by Steve | Nov 16, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Anne Jackson
In May 2008, I posted a question on my blog that simply asked, “What’s one thing you feel you can’t say in the church?”
Hundreds of people responded. The question spread far—both in the Christian faith and outside, even being posted and discussed on a highly regarded atheist blog. The conversation went global. Websites in the UK and a radio station in Australia took the question and posted it to their own audiences. Regardless of someone’s religion (or lack thereof), it appeared that everyone had input.
Those outside the Christian faith spoke familiar sentiments about the façade the evangelical movement has created over the centuries:
• Christians say one thing and do another.
• If Christians can’t be who they are within their own churches, why are they even a part of a church? Why not go someplace where they can be themselves?
We’ve all heard those accusations. From the media, to people in our workplaces, to our families, this perception comes as no surprise.
As far as those within the Christian faith, the responses to the question were as intriguing as they were heartbreaking.
• “I currently feel no connection to God when I pray or read the Bible.”
• “I have been a Christian for 27 years and I still don’t understand the point of praying.”
• “Sometimes I wonder if this whole Christianity thing is a lie.”
• “Most of the time I never feel forgiven for my sins…partly because it’s hard to forgive myself…the other part is that church people seem to never let you let it go and move forward.”
• “I’m a pacifist.”
• “Why do we have lavish worship centers but there are starving children in our own backyards and around the world?”
Some boldly placed their names, even links to their websites or blogs, while others remained apprehensively in the shadow, concerned that even the modest sense of anonymity the Internet offered was not enough to protect them from being judged.
Of course, the root of the question didn’t stem completely from social curiosity. It came from places in my own heart and life where I was afraid to say something inside a church or to other Christians. Fear had kept me silent, had overruled confession and I needed to know I wasn’t alone.
So I asked the question.
I didn’t anticipate the response it would receive.
Broken
At around five hundred comments, you can imagine the variety of answers. This question obviously struck a chord with a lot of people. I read and reread the comments for months. I printed some out and kept them on my nightstand, trying to understand the scope of why so many people felt they couldn’t say so many different things in church. Surely there had to be a common denominator.
Fear was obviously there. Shame. Rejection. But those feelings were more of the why people didn’t speak up more often.
I was looking for the what.
What did things like poverty and being gay and worship and money and porn and sex and depression and abuse have in common?
One night in December, seven months later, it hit me: Brokenness.
Whether it’s as a result of sin, or fear of the response we’ll get by speaking up about something like politics or relationships or mental health in a broken world, it all boiled down to brokenness.
And if this fracture in whatever part of our lives threatens our reputation, our character, or our dignity, we hide.
If something in our spiritual life is broken or is confusing to us, we hide.
If a relationship is broken, we hide.
If there’s an unhealthy habit we fall back on, we hide.
If there’s a controversial political or social issue confronting us, we hide.
We ultimately want to hide what’s broken, whether it occurs individually or in a community. The Bible is filled with broken people, most of whom at some point or another tried to cover up their brokenness. Yet it seems like the people who are the most broken, the most helpless, are the people God often uses the most.
King David committed adultery and murder, yet he was considered a man after God’s heart. Rahab was a prostitute, but she understood her culture and helped protect Joshua’s spies. (She later gave birth to Boaz, making her the great-great-grandmother of King David, whose lineage continues on to Jesus.)
The disciples were considered spiritually worthless in their culture and had already been rejected by various rabbis (that’s why they were all working in their respective family trades when Jesus found them), and they were the 12 people Jesus most closely associated with.
Through church experiences and relationships in my own life as a child and as an adult working in a church, the pressure to be perfect and to have all the answers strongly influenced my decision to keep quiet about a lot of broken things. Some were decisions I was making that were sin. Others were the result of the sin of others, or simply questions about my faith and my God.
We’ve all seen how dangerous it can be to be vulnerable in the church. But now, we have the chance to do something about it.
Sanctuary
The church is supposed to be a safe place for everybody, especially the people who are the most broken, right? The Bible says the kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit—those so broken they have nothing to offer. Jesus came to heal the sick.
Although unofficial in title, the concept of the church being a refuge dates back to the time of Moses and Joshua. In the Hebrew culture, there are historical records of fugitives seeking protection at altars, which recognizes religion’s role in protecting human life even for the most terrible offenders.
The Christian church adopted the right of sanctuary in the fourth century. Because of Christendom’s strong belief in the sanctity of life, clergy and priests began acting on behalf of criminals, defending them from unfair judgment and execution. It wasn’t an easy out for the criminal; they were often restricted in their daily activities, but at least their lives were safe in the church until they received the king’s pardon or a fair punishment.
Anyone was welcome to take safety in the church at this time—not only criminals, but slaves who escaped cruel masters and those who couldn’t repay debts. Village townsmen, women, and children who came under attack from outlaws could take refuge in the church.
However, as time went by, people with power interfered with the system and began excluding specific groups or crimes. At first, those who had committed treason or murder were no longer allowed to find safety. Over the next few centuries, slowly, fewer and fewer crimes were given the right of sanctuary, until the end of the eighteenth century, when it was abolished altogether.
Outside of the legal system, hundreds of years ago, when a person confessed certain sins or doubted or renounced their faith, some Christians refused to welcome that person back into the church, even if the person had truly repented. These kinds of Christians felt like the church was better with these so-called sinners out of the picture.
I find it interesting that in our current culture, we identify the church as a safe place for broken people to find refuge. Church is a place for us to claim the right of a modern-day sanctuary where we can name our sins or ask our questions, and be protected and sheltered while we search for grace, forgiveness, and answers.
Yet as history shows us, for hundreds of years, churches have been sacrificing the beauty of confession and brokenness for religious trappings and the malady of perfectionism. In some cases, if we don’t measure up to a manmade cocktail of moral codes and checklists—if we aren’t “good enough”—we no longer feel welcomed in a church or around other Christians.
We feel ashamed.
We feel ashamed that we don’t measure up to the “holiness” of others.
And shame tells us to keep those ugly, messy parts hidden. Without our secrets showing, maybe then we can be accepted.
We think, and in many cases have experienced, that if we share our secrets or our questions, we’ll be rejected.
And alone.
And so people—broken people like you and me—feel pressured to choose.
Either we can conform to an institutionalized and over-organized product of religion, masking and repressing our secrets or questions or shortcomings, or we can escape the walls of the church and find a place outside a faith-based environment where we are free to share all of who we truly are.
Most of us choose to live in one of these extremes: conforming or escaping. Few can find peace living in the tension of both. Those of us who do wonder if we’re too idealistic to believe a faith community can be a hospital for our wounds to be welcomed and healed, that true sanctuary can be found both within the walls of the church and outside the church as well.
At the risk of sounding overly idealistic, I’d like to say that for those of us who believe the church should be one of the safest and most grace-giving places a person can experience here on earth, it’s time to reclaim what our faith stands for.
It’s time for us to politely but passionately disagree with those who make church a “safe” place by removing all the messiness.
It’s time for us to put all we have out in the open—not for the sake of faux humility or self-depreciating exploitation or attention, but for recognizing the things the Cross stands for and left for us: ultimate love and undiscriminating grace.
Anne Jackson is an author and blogger. This article is an excerpt from Permission to Speak Freely: Essays and Art on Fear, Confession, and Grace (Thomas Nelson, 2010) by Anne Jackson. This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Thomas Nelson, Inc. Photo on opposite page by John Short.
by Steve | Nov 16, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Rob Renfroe
We Christians believe the most remarkable things. Incredible things, really.
We believe that God exists. That’s our most important belief. But it’s not the most surprising or incredible.
We believe that God came to earth. We believe that he came to earth as a human being. We believe that as a human being he died on a cross.
All of those beliefs are incredible.
But most incredible of all is that God came to earth, took on human flesh inside a woman’s womb, experienced hunger and thirst and pain, grew to be a man, and finally died on a cross because we matter to him.
You matter to him.
I matter to him.
Of everything we believe about God, that is certainly the most incredible.
“If the Milky Way galaxy were the size of the entire continent of North America, our solar system would fit in a coffee cup,” writes Philip Yancey in his book, Prayer: Does It Make A Difference. “Even now two Voyager spacecrafts are hurtling toward the edge of the solar system at a rate of 100,000 miles per hour. For almost three decades they have been speeding away from earth, approaching a distance of nine billion miles. When engineers beam a command to the spacecraft at the speed of light, it takes 13 hours to arrive. Yet this vast neighbor of our sun—in truth the size of a coffee cup—fits along with several hundred billion other stars and their minions in the Milky Way, one of perhaps 100 billion such galaxies in the universe. To send a light-speed message to the edge of that universe would take 15 billion years.”
What did the Psalmist say? “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:3-4).
The great Christian mind of G. K. Chesterton put it this way: “All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.”
The God who created just the part of the universe that we’re aware of must be incredible. His power, his wisdom, his imagination? This God must be absolutely, incredibly beyond our understanding.
And that God—the God who is big enough to speak all of that into existence and hold it in the palm of his hand—says you matter to him. He says I matter to him.
1. Your life matters.
That’s part of the Christmas story. In the person of Jesus Christ, God became an infant, was born in a Bethlehem stable, walked among us, went to a cross, and died the most painful and shameful death the Roman Empire could devise because my life matters to God, because your life matters to God.
If it weren’t true, it would be the height of human arrogance to make such a claim: that a God like the one who created the universe cares about creatures like us. But we believe that we matter to God because that’s what Christmas tells us.
Every one of us wants to believe that we matter.
In the movie Shall We Dance?, one of the characters, Beverly, wrongly believes that her husband is having an affair and she hires a private detective.
In one scene, she says, “All these promises that we make and we break, why is it that you think people get married?”
The detective responds, “Passion.”
Beverly shakes her head: “No.”
“Why, then?” the detective asks.
Beverly responds: “Because we need a witness to our lives. There are a billion people on this planet. I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything: the good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things, all of it, all the time, every day. You’re saying your life will not go unnoticed, because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed, because I will be your witness.”
Every one of us wants to live a life that matters. And every one of us wants to share our life with someone who matters to us.
And here’s the good news. Married or single, young or old, successful in the eyes of the world or not, your life has not gone unnoticed. It has not gone, and it will not go, unwitnessed.
There is one who has promised to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things. All of it, all the time. Because you matter to him.
He is the God of the universe who has made himself known in the person of Jesus Christ. And because he cares for you, because he loves you, your life matters.
2. It matters what you do with your life.
How you think about life makes a difference. And people view their lives in very different ways.
For some, life is a game to win. For others it’s a challenge to overcome. For others it’s a riddle to solve. I’ve known men and women who see life as a sentence to bear, or a struggle to survive.
Some are more positive. They see life as an adventure to enjoy.
And what you think about life will determine what you do with the life you have.
Here’s what I’ve concluded. Life is a trust. Life is a gift that God places in our care. We have been entrusted with this most precious thing called a human life. And like any gift, it can be wasted or squandered. Or it can be used for the purpose it was intended.
And whatever we choose to do with our lives, it matters. It really does matter.
Why? Because we matter to God. Your life is God’s gift to you. And all that you have and all that you are is part of the gift.
Your time, your education, your wealth, your influence, your mind, your creativity. It’s all a trust. And it matters what you do with all of that because your life matters to God.
It matters enough that when we made a mess of things, when we were unfaithful with the trust we had been given—the Bible calls it sin—God thought we mattered enough that he sent his son Jesus in the vulnerable form of a baby, knowing that he’d have to die to be our savior, so we could begin life over, forgiven and clean.
When it hits home that your life is a trust from God, that he sent his son to die on a Roman cross, to pay the debt you owed but couldn’t pay, so you could live an abundant life in this world and eternal life in the world to come; when that becomes real to you, you get it. You get the fact that your life matters and it matters what you do with your life.
When you stand in front of a cross and you realize that, as Jesus said about himself, he had come to seek and to save the lost—when you realize that you were the lost he came for, and that he came, knowing it would take his life, it hits home: my life matters. The choices I make. How I spend my time. What I do with my energy and my influence and my finances. What I put into my mind. Whether or not I live for self or for something greater. It really matters.
That’s part of the Christmas message. Your life matters because it matters to God. And because your life matters to God, it matters what you do with your life.
3. Every life matters.
All that I’ve said about you thus far is true of every other person who has lived or will ever live.
One of the amazing facets of the Christmas story is the wide range of persons it involves. It involves a Jewish priest named Zachariah, who was told that his son, John the Baptist, would prepare the way for the Messiah’s coming.
It involves wise men from the East. Though we don’t know much about them, they were wealthy intellectuals, and certainly not Jewish.
Of course it involves Joseph and Mary, part of what today we would call the working class.
And it also involved the shepherds. We think of shepherds and we think of salt of the earth types, caring and strong, close to the earth and probably close to God. But in the time of Jesus, that’s not how people thought of shepherds, and that’s not how they thought of themselves—just the opposite, in fact. Shepherds were assumed to be dishonest and immoral.
In the whole world, you would find no occupation more despised than that of the shepherd. To the list of those who could not give testimony in court, add robbers, extortionists, shepherds, and all who are suspect in money matters. Their testimony was invalid under all circumstances.
For shepherds, tax collectors, and revenue farmers, it was difficult to make repentance. Why? Because shepherds routinely led their flocks across land that belonged to others, eating grass and drinking water along the way.
In the arid climate of the Middle East, nothing was more precious. Whatever was eaten or drunk by the shepherd’s flock was considered stolen. And even if a shepherd wanted to make things right, he would find it practically impossible to remember everyone he had defrauded, much less make restitution.
At the time of Jesus’ birth, shepherds were held in contempt and despised as roving, unscrupulous gypsies and thieves. And often that’s exactly what they were.
Why were these undeserving, marginalized shepherds included in the first Christmas? Not just included, but given an angelic invitation while the world slept to be the first to visit the newborn Christ? Because Christmas is for everyone. And its message is that everyone matters to God.
“But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people’” (Luke 2:10).
All the people. Jews and Gentiles. The intellectual and the uneducated. The religious and the irreligious. The wealthy, the working class, and the poor. Those who have done everything right and those who have done everything wrong.
Christmas is for everyone because everyone matters to God. If that’s true, it leads to something else.
4. It matters how we treat others.
“Remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare,” writes C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory. “All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities…that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ‘ordinary’ people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.…No flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love….”
I love the line: “There are no ‘ordinary’ people.”
Everyone has a soul. Everyone is eternal. Everyone is on a journey that will lead them to God and to a destiny of beauty and splendor—or they’re on a journey that will lead them away from God and to a destiny that is hideous and dark.
And regardless of where they are or where they are heading at the moment, everyone matters to God. That means it matters how we treat others.
God loves everyone, none more than the other. But if you read the Bible and if you look at the life of Jesus, you will find that God has a special concern for those like the shepherds—the lost, the least, the looked-over, and the left out.
One of my favorite artists is Darden Smith. He wrote a song called “Broken Branches.” He lives in Austin, Texas, and was downtown near the bus station watching the street people who hung out there. One couple in particular got his attention. He wrote about them:
“Two people stand on the corner / Counting up some bus fare change / Boy and a girl 26 or 7 / Clothes are all in disarray.”
He describes their appearance and the kind of life they must have lived to end up the way they are: “Back alleys, back seats / Park bench beds / Careless love.”
And then he asks: “Which way does the wind blow? / How blue is the sky? / Can you count the teardrops / Falling from a mother’s eyes? / Hey, that’s somebody’s daughter / That’s somebody’s son. / Somebody’s pride and joy / Turned out to be / A broken branch off the family tree.”
Remember, Darden tells us, before you dismiss a person, or judge them too harshly, or walk past them and pretend not to notice, that’s somebody’s daughter, that’s somebody’s son. Tears have been shed for him or her. Long ago there were hopes and dreams, pride and joy. Once they mattered to someone.
What does Christmas tell us? They still matter. Because they matter to God. And because they matter to God, they have to matter to us.
Not just street people and the homeless—that would be a good start—but everyone. Before we dismiss them, before we give up on them, before we decide they’re not worth what it takes to love them, before we walk past them and pretend not to see, remember: They matter to God.
There were once hopes and dreams, and maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we’re part of God’s dream for that person, and maybe he wants to use us to help them come to know his love and step into the beauty and splendor for which he created them.
People matter to God. And so it matters how we treat people.
5. Christmas tells us how to live a life that matters.
There are many ways we can live, but I want to point out a few specific ways.
• We can live life without God. Many people do just this—even many of us in the church.
We may believe in God, but that’s as far as it goes. We live the same way we would if we didn’t believe in him. We run after the same things the world runs after: possessions, position, power, and pleasure.
We think we’re unique. We think we’ll do something that makes us stand out. We’re writing our own story. But it’s the same story that most men and women write for themselves, a self-centered story of a life that is as hollow as it is shallow.
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) wrote about such lives in his poem There Breathes The Man. “High though his titles, proud his name / Boundless his wealth as wish can claim / Despite those titles, power, and pelf / The wretch, concentrated all in self / Living, shall forfeit fair renown / And, doubly dying, shall go down / To the vile dust, from whence he sprung / Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.”
There’s no honor in this kind of life. In fact there’s no life in this kind of life, certainly not the kind of life that matters.
• We can live with God as a part of our story. That’s the way most church folks live.
We live our lives and then somehow we figure out that there is a God and that we need God. And we ask God into our lives, accept Christ, trust him as Savior, go to church, give some money, and ask God to give us strength to live a better life.
But if we’re not careful, it’s still primarily our story. We write the script, we determine our goals, we stay in charge of the storyline of our lives. We’ve written God into the story. And God is there to give us advice and direction and strength. But our lives are still about our stories.
However, there is a better way.
• We can become a part of God’s story.
Some folks get it. They understand that true meaning comes when we become more concerned about God’s story than we are about our stories.
God’s story is a story of redemption. It’s a story that began when the first human beings broke fellowship with God. And God decided that he would make a way for us to come back to him.
It’s the great storyline of the universe. Since it began, kingdoms have come and gone. Empires have risen and fallen. And all of them claimed to be the story. They would last forever, they would bring hope and peace and life to humankind.
But they’re gone, and God’s story goes on.
It’s the story of God weeping over the broken branches that were once his family tree. And it’s the story of God acting in history to bring his children back to him through miracles, signs, and wonders, through priests and prophets and shepherds.
It’s Mary saying, “Yes, Lord, I’ll join your story. May it be to me as you have said.”
It’s Joseph saying, “Yes, Lord, I’ll be a part of your story, and take Mary as my wife.”
It’s the story of a baby in a manger.
It’s the story of a sacrifice on a cross.
It’s the story of a tomb that’s empty and a Savior that’s risen.
It’s the story of faithful men and women who, for 20 centuries, have determined that they exist to tell the story with the words they speak and, even more, through the lives they live.
It’s the men and women who have realized that life is about more than their little stories with or without God in them. It’s about joining God in the ongoing story of his redemptive work that brings life to wise men and shepherds and tax collectors and Jews and Gentiles and geologists and engineers and bankers and moms on welfare and deadbeat dads and people on the corner counting up bus fare change.
There are a hundred ways to be a part of God’s story. You’ll do it in different ways than I do it. You’ll do it in ways that I can’t.
What’s important is that we do it. Whether it’s teaching a Bible study or leading a small group, sharing cookies—and Christ—with your neighbors, or shoveling snow with an outreach ministry, building churches in South America or loving orphans or some other way, what’s important is that our lives join in God’s story, the big story of redemption.
Rob Renfroe is the president and publisher of Good News. He is the pastor of adult discipleship at The Woodlands United Methodist Church in The Woodlands, Texas.
by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By B.J. Funk
My daddy often quoted Longfellow’s phrase, “Into each life some rain must fall. Some days must be dark and dreary.”
Darkness is a scary thing. When we were small, we thought that boogie bears and goblins inhabited the dark. When we grew up, we knew for sure that they did. Smoke colored clouds roll out thunder into our lives, showing no favoritism. Rich or poor, sinner or saint, no one is excluded. Perhaps that is why I love the story of Fanny Crosby. Her literal blindness was her entrance into God’s work for her and became the catalyst for her triumphant life of writing over 8,000 hymns. She lived inside of Blessed Assurance; Jesus is Mine long before she wrote about that assurance. Our spiritual blindness can also become the catalyst for bringing victorious life to you and me.
At the age of eight, Fanny wrote these verses about her condition: Oh what a happy soul I am, although I cannot see; I am resolved that in this world, contented I will be.” Later Fanny, a life-long Methodist, remarked “It seemed intended by the blessed providence of God that I should be blind all my life, and I thank him for the dispensation. If perfect earthly sight were offered me tomorrow, I would not accept it. I might not have sung hymns to the praise of God if I had been distracted by the beautiful and interesting things about me.”
She might have been blind, but Fanny Crosby could see! For Fanny, darkness was the doorway into life.
We don’t have to go to a Blind Academy or stop under a bridge of homeless heroin addicts to find blind eyes. There will be a pair or two on your same pew this Sunday. Spiritual blindness at church is perhaps the hardest blindness to cure. These people are your brothers and sisters in Christ. However, they leave the church the same way they came in. Scales block an entrance to the truth. The message of hope cannot penetrate. They are as blind as the blind heroin addicts. The difference is that the addict recognizes his blindness and either chooses to stay or tries to get out. The pew-sitter might never recognize his.
Sometimes Jesus did things that caused others to gasp. He broke into their preconceived ideas with unconventional methods. On two occasions when Jesus restored sight to the blind, he used an unsanitary method: spit. In both cases, sight was given to men who had not been able to see. In Mark 8:22, Jesus spit on a blind man’s eyes and then touched him. In John 9:6, Jesus spit on the ground and made a mudpack to place on the other blind man’s eyes. Do you hear the gasp of the crowd as they watched Jesus pucker up his mouth and let out two rounds of human spit straight into a blind man’s eyes. Did that man gasp? Did he let out any x-rated words as the wet saliva drenched his eyes and rolled down his cheeks? When others watched Jesus stoop down and pick up two wads of mud, plastering them on the other man’s eyes, can you hear shouts of “Oh no!” in the crowd? Wonder what it felt like to be hit with a wet, cold thickness. If I had been Jesus, I would have chosen the easier route: just touch the men and heal them. Why the show? Was there anything magical about spit and mud?
I don’t think so. In everything our Lord did, he moved with the determined purpose of teaching us about kingdom living. Perhaps the disgusting elements of spit and mud were meant to be symbols of what we face before we receive our spiritual eyesight: Life’s problems spit at us and disappointments throw mud in our eyes. Once we have had enough negatives of life, enough darkness, we call out to the Healer for mercy. Only His touch can help us sling off earth’s foul pull and open our eyes to the joy of new life with Jesus. Spiritually blind eyes see best after they’ve been crushed under layers of darkness.
2 Corinthians 4:4 tells us plainly where this darkness comes from. “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” Satan so cleverly disguises his work that believers forget there even is a god of this age. Darkness then becomes a way of life, with one layer of blindness piling in on another until a thick, dark coat completely engulfs the unbeliever. There is not a human on earth who can pull back the darkness. It takes an act of supernatural mercy.
Do you have children or grandchilden walking in spiritual darkness? Tell them the story of how Fanny used her blindness to find light. Then, pray that God will pile their eyes full to the brim with the mud and spit of life. It’s a prerequisite to their sight. Lord, have mercy.
B.J. Funk (bjfunk@bellsouth.net) is associate pastor of Central United Methodist Church in Fitzgerald, Georgia. She is the author of The Dance of Life: Invitation to a Father Daughter Dance, a regular contributor to the South Georgia Advocate, and a frequent speaker at women’s retreats.
by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Reed Hoppe
The presence of drug cartels has plagued Mexico for decades. March 2010 saw a dramatic rise in the number of violent deaths in Mexico as two of the largest drug cartels declared war on one another.
More than 22,700 people have been killed since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels after assuming office nearly four years ago. More than 2,000 were killed in the first quarter of 2010 alone. Ciudad Juarez, located across the border from El Paso, Texas, is one of the most violent cities in the world. More than 2,600 people were killed in Ciudad Juarez in 2009.
Mexico supplies 70 percent of the illegal drugs that enter the U.S. each year. The U.S. is the largest consumer of Mexican-produced marijuana, as well as a major consumer of methamphetamine, heroine, and cocaine.
The violent drug wars have hit close to home for the six Mission Society missionaries and their children who serve in Monterrey, Mexico. These missionaries are involved in teaching at John Wesley Methodist Seminary, children’s ministry, ESL classes, outreach to the “garbage people,” evangelism, and discipleship.
Many short-term teams have canceled trips due to the increase in violence and the travel warning issued by the U.S. Department of State. Without the short-term teams that usually flood Mexico each year, there will be a drastic change in the ministries in which Mexican churches have traditionally been involved.
“From Mexico to southern Chile, mission teams have left their mark on the Church,” explains Mission Society missionary Jon Herrin, “in the form of schools, church buildings, medical clinics, Bible schools, micro-businesses, Bibles, clothes, and friendships. These teams have come to do more than just build things. When teams are planned and managed well, relationships are formed. It is through those relationships that we can most surely and effectively share the Good News of God in Christ Jesus.”
Herrin encourages short-term teams from the U.S. to come to Mexico to minister. “We invite teams to come to Monterrey, to work side-by-side with the Mexican nationals in the development and repair of infrastructure, to share the love of God,” he says. “If we believed there was a serious risk to one’s life, we would never invite people to come.”
Ministries have been affected in other ways as well. It is dangerous to travel to remote areas because of the cartels’ prominence on major roadways, so assistance is not getting to rural areas. Most people do not venture out after dark, which has cut down on the evening activities churches offer, such as Bible studies, discipleship groups, and outreach. Several pastors ministering in the border towns have received death threats as well.
But not all of the news is bad. One of the annual conferences of the Methodist Church, which included Monterrey and most of the border towns, took place during the first week of June. Churches reported a 2.3 percent net growth since the violence began. “Because of the rise in violence, the uncertainty of each day, people are asking those eternal questions,” reports Herrin.
Bonnie Hipwell, a Mission Society missionary in Mexico, recounted an encouraging story from a pastor in the conference. One of the pastors with which Hipwell works, had her home riddled with bullets during a gun battle between the Mexican army and cartel members. One bullet came through the wall into one of the bedrooms where her daughter had been sleeping moments before. Elena told her husband that she wanted to leave and take the family to a less dangerous area. He responded, “Why would we want to leave this place? This is where God is protecting us!” Hipwell reports that Elena’s preaching has been electrified by the realization of God’s presence and the church is seeking after the Lord.
Herrin adds, “One of the things that has hampered the gospel in many places is the failure of believers to actually live what they say they believe. We say we believe that God is in control. We say we believe the Bible. However, when we live cowering in fear of the economic disaster that has befallen us, or if we hide in our houses on this side of the border because of an increase in unpredictable violence, our testimony falls flat.”
Bonnie Hipwell has prayed for years for revival to come to Mexico. She hopes that the current situation will encourage people to turn to the Lord. She said, “It’s a tough time to be in Mexico, but it’s an amazing time as we see God at work here. We as Christians are called to be the light of the world. If all the Christians leave Mexico, the light leaves Mexico, and the enemy has won. So we need to stay and stand our ground. This is a spiritual war.”
Reed Haigler Hoppe serves as an associate editor for The Mission Society and is an ordained deacon in the Alabama-West Florida annual conference of the United Methodist Church.
by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Duffy Robbins
The hard part is getting them to give you a listen!
It’s that time of year when youthworkers and Sunday school teachers are heading into a new school year, praying, brainstorming, dreaming, stressing, and panicking about how they will make biblical truth come alive for a roomful of adolescents. For some it’s the excitement of a new Fall. For some it’s the fear of falling. And for some, it’s the fear of total failure.
We’ve been talking in the last several issues of Good News about how we can more effectively communicate biblical truth. Specifically, we’ve been looking at some of the factors that make it hard for students to hear us such as program flow and students’ openness to new ideas. Before we leave this topic, there are a few more issues to consider:
• How much of a threat is the message? (cf. John 6:60, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”) Students are asking, “What are the potential costs and benefits if I respond to this truth?”
• Are we speaking in their language? Missionary Cam Townsend founded the Wycliffe Bible Translators because a Guatemalan Indian posed to him the question, “Why doesn’t your God speak my language?” It’s still one of the fundamental questions that kids ask about our preaching. That doesn’t mean that we need to talk like teenagers, but we surely need to craft our messages based on how teenagers talk.
• Is this the best time and place for this lesson or this message? We’ve all had conversations in which someone has said, “Can we talk about this later? Now is not a good time.” The ambiance of time and place makes a difference in what we hear and the way we hear it. A group that is open and receptive in a late-night lock-in setting, might not be as much so on the following morning. The message that seemed powerful and inspiring when you gave it at the campfire somehow seems cold and sterile at the Wednesday night Bible study. Time and place matter. That’s why your wedding proposal was made in a romantic soft-light bistro and not in the drive-through lane at Chick-fil-A.
• What is the mood of the students? Sometimes a crisis at school or a national news story provides a unique window of opportunity to address a topic with our students when that topic might otherwise be very tough to talk about with a fair hearing.
• How crowded is the teaching venue? Yeah, believe it or not, there is substantial evidence that having students crowd together in a room makes them more susceptible to persuasion than would be the same number of kids in a larger room. Moral to the story: Always use a room—or, at least, try to arrange the room you are using—so that students feel jammed in together.
• Is there a way I can add humor to this lesson? Communication research has confirmed what most youth workers have learned through experience: humor makes an audience more open to persuasion. Numerous studies have shown that humor relaxes an audience and makes it feel more at ease. Humor can break down barriers and increase receptivity to our message. Again, that doesn’t mean you need to be Rev. David Letterman. If you’re naturally funny, that’s great. But, for the humor-impaired, there are wonderful resources for visual humor and funny stories on the internet (still pictures, funny movies, outtakes, clever television commercials, YouTube clips). One of the keys to being funny is not creating humor, but learning to see it when it’s there in everyday life.
• Does this talk or Bible study really scratch where they itch? This is probably the most important gateway factor: are we speaking to their felt needs? Does this study answer their questions or our questions? One of the ways to think about this as we prepare a talk or a lesson is by asking of every biblical text four simple questions:
1. What would my students find hard to embrace in this text? What would my students doubt to be true?
2. What do my students need to know or re-hear in this text?
3. With which inner feelings, longings, hopes, and hurts does this passage connect in their lives? How will they feel this truth?
4. If this text is true, what does it say about the world in which my students live? What might they need to rethink or reevaluate if they accept the truth of this message?
Jesus was wise enough to understand that even the disciples had limits to what they might hear. And, whether it was due to their lack of maturity, or the circumstances they were in at the time, Jesus knew not to push matters beyond their limits: “I have much more to tell you, but now it would be too much for you to bear” (John 16:12). Understanding how our students hear can help us to think more strategically about how we communicate.
Duffy Robbins is Chairman of the Department of Youth Ministry at Eastern College in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, and a long-time columnist for Good News.
by Steve | Oct 11, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Linda Bloom
In rural Zimbabwe, there is not much relief—physically or emotionally—for those dying from the complications of HIV/AIDS.
But, by training nurses at United Methodist-related Mutambara Hospital and other hospitals, as well as educating volunteer community caregivers in hospice skills, the Foundation for Hospices in Sub-Saharan Africa is making a difference.
That project is among the 155 projects in 33 countries receiving $527,165 in grants from the United Methodist Global AIDS Fund in 2009. The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) administers the fund.
The Rev. Don Messer and other members of the denomination’s Global AIDS Fund Committee are proud of that accomplishment. However, donations to the fund have dropped from a high of $977,541 in 2007 to $395,851 last year, with receipts even lower as of July 2010.
While the church alone cannot solve the HIV/AIDS crisis, Messer pointed out, its participation is essential.
Lighten the burden. The committee hopes to rejuvenate denominational interest in HIV/AIDS mission work with its third international conference on the subject. “Lighten the Burden III,” set for October 14-16 in Dallas, will offer participants the opportunity to discuss how to work “towards an AIDS-free world.”
Dallas was chosen as a way to attract participants from the Hispanic community and highlight the concern over growing HIV infection rates among Hispanic and African-American women in the United States, says Patricia Magyar, an executive with UMCOR Health.
Magyar senses a call from the denomination’s annual conferences for more educational tools to help them respond to the pandemic. Such information sharing will be part of the conference. “The hope is to re-energize and re-charge,” she added.
Messer believes the speakers—who include an African theologian, a U.N. expert, two United Methodist leaders and, possibly, the director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy—“can motivate us to see that clearly we are responding from the call of Christ.”
Etta Mae Mutti, the wife of retired Bishop Fritz Mutti, also will share in a workshop session her experiences of having lost two of her three sons to AIDS.
Maureen Vetter, a member of Trinity United Methodist Church in Grand Island, Nebraska, has found inspiration from Etta Mae and Fritz Mutti, as well as the stories she heard from local caseworkers dealing with people with HIV/AIDS.
One of the denomination’s “AIDS Ambassadors” organized through the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, Vetter knows of people coping with HIV/AIDS in silence. “I feel it is time for churches to start talking about HIV/AIDS and those struggling and ways we can reach out to others,” she said.
Messer—who has attended four international AIDS conferences, including this summer’s event in Vienna—finds acceptance of church involvement. “Increasingly, there’s been an openness by AIDS activists and government officials around the world to get the faith-based groups involved,” he said.
The Vienna conference, which drew almost 20,000 people, focused on human rights, understanding the scope of the pandemic in each nation, and “marshaling the resources to meet that need,” he added.
Messer, director of the Denver-based Center for the Church and Global AIDS, believes that creating or supporting such resources is the type of action that any local church or individual member can take.
Phil DiSorbo, whose organization runs the hospice project in Zimbabwe, certainly depends on such support. “Many people would like to turn their backs on the suffering, especially in tough economic times,” he pointed out.
But “the church needs to be in the forefront,” DiSorbo declared, not only addressing HIV/AIDS, but also the social justice, health care, gender inequality, and child abuse issues related to poverty and disease. “It’s our calling.”
Linda Bloom is a United Methodist News Service multimedia reporter based in New York.
