by Steve | Nov 8, 1992 | Archive - 1992
Archive: How to Reach Secular People
By George A. Hunter
George Hunter’s new book, How To Reach Secular People (Abingdon), already into its third printing, is a milestone in the history of books about Christian evangelism. Hunter, the dean at Asbury Seminary’s E. Stanley Jones School of Evangelism, takes up the awesome challenge of engaging secular people with Christianity’s message. In the preface, Hunter reports his discovery of this formidable challenge. —the editors
How do you communicate the Christian faith to the growing numbers of “secular” people in the western world? Pastors and Sunday school teachers who teach the faith week by week to professing Christians experience their assignment as increasingly difficult; so how do you communicate Christianity’s meaning to people who do not darken church doors, who have no church background, who possess no traditional Christian vocabulary, who do not know what we are talking about? The question presses us with greater intensity as we realize that the countries and populations of the western world have become “mission fields” once again.
I have been obsessed with this question for over 25 years. I experienced Christian conversion and a call to the ministry as a senior in high school, in Miami, Florida. Soon I was absorbed in the Scriptures and indoctrinated into the Methodist Church. I even acquired a “ministerial tone” in near-record time. For the summer of 1962, while still in divinity school, I was assigned to do “unconventional evangelism” in a section of Santa Monica, California, known as “Muscle Beach.” I spent the summer conversing with people in a beatnik coffee house, a gay bar, a house of prostitution, a pool hall, an “iron pumping” pavilion, and with drug addicts on the boardwalk and surfers on the beach. What an astonishing range of sub-cultures in one location! But they all shared one feature in common: they wondered what I was talking about! They were totally secular. They lived their lives, many desperately, in terms of this world alone. My “churched” culture, with its jargon and rituals, robed choirs and stained glass, pews and pulpits, hymnals and handbells, was almost as alien to them as if it had been imported from China or the Middle Ages or Venus.
My unconventional friends were not familiar with someone from the church invading their turf! But about three dozen of them responded enough to help me begin with their questions and concerns. I used words they could understand, I shed the ministerial tone, and I learned to speak like someone from this planet. Four of my new friends discovered faith that summer—not an impressive harvest for eight weeks of ministry. But the experience rubbed my face in questions about communicating the Christian faith to secular people that I have struggled with ever since.
Hunter’s book demonstrates the spread of secularism and its historic causes. He profiles secular people and the kinds of Christians and the kind of message that reach them most effectively. He shows people models “that describe how secular people discover Christian faith.” The following is his “Target Model.”
Targeting the Secular
From my interviews with converts from secularism, and my studies of churches reaching them, it is now possible to present a distinct version of the steps that many secular people take toward a deep faith. Imagine a four-ringed target for throwing darts; and imagine secular people as beyond the outer circle, having missed the target for which God aimed their lives (Romans 3:23). The “bull’s eye” represents God’s goal for us—that is, God calls each person to become the kind of disciple who lives in faith, hope and love, one who chooses the will of God which the New Testament describes and the Christian movement needs. Each step toward the bull’s eye involves responding to God’s grace by crossing a barrier.
The Image Barrier
Secular people who are farthest away typically begin with their backs (or sides) toward the faith because of a negative image of Christianity.
One version of the image barrier, held by people who still subscribe to enlightenment ideas, assumes that Christianity is untrue. These people still believe in a machine-like universe, they still bet on human reason to deliver ultimate truth and a consensus morality, they still count on science and education to save the world. With an enlightenment world view, they assume that Christianity is disproved or is the same as other religions. But, as the dust continues to settle and increasing numbers lose confidence in the enlightenment alternative, more people will be open to other faith options—including Christianity. Churches can accelerate the dismantling of modernity by exposing and puncturing the remaining enlightenment balloons, and by offering the Christian alternative as they communicate Christian truth claims on secular turf, in secular language, with the support of good reasons.
A second image problem with Christianity involves the assumption that Christianity is irrelevant to their lives and/or to community and world concerns. Many of them once had experience in an irrelevant church and generalized to all churches from that experience. Many churches can (and do) challenge that image by becoming more relevant than any other fellowship or institution, by joining with people and communities in their struggles, and by communicating the relevance of real Christianity to people’s needs. Secular people bridge this barrier when they discover a church that is, in fact, relevant, and they become “seekers.”
A third image problem with Christianity involves the assumption that Christianity is boring. These people, raised on television sitcoms in an entertainment age, find church to be insufficiently interesting or stimulating. In response, some churches have discovered that it is okay to make it interesting, and they develop approaches, liturgy and discourse that adapt to short attention spans, and stimulate and even amuse, while teaching and inspiring.
The Culture Barrier
Once a person becomes a seeker, the second barrier typically experienced is a cultural barrier—or the “stained-glass barrier.” When secular people do visit a church, it can be a culturally alienating experience. If they do not understand the jargon, relate to the music, identify with the people, or feel comfortable in the facility, they infer that Christianity (and the Christian God) is not for people like them. This cultural barrier is not usually perceived by the church, especially when the target population represents the same general culture as the church membership; the church assumes that they do understand and relate to what we do, or they should. But secular people who aren’t already “churchbroke” usually see church goers as belonging to a different subculture from theirs. This cultural barrier is sometimes crossed when an earnest seeker agrees to “become circumcised”; they submit to the more conventional sub-culture and become like “church people.” That happens often enough to seduce churches into thinking there is no cultural barrier or that all seekers should be eager to adapt to their ways. But the churches that reach greater numbers of secular people pay the price to become much more indigenous to the people in their mission field, thus removing the cultural barrier that hinders most people from considering the faith itself.
The Gospel Barrier
Once the image and cultural barriers are crossed or removed, seekers are free to consider the gospel itself the only stumbling block that people should face. There are several dominant models (covenant, kingdom, justification, atonement, forgiveness, reconciliation, salvation) in the biblical gospel presumably because no one paradigm conveys the full reality of God’s deed in Jesus Christ.
Most churches reaching secular people distil some cogent version(s) of the gospel, because seekers often experience the gospel barrier as an intimidating thicket of more theological trees, bushes, limbs and vines than they can grope through. Effective churches help seekers with this theological barrier in several ways.
First, the churches focus on the faith’s foundational truth claims and do not, for now, try to teach everything. For example, a church may discern that certain convictions about God, Jesus, sin, reconciliation, the love ethic and the kingdom of God are essential to producing real disciples, while convictions about angels, consubstantiation, Jonah’s whale and the date Ephesians was written are less important. Once people become Christians, in time they can affirm many things they could not have affirmed at their time of conversion.
Second, the churches surmount the theological barrier by meaningfully interpreting the foundational convictions of Christianity, rather than merely perpetuating and parroting the tradition.
Third, the church joins seekers in the discovery of the good reasons that support many Christian truth claims.
Fourth, they encourage an experiment of faith so that people may experience the validity of Christianity as a threshold to commitment.
The Total Commitment Barrier
Once people accept the gospel and are Christians, the fourth barrier or challenge relates to becoming a totally committed Christian who seeks and obeys God’s will and lives to advance God’s kingdom. When people first become Christians, typically they do so for the benefit Christ gives them. They want (and receive) meaning for their lives, or higher self-esteem, or glue for their marriage, or the experience of acceptance, or the promise of heaven. But, as the evangelical tradition has often expressed it, they have received Jesus as Savior, but not yet as Lord. If they fail to become totally devoted, they become nominal Christians—almost as selfish and self-seeking as they were before, never experiencing the transforming power that Christianity promises, and not embodying the authenticity that seekers look for to see if Christianity delivers on its promises. Therefore, effective churches invite and challenge their Christians, for their own sakes and the world’s sake, to a life of obedience to the will of God.
This ultimate evangelical challenge is so formidable that some churches dodge it and appear content to have people (depending on the tradition) “saved” or “confirmed.” Secular people do not know that the God of the Bible is their Lord, that their rightful response to the Lord is lifetime commitment to God’s will.
Frequently, people who have moved past the barriers are as unaware as rank pagans of God’s radical claim upon their lives. In Mastering Contemporary Preaching, Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago, reports that “becoming totally devoted to Christ” is the most difficult single topic to get across to people. “When I teach that to secularly minded people, they think I’m from Mars. The thought of living according to someone else’s agenda is ludicrous; it contradicts Western culture’s myth that ‘you can have it all.’”
Good News Interview
Good News: What encourages you about what the UM Church is doing today in evangelism?
Hunter: I am especially encouraged by what a number of UM local churches are doing in evangelism. They have decided they are essentially mission stations in a mission field, that finding and reaching lost people is their main business, and that the established church is renewed as a steady stream of new believers is entering its ranks. However, most churches have not yet discovered and embraced their real mission; they are just “chaplaincy” ministries.
Good News: Your book suggests a distinction between “apostolic” ministry and “chaplaincy” ministry. What is the difference?
Hunter: At least eight out of ten churches function out of a chaplaincy model. They assume: (1) that ministry takes place mainly in the church building, not in the world beyond; (2) that ministry’s primary target is Christians, not non-Christians; (3) that ministry is primarily the responsibility (or privilege) of ordained clergy, not of the laity; and, (4) the validity of any ministry is indicated by the vocational satisfaction of the clergy person, not by changes in peoples’ lives or by changes in the community. Churches living out the apostolic pattern make the opposite assumptions. Their mission is a lay movement to non-Christians, mainly in the world, producing changed lives and reformed communities.
Good News: How can a church move from the “chaplaincy” to the “apostolic” mode of ministry?
Hunter: Churches who experience this “paradigm shift” frequently make three discoveries: (1) they discover that their members, even the protectors of the status quo, are not becoming deeply fulfilled Christians by sitting on the sidelines while the clergy play the game, (2) they discover that their ministry area is not a settled Christian community but a pagan mission field—with many receptive seekers, (3) they rediscover, usually from the Scriptures, their “first love” of making new disciples.
Good News: Is How To Reach Secular People a “church growth” book? Some people are convinced that church growth is only about numbers. Do you make a distinction between evangelism and church growth?
Hunter: The real distinction should be between evangelism and mere membership recruitment. True evangelism involves incorporating new believers and seekers into the Body of Christ, and therefore involves the growth of the true Church. The field called “Church Growth” basically asks this question: “We know how the faith ought to spread, but how does it really grow? What is really happening when churches reach and disciple people?” In this sense, How To Reach Secular People is a Church Growth book focusing on how a distinct population—people with no Christian memory—are reached and become disciples.
by Steve | Sep 10, 1992 | Archive - 1992
Archive: How to Wait on God
By Margaret Therkelsen
I can remember as a high school student often talking with my father, a UM minister, about wanting to know how to grow in grace. I knew that I had my part and God had his, and that the basic ingredients of prayer, Bible reading and obedience were essential to growth. However, I kept feeling there was an added dimension of spiritual understanding involving responsiveness to his presence that would greatly enhance my growth. I did not understand at that time that this involved protracted periods of waiting on God. This waiting included listening to God, a calming of the inner person, and an altering of the capacity to be aware of God.
Waiting on God should teach us a more reverent receptivity; a quieter, less self-willed listening; a calmer repose and collectedness which opens the door to knowing God better, because we can hear him speak and respond to him in conversation and in our will.
Our difficulty lies basically in the feverish, frantic way we live with very little time spent in God’s presence. Our dilemma centers around not knowing the value of spending time in the presence of God nor really understanding how it is done. Waiting is a totalitarian experience of body, mind and spirit. This includes relaxing the body when it has been agitated and tense, focusing the mind on God when it has been scattered over many interests, and getting in touch with the inner spirit when we have lived externally rather than internally.
The Scriptures are full of invitations to come into his living presence. Matthew 11:28-30, Isaiah 40:29-31 and Proverbs 8:34-36 are but just a few.
There are several principles to follow in order to enter into the presence of God. These are not difficult but require time and patience to experience the actuality of them. The lives of Christians throughout history, regardless of their station in life, have involved these great principles.
1. Find a quiet place in your home that will be without outside distractions, noise, phone, TV, recordings, and tapes. You will quickly discover that it is not nearly as difficult to eliminate the exterior noises as it is to eliminate the interior noises. These distractions hinder our ability to focus due to darkness and the unknown within us. This takes courage to persist, but it is not impossible.
2. It is important to ask the Holy Spirit to guide and teach us (John 14:26). We must refer to him!
3. Return daily to this same place, which the Old Testament refers to as the tent of meeting, and the New Testament refers to as the place of abiding in Jesus. Regularity aids us in accustoming ourselves to coming into the quiet. We may begin to enjoy it!
4. Sit in a comfortable chair poised, alert, respectful and anticipating an encounter with God.
5. Relax your body and mind. Avoid trying too hard, or trying to do it perfectly. Relax, let go, this is your time to cast your burden on him.
6. Waiting on God involves the whole person, spirit, soul and body. Give him your mind that you might receive from his mind. Give him your body, its energies to be refreshed by his life. Give him your emotions, all your feelings, to be cleansed by his love. Give him your will that you might know and love the will of God. Give him your human spirit so that he might reign as Lord of your spirit.
7. There are two ways to realize God’s presence. First through the Word of God, such as taking a single thought as Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God,” and meditate on each word. The second way is through using our minds and imaginations. In your mind’s eye see yourself talking with Jesus, look at him face to face and listen to his response to you (II Corinthians 3:18).
8. Know that you will experience mental distractions and be prepared to wait even though your mind is unruly. Speak gently but firmly to your mind and bring it back to Jesus.
9. Use the name of Jesus often, repeated softly; or use the “Jesus prayer” to keep yourself collected and focused. A form of the Jesus prayer is, “Lord Jesus Christ Son of the living God have mercy on me.”
10. Keep reaffirming during this time that you are there to know the Lord better and to wait on him.
11. Take 10 to 15 minutes at the end of your devotional time and listen for his voice and presence.
Andrew Murray, in his wonderful book Waiting on God, says to stay positive and believe you can and will wait and that God will draw you into his presence.
Will you meet me in the waiting place at the throne of God? I hope to see you there.
Margaret Therkelsen, a teacher and counselor, is the author of The Love Exchange (Bristol). This is the second of three columns on this subject.
by Steve | Sep 9, 1992 | Archive - 1992
Archive: UM Charismatics Flourish
With spirited music, enthusiastic singing and uplifted hands, more than 1,700 charismatic United Methodists gathered in Oklahoma City for the Aldersgate ’92 conference on the Holy Spirit. The mid-August meeting is sponsored by the United Methodist Renewal Service Fellowship (UMRSF), also known as Manna.
“One of the great tragedies has been the UM Church’s failure to recognize and embrace the phenomenon of the charismatic renewal,” Gary Moore, executive director of the UMRSF, told Good News. Because of that alienation, he believes, “tens of thousand of joyful, grace-gifted Christians have wound up in other denominations and independent churches.”
Despite that member hip drain, Moore says the charismatic movement within the UM Church has continued to grow, flourish and influence our worship through contemporary music styles, liturgies of healing and “programs that call for the charisms [spiritual gifts] of vision, intercessory prayer, discernment, healing, faith and evangelism.”
Moore also believes that if the UM Church is to “turn the tide of membership loss” it will have to “embrace a ‘non-boring’ charismatic style of worship. Worship that is exciting and full of the energy and power of the Holy Spirit, worship that lifts up and glorifies Jesus Christ.”
“Congregations that experience that kind of worship,” he says, “are generally full of baby boomers, and busters, and are growing.”
Moore, like many charismatics in attendance, senses a “growing interest and openness to spiritual gifts in the church. Churches that discover and function according to spiritual gifts will look and act more like the body of Christ, practice lifestyle evangelism and place a greater emphasis on ministry to the poor and disenfranchised.”
As for the future, Moore says that “churches that want to become vital congregations of faithful disciples will recognize the need to embrace the good fruit of the charismatic movement.”
“We will continue to pray for a revival among Methodists that exceeds the power and vitality of the Wesleyan movement of the 18th and 19th centuries,” Moore said. “We will continue to evangelize in the power of the Holy Spirit and produce numerical growth until the additions exceed the exodus.”
“We will not go away, we will stay and pray and work for renewal in the UM Church by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
by Steve | Sep 8, 1992 | Archive - 1992
Archive: The Cry of China
Carroll F. Hunt investigates the House Church movement in China
The taxi driver found the place without difficulty; having Cantonese-speaking people along took care of that. We clambered out of the car and stared about us at the ordinary evening sights in a south-China city. Traffic, vendors, pedestrians—some staring with curiosity as our gaggle of foreigners plunged down a dark alley. We pulled up before a door like every other door on that side of the alley where buildings share mutual walls without the grace of shrubs, paint or space. Just walls, alley and people.
“This is it!” our guide said, stuffing the directions back into his pocket.
Through the door and up steep steps we went, headed toward one of the unique experiences of our lives, for we were entering one of China’s famed house churches and would meet its pastor, veteran of 22 years in prison for his faith, and subject of surveillance and harassment because he follows the Lord Jesus Christ.
House Church? What does that term really mean?
Two kinds of Protestant churches exist in China; those registered with the Three Self Patriotic Movement, and house churches, those which are not. The Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) is a quasi-government agency which oversees and regulates the open churches where Christians are permitted to worship once again in re-opened sanctuaries. Three Self means self-government, self-support and self-propagation.
House churches, in the main, do not submit to TSPM control and gather in a variety of places across China. Both kinds are seeing crowds of Chinese worshipping, asking questions, accepting Jesus as Lord and seeking baptism.
Our little troop of foreigners climbed the narrow, steep, wooden stairs to the third floor of the brick house, entering at last the room that is home to Pastor Samuel Lamb and sanctuary for the 1,200 who gather there each week. Oh, they can’t all squeeze in. No way. They crowd in until no one else will fit, then they flood the second floor where high-decibel speakers bring them the two-hour sermons. And when the second floor is jammed to capacity, they fill those steep, narrow stairs we’d just climbed. But it still won’t hold everyone who wants to be there, so Pastor Lamb preaches in multiple Sunday services and every night but one during the week.
“I am so glad to see you,” he greeted us in flawless English. “I was going to visit someone when they came running to tell me foreigners were coming. How wonderful they caught me!” Warmed by his welcoming smile, we believed he meant it.
Then followed an hour of learning for us, learning from one shepherd of the Lord’s uncounted flock in China. He told us how in recent days government officials had detained, questioned and threatened him—not only him but some of his church people as well—and how that persecution had multiplied attendance. Hearing how Lamb brushed off their prison threats with, “I’ve been to prison twice and I am ready to go again,” left us dumbstruck.
Here, dressed in an ordinary blue jacket and smiling like a benevolent grandfather, sat a leader of the church in China, a man known around the world for courage and unswerving faith in God.
What could we learn from such a man? Are he and his church typical of the body of Christ all across that intriguing nation whose people make up a quarter of the world’s population? And is it really true, what we hear about droves of seekers after truth accepting Jesus?
As for that, consider what several evangelical agencies in Hong Kong learned when they commissioned a prominent consulting firm to do a marketing survey. “What if,” the agencies proposed, “we bought full-page space in China’s five most-read periodicals and published a five-day series about the Christian gospel, asking interested people to respond to what they read?”
“Don’t do it!” the consulting firm advised after compiling their information, “You’d receive a million letters per day and no one could handle such a deluge.”
Even knowing this, one can only guess at the kingdom-building activity going on in China. Its size mitigates against generalization. An oft-repeated statement from those involved with China is, “You can’t generalize about China. It’s too huge, too diverse. What’s true in one sector is not in another.” This makes sense when you are dealing with 1.2 billion people and 5 ethno-linguistic groups.
Another factor enters the picture: Hong Kong and Macau, long-time city colonies separated from China since the colonial era, are on the brink of re-absorption by the Beijing government. As Christian residents of those two cities gaze at the 21st century and try to imagine what changes await them (Hong Kong reverts to China in 1997, Macau in 1999), the church works at readying itself for the unknowable. Even though fore-knowledge is not possible and predictions are as varied as fruit in a street market, certain emphases do crop up and merit our consideration.
Evangelism
Neither Hong Kong nor Macau presently face any restrictions against evangelism; consequently, numerous efforts and methods come to play in both crowded cities. Materialism, however, often blocks entrance to the narrow way. Twice, while riding in Hong Kong taxis, an American missionary sought to turn conversations with the drivers to God and a life of faith. “God?” each replied. Then reaching into their change boxes and waving a piece of money under the missionary’s nose, “Here’s my god.”
In Macau where the major industry is gambling, statisticians claim there are twice as many drug addicts as Christians, making detoxification and rehabilitation efforts high priority ministries for some churches and agencies. Add to that, opposition to conversion by idol-worshipping families and one realizes evangelism in this part of China is slow and difficult.
The Hong Kong Evangelical Church, a federation of 14 congregations begun by OMS International, has set the goal of planting a new church every year up until 1997, utilizing evangelism teams. One senses that evangelism will continue after the turnover, if allowed.
In the mainland, countless evangelism efforts go on, but it is impossible to comprehensively count, catalog or even randomly report about them in depth. Much evangelism is carried out within families when one member discovers Jesus and tells about him to those closest. A visitor might hear stories of young itinerant evangelists, themselves newborn babies in Christianity, rushing about the countryside sharing their fledgling faith. But then they are told, “Oh, but you can’t publicize that!” And you know that the specter of detention, questioning and imprisonment looms over all outward expression of faith not controlled by the government
Christians do say, however, that people enjoy more freedom away from centers of government like Beijing, China’s capital, and Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton.
Persecution
Pastor Lamb (the English version of his name is his choice) told of the most recent threats by the Religious Affairs Bureau, directed both at him and the believers he shepherds. Loss of jobs, salaries, pensions or imprisonment was dangled over their heads.
“But the more they are threatened, the more they come!” he said. Before their most recent problems, attendance at the house church down the alley was about 900 on Sundays at all services; now it is up to 1200.
“Why do they come?” asked one of his visitors.
“They want Jesus,” he replied.
Unregistered house churches are not the only objects of government persecution. Catholics are special targets because the government, aware of the Catholic role in the Communist collapse in Europe, fears their influence in China. Consequently, Hong Kong Catholics are forming small cell groups within their congregations, accustoming themselves to different forms of worship should it be necessary after 1997.
In Macau and Hong Kong, churches carry on youth group activities normal to Christian fellowship, but in mainland China, students especially, are warned against practicing religion. From all one can learn, however, the churches overflow with the young
Recently The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s largest English-language daily, carried an article by a New York Times reporter regarding Beijing’s bid to “stem the flowing religious tide.” A Protestant believer who sat in on an illegal Bible study group said, “There is an inherent conflict between Christianity and Marxism, and this will mean a confrontation sometime in the future. Christianity is a new faith, a new force in China. Now it is small, but our number will grow, and change will come from this force.”
This echoes in spirit what Dr. Gail Law, missions professor at Hong Kong’s China Graduate School of Theology, says about 1997. “I believe this is a divine strategy for mission to China.” Rather than fearing what the Communists might do to the Christians, she believes that the re-absorption of Hong Kong into China will release the power of the name of Jesus with greater force than ever before.
One wonders, listening to her expressions of bold faith and anticipation, if Daniel clambered down into the pit for his visit with the king’s pet lions with the same attitude. It worked for him, why not for China?
Training
Whenever China-focused conversations and reports turn to need in the Christian church, one word crops up without fail: Training. Evangelism bears fruit, only God knows how much. Persecution may delete some of Christ’s followers, but it seems that more pour in to take their places. But from the mainland come consistent reports that Christians lack understanding of how to live and grow in their new-found Savior. Nurturing, discipling, and Scripture-based teaching do not exist for far too many and consequently, aberrant and even bizarre behavior marks some rural groups in particular. The country’s greatest need is for new-believer training.
In Macau, Christian workers struggle against tides of social problems and indifference. In Hong Kong some pastors, not all of whom share Gail Law’s visionary attitude about Beijing’s takeover in 1997, are burned out and fearful about the future. “They need,” according to one theology professor, “seminars and retreats,” while lay leaders need to learn how to work with pastors, and the Christian public needs information on prayer and spiritual discipline.
The mainland church looks with hope to Hong Kong for training and is receiving it in a number of remarkable ways. Again, when visitors hear church leaders and educators tell of efforts to nurture mainland Christians, they are also told, “Oh, but you mustn’t publish anything about that.”
So the story is off-limits for the time being. We can’t know of the adventures of theology professors and their students who take vacation time to disciple itinerant evangelists, lay pastors and new believers. Nor will we hear much about Chinese pastors who Live outside the mainland, traveling across the vast expanse of their native land carrying Bibles and sharing their knowledge of the love of God. And within China Christians discreetly cover great distances to meet with other believers to gain understanding of their faith.
English teachers. Non-Chinese Asian Christians. People returning to their ancestral villages for holidays. Tourists. Radio broadcasters. All these and more are building faith in their spiritual brothers and sisters responding to the most crucial need of the church in China.
Our conversation with Pastor Lamb ended. We knew that two men sat on the shadowy side of the room as we clustered around the table. We walked across to greet them before heading back down the narrow stairway, for Pastor Lamb had told us they were brothers from north China who had come to learn more about life in Christ.
Their rough, leathery hands and sun-browned faces betrayed their rural origins. We all mumbled something in varied languages—English, Cantonese and Mandarin—not really communicating, but one in him whom we all seek to serve.
“Lord, protect and nurture these fellow walkers on The Way! Give them the tools they need and your Holy Flame so they can light up their corner of your world.
Carroll Ferguson Hunt is a freelance writer and author of Absolutely! and From the Claws of the Dragon. She and her husband were missionaries with OMS International in South Korea for 20 years.
Addendum
After our visit, Pastor Lam underwent a three-hour interrogation at the Public Security Bureau, once again suffering for his refusal to register his church with the Religious Affairs Bureau.
Following Lam’s questioning, authorities again ransacked the house in the alley which serves as pastor’s home and church sanctuary. The place remains under surveillance, according to the Chinese Around the World newsletter and various reports from acquaintances of Pastor Lam.
by Steve | Sep 3, 1992 | Archive - 1992
Archive: Ruby’s Listening Post
By Boyce A. Bowdon
What you can learn from a woman who listens to God
Ruby Galloway Farish stepped to the podium at the 1992 General Conference of the United Methodist Church and glanced at the audience assembled there in the auditorium of the Louisville, Kentucky Convention Center.
Eighty bishops were seated on the stage behind her, and 998 delegates from around the world were seated at tables in front of her. In the bleachers around three walls sat hundreds of observers, including her husband—Jay Farish, a retired physician—and her two daughters, Karen and Jessica, both United Methodist ministers. She knew her son, Kent, a physician, was there in spirit, even though he was back home in Tulsa caring for his patients.
Ruby had spoken many times to groups in her church and community, but never had she addressed an audience like this. Microphones and cameras were aimed at her, ready to pick up and pass along to countless thousands every sound and every move she made during the next half hour. And she knew she wasn’t speaking just for herself. From a field of 284 persons who had submitted manuscripts, she had been chosen to deliver the Laity Address to the General Conference. She was speaking in behalf of nearly nine million Methodist laypeople.
Standing there in the spotlight, how did Ruby feel? That night she described the experience in her journal:
“During the half hour worship service before my talk, I had the sensation of flowing and floating in God’s love. I had no fear, no anxiety. I was fully trusting in God’s indwelling. I felt alive, natural, perfect peace. I felt as if I were covered by the warm sunshine of my Listening Post.”
Ruby’s “Listening Post” is at her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is located on a three acre lot with more than 150 trees. A driveway circles in front of her beautiful home. East of the driveway, nestled in a grove of trees near a pond, is her Listening Post. When she goes there, she can hear many sounds: birds singing in the treetops, bullfrogs croaking in the pond, bees buzzing in the honeysuckle, traffic rushing down 41st Street, kids playing at the nearby school. But those are not the sounds that attract her to her Listening Post. She comes to hear God speak to her. And as she sits quietly and reflects, God does speak to her.
In fact, it was here at her Listening Post that Ruby wrote most of her laity speech for General Conference. Sitting under the pine and dogwood, trusting in the initiatives of the Holy Spirit, she asked God to give her a message. “Speak to me that I may speak,” she prayed. And God spoke to her.
During sad times and happy times, she comes to her Listening Post to express gratitude, to ask for forgiveness, to receive guidance and strength. Some of the turning points in her life have occurred here.
For example, one morning a few years ago Ruby came to her Listening Post physically and emotionally exhausted from long weeks of caring for her invalid mother.
“Mother had developed an illness, and had come to live with us,” Ruby explains. “It was very difficult for me. She demanded so much care and attention. She even had to be diapered. Sometimes she was badly depressed. I remember one day, I just couldn’t do it any longer. I went down to my Listening Post, sat down in my old praying chair, and shed some tears. I said to God aloud: ‘I will do it. I will take care of her. I don’t want to do it. I will only do it because I think it is the thing to do.'”
“After I poured it all out, and it was quiet, I began sensing that God was saying to me: ‘Ruby, would you come off it! You are always telling me what you are going to do with clinched teeth and flexed muscles. Now will you just relax? Would you let me bring to you what you need? Would you not talk about serving me and your mother? Would you let me serve you? Just turn this thing around and quit being in charge of everything. Learn that I am the initiator and that you are the responder. You remember about Jesus, tying the towel around his waist, and washing the feet of his disciples. Would you let me serve you? That’s what I taught you through the life of Jesus.'”
Ruby sat there a long time and looked up at that blue sky and listened to those birds. In the silence, she thought about her own childhood. Her father—a Methodist preacher in Arkansas—had died when Ruby was only six-months old. Ruby thought about the load that had been placed on her mother’s shoulders. She remembered that even though her mother had been overloaded physically, emotionally and financially, she sang all day, she saw the beauty and glory of the skies and the sunsets, and she heard the birds. What had given her mother courage and hope? Her awareness of the love of God. She had known that the load was not hers to bear alone.
With God’s help, Ruby’s mother worked hard and managed carefully. The two of them made it through the difficult days of the Depression. Ruby graduated from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. She became a youth director at a large Methodist church in Little Rock. On the steps of that church one Sunday, she met Jay Farish—a young medical student. The two fell in love, married, and moved to Tulsa. Jay became an outstanding physician. They became the parents of three healthy, bright children. God had been with Ruby all the years of her life.
As Ruby reflected there at her Listening Post, she was reminded that she was not alone now. The weight of the world was not on her shoulders. The one in charge was God—the Maker and Sustainer and Redeemer, the One able to meet every need, to turn every disaster into victory. She was merely an instrument through whom God worked.
“When I went back in the house,” Ruby said, “I thought of a way that might help me remember what God had told me. I had an idea. I went to the grocery store and bought some grape juice and a box of crackers. I put them in my refrigerator. Every morning, after I had finished doing the necessary things for my mother, I knelt down on the floor in front of my refrigerator, took out the grape juice and crackers, and had holy communion. God blessed me through that. I experienced his presence, his healing, his renewal. And that’s what I needed to care for my mother and to be faithful to my other responsibilities.”
The discovery Ruby made about herself and about God at her Listening Post—along with some other experiences, including a bout with cancer—turned her life around. “I was moved to consider how I should respond to what God has done. I had been pleading with God to align himself with me. I began asking him to help me align myself with him.”
Not only did Ruby realize God works through her, she realized God would always empower her to do what he called her to do.
Such a challenge came one night in October 1971. Jay, her husband, came home from caring for patients at the hospital and told Ruby about a baby who had been brought to the emergency room with severe head injuries received when her mother battered her head against a wall. The best medical care available could not save the little girl. When Jay told Ruby about the child’s death, her first reaction was the same as his had been—anger. How could a parent be so cruel? But then she and Jay began asking another question, “How can such violence be prevented?” They knew that no agency in Tulsa was addressing the child abuse problem. They asked themselves, “What can we do to help prevent such violence?” The next day Ruby spent some time down at her Listening Post searching for an answer. How could God address the problem of child abuse through her? The answer came. “I invited 22 friends to come to my house. I told them about the little girl’s death. All of us agreed something should be done to prevent such tragedies from happening. For five months on Mondays we studied the problem of child abuse. We invited experts in. We had workshops. Four of us were assigned by the Oklahoma Department of Human Services to work with parents who had abused or neglected their children.”
From that small beginning in Ruby’s den back in 1972, has grown the Parent-Child Center of Tulsa. Today it has a staff of 31 professionals and many volunteers.
Since 1980, Ruby has volunteered as a listener at Resonance, a women’s growth center in Tulsa. During one-to-one listening sessions, she helps women find a starting place that can lead them to hope and healing.
For years, Ruby has been a certified mediator with the Early Settlement Program of Tulsa Municipal Court system. She meets with parties who come together in out-of-court hearings, hoping to reach satisfactory settlements through face-to-face negotiation.
Since 1986, Ruby has been a volunteer chaplain for the Tulsa police department. She carries a police radio, and responds to calls at the scenes of auto crashes, suicides, crisis interventions, and various other disasters. She frequently holds funerals for persons who do not have a church or pastor.
Her work as a volunteer exposes Ruby to many unpleasant realities of life.
“There is so much in this world that is dark and discouraging, so many hurts and so many problems,” she acknowledges. “We laypeople could throw up our hands and say, ‘What’s the use?’ But we have another choice. We can ask God to speak to us and enable us to be priests to one another. This world will brighten up once laypeople are so filled with God’s love that we can’t keep from going out there and spilling over his love to the world.”
Ruby says she goes to church to be healed, to be equipped, and to be deployed into the world to serve.
“God calls laypeople as well as clergy to be his instruments and help meet global and community needs,” Ruby said. “It’s not that the clergy don’t have time to do its job, so we have to do it for them. All of us are called to be Christian disciples. Jesus Christ died that I might have eternal life. In response, I pledge to be his disciple—to hold nothing back, to yield my time, my resources, my strength, and my service, to search out God’s will for me and to do what God wants me to do. Laity can be God’s instruments in the office, the hospital, on the street. Wherever we are, we are the church. We can get into places that the clergy could never get into, and we can accomplish some things it could never accomplish.”
Ruby admits there was a time when she thought of herself as a “warrior” who had to push up her sleeves and get out there and fight the world and all the bad things that are in it. She doesn’t think that way anymore.
“I have learned that the results are not in my hands, they are in God’s hands. But that doesn’t let me off the hook. My hands are for God to use. He can do far more with them than seems possible.”
Near the close of her Laity Address, Ruby summed up her own views about private faith and public action—the theme of her message—with these words:
“We hear the voices of the saints and prophets resounding throughout history and echoing even today in this great auditorium. Those voices urge us, ‘Listen, listen, listen to the crackling of the fire of God within us and without us.’ Those voices of the faith call out to us today to become ignited with the spark of the Holy Spirit as we participate in the ongoing, creative kingdom of God.”
Boyce A. Bowdon is the director of communications for the Oklahoma Conference of the United Methodist Church.
