The World Awaits

The last few years I have been working with urban poor. Spending lots of time with people on the bottom end of society has been an eye opening and rewarding experience. It has also made me think a great deal about what it means to “hear” the Gospel.

In the early years of my walk with Christ I was socialized into a view of sharing the faith that was primarily a monologue and it was something you told people. Obviously, there were better and worse versions of this…it can be done tactfully and with grace or it can be pushy and forced. But nonetheless, the point was to get the “message” in its shortest and most easily understandable form out to as many people as possible in the fastest time possible.

That view of sharing the story of Jesus has been pretty much erased for me while living and working among a people group that has very few Christians and a long standing religious tradition of its own. But working with urban poor has even brought new insights and angles as so many of the things that we take for granted in sharing the Gospel with people are missing or much different. Literacy, private and quiet time to think and reflect (slums are crowded and noisy), an education that helps you think critically and for yourself, an environment that does not wreck your mind with toxins, drugs, and disease, the leisure time generated by having a secure income, and so on.

Take away all of that and what does it mean to “hear” the Good News? You have to live it out, and show it, over and over again, day in and day out, and be there for that moment of openness and insight to help connect the dots of what all of this means.

Drive by evangelism, throwing literature at people, and blasting it at them over radio waves will not get the job done….these people are surrounded by religion and one more is not going to make a big difference. They are trying to survive.

So I guess my wrestling with thinking about all this is why an essay by Barbara Frost on the back pages of the Global Future magazine from World Vision (Nov. 2, 2007) rang the bell with me when I read it.

She began by reminding her readers of many of the cherished moments in the life of Jesus that we learn about in the Gospels…a sinful woman anointing his feet at a meal, a talk with a Samaritan woman followed by a couple of days in her village, lunch with Zaccheus…all happened in the midst of daily activities.

Then she raises the question…”Did Jesus have nothing better to do with his time than to spend it so freely on the seemingly insignificant or dishonoured citizens of his day?”

The kind of people Jesus hung out with tells us something about the nature of God, about the nature of true ministry, and shows us how he approached being Good News.

I am so glad that Jesus was not in a rush, and he did not see these people as interruptions in a very busy schedule. Ms. Frost points out that these encounters “were the very fabric of his life.”

Over the past several months I have read a wonderful book by Arthur Glasser entitled Announcing the Kingdom: The Story of God’s Mission in the Bible. In the introduction written by Paul Hiebert there are some great thoughts about the problem of fragmentation that we face in modernity and the need for an integrating cosmic story from the Bible.

I will excerpt here some lines from the introduction…

“One of the hallmarks of modernity is the fragmentation of life into different spheres: public and private; economic, social, political, and religious; rich and poor. This fragmentation is reflected in the university, with its many disciplines and narrow specializations. With this fragmentation has come the loss of any sense of the dramatic story underlying history.

…most of us are left to live in a world of highly specialized knowledge and no integrating cosmic story. … Reginald Bibby documents what many of us know from experience. Most Christians have a smorgasbord theology-based on the study of specific biblical passages in sermons, Sunday School classes, and Bible studies-which answers certain questions and focuses on individuals and their needs. Most Christians talk about personal salvation and what God has done for them in their lives. They have a theology of worship and fellowship, of health and prosperity, and of care for the needy. But they have little in their thinking for a world full of diverse peoples, of an earth caught up in the evils of sin, of a history from before Creation to eternity, or of the reason for their existence in such a world.

…No longer do we see ourselves as part of a movement far greater than ourselves and a universal history that gives meaning to our lives because it shows us our place in a cosmic story. (7)

[Glasser] show that all of Scripture points to the fact that God is a missionary God, that the church is to be a missionary community, and that God’s people are to be a missionary people. He shows us that mission is at the center of God’s great plan, not only of redemption, but also of Creation. He reminds us that this mission is God’s mission, that it is much bigger than the little worlds in which we minister, and that it includes not only the salvation of individuals and the redemption of the church but also the reestablishment of God’s Kingdom of righteousness, peace, and justice in a new heaven and a new earth.

If we as God’s people truly meet God, we cannot not be a missionary people, and the church cannot exist apart from mission. Our ministries take on meaning not because they are deeds of witness and service, important as these are, but because they are part of the great mission of God.” (8)

These are powerful thoughts…but dangerous ones. I believe it was Hiebert who also said in another essay I read recently that mission theology has always disturbed the peace of the church. Once you get a set of filters that helps you to see God’s redemptive plan as the backbone of Scripture it will destabilize your world-because as Hiebert notes here, then you cannot NOT be take part in the plan and purpose of God-and that will challenge all one’s old assumptions and comfort zones.

Read it and read Scripture with a new lens, but only if you are willing to take the risk of change.

We were given a book at the World Missions Summit last year and my wife is reading it right now. She was reading me some great quotes out of it so I asked her to write them down so I could share them here.

The book is by Claude Hickman, titled livelifeonpurpose God’s Purpose. Your Life. One Journey (Enumclaw, Washington: Winepress Publishing, 2003).

Enjoy….there is good stuff here.

“When I first became a believer, I sought zealously all that I perceived to be the Christian life. I tossed all my secular music, put motivating stickers on my car, and even tried to evangelize by wearing the most Christian t-shirts I could find. I thought all this was what it meant to be a good Christian. But the more I grew spiritually the more I realized that God was not really interested in me Christianizing my life as much as He was interested in me crucifying my life. The problem that many of us face is that when we become Christians we simply adjust all of our natural ambition toward Christian things. Whatever effort we put toward the pursuit of carnal goals before Christ is now spent in pursuit of Christianized goals. Not much changes. It seems from scripture, however, that God is challenging us to lay down our ambitions. Not simply to adjust them but to abandon our ambitions in exchange for His. In order for this great exchange to take place a few things have to happen. First, you must crucify your life to Him. Second, you have to know what His ambitions are. And third, you have to know practically how you are going to live out His goals. These are the reasons Claude Hickman wrote this book.” (From the Foreword by Todd Ahrend, pages 9-10)

“The reason why even Christians are still searching for purpose is that they try to take their new full-color puzzle piece and cram it back into their old black and white picture. They want to be a Christian and a new creation, but they want to hang onto their old plans as well. Maybe I can just be a “Christian” pro athlete, is what I said to myself. For others maybe it is becoming a “Christian” businessman, or a “Christian” actor. As if it’s okay to just put on a Christian t-shirt and keep on living out your own dreams. That kind of life will never lead to true happiness because it is centered on us. It is working form our plans out to God’s, and then asking Him to join us, instead of asking Him what he is doing and what we can do to join Him. God isn’t interested in joining your journey. You were created for His. (page 19) 

“Young people have within themselves the relentless potential to become world changers, but all this ability and ambition is also paralyzing. They are so talented that there are limitless things that they could set out to do and be successful at. This generation’s worst fear is that they will choose the wrong path and miss their destiny. Since they can do everything, nothing is supreme. Everything is within reach, so choosing to grab hold of one seems to be more like letting hundreds of other paths slip out of your fingers.” (page 26) “John Piper put it like this, “You don’t have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, and then be willing to live for them and die for them.” (page 27)

“Beware: our Christian culture will validate anything-even the wrong life purpose.” (page 29)

These are some thoughts that I jotted down from some time spent meditating on Mt 26, Mk 14, Jn 12-the woman with the alabaster jar of nard..they are still in process, and I want to do some exegetical work on the passages. But here is what is on my mind…

I have always puzzled about what this means, I am sure that there are numerous things that you could draw from the passage, but this is something that has come to me recently.

We as pragmatic Americans would not doubt have cried out with the indignant, ‘why this waste?’ It is rational choice economics, bang for the buck. Think of all the poor that could have been helped.

The symbolism that Jesus gave his approval to has in some way to do with his redemptive death.

So there is something here about God’s economics where rational choice does not work and extravagance is appropriate. I am not sure what all this is about but my thoughts are leaning in this direction…

I think that reaching the least-reached, going where the Gospel is not yet rooted, can never be explained in rational choice terms. Where it has to do with making the redemptive death of Jesus known where he is not known, it appears to the bang for the buck crowd an unimaginable and profligate expense to labor where fruit comes so slowly…but it is an extravagance pleasing in God’s eyes.

So if we are going to be extravagant, and lavish, and profligate in our spending lets redirect it away from million dollar foyers and gargantuan facilities and send thousands of young people in teams to reach the M, B and H world.

My wife and I work among the urban poor in Bangkok.One day I was finishing a prayer walk and I stopped to visit a family that I have been getting to know the last couple of years. They sell puang malai, small jasmine flower wreaths.

I first met them because their work takes four set of hands and this means that while Mom and Dad work their three small children, have to play and sleep alongside the sidewalk of this busy road from the late afternoon till the early hours of the morning.

On this particular day I was tired from walking and they offered a little stool. I sat with them as they worked. Nine year old Sai spends her afternoons not playing with friends, but stringing jasmine wreaths and breathing exhaust fumes with her parents, while Bang Bon and Tak play in the strip of land or on the sidewalk, too young to know that they are dirt poor.

Sai is bone thin and rarely smiles. As I sat there silently talking with Jesus about their family, stealing glances at her and her mother working with the flowers, I looked into her eyes.

It was the deadness of her eyes that caught me up on this day…in her face and eyes all of the life and joy of childhood had been drawn out as if by a giant syringe. It dawned on me that somewhere along the line she had crossed the threshold of ‘toy land’ into the harsh realities of what her entire life is going to be like. She sees her story written in advance as she works beside her uneducated mother and alcoholic father who struggle to make ends meet for a family of five on less than 6 or so dollars a day.

I thought about what was on my mind when I was 9, and what burdens lie on Sai’s shoulders. Her fingers work the flowers, while she faces a life of too little education, a childhood lost, and a future of grinding poverty.

My eyes filled with tears and I got up and finished the short walk home.

And I wrote a letter to my children about Nong Sai.

In my opinion it is unfortunate that too often stories of majority world poverty and pictures of poor children become reduced to mere fund raising devices to get money out of affluent westerners.

This only obscures the real issues that are pressing for us today in cross-cultural missions. Nong Sai and her family, are not an anomaly, but serve as a classic illustration for me of the dilemmas that face us today as we look at our world through mission eyes.

Nong Sai is Buddhist, part of a least-reached people group.

Nong Sai billions who live in what is primarily the Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist world that makes up the 40% of the people on our globe who lack the potential for access to the Gospel. In their sociocultural settings they have no access to near-neighbor witness. There are no Christians among their people or so few that the chance of them hearing a relevant witness in their lifetime is very small.

The dilemma is that places in the world that do have lots of Christians continue to go to other places in the world with lots of Christians, and thus the 40% remains tragically neglected.

She needs to hear the Gospel.

Who will go to share the story?

Nong Sai is poor.

The 40% who have no access to the Gospel, are also for the most part the poorest of our world. We are in the midst of an admirable and needed shift of understanding among people who take the Bible seriously…they know we must care for the whole person.

The dilemma is that this new insight too often devolves into a drive-by, give-away mentality that has more to do with helping us salve our conscience by feeling like we have done something than confront the complex realities of culture, power, and the spiritual darkness that makes poverty so intractable.

Hope for her future lies in a relationship reconciled with God and others, and the formation of a new community living under the rule of God.

Who will go to build this new community of people reconciled to God and each other?

Nong Sai is marginalized.

Her society cannot see her.

The few Christians that are in her culture rarely venture into the place she lives.

Traditional churches around the world from small to large have all kinds of ministry and programmatic machinery. The problem is that we are so busy running the machinery that it pushes real people to the periphery, where ministry happens by accident when people ‘fit the program’.

The dilemma here is that messy people like Nong Sai and her family, the urban poor, the addicted, the gender confused, the mentally ill, the broken, and people who are truly lost and far from the Father, are not seen, and they do not fit-the program.

Who will see them?

I wrote my children about Nong Sai.

“When I got up to walk away I left with a renewed sense of clarity about how important it is to make a difference for just one person, one at a time, to be there as God’s instrument to bring His rule in the middle of exploitation, to try and level the playing field in a world where the rich and powerful make sure kids like Sai stay at the bottom of the heap.

And for some reason at moments like these my thoughts always turn to you three, and …I dream on your behalf. I dream about you being people who…practice the Lordship of Jesus Christ, people who are committed to bringing his glory to their corner of the world. So I pray for you and ask for God’s grace and guidance to walk you past the myriad side trails and seductions of modernity and western culture to be people that incarnate Jesus wherever he leads you.

I love you, and am immensely proud of all of you. You bring joy to my heart.

Thinking of Sai and all of you,

Dad”

My dream for my children is what I dream for local churches, that you can make a difference for the 40% who have no access to the Gospel, are poor, and marginalized, one person at a time.

Two events in the late 1970’s radically altered the direction of my life. Just after high school graduation I began attending an Assemblies of God church, and that summer I was baptized in the Holy Spirit. That experience brought a zeal and passion to share the Gospel and ultimately led to a decisive calling into full time vocational ministry. The second event happened a few years later when a missionary friend from my church handed me a brochure about a group trying to found an organization called the U. S. Center For World Mission. I liked the idea when I read about it, sent a small financial gift and received in return a poster that I hung on the wall across from my desk in the small youth pastor office I was occupying. Day after day I would look at this simple pie chart depicting the five major blocks of unreached people. Looking turned into praying, and led in turn to more reading and study until the Holy Spirit used that data to create an unshakable conviction that I personally had to work among an unreached people. That pie chart changed my life by giving me a whole new vision of the world.

Before that my local church experience of hearing missionary reports had fanned the flame for evangelism, but it never pushed me toward the conclusion that I must be involved personally. With my missiological naiveté and lack of context, the glowing reports I heard were so victorious and exciting they only confirmed my conviction that overseas the job was being finished and someone needed to stay in America to try to bring such revival here. However, this unreached peoples chart turned my naïve thinking upside down. Suddenly I found myself in a world where some people had access to the Gospel and others did not-unless someone crossed a cultural frontier with the message. My own personal calling to involvement in missions came as two streams of my experience converged. Baptism in the Spirit brought passion to reach the lost, while missiological data showed me the state of the world and where those with least access to the Gospel were located.

What I was unaware of at the time was that just a few years before, the developer of that chart, Ralph Winter, had given a brief presentation featuring facts, figures and biblical interpretation that challenged the Christian community to make cross-cultural evangelism the very highest priority. The concepts presented that day became the foundation of a new paradigm of missiology and the inspiration for a movement that has mobilized Christians everywhere in unprecedented fashion for a final thrust at the last unreached and least reached harvest fields. Calling itself the frontier mission movement, this new way of thinking centers on the concept of people groups and the need for establishing a viable church movement among every people. Gary Corwin assesses the impact of the movement in this way:

When in 1974 Dr. Ralph Winter gave his famous speech, “The Highest Priority: Cross-Cultural Evangelism,” at the first Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, a new era in mission history was begun. It was not really so much that a new vision was born, but that a new way of looking at an old vision was provided….What was new at Lausanne was that for the first time in the modern period the task was now couched primarily in terms of ethne or peoples and religious blocks, rather than in geographic or geo-political terms. Over the last two decades since that speech an astounding shift has taken place. The concept of unreached peoples (in contrast to unreached people) is on the lips of virtually everyone concerned with the mission of Christ’s church.¹

I believe that this focus, taking the Good News to sociocultural settings where there are no church movements, remains a top priority for God’s people. Many people remain unaware that large parts of humanity do not have any near-neighbor witness within their social system. Paul Hiebert says that mission theology has always distrubed the peace of the church. I believe that the insights of people like Ralph Winter and others about the priority of cross-cultural evangelism where church movements do not exist needs to disturb us today.

¹Gary Corwin, “Sociology and Missiology: Reflection on Mission Research,” in Missiology and the Social Sciences: Contributions, Cautions and Conclusions, ed. Edward Rommen and Gary Corwin (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1996), 20-21.

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