CHAPTER 7
IN JERUSALEM
Where is the front line of God’s mission? Look out the window. Yes, that window.
You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem.
JESUS (ACTS 1:8)
Beloq: It only takes a little nudge to make you like me. Indy: Now you’re getting nasty.
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
She stormed up to me, irate, as I basked in the Californian sun during our outdoor service. “There’s a transvestite in the women’s room. What should I do?”
I smiled at her calmly.
“Wait for him to come out?” I said quizzically as my smile turned to a smirk. I knew what was coming. Told you I was a punk.
There was no response, just a blank look. Her eyes narrowed with apprehension of what I was suggesting we do: nothing. With a huff, she stormed off to find another leader and tell on “that bald guy over there” who didn’t give her the answer she wanted. I’d planted this church a few years earlier, but when I returned occasionally, few knew who I was. Just some bald guy; and that was the way I liked it.
I knew the transvestite she was talking about. We had three prostitutes in the church at that time, but Marcel was a cross-dressing ex-construction worker who was coming to church regularly. It had taken months for us to earn his trust. In fact, the first time I asked how to get in touch, he handed me a paper that had an email including “4rent” in the address. When I read it, tears started to form, and I nearly lost my composure as I folded it up into my pocket. Marcel had been a construction worker, and once he began to open up with a few of us, we realized he’d walked a very tough road.
The other leader who she tattled to later told me that the lady wanted a confrontation with Marcel. A pound of flesh. A showdown at high noon. She wanted me to give the nod for her to storm into the women’s bathroom and demand that Marcel come out immediately. After that, she was hoping one of us would chew Marcel out for the audacity to think he could use the women’s bathroom. In many churches, if I’d given the nod, the coats would pile up at my feet as others eagerly picked up stones to throw. This is where, I fear, many Christians would make a stand against all they thought was indecent. This is where they might plant the flag and hold firmly, and as they did so, they would also pierce the heart of yet another person who’d come to a church named Refuge, and was hoping it would live up to its name.
Marcel had learned quickly that very few churches were indeed a refuge. After the service, we spoke with Marcel, and he let us know that he strategically chose to go into the bathroom during the sermon because he didn’t want to make anybody feel uncomfortable. Further, he’d chosen the women’s restroom because he usually got beat up when he used the men’s room. In a conflict like this, experience had taught me that before the day was done we would lose somebody. The important thing was quickly deciding who it was going to be. I knew exactly how upsetting my response was to the woman, but I also knew that she could find a handful of churches where people would think and act exactly like her. She’d be welcome in those churches. Marcel? We were pretty much it. Because of the large number of funerals we’ve done in our first few years, we call Refuge the “last stop before hell.” For many people, we’re their last chance at redemption before they face eternity.
You can tell pretty easily when people just talk about reaching lost people versus talking to them. Sometimes it’s the way they describe a drug addict or somebody with mental illness, but there’s one quality that will expose that they don’t actually know anyone with those struggles—a lack of compassion. Everywhere Jesus went, if he showed one thing to sinners, it was compassion. And nothing tests your compassion like a cross-dressing prostitute on a Sunday morning.
Compassion was one of the first results we observe in the apostles at Pentecost. When the Spirit came in power, they received his heart for the community and began to see Jerusalem through his eyes. Peter had passed the beggar propping himself against the Temple Gate called Beautiful countless times on his way to daily prayer, but that morning after Pentecost, Peter saw him differently. Same beggar, different Peter. “Peter directed his gaze at him” (Acts 3:4 ESV). The Greek text implies that Peter studied him, perhaps as if he’d really seen him for the first time. Or perhaps the first time seeing him in a new way. Whatever it implies, that look was momentous. When we come under the influence of the Holy Spirit on mission, our attitudes towards our own “Jerusalem” changes. Becoming a witness in Jerusalem means going on mission in the community you’ve probably lived in for a long time. So long, in fact, that the way you see your city, or community, or neighborhood is in need of an overhaul. Perhaps you no longer see it all. As the Spirit consumes us for mission, we see our community as God sees it. Being a missionary isn’t so much a matter of geography as a matter of posture. The Greek philosopher Anonymous* said, “A missionary isn’t someone who crosses the seas but someone who sees the cross.” Once you begin to see the people you’re interacting with as people for whom Christ died, it’s a game changer.
By the way, that day at the temple gates? About two thousand more men believed, in addition to the three thousand at Pentecost. Why? Simple. The apostles had become the crucified Christ’s witnesses in their home turf, Jerusalem. And it all began with Peter taking a second look. It’s the second look that kills ya.
I HATE PEOPLE
Every town tells the tale of two cities. There are two types of people you can choose to reach; people just like you, or people who are nothing like you at all. On Paul’s first missionary journey, he and Barnabas went home and reached people just like them. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s a good starting point when God begins working in our lives. Paul targeted his fellow citizens of Tarsus, in his native Turkey, and Barnabas the inhabitants of his homeland, Cyprus. But on Paul’s second missionary journey, something shifted. Paul thought he had it all mapped out, where he would go, who he would reach, but the Holy Spirit kept frustrating his attempts to go places. Finally, the Macedonian call brought him to Greece. That was the shift away from Paul’s own Jerusalem, and the beginning of the call to a specific foreign people group. Sometimes God calls you to reach one specific people group at the expense of others, and believe it or not, there is nothing wrong with that. In every epistle, Paul claimed that he was the “sent one” specifically called to reach the unreached Gentiles. Rick Warren claimed he was called to the yuppies in his Jerusalem of Southern California. During his three-year ministry, Jesus said, “I have been sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:24).
Wherever you think your mission field is, it always starts in Jerusalem and expands outward from there. Like the apostles, God will initially begin to use you in your immediate surroundings, even if it’s the springboard to a different destination. J. Hudson Taylor felt called exclusively to the Chinese, and in embarking for China, had to leave his Jerusalem behind.
God may never call you to South-East Asia, or to the Afghanistan tribes to share Jesus, because he may have strategically called you to stay in Jerusalem and reach the home team. There is enough brokenness in your city to keep you busy for the rest of your natural born life. Instead of a passport and an airline ticket, Charles Spurgeon said that the two necessary items to reaching people effectively are a love for God and a love for people. Monty Python missed this as the meaning of life, but the Holy Grail of truth from a biblical worldview is that we were made to love and be loved by God. It shouldn’t surprise us, therefore, that being witnesses in Jerusalem flows out from loving God and loving others.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. I hate people. People laugh when I say it, but it’s true. When I grew up, I escaped the heartache of my upbringing by reaching into the furthest corners of my imagination, represented by a universe of plastic action figures with five points of articulation. Star Wars, He-Man, G.I. Joe, ThunderCats, and plastic three-and-a-half-inch people were my friends, locked away with me in my room, because being around human people meant pain, rejection, and emotional abuse. In the end, I felt safest when alone. Childhood was all toys and cartoons (which probably explains a lot). When I approached adolescence, however, I lost myself in reading and music, all of which provided more opportunity to isolate myself. When I was a child, I thought as a child, but when I came to Jesus, it was time to grow up.
Many Christians grow older in Christ without really growing up in him. When I came to Jesus, his Bible kept saying that I needed to tell others about him. There was a part of me that was doing that naturally, but a piece of me felt like Jonah—loathing the people I was called to reach. It had nothing to do with them. It wasn’t personal; I didn’t like anybody. How was a natural born Son of Thunder to become transformed into John, the Apostle of Love? John’s evangelistic methodology worked for me, “Call fire down upon those people, Lord.” With the Vikings “Convert or Die” program in full swing, I grabbed the first scoffer that ever mocked me for being a Christian by the neck and slammed him against the wall. Fist cocked back I growled, “Think Jesus is funny now, wuss?” Tears moistened his eyes in humiliation and fear, and his quivering lip eked out “No, I’m sorry . . . just let me go.”
I realized pretty early on that I had a dilemma. Jesus was trying to love people through me, but I naturally feared, disliked, and hated the people he died for. If I was going to love people, his supernatural love was going to need to trump my natural hatred, I just couldn’t see how. We waste time pretending that we love people when we don’t. So in desperation, I broke down and did a crazy thing. I told God the truth!
I confessed my hatred of people.
Acknowledging the truth to yourself and God is the first step in yielding your place of brokenness and helplessness and inviting him to fill you and fix your inadequacies. When we come to the end of what our natural self can do, the supernatural Holy Spirit begins to kick in. At least that’s how it worked in our justification. Why not our sanctification too? In our justification, we had to come to a place of utter helplessness in our ability to save ourselves before we cried out to Jesus to save us. In our struggles with sanctification, we can’t tell God, “Thanks for saving me, God. I pretty much got it from here.” The Spirit rushes into that vacuum created by a spiritual bankruptcy where we’ve reached deep into the pockets of our own resources and come up with pocket lint and a paperclip, but no dice. At that moment heaven kisses earth, and the Spirit fills that vacuum of inadequacy and supernaturally fills us with a love for people we’d naturally hate. I’ve stood weeping, overwhelmed with love for the people I shared the gospel with, aware that left to my own devices, I wouldn’t give a rip about them. It’s inexplicable. It’s what Paul naturally felt when he asserted that it was as if Christ himself were pleading through us to “be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20) and that “Christ’s love compels us” (2 Cor. 5:14). You don’t have to have the same love he has, you just have to let him love people through you. And with that, you win the T-shirt “Instant People Person—Just Add Holy Spirit.”
Why am I telling you all of this? To reach the unreached at the ends of the earth, our Jerusalem changes only when we change first. The revolutionary spiritual awakening known as the Jesus movement started in the 1960s with a forty-five-year-old Foursquare preacher named Chuck Smith. Problem was, he hated hippies. As they sat on the wall in front of his house on the coastal boardwalk in Newport Beach, Chuck would peer out the window at the unwashed, stinky, emaciated bodies invading his space, and grumble about what losers they were. Until his wife, Kay, stopped him dead in his tracks one day with a challenge, “Chuck, why don’t we start praying for them?” You can’t get any more “Jerusalem” than the front wall outside of your house. As Chuck and Kay prayed for the hippies, God started to open Chuck’s eyes to the mission field of his own personal “Jerusalem.” Without it, the Jesus Movement may never have had happened, and you might have been dressed in a suit next Sunday singing hymns. Remember, if you enjoy cruising church in shorts and sandals, you have the hippies to thank for it. The harvest was indeed plentiful, but the workers were few. A prayer to see hippies differently made all the difference and changed outreach as we know it.
MAKE THEM GO HOME, JESUS
The masses had been following Jesus late into the evening. The disciples were hungry, exhausted, and ready to turn them away, but Jesus, being Jesus, would hear nothing of it. He pictured them being like sheep released into the darkness—vulnerable, helpless, and harassed. His shepherd’s heart was moved with compassion for the shepherdless sheep. Personally, I’d have been with the disciples all the way.
But that dusky evening was more pivotal for the apostles than for the hungry, heaving masses. Having our eyes opened is the first step to becoming a worker in the field.
“Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field,” Jesus said (Matt. 9:38). It was a sneaky little prayer of self-transformation Jesus pulled, because praying that prayer isn’t about changing the lost, it’s about changing us. David Wilkerson had his heart broken by a youth on trial for murder, who was pictured in a newspaper, resulting in Wilkerson’s head-on collision with the Great Commission. It can happen at an intersection on a dusty road outside an African village on a short-term mission, or holding an infant in an orphanage in Haiti. It could be outside of a brothel in Bangkok, witnessing the sale of children. Each of us has a moment where our hearts are broken, and in that moment a piece of us surrenders into the hands of God.
Thy kingdom come . . . through me.
Thy will be done . . . through me.
No matter where you are in the world when it happens, it will change the world you already inhabit. My job of assessing church planters can be a bit like the old seventies Gong show. After the planters pitch their elaborate visions for where they want to go (Las Vegas, Los Angeles, London) and change the world, we ask them what they’ve been doing locally. Sometimes we get silence and blank stares. When they don’t pass the test, we tell them, “Jerusalem first.” You need new eyes before you can move to a new place. That’s what Paul said, “So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor. 5:16–17). We often misquote and misapply that verse; it’s not about you being changed, but changing the world as you see it.
Paul was the poster-child for this; transformed from a murderous, xenophobic, sinner-hating monster, into a broken man who loved people until it killed him. Just like his Master.
How can that happen to us?
IGNORANCE IS BLISS
Opening your eyes starts with the people you’ve already been passing by in your personal Jerusalem. But opening your eyes so you notice what’s really going on in your own private Idaho can be dangerous. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. Once you pay attention, the need of your neighborhood forces you to feel, and you feel forced to take action. It’s like peeling back the plaster in a remodel and discovering asbestos. Perhaps you would have felt better if you’d left well enough alone, but now that you’ve exposed it, you’ve got a job on your hands. Now that you’ve picked at the scab, you’re going to have to deal with the bleeding. Ignorance is bliss, but God doesn’t want us to be ignorant. Brace yourselves and put on your spiritual beer goggles, because compassion makes the lost look a whole lot more attractive when we see them as God does.
Contrast the comfort you have as a believer with the hopelessness that an unbeliever feels daily, as they soldier on alone, and struggle to make sense of their world or find purpose in it. Maybe you’ve forgotten what that feels like. To flesh out what people feel like when they’re without hope and without God in the world, we should ponder what it’s like to have God as a compassionate, care-taking, watchful shepherd, and invert it like a negative exposure snapshot of Psalm 23. After each line in Psalm 23, I’ll contrast it with what people normally feel when they don’t know God as their shepherd.
The Lord is my shepherd . . .
I’m on my own. Nobody cares for me, and nobody is looking out for me. When I fall, I have nobody to pick me up.
I lack nothing . . .
I can’t keep up with the competing voices clamoring for my attention, demanding to be satisfied. Nothing satisfies no matter how much I spend or buy. I still feel empty.
He makes me lie down in green pastures . . .
It’s never enough. I fear about tomorrow, like there won’t be enough for me or my kids. Eventually, everything and everyone fails me. I’ve never known the feeling of abundance and contentment.
Beside quiet waters . . .
I’m restless. I would lie down if I felt safe. The times and society keep rushing by me and I have no peace.
He refreshes my soul . . .
I don’t believe in a soul. I’m a highly evolved animal. My animal instincts wear me out, and I feel like a slave to my passions as I indulge their every whim. I can never satisfy my animal appetites.
He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake
I do whatever feels right to me at the time, but why then do I always end up eventually feeling bad? Nobody else can tell me what’s right to do—it’s my life—but sometimes, I wish they would, and I’d follow if I knew they were right. Nobody seems to have the secret, though; we’re all blindly groping along.
Though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil . . .
In life, crap happens. I just hope it doesn’t happen to me. If it does, I’ll probably have a nervous breakdown or need to get on stronger antidepressants, but I can’t think about that right now. I could use a drink right now.
For you are with me . . .
I’d like to think that when the dark times come, my friends will stick by me, but they never have. I wouldn’t stick by them either; it reminds me of my own mortality. Where’s that drink?
Your rod and staff, they comfort me . . .
The only comfort I have is that I have tried my best, but mostly, I’m pissed off. Life is unfair. Why did this happen to me? If there is a God, he must hate me. I hate him for doing this to me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies . . .
I’d like to tell my enemies how I feel before my time comes. Give them a piece of my mind, or at least get them back. But I’ve never been able to tell my enemies off. I’ve always been paralyzed by fear. Even with nothing to lose, I’m still a coward.
You anoint my head with oil . . .
How’s my hair? Better to look good even if I don’t feel good. I need to go to the gym and get one of those hot mom bods. At least people can still think I’m hot. At least there’s that.
My cup overflows . . .
My cup is empty. My whole life has been a waste. Eat up and drink it down because tomorrow we’ll all be food for worms.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life . . .
My life has been a goat rodeo of pain and regret. Maybe checking out early will save me more of the same. I’d just always hoped it might get better so I kept going.
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
If God is there when I get to heaven, I’m gonna flip him off and cuss him out for everything that’s so jacked up with this world, and tell him that’s why I don’t believe in him. If he were real, he wouldn’t have to play like a make-believe Santa Claus that nobody ever sees because he’s up in his North Pole Heaven, checking to see who’s naughty or nice. Like most children who grow up, I stopped believing in Santa long ago. It’s his problem, not mine . . . but . . . I want it to be real. It’s a nice thought. I just wouldn’t have let people suffer if I were God. If God were ever willing to get off his high horse and come down here for a few minutes, he’d know how hard we have it. If he were willing to suffer through what we do, he might act differently. That would be a God I could believe in.
In response to that last bit, there is only one word, in the form of a name, that answers every objection in that reverse Psalm.
Jesus.
And we may not have all of the answers, but we do have the only one.
HELLA CORPORATE
When God poured his heart into the disciples, they immediately poured themselves out for their community. They distributed food to widows, sold their stuff, shared with the poor, and fed the hungry. Being Christ’s witnesses in Jerusalem became a hallmark of the church’s DNA that was replicated into Paul’s ministry among the gentiles. When Paul recounts his first sit down with the twelve after his conversion, he tells us that they told him to “remember the poor” (Galatians 2:10). People mattered, not programs.
What does the unchurched person see when they look at the church? The average young person from this generation looks at the church with suspicion because they see our Sunday gatherings and they appear . . . expensive. They quickly calculate how much the air conditioning, lighting, and pyrotechnics cost. Then they look around the room, and according to externals, the church appears a very wealthy, religious country club. Internally, they’re working out whether we are for them, for God, or for ourselves. They add up the costs of running the machine, subtracting from that the number of times Jesus said to look after the poor while noting the lack of evidence of social awareness, social accountability, or social action. It doesn’t take them long to do the math.
Perhaps this is another reason why the church has lost the Nones, Dones, Mosaics, Prodigals, Nomads, and Exiles or whatever else you call them. By way of review, the Nones claim no religious affiliation. The Dones are done with the church. The Mosaics are made up of a little bit of every belief system. The reasons they’ve left are more accurately described by the following terms: Prodigals are those who no longer believe; Nomads still believe but just don’t come to church; Exiles believe that their gifts are best used outside of the church. We’ve lost the younger generation mainly because they didn’t want programs to do the work of missions for them. They grew up in the age of social media interaction that got them mobilized to engage in people’s struggles and championing causes. Millennials know the power of the digital groundswell communities, Kickstarter campaigns, and online charitable causes, and they’ve been wondering why there’s a cognitive dissonance. They’ve been exposed both to people on the one hand who talk about Jesus, but don’t take action emulating what he did, and people on the other hand who do what he said, yet don’t believe in him. So they left. If they do come back to church, I guarantee you it will be to churches that pick a fight with something in their city: sex trafficking, poverty, orphans, battered women, or homeless vets. This is because the gospel can really only be understood in the context it was created for—out there. This generation needs to see the gospel doing what it was made for—changing things. Complain about the millennials if you must, but this generation gets it more than you think. They’re just not waiting around for the church to get it. Many of them are already out there impacting the world around them. I’ve seen prodigals running food banks, exiles starting companies that promote fair trade in people’s lives, building relationships, and serving the gospel to their souls. I’ve seen people running Habitat for Humanity campaigns from their offices, and leading their unconverted missionary coworkers to Christ as they build houses together over Christmas break in Haiti. The gospel makes more sense in action. I’m a gospel man until the day I die, and I will go to my grave believing in the importance of preaching, but who convinced us that we had to choose between action and sermons?
The CEO of Chick-fil-A told his senior leadership that he was tired of them always focusing on getting bigger. He changed the conversation to getting better. Once they got better, he created the need for the company to get bigger because people were buying what they were selling. If only reaching our generation and turning this situation around were as easy as making better chicken sandwiches. Some would like to argue that it is, and that if we just make church better, it will become bigger. Statistics show, however, that forty to fifty percent of youth who are active in church today will walk away from church.1 Truth is, the next generation couldn’t give a rip about what we’re doing inside our four walls. It’s what we’re not doing outside of them that concerns them. They’re not waiting for us to get better so that they can demand more campus franchises and floor space. They’re waiting for us to get on the road and do what we talk about on Sundays. They’re waiting for us to be witnesses in Jerusalem, and when that happens in our communities, they might start to give a rip about what goes on inside our churches. Ironically, the yuppie generation running the show hasn’t realized the millennials see the church through the same eyes that they themselves did when they were young, anti-establishment hippies. Except now, the tables have turned; the hippies have become the establishment, forsaking their counter-cultural ideals. The Nones and Dones have left the ninety-nine to go after the one because we haven’t. They know what Carl F. Henry said was true, “The gospel is only good news if it gets there in time.” Perhaps the conversation is less about them coming back to us. Maybe it’s about us going out to them.
ALL’S NOT GOOD IN THE HOOD
It’s time for a little old schooling with Mister Rogers. He was burdened for underprivileged children growing up in neglected neighborhoods in America. Fred knew it wasn’t all good in the hood. Say what you will, but Fred Rogers is one of my heroes. Not only was he an apostle of love to generations of lost kids, but beyond Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Fred was known as an activist for children’s rights. I’ve watched footage of him in congressional hearings, advocating for children. He held his own, championing the rights of children in urban areas. He was a man full of conviction, full of faith, and full of the Holy Spirit. And he oozed Jesus. The presence and love of God rolled off of him as he sat before children, but it was in front of adults that Fred bore the authority and power of Jesus. Although he’s been ridiculed often, if you read the YouTube comments to any of his videos, the laughter stops. People confess in their comments to crying, missing him, and wondering out loud why we don’t have people like him anymore. Discussions about grace, love, and God surface in reverent tones from the keyboards of non-religious people, centering on his presence and persona. Why? He impacted a generation by showing them what God was like.
Rogers appeared on Joan Rivers’ talk show, and during his brief but amazing interview, Fred dripped with the love of God. The clip is just under two minutes, but Joan Rivers melted in his presence and became like a little child under the power of love. Only onions and Pa Ingalls can turn on my waterworks like Fred Freakin’ Rogers. Sadly, he’s gotten a lot of flak over the years by Christians who are too insecure about who they are to acknowledge that Fred embodied Christ in his own way. He’s been compared to Ned Flanders, and used as the straw man for how Christians are perceived as milksops, but here’s a little known factoid about Fred. He went to seminary with R. C. Sproul. You heard me right! R.C. Stinkin’ Sproul! Fred Rogers as a Lutheran minister was a theological animal, and could have had an amazing career as a pulpiteer had he chosen to. He studied psychology and sociology enough to know that most urban kids grew up in hellholes, shells of houses that would never be homes. Places where they were abused, neglected, and often thrown into the foster care system. Fred knew that millions of children lived in environments where nobody ever told them that they were loved. Fred knew that God loved them and that Jesus had a special place in his heart for children. Like the undercover radical he was, he threw everything he had into launching a public television show that had every inclination of failure. He locked his sights onto those lost kids in America and modeled Jesus to them through love, vulnerability, and service. At the peak of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, eight percent of the American population was tuned in to him every single morning. You can say what you want about him, but those who push for a brawling, macho, swaggering, tough-guy Jesus have nothing on the impact that Fred Rogers made. Not a lick.
Let’s step away from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for a moment and talk about your neighborhood. What if you were as burdened for your neighborhood as Fred Rogers was? Solomon moaned that with much knowledge comes much sorrow (Eccl. 1:18). The more you see of the brokenness around you, the more it breaks your heart. And you can’t just do nothing anymore. Bono’s trip to Ethiopia in the 1980s changed his life forever. Ask Angelina Jolie about her trips to Cambodia, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania, which resulted in her giving twenty-five percent of her annual income on a yearly basis toward helping children globally. Even the most privileged people on the planet are not immune to having their hearts ripped inside out, and their lives turned upside down until they are utterly unmade, and repackaged into activists who see the world through God’s eyes once they open their own.
When Michael Cheshire was in the church planting game, he founded The Journey Church, just outside of Denver, Colorado. His core team cleaned out abandoned apartments to scrape enough cash together to pay the bills. They called it doing “trashouts.” Trashouts are needed when people have suddenly cleared out of a property because of dire circumstances. As Mike and his team cleaned out the remains, it was like sorting through the personal wreckage and piecing together how lives had fallen apart. They found pictures of families that had been split, letters of unrequited love written to estranged spouses, copies of divorce papers, and containers of antidepressant pills stacked up on bedside tables. The trashouts were emotionally devastating. The team felt like detectives investigating a homicide at a crime scene, piecing everything together when it was too late to avert the destruction. The damage was already done. A virtual-reality demographic study unfolded before their eyes, and Cheshire and his team were determined that their church plant was needed in that community to ensure that people in dire circumstances had hope, so that these situations played out less frequently. G. K. Chesterton said that those who would be used of God would need to hate the world “enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing.”2
Bordering Long Beach is a dockside community called San Pedro. You know it from The Usual Suspects. We’re planting in Keyser Soze’s neighborhood. My planter who is there grew up in a barrio, got converted in the back of a cop car, and was discipled in prison. While I teach most of my planters to pick the brains of the local authorities about the community they’re planting in, my planter there had to get permission from the local homies to come onto their turf.
After driving home through the ghetto community, he wrote:
God forbid I ever look at a person as too far gone. I got a chance to take a drive through San Pedro tonight after meeting with some brothers and sisters out there for fellowship, I cruised up Gaffey Street then drove through the projects. I have to say it breaks my heart seeing the nightlife because it’s so much like the places I grew up in, and I know some of the hopelessness that resides there, that feeling of having no other way. It’s a tough fight to reach the lost in a place. It’s not about starting a “church” that you can minister from but going out on the streets and meeting people and being real as you share the gospel with them. If you’re going to help someone stuck in the muck you better be willing to get dirty; if you’re going to help the broken you’d better be ready to get hurt because the jagged edges of a broken life are sharp. I pray I’m bold enough by God’s grace.
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
Years ago, a video game came out depicting an alien invasion during which it repeated the phrase, “All your base are belong to us.” It was classic stuff. Somebody made a video mocking it, it went viral, and the rest is history (that you probably missed). The point is, had a little more research been done, the audience might have been intimidated when the alien horde invaded, bellowing their verbal threat. Many of our efforts to reach people are equally as laughable because we simply haven’t done our homework. This is where researching the people you’re trying to reach is valuable.
A major help to seeing your community how God sees it is to know a little more of what God knows about it. I want to introduce you to a tool called Google. I found it on the world-wide-interweb, and it’s really amazing. You can search things with it. Sarcasm aside, it has a bigger kingdom purpose than finding unicorn rainbow fairy kittens. Ever Googled your neighborhood? How many single parents, divorcees, meth users, or sex offenders are in your neighborhood? It’ll change the way you look at everything. Better yet, it will give you a sense of mission. A calling. You might even start building puppets, wearing cardigans, and talking to trolleys.
The country of Wales contains a fair share of severely economically depressed areas. Valley communities exploded with people during the coal mining days, as evidenced by the row houses that snake through the valleys, packing people in like sardines. When the coal industry died, the communities were left high and dry without any industry. We started a youth outreach in the HUDs in post-industrial South Wales, where unemployment in certain communities was the chief occupation of its inhabitants. In the projects, we built relationships and saw lives changed. We had been doing outreach among working class youth. One Christmas the mayor identified the neediest families in our town so we could deliver Christmas dinners to families who couldn’t afford them. While we were making the rounds, I walked into one of the homes and saw the evidence of alcohol-fueled rage and violence. There were holes punched in almost every square inch of the hallway, running from the front entry to the kitchen. As we passed the living room, I noticed the dad passed out with a bottle next to him. The mom was clearly drunk, and the ten-year-old girl stumbled up to us, smiling, with a glazed-over look from whatever she was high on.
Then Nathan came down the stairs. Nathan was a young kid who’d been coming to some of our gatherings. He had some behavioral problems at first, but had learned to trust us when he realized that we really cared. As he came down the stairs to see who was at the door, his face changed into a look of horror, as if he’d seen a ghost. That’s when I saw the shame cover his expression, his eyes averted, as his mind retreated into a mantra that repeated, Please don’t be here. Please don’t be here. He didn’t want me to see his home; that this was how he lived. Nathan wanted out of that room. I left as quickly as I could so as not to pour salt into an open wound, but I resolved to do what I could for kids like Nathan. I’d continue to go where the need is, not where the money is. Unfortunately, the opposite is the current trend. The church follows the trajectory of starting congregations in middle-class neighborhoods because that’s what can sustain the church’s existence and pay a minister’s salary. Somehow I think I missed the part in Bible class where that was the point of it all.
Being a witness in Jerusalem means meeting needs.
Prison Fellowship founder, Chuck Colson, wrote during the nineties that “an estimated 36,000 homeless men and women have been wandering New York’s streets at night. The city’s maximum shelter capacity is just more than 3,500 and the budget is already overloaded, so Mayor Koch appealed to the city’s religious leaders for help. If each of New York’s 3,500 places of worship would care for just ten homeless people, a desperate human problem would be quickly solved, without huge government expense.”3
At Refuge Long Beach, where we are a small congregation and we don’t have a huge budget, we’ve seen a handful of people come off the streets, get jobs, move into homes, and start over. But it’s come with a price tag. We’ve seen people take in schizophrenic young girls because they can’t bear the thought of them being raped on the streets another night. We’ve had people looking under cars for addicts at the wee hours of the morning and saved their lives. We’ve literally talked people off the ledge and kept them from committing suicide. Although we’re small, God is powerful.
With God, we’re more powerful than we realize if we’d sit down and do the math. I hate math. Math is hard, so we just get out there and help people because we’ve stopped making excuses. Helping people is easier than doing math. That’s our excuse.
In his book In Deepest England, frontline street missionary William Booth wrote “While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight; while children go hungry, as they do now, I’ll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I’ll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight—I’ll fight to the very end!”4 With a heart like that, how do you not change the world around you?
WHERE TO START
As it was for the apostles in the upper room before Pentecost, reaching the unreached starts with prayer. “Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field” (Matt. 9:38). When you do, your eyes slowly begin to open, and with it, your heart yawns open too. When I pray for the harvest, I change, despite whether the world around me does or not. Because I’m the worker that’s going to be sent if I keep up all that praying stuff. How should we pray? In answer to that question, Jesus suggested the Lord’s Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer itself is a daily reordering of priorities, laying my life out as a sacrifice to glorify his name, begging for kingdom expansion, and submitting to his will.
▪ Hallowed be your name = Let your name and fame be known, revered, and loved.
▪ Thy Kingdom come = Let your agenda and priorities be mine as well.
▪ Thy will be done = Let the parts I don’t like be my act of worship and surrender.
By the “Amen” part, I’ve begun to care about what he does. However, praying for the Lord of the Harvest to do his work should come with a warning label because it can seriously jack you up. Darren Edwards, a church planter in the council estates (think HUDs) of England, prayed for God’s compassion for people. He wrote about the consequences:
I asked God with every ounce of sincerity to “show me the way you feel about people, and give me a taste for the love that you have for your people.” After all, if I was going to win people for Jesus, I needed to know how Jesus felt about them so that I could speak from truth and experience, rather than blind faith. The following Monday my wife and I were shopping in Morrison’s (the grocery store) when, as I was walking up the aisle, a man stood in front of me looking at some groceries. A rush of emotions hit me as I began to feel God’s love for this man, and I began to cry as God told me that this man may not make it into heaven and eternal life. My wife, in shock and horror, quickly reminded me that we were shopping in public and that it wasn’t good for men to cry in public. The same thing happened again in the next aisle and I had to keep my head down the whole time that we were shopping.5
YOU HAVE TO EARN THE RIGHT
Once you’re burdened for Jerusalem, what’s next? Like Peter, returning from prayer in the temple, you have to stop in your tracks, and look. But seeing the condition isn’t enough. You have to be determined to do something about what you’ve seen. Once you’ve served somebody, you earn the right to speak to them. Whether it’s an individual, family, city, or country, you earn the right to tell them about Christ’s love after you’ve shown it to them.
In 2006, our infant church plant in Wales met with our mayor. Our particular councilwoman sent a newsletter around the neighborhood and it was obvious she was a woman with a huge heart, intent on bettering the community. After asking for a meeting to interview her about the needs of the community, she was shocked a church was contacting her. She said nobody had ever done that before. We learned that nobody knows the city like a local civic leader who wants to make an impact. Over the next several months we visited shut-ins, mowed lawns and trimmed hedges of cancer patients, and started cooking classes for teenage pregnant mothers, but it didn’t get a single person through the doors of our church. But that’s not why we did it anyways. It wasn’t a program. It was Jesus in action. We were frontline—witnesses in our Jerusalem as we used our gifts missionally. We also promised all the men who turned up to do hard labor that there’d be copious amounts of grilled meat afterward.
Or instead of calling a civic leader, you could pick up a newspaper. Slap it down on the table in front of your church and circle all of the needs in the city. Then, with a red marker have each individual circle the top two that they’d like to do something about. Those red circles have just pinpointed their passions, and once you’ve pinpointed somebody’s passions, their gifts are close behind them. There are far too many needs for your team to reach, but if you focus on those red circles, you’ll find that not only do your people care about those areas, but they’ll want to roll up their sleeves and do something about them. I’ve learned the key to mission in any given cultural context is to see how the Spirit has matched the gifts of the team in front of me to the needs of the culture I want to reach. If I have a third of my people wanting to reach homeless people, then guess what we’re going to do? Luckily for you, the Holy Spirit has already identified and targeted the needs for you and equipped your church.
The apostles were all about service. Luke tells us, “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need” (Acts 4:34–35 ESV).
The Jerusalem church grew rapidly because the believers grew rapidly in the esteem of the people (Acts 5:13). Here’s why:
1. Good news created good works.
2. Good works created good will.
3. Good will created good soil.
4. Good soil created good response.
Entrepreneurial guru Gary Vaynerchuk calls this the “Thank You Economy.” It’s the philosophy that once you’ve done something for somebody else, they’re more inclined to help you or give you their time and attention. That means listening to you. This was illustrated when we braved the open mic night in the LGBT coffee house in Long Beach. We learned that you start the night off right by buying a drink for everyone. Some are trying to study, and may not appreciate the interruption, but hey, you bought them a drink. After drinks, you announce the topic of discussion and then shut up. Let them talk. Once you’ve listened to others, it’s your turn, and people are more gracious listeners when they don’t feel preached at. Spurgeon said, start where you are. Start today.
My fellow Christians, you who have believed in Christ, it is time for us to bestir ourselves, for we have not preached the gospel to every creature, yet, by a very long way. Some persons have never preached it to anybody; some, I mean, of the very persons who are commanded to preach it to every creature. A quaint preacher says that, if some of God’s people were paid ten dollars an hour for all they have done for their Lord, they have not earned enough, yet, to buy a gingerbread cake, and I am afraid the statement is true. So very little have some persons done for the spread of the gospel, that the world is none the better for their being in it. Do I speak too severely? If I do, you can easily pass on what I say; but if not, if it be so that any here have never yet fairly and squarely told out the gospel of Jesus Christ, begin at once! When you get home tonight speak of the Gospel to your nearest relative; and go out tomorrow to your next door neighbor, or to the friend whom you can most easily reach, and tell the good news that your Lord revealed to you and so help to preach the gospel to every creature.6
That’s your Jerusalem.
Start where you’re at, then love on it.
A witness in Jerusalem is a city on a hill—it can’t be hidden for long, and neither can you.
Discussion Questions
(For Dr. Jones, the Princeton Professor in you)
1. What is your Jerusalem?
2. How are you currently reaching the people there? If you were to give yourself a letter grade of A through F, what would your grade be?
3. What are the challenges to reaching your Jerusalem?
4. What would you need to do next to bump it up one letter grade?
Adventurous Actions
(For Indiana, the Temple Raider in you)
1. Invite a neighbor, coworker, or family member to do something with you this week. It could be to get coffee, see a game, or help them with a project they’re doing.
2. On your drive to work this week, spend the drive praying for people and places your eyes see. Ask the Holy Spirit to open your eyes to what has become “normal” to you. Note what you’ve passed and accepted as “the way it is.”
3. Confess to God anything you’ve overlooked, and pray that he sends more workers to address that issue, people, or brokenness.
4. Write three action steps that “someone” could use to impact that area of your Jerusalem.
*Yes, I know. This is a joke . . .