is in need, if I pass someone on the street, or I visit a poor house, that I won’t have to be there with some pious words and the hope that maybe things will work out. So I keep a stack of Wal-Mart gift cards with me, and if there is a need, we try to meet it as best we can.

But let’s go deep, and put forward a plan that can get us back to how we are supposed to live as God’s people. We have learned that the biggest problem facing the kids (and therefore the families) in our community is transience. That is, by November 1/3 of the students at the elementary school had not started there. What that means practically, is that the kids have to start all over each time they move. They fall behind, and if they have learning difficulties, it only gets worse. For the family, it’s not much better: they fall behind each time they move, too, in terms of money and reputation among people who might rent homes. The school principal says that if kids can stay in the school for three years, they can overcome most learning difficulties or being behind.

So, how do we address something like this? We came up with an idea, a Methodist idea, an early church idea: what if we meet the needs that cause people to move? That is, instead of waiting until the family is behind on rent, let’s figure out what the gap is and subsidize that gap. The practical result is that we keep the child in the school because we kept the family in the neighborhood. So. Are you willing to spend, say, $250 a month on a few families?

No, actually, most people would not be. For all the reasons we talked about above—it’s working the system, maybe they need to work harder, etc. But, those reasons were also exposed as shams because we talk ourselves out of generosity because we won’t take on the whole of the work of charity.

See, we have to be willing to go deep. That is, the Lord has blessed this already because the school has paired us with our first family, the family of a little girl I have been working with on school issues. Who knew it would be her family? And when I approached the family and said we would like to help, they were a bit shocked. Who does such a thing? They were still freaked out when I told them it’s because of Jesus ( thumbnail way of saying Luke 14 and Matthew 25…).

I also laid out that we would be asking them to be willing for me and Curtis Book (our missions pastor) to meet with them, to discuss where the money goes, how to budget, set priorities, learn life skills, and talk about new life in Jesus. Hey, if you take my rent, you gotta take my love.

The only way to actually be generous is to not give money, but rather to give the money it is going to take to get the job done, and then enter their lives in love. A little bit of money for a gas bill makes no difference. Pay more generously and enter into the real work of long-term transformation. This is why you came to Jesus. If He had forgiven only part of your sins and then left you to fend for yourself, what a mess you’d be in! But instead, He paid it all, and left you His continuing presence in the Holy Spirit and Holy Communion. He sticks with you through the hard times, not leaving when you are selfish, lazy, or ignorant. Lord, may we be willing to deal with others as you have dealt with us. Amen.

So how did all this happen? Well, it started on a small scale in Clark County. The missions person, Becky Taylor, was pretty generous with people in need. I learned a lot from that. And the need was everywhere. Pretty soon Frankie Moore and Cynthia Long were wanting to feed people. So wherever I went, I was not empty-handed, and quite simply, the Lord blesses that.

I am really just a country pastor in the heart of the town. I visit, like Wesley asked his pastors to, from house to house, to find the social needs and spiritual needs. Woe to me if I can preach the Gospel but cannot feed the hungry!! And though I don’t get to pray for sick calves or mean horses anymore, or help people load hay, it’s not that much different, the visiting from house to house. Maybe the needs are more stark, or maybe they are just more concentrated.

Somebody gave me $3,000 for my “discretionary” fund. I don’t know what all will happen with it, but I can guarantee you I will never be embarrassed again by saying I can’t help. Or won’t help.

Riders on the Storm

Saturday was a such a good day. We hung out with the boys, went to see Charlotte's Web, had a good dinner together-- all seemed as right with the world as it can be in our situation. I stepped into Kroger to pick up something quick. When I came back out, I saw that Melissa was laying on the floor of the van, stuck between the seats. I thought maybe she had had a seizure, but she said she didn't think so, and she was not in the usual fog after one. I was mad, sad, worried all at once-- there were the boys in their car seats, unable to do anything. To add insult to injury, John said he didn't think it was a seizure; I had always hoped he would never have to deal with that. His great strength was his weakness: he is my helper in so many ways, and he could not do anything to help his mommy. Joe said, "I hollered for you, Daddy. Did you hear me?"

Luckily, in spite of being worried, John got back to his normal self. By bedtime he was talking about protecting Joe from bad guys. John has definitely made things easier for Joe. Every transition that the boys make is harder for them, given Melissa's illness. But John keeps a stiff upper lip for Joe, holding his hand or putting his arm around him. And so Joseph becomes something of a spokesman; he hollered for me while John worried what to do. Most times, Joe will step forward to speak on their behalf. I guess they're like Moses and Aaron.

I spent some time talking to the boys about how to help Melissa if she has a seizure. Ack, what a discussion. I wonder why I forget sometimes with the boys what I try to live with-- being up front and honest about situations? I thought the boys would be wigged out by talking about it, but they were glad to know what to do. Joe said, "And I'll pray."

We also spent some time on perspective. That is, Melissa's cancer is gone, hopefully to stay. So if she has seizures, that's a lot better. We'll pray and trust those will be gone, too.

In the midst of all this, we still find so much joy in the Lord. I visited the Itoula family a few days ago, discussing the problem of their children still in the refugee camp in Gabon. I read them Psalm 126, the Psalm we rejoice in so much. We prayed about getting ready to sing this Psalm when their children come: "When the Lord brough back the captives to Zion, we were like men who dreamed! Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy."

Martha, Barbaro and Shipwreck

Melissa’s surgery went well. The doctor said the spleen just about jumped out. We won’t know for a few weeks if it works. That’s average. But it may be apparent even more quickly. But for right now, we’re happy that it went well, and she did not need any blood. She had a lot of pain after the surgery, and was not able to move much, but in a few hours, she picked up.

She was really peaceful about it all. I guess given everything else, this is small stuff. She said beforehand that lately with God and her it’s been all about trust. So she wasn’t worried.

When Melissa went in for the first chemo in 2005, it was when Martha Stewart was getting out of jail. There were news stories, and everyone was talking about Martha, feeling sorry for Martha. I was not too sympathetic; if I had done what Martha did, the cavity search would still be going on. Melissa was really mad, tho. She said that Martha did something wrong and was getting out of jail, and there Melissa was, having committed no crime and starting a two-year sentence (that’s what she called her chemo regimen… little did we know!)

Then came Barbaro back in the Spring. That was crazy. A horse was treated better than most humans, but again, there’s Melissa being irradiated. The cynic inside her said our lives must be really shallow if we get so worked up about a horse. And it only makes it worse if you say it’s because there’s so much money involved… It’s one of those moments where you laugh at how things don’t change. Wesley wrote a great essay more than 200 years ago, I think it’s called “On the Present Scarcity of Provisions.” Basically, he was decrying the idea that there are too many people to feed when the best land in England goes first to horses for racing then to grain for whiskey. Wake up, Kentucky!

And now it’s that dude who had to get rescued because he was trying to sail around the world and his boat sank. I am glad they rescued the guy, but at some point you have to wonder how come no one ever says to themselves, “I need an extreme rush! I need to face down danger and possible death! I want to do something that will demand focus and endurance! Even if I can’t get leukemia, can I at least take 105 minutes of radiation and chemo that can cause secondary cancers? Hoo-ah!” Somehow it’s cool to have to call everybody in to get you off a mountain, out of the sea, or cut off your own arm because you had to have that rush. This has been a two-year rush, but where are all those pansies?

You see why I like Cake’s song, “The Distance,” so much:

No trophies, no flashbulbs, no flowers, no wine
He wrestles with something he cannot define
Bowel-shaking earthquakes of doubt and remorse
Assail him and impale him with monster-truck force

A Child's Prayer

Wow, there are just so many layers to prayer. Firday night I told Joe that Courtnay didn't feel good. Courtnay works at the church and is a favorite of the boys, altho she has for the moment been supplanted in their affections by Allison Krauss. Anyhoo, Joe stops to pray and says, "Heavenly Father, Courtnay doesn't feel good. Amen." I was immediately struck by his simple statement. He didn't ask God to do anything. He just stated the facts. A child knows something is up, but doesn't always know the answer. Joe does this in lots of areas. "I'm hot" or "I'm hungry," and then we do what seems best. BUt isn't it funny-- there's always that moment of frustration where you say, "what do you want to eat?" or "why don't you take off your coat." But what profound faith to say to God, "Courtnay's sick" and trust Him to know what's best.

Father, my children are burdened with me and my grown-up ways. Amen.

Prayer and Preaching

There is a great and mystical connection between prayer and preaching. I learned at First Church that once we started having times of intercessory prayer during the services that the worship became more powerful—music, preaching, the feel of the service, because God’s people were praying, and people knew there was always a team back there praying. But it goes deeper than that. It reaches down into the life of the people from the lives of the worshipping congregation in heaven. And it does more than impact preaching. But preaching is on my mind right now.

When the angel Gabriel announces to the priest Zechariah that he will have a son, John (to be called the Baptist, although he sure seems like a Methodist to me…), it comes at the time of prayer, the time of burning incense (Luke 1:8-10). So, the proclamation of the birth of the one who will lead the way for the Messiah comes at the time of prayer. The task of the preacher is much like John’s, to prepare the way by convincing people of sin and showing them the way to Jesus, so should it not come at the time of, at the cost of, prayer?

A few years back, Melissa shared something powerful with the prayer meeting at Dunaway. In Revelation 5:8, there are golden bowls of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. She shared with us that she visualizes her prayers as being in those golden bowls of incense, and how the prayers of all the saints around the world, perhaps from all eternity, are in those bowls.

I have noticed a connection between the bowls of incense and prayer in Revelation and the incense and time of prayer in Luke. That is, in Luke, the incense and prayer come at the time that announces the coming of the one who will prepare the way. The incense-as-prayers of the saints in Revelation come as the Lamb whose blood has cleansed believers of sin, is declared worthy because His blood has saved us from sin. And indeed, John the Baptist cried out, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!”

Prayer must surround the word of proclamation if it is to have any effect at all, if it is to be more than just words, however fine, however well-put together, however full of Scripture. If there is no prayer, there will be no power. And it must be more than the preacher’s own prayer and study time, which anyway if most people are honest is more study and less prayer. No, there must be thick prayer rising up to God from the many people.

Orth it Up

A couple of days ago, I was discussing some plans for a service of prayer and fasting that I want to have every Wednesday during the lunch hour. I hope that it will be something that brings some peace into the day—the peace of repentance and the peace of staying close to God in fasting. And I hope that there is just some peace and quiet. Bonnie MacDonald, deacon at Christ Church, would always begin her pastoral prayers with a time of silence. I took that good advice and started, too, and someone remarked to us that it was the only time of silence they had during the week.

Anyhoo, part of my plan involves some fixed praying and also some incense, both as a pleasing aroma (part of the peace and quiet) and also to symbolize the sacrifice of prayer, ascending to God. So I pulled out my censer (I have always wanted a censer, and it was my Christmas gift to me). Rosario came in and said, “All right! Way to orth it up!” So now we have a new word, “to orth,” to make something orthodox.

Even as I write, we are “orthing it up.” When the boys were first born, they came at the times when I was working on my Board of Ordained Ministry paperwork. It’s a long process and took a lot of time and effort. I would put the babies in a bassinette next to the computer and they would nap or play while I worked. I like to think it’s why they both like my set of books on the Early Church Fathers—they were right there with them from the beginning.

Anyhoo, it has been a good day for us—playing, huge naps (all four of us!) and a good dinner at a Mexican restaurant. So now, I have some stuff to write, sermons to prepare, and the boys are in bed. They seem ok that I am here in the monitor’s glow. And I have a CD of Gregorian Chant in, low volume. John says, “can this be my lullabye?” Way to orth it up, John!

A few days ago, Joseph was singing to Melissa, “You are so beautiful to me.” I thought, why is she beautiful to him? In the end, it has nothing to do with how she looks, it has to do with who she is to him, his mommy. When does that change? When does beauty quit being about the inner quality? St. Peter said, “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight” (1 Pet 3:3-4). Way to orth it up, Joe!

In Defense of Brute Force

Some years back, I started getting interested in the Japanese game, Go. Actually, my interest has come in three waves, and the first two waves died for lack of time or someone to show me how to play. The third phase of my interest came to an end about a year and a half ago. See, Go is a strategy game, but it’s not like chess. It’s a 19x19 grid, and players take turns placing a black or white pebble on the points of intersection. The goal is to surround as many of your opponents pieces as possible. There is not a set opening, as in chess, where all the pieces are on the board. The game has almost infinite variety. So much so, in fact, that a computer can’t play it and win, whereas in chess, a computer can now beat the greatest players because it can predict all the possible moves.

Chess is a game of force, whereas Go is a game of patience. Maybe that’s not the right word. You take possession of property in Go by surrounding an opponent’s pieces, and the patterns that develop from that are beautiful. You take control in chess by bluntly forcing the opponent off the board, by bringing more force to bear than your opponent has.

I confess, I was interested in Go because of its elegance. I like chess a lot, but Go had some hold on my imagination. I also used to like bonsai. I always wanted to have a cedar or pine bonsai that I could make to look like the memories of my childhood on the beaches of California’s Central Coast—windswept and battered, but the tree endured, flourished, even, in spite of circumstances.

But my interest in Go ended because my interest in bonsai ended, and my interest in bonsai ended in George Strunk’s office. See, he has a bonsai plant there, in its nice little enameled trough. But it is totally dead. All its needles may be gone by this point. I asked him about it, and his answer was a real wake-up call. He said he just could not get into bonsai, could not bring himself to accede to the very idea of bonsai. He went on to say that he thought it was unnatural, to keep something from growing, to prune it, to take it out of its pot and prune its roots to keep it small, to keep it from growing. “It’s not the Kingdom,” he said.

Sometimes you need someone else to shake you out of complacency. You think you know something, you think you’re sold out to something. In my case, I like to think I am sold out to the growth of the Kingdom, the agricultural metaphors of Jesus. And yet there was a double-mind of interest in bonsai.

I know that sounds melodramatic, but I think that what was behind what George was saying was you have to believe. I don’t mean just lip-service, or think it’s a cool idea. But there is more to it than even working hard at it.

So there I was. I let go of bonsai, and Go, too. Because around the time that I heard George’s parable, I was also reading Victor Hanson’s Carnage and Culture, a book everyone should read. Hanson discusses the Western way of war in contrast to non-Western ways. He says what makes the Western way more effective is that it is finally amoral and not ritualized. That is to say, it is not so much interested in how as in what. There is a goal that is independent of the means to the extent that the Western way adopts and adapts to accomplish the ends of war as opposed to the forms.

This is what I mean by the title of this blog entry—in defense of brute force I mean we have to let go of notions about church that may be pleasing, elegant, or time-honored. Bonsai are pleasing. Go is elegant. Sure, if you want to sound cool at a cocktail party, read Sun Tzu. But if you want to win, try de Jomini. Sure bonsai is fun in a solipsistic way, but better the man who plants a tree that produces fruit that produces seeds to produce many more trees to produce fruit…

There is a K-mart future for the United Methodist Church. That is, in the next 10 years, we will see an acceleration of churches closing, especially in the rural areas. Some will close because older congregants die. Some will close because they are run by wolves and vultures. Some will close because the pastors, perhaps hampered by wolves and vultures, won’t bring in the new people who have moved to the country. But close they will. And then there will be one option: to sell the property. And then we will, like K-mart, make a killing. Then comes the crucial moment. What will we do with the money?

What we should do is put it into starting new congregations all over the place, even in the poorest, inelegant places. Find by hook and by crook the kinds of pastors who can start a new work, and rebuild the church. What we will do, I am afraid, is send the money to the bureaucrats who can prop up the same failed plans that got us into this mess in the first place. But for a little while there will be a chance to lay aside things that are pleasing and even elegant in our own tradition for the things that will get the job done. From the beginning, the Kingdom has been forcefully advancing…

Let me give you an example of the frightening problems at the highest levels of the United Methodist Church, the jokers who get too much of our money. When I was at Christ Church, I was doing some research on how do churches grow by conversion, not transfer. Our growth comes from transfer—people moving from one town to another, or people who come from another denomination. That’s not growth. You can see it in a horrible piece of reality: there is no county in America that has more people attending church now than it did in 1990. Lots of churches have grown, but Christianity is dying. So, the key is to learn how to get back to making converts to the faith.

So, I did the logical thing. I called and emailed the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Discipleship and asked for the Evangelism bureau. We have a few people heading that up for the church. I asked what I thought was a simple question: which UM churches are growing by “profession of faith,” that is, conversion? I figured once I heard about who was doing it, I would look for churches about Christ Church’s size and learn from them.

They did not know. The very people in charge of evangelism for the largest mainline denomination in America have no idea which of their churches are growing by profession of faith; the people in charge of evangelism do not know which churches are doing evangelism!

But they did have a suggestion for me: I should get in contact with GCFA, the General Council on Finance and Administration. This agency keeps all the records for the UMC. So, since every church turns in a yearly report that has a line for “professions of faith,” they should be able to tell me which churches are growing by professions of faith.

Now, disregard the fact that maybe the evangelism gurus in the Board of Discipleship should already know that. So I got in touch with GCFA. Naturally, it’s not really their job to worry about that specific line in the report. They offered to send me the data reports of all 40,000 or so United Methodist Churches and then I could look at the profession of faith lines for each church…

Finally I broke down and called a retired bishop, Bishop Looney, who started the Foundation for Evangelism. I guess he started it because the bureaucrats weren’t doing evangelism. He gave me the names of a few churches based on my criteria. He knew it off the top of his head—because first, there are very few churches growing this way, and because he keeps up with such stuff.

We can keep doing what we’ve been doing. Or we can take the chance that is going to be offered us: to put our money to good use. Quit doing it the way we have been and do something that works. We have such an elegant structure, vast and sprawling, and many times that is all Go comes down to—a game that is about a beautiful and unpredictable complex design. Looks cool in a coffee house, but it’s not very good training for war.

New Year

Already, this New Year is better than last. Last year, we knew we were headed for bone marrow transplant, that the disease would spread rapidly by the time we could get the transplant, and who knew what would happen? Who knew where things would stand at this point?

So we are thankful and full of praise. We are glad that things like seizures and splenectomy are not life-threatening parts of the disease. We are blessed. Family and friends have made this journey not just easier, but possible. So, what will this year be like? I am hoping it will be like last year, from the standpoint of relying on God. You can't go wrong there.

Happy New Year!

On the way

Today, on the way home from school, we got to wondering how we came up with some goofy hand sign we use. Joe finally said, "we all came up with it together," which I thought was a pretty good answer; there's a lot of power in doing things that way, in thinking of things that way. I mentioned that was kind of how the Holy Spirit worked in believers. John then said, "The Holy Spirit reaches into His pocket and pulls out his glue stick and keeps everyone together." Truly, the Fathers could do no better.

When the angel Gabriel announces that Elizabeth will give birth to a son, Zechariah can't believe it. Then the angel stops him from being able to speak until the child is born. But when Gabriel comes to Mary and tells her she will give birth to a son conceived by the Holy Spirit, she expresses doubt in the same way that Zechariah does, but she is not struck silent. I wonder why.

Greater love hath no man than that he take his children to Chuck E. Cheese for two and a half hours...

p/g

Christmas Morning

It's been said that it took the wise men, the kings, whatever they were, two years to get to Jesus, but all the shepherds had to do was cross the field! I guess the shepherds didn't have anything to lose; if they go and it's a bust, oh well, they had a diversion from the monotony and cold of watching flocks by night. If it's true, well, then nothing will ever be the same again.

The magi, on the other hand, have a lot to lose. But I'm not sure they knew that going in. Some of the early church Fathers say that the star in the sky marked the end of astrology. They didn't mean horoscopes, they meant something much more. Astrology was big stuff in the ancient world. It was about the only certainty pagans had about their gods-- the stars moved in predictable patterns, and if you were learned, possessed mysterious knowledge, you could predict eclipses or the flooding of the Nile. It was all-important knowledge. Something new in the sky-- a comet, or some strange alignment of planets meant something. Maybe good, maybe bad; better check it out. So the magi followed a sign they knew something about.

But they did not know that with the birth of the Christ Child certainty had come into the world. No more need to look at goat livers or chicken bones to determine the future, or the nature of the gods. The one and only god had come into the world, took on flesh, shown great love and mystery.

They knew they had to worship Him. But were they happy about it? What did they do with it? Your life changes when you accept the babe born in Bethlehem. The things the magi had-- wealth, status, power, knowledge-- mean very little in the wake of Christ's birth. That is, they mean very little if you depend on them for happiness or peace. The end of astrology means not only certainty about God and who He is; what He is like is availible in the person of Jesus; the end of astrology means that all the things we hold on to must go. They are increasingly revealed for the hollow and empty things they are. There's never enough money. The love runs out. You can't drink it away.

We have a lot to lose, don't we? I think of the drunk who came by the church. To exchange to the certainty of the love of Jesus for his bottle, he thinks it's too much. I once thought in broader strokes-- the intrusion into my life and rights of a God who can say what is holy and unholy was too much to take. So much of who I was and what I liked to do had to die.

We are blessed when we wake up before it is too late, when we realize that all our ways are leading to death, and that the birth of Christ is an invasion, a beginning of the end. All the forces of darkness, death, and corruption are going to be swept away. They couldn't, can't, see it coming. But we do, even though (as the Apostle Peter says), "we suffer grief for a little while."

I think there is a new birth today. I hold the Christ Child and pray that He will grow in me. I want my home to be a "Little Nazareth," where He can grow and speak to us.

p/g

Hide and Seek

“I am frightened by the corrupted ways of this land—if only I could kill the killer”
--Alannis Morrissette, “All I Really Want”

“Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiprah and Puah, ‘When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and observe them on the delivery stool, if it is a boy, kill him…. Now a man of the house of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket fro him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the banks of the Nile” (Exodus 1:15-16; 2:1-3).

“When they [the magi] had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. ‘Get up’, he said, ‘take the child and his mother and escape into Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him’” (Matthew 2:13).

The summer days in Germany were long. The sun did not start going down until around ten. So we kids stayed out as long as we could. Our favorite game was hide and seek. The way we played it was a lot more fun than I had played it in the States. But one day, something strange struck me, something that has come back on me a few times since the boys were born.

I realized that in some way, Hide and Seek is a vicious game of survival training. Can you hide from the hunter? Can you find the prey? Answers to those questions mean life or death in many parts of human history. I remember thinking about the Holocaust and the terrible stories of people trying to hide, but being given away by a crying child. Or a mother who had to smother her child to save the lives of many. Then I got back to playing.

I know, I know, I have a dark streak in my personality, one that is at once fearful of violence and convinced that part of my task is to resist it and help others do the same. I suppose there was something of a call in my childhood thoughts about hide and seek.

Sometimes when I see John or Joe running across the field to the creek, I am tormented again by those childhood thoughts. How slow children are, how weak. And then, as a man, I now know that if people are weak, they are taken advantage of. It’s even legal to do so, because they are weak and can’t stand up for themselves. An instructive moment: I mentioned to a colleague that “activists” in the church community have missed the main justice issue in America: abortion. The reply was that if I asked the people in the community if abortion was the main issue, they wouldn’t agree. I replied “That’s because the people for whom it is an issue are dead.” The dead do not get to speak, and a fetus can only raise a hand in a startle-reflex. Why are we so scared of children? Moses and Jesus would have a hard time being born in our own day. There is nothing new under the sun, and the more things change, the more they say the same.

A few nights ago, we were playing hide and seek downstairs. Normally this is such a good game, and I don’t really think about my darker thoughts. I mean, one of us hides and the other two snuggle on the couch while we count. (When boys get older, they don’t snuggle with dad as much, so you have to sneak it in where you can). Thursday night Joe lamented that he doesn’t know how to hide very well. Dark clouds rise. Then, he was hiding in a good place, but two of his toes were sticking out. That was it. We went on playing, but I was twisting inside. Do I give him a crash course in hiding? There’s nothing sadder than desperation.

Of course it’s ridiculous, but then again it is not. Does anyone deny the existence of evil, its particular fondness for the weakest and most vulnerable? We sometimes think it is a limited thing, something that happens to the unfortunate few. We can feel bad when we hear about it, but it won’t touch us. Finally, evil exists in a million forms, and perhaps the most pernicious are not the physical manifestations, but rather the devilry of domination and control in relationships.

I met a man a few days ago who came to the church looking for some clothes. He was a drunk, and said, “I’ll be honest, I shit all over myself. I can’t go around stinking like this.” It was pretty bad, for sure. I mentioned that there was a deeper filth all over him that he had to let go of, too.

“I’d rather die,” he said.

“You’re going to,” I said. And then he told me that his dad gave him whiskey to shut him up when he was a baby and small child. He could not hide from that hunter.

p/g

Christmas Songs

Last night we had a Christmas Singing Service. I guess there were 80 or so of us together, and we had polled the congregation to find our favorite Christmas hymns. Then we just sang, and were blessed. The Itoula family sang, Princia Itoula did a solo and so did Noella Mapigano, Magdalena Rodriguez, and Nancy Agrinsoni. Denis Diaz led us in Feliz Navidad. All told, we sang in English, Spanish, French, Swahili and Lingala. I hope everyone got to see that we were all together, a very diverse group of people, but all together as children of God.

Afterwards, we had dessert. It was so good to see everyone together. I sat at a table with some kids—Rosy, Joyce and Jose Itoula, Alex, Savanna, and Lainie. Kids are quick to be friends. But the adults, well, we still sometimes separate because it’s easier. That’s ok. I like nothing better than walking around to tables, introducing people, and causing trouble, then leaving.

It always comes back to guts. Will we be one family? Will we make a choice to not simply tolerate, but to embrace? I’ve been in too many places where people “value” diversity. Funny, but the people who talk most about diversity rarely model it, because they are content on the surface to see lots of difference, but don’t really want to accept that different people may actually have something to say! More importantly, diversity doesn’t happen if you can retreat somewhere to a homogenous place. It means actually living together.

I know this is an uphill battle. In fact, I suspect that I may lose. We may lose. That is, we will have misunderstandings. We will grow weary of trying when it is easier not to. We will not “submit one to another, out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21). Only our love for Jesus and the Holy Spirit will sustain this work.

I learned an important lesson in Winchester: if you do the right thing, the money and the people show up. It’s hard to trust that, but I have not been disappointed yet. Our ministry is to all people, but especially to the poorest of the poor among us. So we are marginal, and it is always going to be a struggle to survive, to find people willing to be here not just in worship, but also in terms of community life. And then, the very people who are our constituents do not have the kind of money it takes to run a mission. But we are also a church. First and foremost a place of preaching. So we are a weird thing, but a good thing, and I hope people can see that, and join us. If you want a glimpse of heaven, come visit us sometime!

p/g

Christmas Greetings

What a year! So many changes-- we thought we would be done with leukemia in the fall of 2005, then just before Christmas we got the bad news Melissa would need further treatment, meaning bone marrow transplant. Decisions about where-- Vanderbilt or UL? We think we made the right choice, and anyway, Melissa is disease-free since August! It’s been a long recovery from the rigors of the transplant, but she gains strength everyday. We have a long way to go. We continue to ask for your constant prayers, as the cancer could come back. But everyone is upbeat, and no matter what, we keep living!

We are serving at The Rock La Roca United Methodist Church, and if you have followed this blog, you know what a freaked out place it is! We are very blessed to be in such a ministry. I can’t put my finger on it, I couldn’t have planned it, could not have conceived it, but when I am in it, I know it is what I have been looking for in a group of believers.

John is 6 years old and lost his first tooth a few weeks ago. He is in Kindergarten at Cornerstone Christian Academy. Joseph is 4 and also goes to Cornerstone for preschool. I cannot say enough what blessings they are in our lives. I turned thirty-seven and am a diligent student at the School of Hard Knocks.

This is now the 13th Christmas since I accepted Christ as Lord and Savior. I love Advent and Christmas, maybe it was the years in Germany? There was so much happening this time of year there. The Feast of St. Martin (Nov 11) kicks it off. Then Dec.5 we put our shoes out for St. Nikolaus. We ravaged our Advent calendars. We opened gifts Christmas Eve. All was calm and bright.

I meditate a lot on the baby Jesus, the mystery of the Incarnation. I think of Mary and Joseph raising Him. I wonder about what it means that the Word could not walk or speak. I remember how much I look forward to each new place the boys go in their development, the things they say, can say, can understand. And then I wonder about the first time Jesus spoke. What did He say? When He learned to speak, did we learn to listen? When He speaks, He says, “come and see.” “Follow Me.” “Give up everything.”

All of you are in our prayers. We wish you a Merry Christmas, with all the fullness of the meaning of the season!

p/g

Otherworldly

I told david and Noella (two of our Congolese people) that the church in America is weak. They nodded and said they had noticed as much. Noella asked, "How many of your people can fast three days?" What can you say? As a United Methodist pastor, I took a vow that says among other things that I will "teach fasting and abstinence by precept and example." I know that I have preached on it a lot, try to keep to fasting on Wednesdays, but on one even humors me about fasting. It's too serious, I suppose.

David then asked, "Do you have a Baptism School?" Apparently where he went to church in Congo, they had a long-term class to get people ready for baptism. And when you passed, they took you before the congregation, but if someone said you were still living in sin, oh well, start over. We think, "Oh my! How harsh and judgmental." St Cyril did not think so. Neither did St. Ambrose. Or Augustine. Or more recntly, John Wesley. My church in Winchester kicked a guy out in the 1870s because he sold a bum mule to someone. Now that's discipleship. I could at least say to David, we are working on in-depth discipleship program.

A month or so ago, I asked them what their names mean. The oldest boy is Malippo, and it means "reward." The youngest boy is Benjamin. The family's last name is Mapigano, which means "war." Noella said they changed Benjamin's last name to... "Espoir," or "Hope."

David related that when the genocide in Rwanda happened, and people spilled across the borders, his mother took care of people as best could. David fussed at her a little bit because it was taking away from the family's meager provisions. She told him, "One day we may need someone to take care of us." He couldn't argue with her on that. "And now," he said, "here we are." Praise God.

We laughed a little bit about some things. It's cold to them here. They have never seen natural ice. But David said some people he knows were resettled to Norway.

p/g

No Need for Name-Calling...

In the last two weeks three different people have referred to The Rock La Roca as part of “the emerging church.” I know they meant well, but I took it hard. The only think I know about the so-called emerging church movement is from Brian McLaren, and I don’t care much for his stuff. I think it’s an attempt to soak off the vibe of some sentimental notion of the pre-medieval church. There’s a loose definition that says there are new kinds of churches “emerging” that aren’t “traditional” in the way we have tended to think about church. Fine. But the end result for me has to be that we don’t do or say anything new.

p/g

Dancing Days Are Here Again

All I can do is keep falling back on Psalm 126—“When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like men who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.”

My thoughts on this Psalm are always closely related to Psalm 121, especially “He will not let your foot slip, He who watches over you will not slumber.” The only way you can understand that is living with it for a long time. If you want it as an instantaneous promise that nothing bad will ever happen, then I guess you’re right—it’s foolish and wishful thinking.

But if you trust 3000 years of peoples’ faith and your own experience with God over the long haul you see that it means precisely what Paul said. None of us are getting out of here alive, sin and evil are real. But, “nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

So, a few days before the scan when we were tired of waiting, wondering, trying to prepare for the worst, Melissa said simply that if it’s bad news and a downhill slide, she’s ok because she’s going home. Not an easy conversation. But imagine if you did not have the going home part, just bad news and a downhill slide.

But for now, we are delivered. I’m not sure what to say in prayer. Maybe the more you have to say, the less important things are? When it’s vital, life and death, maybe there is only silence in the face of God’s awesomeness.

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Multi-Cultural

An instructive moment at Wal-Mart: I was there with David Mapigano, the father of the Congolese family we are sponsoring. We were laughing and joking about how much we're alike-- 2 boys, 2 years apart, wives much taller than both of us... Then I saw Julio, one of our parishioners. We waved him over and tried to have conversation, altho my Spanish is grim. I understand half of what is said to me but can't say much back. David and Julio tried to talk a little, and that was awesome-- recognizing that they were both immigrants and had something in common, and knowing that they were both Christians. I was standing there thinking, "I can't believe that I am the pastor of such a freaked out church!" I don't think I have a had a moment more thankful for my calling, and for the opportunity that we have at The Rock La Roca.

And then at the evening service, a black man said to me at communion-- "merci pour la message ce soir." Well, it's a Spanish-speaking service and here's this guy speaking French. I talked to him and his wife after the service, Luc and Joannie. They are from Haiti and heard that there was a church that had preaching in French. Joannie said, "God wants everyone to be together, that's why this is happening."

Can we do it? Are we tough enough? Are we bold as love? Multi-cultural churches generally fail. It's too easy for people to choose to go to a place where it's one language, one type of people. But I do not think the La Rocans are like that. I used to think people come here because they choose to. Now I am wondering if part of it is alos being chosen, being called, and then submitting to work through how God's spirit is pushing through us.

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Camped Out at The Rock

Well, today we did something we had talked about for a while: we camped at the Rock. Joseph had the idea; we would take sleeping bags and sleep on the floor. So we brought them in and napped a bit today. Joe is still asleep. But John came over to me with a book. It is a book I like quite a bit, one I heartily recommend: Six Centuries of Great Poetry. He says, “Read me a poem from this book.”

“How do you know these are poems?” I asked.

“Because Steffi read us some today.” Steffi is Stephanie McKinney, long-time family friend, long-suffering babysitter of the boys on Sunday mornings during the early-service. So, good job Steffi! John happened to open it to… Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” I love that poem, and it had a poignant sense when Melissa got sick, especially when she lost her hair. “If we had but world enough and time…” Indeed.

Now there is a fierce sense to the poem, the fierceness that I knew was brewing in me, and would emerge from this journey with Melissa: that there is not world enough and time, and worse than that, meaningless things crowd out what time and world you do have!

The thing I have not resolved is how to be relentless and graceful at the same time. How to pursue the things that matter and trash the things that don’t. In ministry—how not to get bogged down in details, or doing anything that keeps you from the real point: saving souls, making disciples. Anything else is pointless. And if you have to spend time justifying how a task that is not evangelism and discipling supports the work of evangelism and discipling, you have already lost.

And then in the personal life: what builds a relationship? How to break out of the mindlessness that is so easy? How do I reject what is urgent to do what is not just important, but right. Or simple.

In ministry, a thing’s urgency is almost always in inverse proportion to its evangelistic or discipleship potential. Usually, it grabs us unawares, and we subconsciously realize: my faith is about me, and my exercise in ministry is still about me, but here someone is reaching out and I have to do something now… hurry hurry hurry.

In personal life you wake up one day to find you have not wrestled with the boys since you don’t know when and you plan this or that and then something gets in the way and it doesn’t happen and you hurry hurry hurry to a miserably good time. There is a reason God created the Sabbath. Stop everything.

We read some poems by John Donne—when (if) you studied him in school, how much was made of his faith? Very little I bet. And yet he was nothing if not a Christian. Then we read some John Milton. Some John Keats. “So many named John!” John said. “John Mansfield?” he asked. “One day, maybe so,” I responded.

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Words

I learned a good new word in Spanish: "gente," or more specifically, "mi gente;" "my people." Maybe a better word is folk. It comes from Latin, "gens," meaning "kind, type, or sort." Generic, genus, gentile come from this word. The reason I like the word is because the context I learned it in indicated it meant a close relationship, something more than just "people." Not quite immediate family.

Everybody needs a gente. What would Melissa and I do without a gente? On the one hand, we have family that sticks by us, helps out in unbelievable ways. I think that's the direction Church needs to go, to be a gente for people with no gente. To be a gente to people who already have one, so we can see what gente is really all about.

Advent is a time to welcome Nazareth into our hearts and homes. What would it mean for our hearts and homes to be "Little Nazareths," a place where Jesus is welcomed and nurtured, where St. Joseph is what it means to be a real man and St. Mary what it means to be a real woman.

What a gente God has for us if we can adopt it!

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Advent

"Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Nathanael asks when Philip tells him they have found the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. We ask those kinds of questions all the time. We all snicker if someone says they're from some really country town, with names like Viper or Gravel Switch. Interestingly no one laughs if they tell you they're from Pig Town (which is what the "York" in New York means).

But I think we ask it in different ways, when we doubt, when we fear, when we don't forgive, when we don't repent-- in short, whenever we fall back on thinking Jesus is just a good idea, something other than the Son of God.

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Trout Fishing in America

When I first moved to Lexington 11 years ago, occasionally someone would call and ask for Richard. The first two times this happened, I asked “Richard who?” “Richard Brautigan,” came the answer. I thought it was a prank played by one of my friends. “Brautigan’s dead, dude.” The voice on the other line was taken aback, and I got to wondering if it was a serious call. Sometime later, I got to talking to someone else asking for Richard Brautigan, and I said a little more gently, “He’s dead.”

I was telling the truth, knowingly and not-so-knowingly. On the one hand, the writer Richard Brautigan, who I thought my prank-playing friends were asking for, is dead (they know I don’t really care much for him, and I wondered if his work was the subject of one of my rants… thus the prank calls to egg me on… sad, I know). On the other hand, the Richard Brautigan the callers were really wanting to talk to was dead as well, recently deceased.

Richard Brauitigan, the beat writer, has caught up with me. I don’t know that I like him any better after re-reading him this spring. But I can’t get his book Trout Fishing in America out of my head. It’s not that it’s any good, because empirically, it’s not. But there is something poignant in the writer that begins to invade my experience of the book.

Brautigan’s biography intrigues me because those who knew him best recall that he never spoke of his mother, any brothers or sisters or his childhood in poverty (he threw a brick through a police station window so they would take him to jail and he might get something to eat), . It’s like he just showed up in Haight-Ashbury one day. His last book, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away was a reminiscence of his life, including his childhood. He committed suicide a few years after it was published. Some say when he broke his silence, that’s what killed him. Who knows.

The question it makes me ask, the question the nervous bungling of the trout fisherman (esp as a child) in the story makes me ask, is how does the church reach into such people’s lives? I mean, there are millions of little Richard Brautigans. Whatever we can say of the success of his literary career, he was never happy. There was never enough money, booze, women, or adulation of fans to fill the emptiness of a loveless childhood. That’s the way it is. The things we try to fill life up with kill us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, tell us about Melissa. But that’s what I’m trying to do. While we were still in Louisville, we were sitting around thinking about things like this. About people like Richard Brautigan. People not as famous who had difficult childhoods, and no one protected them. It got back to me and Melissa remembering how much the Kingdom of God was our first love, and how a million things crowd it out. And then bam, you’re sick, maybe dying, and all those things that crowded out the Kingdom are looking pretty stupid.

Melissa said, “Whether we have 1 year or sixty, we have to keep laughing.” And we went on. Praying. Loving. Believing. Living abnormally. Trout Fishing in America is a strange metaphor for… life? Something that never was but you still lament its passing?

I used to fly fish. That is, I had a fly rod and would practice catching blue gills at the pond on USM’s campus. I was hoping one day to go out West, specifically to Bishop, CA, where my great grandfather used to fish. He was from France, the mountains, where the trout are abundant. I thought I might forge some connection. Never happened, because I am a wretched fisherman (as Dane Conrad can attest). And because ultimately, trying to attach some significance to a past you never had doesn’t go anywhere. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to figure anything out about Trout Fishing in America-- it’s a character, a place, an idea, something you can’t quite hold on to.

Perhaps things aren’t as weird as an early 60s novel, but we are using something, searching for something to fill up our lives, and if it’s not Jesus, I don’t fancy your chances of making it out alive.

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Kingdom Service II

I have been doing some more thinking about the Kingdom Service, esp about how a sermon that is short sentences broken by the pauses of translation into two languages still gets across. It has everything to do with the Holy Spirit. I was preaching from 1 Peter 1:1-9, about remembering our true identity, being together from all over the place, belonging nowhere except in the “gathered community.”

The reason the sermon worked is because the Holy Spirit had already done the work! We were the gathered community, we were aware of Christ’s sacrifice for us, we grope towards living into our identity as created, redeemed children of God.

I suppose if none of that were true for us, I would have had to come up with something eloquent so no one would have felt cheated! We come expecting because we have received.

Pray, pray, pray. This is all you can do-- pray that you will be open to the power of the Holy Spirit to do the work He always does: convincing the world of its sinfulness, drawing people to Christ, providing faith, and then empowering them to live the Christian life. I guess based on where we were, I could have simply said, “Jesus. Holy Spirit. All of us together. Look!” and we all would have really felt something! The Holy Spirit had already done the work the Word was talking about!

p/g,

Aaron

Stuff

I have been chewing on something Melissa said a few weeks ago, something about getting thru the worst of the stomach pain by praying and hearing God say something like "Haven't I always been here? You wouldn't have made it in life even to the age where you got cancer if I hadn't been there." I wonder what kind of answer that is, and how does it make a difference? I know it does, but I wonder how? I wonder how in the spiritual life when you confront difficult issues, acceptance and honesty are so comforting whereas in the simple things, or the mundane things, acceptance and honesty are seen as painful, naive, and cruel?

She has scans December 1st. Just in time for the holidays, she says wryly.

You have to be thankful when things are going ok and you can't really think of what you're thankful for. And you have to be thankful when there's nothing.

Kingdom Service

We had the first "Kingdom Service" since I've been here. Now I wonder why we waited so long. We get all the services together for one service. That, in my mind, is going to be increasingly important. It is hard enough to keep a multicultural church together when things are flowing. In order to keep it together long term, people have to form relationships across the services, across cultures.

I can't tell you what it is... I know that when we do translation the way we did Sunday, the sermon is not technically as good. I spoke, then Cedrick Lukonga translated, then Ruben. So there is not the usual narrative flow that I work best with. BUt somehow, it works, and works well. I don't mean it is "good." I mean people respond. It's the Holy Spirit. He can do more with His own words than He can with me dressing them up. It is humbling. I used to be worried when people would say, "good sermon." I would always say, "By His grace," so there might be no mistake. Now, I have to trust that in ways I only thought I did.

Even if the sermon is simply short declarative sentences that lend themselves to translation, it works. Shame on me for thinking anything else!

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Blessed Be The Name of the Lord

At the Wednesday prayer meeting, Michele Rodriguez led the singing. She started with “Blessed Be the Name of The Lord.” That’s a song I had a hard time with when I first heard it. Kelly Patton used to sing it at our service at Christ Church. It has some tough lines: “Blessed be your name on the road marked with suffering, when there’s pain in the offering, blessed be your name.” Honest, and so far so good. But then, more honesty that’s hard to take: “You give and take away, you give and take away, my heart will choose to say, Lord, blessed be your name.”

I got over my apprehensions about it when Melissa sang it very prayerfully and praise-fully.

Michele prefaced the song by saying in youth they were studying Job. As she talked about the beginning of Job, the “deal” between God and Satan, there was one of those moments where you understand something you have known. On the surface, God allowing Satan to do whatever to Job is jarring. But as Michele was talking, I found myself thinking this story is not about Job. It’s about people and evil. Everyone will experience what Job did, and the story, in a very artful way, deals with the deepest problem for theology: the problem of evil. Human choice is one part of evil, perhaps the only kind of evil the modern mind can accept. But Job also deals with the malevolent force present in the fabric of the universe.

And of course, we all know this on some level, but the story of Job gets so personal, we are so sympathetic that we cringe at the injustice and pain. I find that I lose sight of myself in the story. It may be the hardest story to break into in the Bible. On the one hand, it is so very human and so I am right there. On the other hand, it’s hard to see it as a story about everyone. Do I hesitate to think Job’s story is the way of the world? Maybe it’s just me.

Of course, Melissa has a much better insight than I do, living the story, and at the same time counting her blessings that she is not Job, etc. One great truth in Job: the best thing that your friends can do is be quiet, but be there. There is a time for talking. But in pastoral care the one thing you have to make sure of is that if you are talking to someone who is suffering, you’re not trying to answer your own questions about pain of God’s justice. And how hard that is for me; I always want something to say.

Melissa has scans coming up. If she is clear, woo hoo! But there is a lot of anxiety about it—almost wish they had not told us. Just let us walk in and say, “Hey you have scans today.” She is basically over the stomach pains that started in August (man, time has flown). She is eating more, has some more energy. Now she needs more confidence to get out and about when she has the energy.

Norbert Itoula was a mathematics instructor in Congo. He now has a job at Transylvania University as a janitor—in the Math and Sciences building! He hopes that he can have some contact with the staff and maybe as he learns English, get a better job in the same building!

The boys don’t have to work too hard at being boys. Sure, they are exasperating at times (bath time especially). Or they just go wild. But they are also unbelievably sweet and funny. How hard it is to be a father, tho. It is a foreign occupation, not natural. The human tendencies are too much there. One day this summer, I thought about the gospel’s beginning and end (narratively speaking). Joseph takes care of Jesus and Mary, and at the end, John takes care of Mary. There is a great need for men who will take care of their families in the ways that Sts. Joseph and John did.

It’s a messed up world. In our quest to be in ministry to and with the school across the street, we are gathering information, looking for needs. It only intensifies the idea that what we need to do is not a program, but an invasion of people into the life of the community. We don’t need a plan, we need people. Lenin had a saying that I think makes strange sense: “quantity has a quality all its own.” The Rock La Roca doesn’t have money (we’ll take some if you want to send it), but what we have is people. We need prayers to determine how we will motivate lots of people to move in. We need 100 people from our worshipping community who will each get to know 2 families in the area. Something like that—pray for it, please. One of the tough stories that hit us was a boy who comes to our church. He lives with his grandmother. His dad is out of state. His mom left one night and has not come back—no one knows where she is. You can well imagine how heartbroken he is. So what do we need? People to come and help with children’s ministry? Well, sure, that’s a start. But what we really need are lots of people who will hang out with our kids, one-on-one, playing and praying with them.

Life is messy. We do everything we can to stay away from that. And ministry is depressing if you don’t have the right info up front. Most of your addicts will die. Most of the people who come out of homosexuality will fall back into it. Your liars will go back to lying, and some people will never stop being s.o.b.’s. Narrow is the way that leads to eternal life, and few find it. You just have to know that going in. But you also have to know that the work of Jesus is messy. Look, He was born, and that’s messy. He died and that was messy. He talked to people, healed them and that was messy. He sent His disciples out and that was messy.

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Entering Scripture

Things look different and in some ways better on a number of fronts for Melissa. Her appetite is getting better. After three months with stomach problems, that is good! Her hair is coming back. She has more energy. But some days are still hard.

And then, we have scans beginning of next month. There's a lot of anxiety about that-- what will they show? Cancer still gone?

Just before the bone marrow transplant, the cancer had spread to a lot of places. Some you knew only because the scan said so, others because she could feel them. I was too chicken for her to show me.

One of the places was in her back, and it caused almost unbearable pain. Psalm 38, a Psalm of confession, says, "My back is filled with searing pain" (verse 7). Even though the Psalm is about confession, about coming to God when our sin gets the best of us, there is something important about the honesty of the Psalms, how they confront and express EVERYTHING. Nothing is hidden. And so, in God's word we find not simply comfort or help, but also solidarity.

Curtis, Ruben, and I have had some opportunities to talk about what The Rock La Roca is up to-- to pastors in the ordination process and also to a church planting class at Asbury Seminary. I didn't really have much to say about church planting because I am new here. I focused instead on what looks to be something vital for the future of churches in America: ministry in a multi-cultural environment.

But, the thing that interested me most was a comment Ron Crandall, the seminary professor, made after our presentation-- in Acts chapter 6, the early church deals with a multicultural issue: Greek Jews feel their widows are ignored in food distribution, while Hebraic Jews get preferential treatment. I had not looked at it as a cultural issue. I was always intrigued by the outcome: the apostles appoint some fellows (notably Stephen and Philip) to make sure no one is short-changed. the fascinating part to me is that you never see Philip or Stephen handing out bread: they are evangelizing!

So, after Dr. Crandall's comment, I began to wonder: is there a natural outcome in the church when it seriosuly tries to draw different cultures together such that the people involved in ministry simply share their faith in Jesus? Is that why it is possible to have about 15 people sharing the Good News in our neighborhood? Or to get 30 people on a prayer walk?

A seminary student asked me if there was anything I felt called to that kept failing but I stuck with it anyway? I laughed and said, "Yeah, evangelism!" I have been trying for 6 years to get large groups (i.e., not 2 or 3) to go out into their neighborhoods and form relationships and invite people to church. Why is it happening here and not in other places? Perhaps because of the natural outworking of the Spirit in our lives? We have welcomed all kinds of people-- multi-cultural means more than Hispanic; it encompasses issues not only of race, but also socio-economic, education and other things that separate us.

Most churches are homogenous. That is, they are not only white or black, they are white or black within other parameters. As Norbert said on the prayer walk, it is natural for people to stay with people like them. But when the Holy Spirit comes, all peoples can come together without the hindrances we have thrown up.

So, since we have welcomed all kinds of people (and it is important to note, no one batted an eye when 20 Congolese showed up), maybe it's only natural that we talk about it, invite people. We know the Lord is doing something with us.

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Congo War

Providence: a few months ago, I began calling the church to work more closely with the school so we could break into the community with the Gospel.

I went over to the school to see if my background check went thru, and see where I could start working. Turns out that they have a student at the school who needs some tutoring, someone to help her along. They took me to the room, and it was Rosie! The daughter of Hugues Itoula! She doesn’t know English yet, and she lit up to be able to talk. She was sitting alone, looking kind of lost. How is it that the Lord leads us? Looking to break into the school, working with refugees from Congo, go to the school and be placed with one of the children!

Why are the Congolese refugees here? It has been a real learning process and has revealed a lot ignorance in my education! First, there are three Congos. The big one, the one whose Civil War we hear about most is The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, formerly Belgian Congo, The Republic of Congo, which was French Congo, and a smaller place called Congo Cabinda, which was annexed by Angola. Most of our families are from the former French Congo.

The people in the former French Congo elected their own gov’t in the 90s. The French had pretty much taken the oil from Congo, but the democratic gov’t wanted to be paid fairly for it. The French did not like that idea very much, so they sent some aircraft, soldiers, and brought in mercenaries from Angola and another country (maybe Mauritania? I couldn’t quite get it all from Hugues as he told me this sad story.) So they were bombed by the French Air Force and driven out by the army. Hugues’ father was involved with the democratic gov’t in some capacity, and if he goes back, the French-installed dictator will most likely kill him.

Did the French get a U.N. mandate for this? Maybe we should be more like the Europeans? I mean, they know so much about it.

One of Hugues’s sisters had polio years back. They had to flee on foot some 300 miles—sometimes they carried her, sometimes they pushed her in a wheelbarrow, and hid from the soldiers and airplanes when they came around.

Daylight Savings Time

Last Sunday, the Congolese families did not know to turn back their clocks. And I did not think to tell them. So, they showed up at the 10 a.m. service.

To get this picture, you have to know this about The Rock La Roca. It is a Restart Church. The old church, Epworth, had fallen on hard times, was probably going to close. It restarted with a lot of help from the Conference. The 10 a.m. service is mostly the folks from Epworth congregation. The service is fairly traditional. The 11:15 service is the contemporary service. I think there is a sort of deference paid to this service as it is the “new” one, and has drawn a lot of new people. But in my rambling thru the community, the people are actually going to respond to the 10 a.m. service. But I digress.

The Congolese families have been coming to 11:15. I wasn’t sure what would happen at the 10 a.m. service. But I looked into the congregation and saw the Congolese singing! Had they learned English? No. Madame Itoula showed me later that night at her home the songbook they used in Congo. It is in the Ki-Kongo language, but the melodies are the ones we know! The missionaries translated the words of our hymns into their language. So they knew the songs!

The early service people just mobbed them with love. And afterwards, two families said whatever it will take for us to get a multi-channel broadcast device, they will pay for it. The goal is to be able to do simultaneous translation in a number of languages, broadcast it to headsets, and many peoples can worship together!

I have this sense that the old Epworth, now The Rock La Roca, a church that sent out more than 50 pastors and missionaries—I have a growing conviction that this church was raised up not for the glory that it had for 50 years, but rather to be here now and in the future. The old Epworth has a heart for mission and evangelism. Those days are not over! If we can get everybody together, to let the early service see the power and passion of the 11:15 service, to see it reaching people who might not otherwise come to church; if the early and 11:15 services could embrace the evening (largely Hispanic) service; and if the “new” services could hear the stories and see the heart of the first service, what a church we would have! What wonderful work the Holy Spirit might do through us!

Prayer Walk

I have been reading in Judges lately. It’s kind of part of my “entering into the history of Israel” to find God’s faithfulness. I was telling Melissa about the long haul, the long faithfulness of God. She mentioned that in her prayer life she keeps hearing God say, “Haven’t I been with you for 35 years? Even when you did not know it? Even when you turned away? Haven’t I answered every prayer?” In my mind, there’s all this doubt, even disappointment. And yet Melissa testifies He answers prayer.

We did something a little out of the ordinary at the Rock/La Roca. We hired a missionary. People have been talking for years about North America being a mission field, the kind of place where if you had told a women’s group or Sunday School class that there were 200 million unchurched people, they would have felt compelled to take up an offering for a missionary. Or maybe a young couple would have felt called to move to the distant land.

The distant land is right outside your doors!

So Curtis Book is on staff with us. He was born to missionary parents in Zimbabwe, and with his wife Les has been involved in missions in New York, London, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Colombia.

Curtis organized a prayer walk in our community. It was awesome. About 30 people gathered in teams of 2 or 3 to go into a prescribed area to pray for the families, and then if we saw someone on the street or a porch, we’d talk to them, take prayer requests. The prayer walk united a lot of important aspects of ministry at the Rock: paying close attention to the neighborhood, praying, inviting. The one goal is to draw people to salvation in Jesus Christ.

Almost 30 people. Awesome. The Little Seminary was in effect. John and Joseph went with me. They got to see the neighborhood and meet a little boy about their age. Of course, they got to playing while we talked to the parents. I think we talked them into a community church.

Norbert Itoula went with me. Norbert is the patriarch of the first Congolese families to come. Wow, did we have a great walk! We were assigned an area just south of our church, a place that the church has not really drawn from, a predominantly African-American area. I mentioned to Norbert the division of the neighborhood. He had an interesting take. He said it was so for God’s glory. It’s human to divide, to stick with people like you. But when the Spirit comes, then the divisions fall. [HAVE I SAID BEFORE THAT THE MOST MULTICULTURAL AND DIVERSE FORCE ON THE PLANET IS ORTHODOX—I.E. NOT AMERICAN MAINLINE—CHRISTIANITY? OH. I DID MENTION IT? SORRY.]

Norbert shared that it is by God’s grace that he is here. 8 years in a refugee camp in Gabon. 4 of his children are not with him here. He is here and he doesn’t think it is an accident. He says that he is here to work for God, to evangelize. “I am saved, and not because I am so good, but because of God’s grace. And others? Without Jesus, they are lost.” I’d challenge every church member to ask if they feel the same way. And if not, what is the Scriptural warrant to lay off evangelism?