CHAPTER 9
IN SAMARIA
Guess what? Reaching the unreached means reaching people unlike you.
You will be my witnesses in . . . Samaria.
JESUS (ACTS 1:8)
Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?
INDIANA JONES
She interrupted the sermon I was preaching, “Excuse me. I don’t mean any disrespect. I’m a lesbian. You’re talking about all of this love and mercy. What does this mean for me?” My mind raced through the various responses available to me in that moment. It was the launch day of our church plant in Long Beach, California. I knew that whatever my answer, it would most likely cost me half of my church planting core team. As I faced the crowd, I was the only one who could see the tears glistening in her eyes as she fought back the emotion.
To the Jews, the problem with Samaria was that it was filled with Samaritans. To the horror of the Jewish remnant, Samaritans were bred into existence when the pagan Assyrians invaded the Northern Kingdom, slaughtered the men, and took their Jewish wives. The Jewish-pagan half-breed babies were known as Samaritans, and if you’d asked the Jews, they bred and infested like cockroaches, and were just as disgusting. When Jesus included the Samaritans in the equation of Acts 1:8, that was a little detail the apostles were happy to put on the back burner.
Who are the Samaritans today that the church is loath to touch?
The inclusive language used to describe the gay community is LGBT, broken down into lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. To say that Long Beach has a large LGBT population would be an understatement, ranking second in California only to West Hollywood. The church plant launched that day was nestled in the rainbow district in a sixteen-acre park that regularly hosted homeless, pushers, prostitutes, skaters, families, and gangs. Across the street from the park was the city’s premiere gay coffee house. It borders the thoroughfare that the Pride parade marches through, making it impossible for us to get to our building on Pride Day.
I braced myself to give her the only answer I could give.
REWIND THE TAPE
This chapter isn’t about sexuality, but the current sexual revolution of the new millennium highlights the difficulties the church faces today. And the church isn’t any more prepared to engage those beyond the outer fringes of the church than it was in the sixties. Or in the eighties. Nobody will disagree that the church has been in a difficult position for the last twenty years. In the eighties, the church was broadsided as movies like Philadelphia hit the box office, raising public awareness of the AIDS crisis. A new prejudice called sexism was the talk of Tinseltown, while gay-bashing was standard fare in the pulpit. Cruel cracks about homosexuals were made to masses of like-minded individuals within the four walls of the church. As the church chuckled, the rift widened between heterosexual followers of Jesus and the LGBT community.
As a young man I felt called to the LGBT community, but to reach them, I knew I would need to go outside the church. The church was miserably failing at representing Jesus in that arena, so I trained as a registered nurse, intending to apply for work in an AIDS hospice program. Years earlier, when I read the gospels as a new convert, Jesus struck me as a radical. I became convinced that if Jesus had come to earth in the twentieth century, he’d hang out in a gay bar because they’d been ostracized like modern day lepers. The Jesus I read about was always on the wrong side of popular religious opinion, alienating the “righteous,” and being identified as the friend of sinners. When the law demanded death to the immoral, he sidestepped protocol. He was a master of subverting religious convention—breaking spiritual, racial, and social taboos. Two thousand years later, the church still comes nowhere close to being as radical as Jesus. Edward Lawlor said, “If God’s love is for anybody anywhere, it’s for everybody everywhere.”1
MISSED OPPORTUNITY
If we’re not good at reaching our Jerusalem where there are likely others similar to us, we’re worse at reaching our Samaria due to xenophobia of those that are different from us. When dealing with people of questionable morals, Jesus elevated the person above the principle. Such was the case with the woman at the well and the woman caught in adultery. Jesus prioritized reaching their souls, and seemed to relegate their sins to the cross in advance of dying for them, in the same way that he nailed ours there two thousand years ago. I wonder why we find it so hard to do the same. The church seems to focus on sins of individuals outside the church, like the grumpy neighbor who calls the cops on the party next door. We’ve taken to fighting the LGBT community politically, instead of loving them compassionately. We’ve left the impression that they are the enemy, demonstrating we’ve learned so very little from the mistakes made in the eighties. I remember them well. Let me be clear that I’m convinced the message of the apostles on this issue hasn’t changed, but I’m equally convinced that our approach has to change. We keep approaching this issue as a theological argument, when the world is asking for social justice for the LGBT movement on the grounds of civil liberties. You can maintain a conservative theological stance while still approaching the issue liberally on a social level. This is what Jesus did when he sat with the woman at the well, and talked with her as if she mattered, challenging the racist attitudes and treatment that, as a Samaritan, she was used to from Jews.
Thirty years ago, as AIDS swept the nation, the church missed a crucial missiological opportunity. Religious figures were heard stating AIDS was the judgment of God, while the gospel took the back seat. Into a similar tension, Jesus told a parable to illustrate Israel’s prejudice against their next-door neighbors, the Samaritans. Bono’s AIDS charity, the One Campaign, is named after this parable, because Jesus commends the Samaritan man who is idealistically nothing like the Jewish man that he helped. In fact, the man being helped would have been disgusted by the man who saved him. Although the Jews and Samaritans were on opposite sides of the religious fence, if they’d both heard the story, they could agree on one thing; the man needed saving. Bono has repeatedly urged the sleeping giant of the church to wake up, calling them to action, to be those that love their “enemies.” For thirty years, the church has missed the opportunity to be the Good Samaritan as the foremost AIDS activists. Had we done so, instead of fighting the traditional values battle, the world would be listening to the gospel. We’d have neutralized any accusation of bigotry because although we disagreed with the lifestyle, we still viewed people as worth saving. Such action would have been an embodiment of the gospel itself. As Spurgeon said, “Sometimes shepherds go where they themselves would never roam if they were not in pursuit of lost sheep.”2
CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE
The dilemma of reaching the unreached is nothing new. In Jesus’s day, the Pharisees were committed to upholding the standards of the law, while the Sadducees were dedicated to throwing out anything that was difficult to believe. Respectively, they represented the conservatives and liberals of Jesus’s generation. Neither camp fully represented him then, and neither do today’s counterparts. Theological liberals have adopted a “theology of convenience” by interpreting away the hard passages of the Bible in their dedication to reaching the LGBT community, but dodge the responsibility of faithfully representing a God who is as holy as he is loving. Conservatives make the opposite error by viciously digging in for a protective last stand on the high hill of morality, while dodging the responsibility of reaching out. Both sides have managed to push people further away from the God of the Bible, but in different ways. One side erects an idol of their own imagination that only loves, while the other erects an effigy of a vengeful deity that no one could love. The end is the same; both versions of God are easy to ignore.
Jesus managed to glide deftly between these two extremes without throwing barriers in people’s way and without compromising the standards of holiness. It probably takes a divine being to get that exactly right.
That was the dilemma I faced the day our church launched as the woman’s question hung suspended in the air.
My answer came quickly, “It means the same for you as anybody else.” For all I didn’t know, I was confident about one thing.
Nobody gets a separate gospel.
ONE FOR ALL
Jesus didn’t have any problem reaching people. Do you know why? He specifically targeted those that nobody else bothered going after. Regionally, he targeted dirty, redneck Galileans and Samaritans. Occupationally, Jesus had a thing for fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes, and Roman soldiers. Jesus also went after the marginalized, those who fell through the cracks: women, demoniacs, and lost causes. Stop and think about the vast numbers of people who will never darken the doors of the churches that exist in your city. Now ask yourself why. Once you’ve answered that question, you’re halfway to understanding who your church is called to go after, what part of the city it’s called to go to, and what it’s called to do. Everything from the location it meets in, to the time it meets, what people do when they get there, to the way the room is set up will all come into play. I’d say that for the most part, everybody plants a cookie cutter version of church with hipper music, sexier graphics, and skinnier jeans, thinking that will really reach people. But have you ever noticed that the “stuff Christians like” is often worlds apart from what a lost person really notices or desires when they come to a point of honestly seeking God?
Jesus may have gone after the marginalized, but more importantly, the marginalized flocked to him. Jesus saw the down and outs, outcast from society, lost, helpless, and harassed like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus was a man of sorrows because he was the man who knew too much. Solomon observed that more knowledge brought more grief. It increased Jesus’s burdens, and after all, he came to bear them. He was the suffering servant who took others’ burdens upon his own shoulders. He carried our sorrows, bore our afflictions, and was bruised for our iniquities. The same Jesus who crumpled in a heap in front of Lazarus’s tomb was a Jesus who was wrecked by the consequences and pain that sin causes. The Jesus who sat on a donkey in the midst of a frenzied crowd chanting his name and bellowing prophesies about him, was a Jesus unmoved by their desire to make him king. Weeping as his face flooded with tears, he was emotionally moved as his heart understood the hard-bitten determination of unbelief, and the destruction in A.D. 70 that would result. He had come to suffer for them, not to rule over them.
As I gave my answer to the woman who stood up that Sunday morning, I audibly heard gasps from the crowd. They betrayed the mindset of those who didn’t understand the grace of God. Similar gasps must have been heard when Jesus singled out Matthew with his index finger and said, “Follow me.” People’s mental objections hung heavily in the atmosphere like oppressive phantoms.
Then something beautiful happened.
An art professor called out, “Nobody here is any different from anybody else in God’s eyes. You should get to know me. You think you’re a hard case!” Ten heads over, another woman raised her voice, “God loves you. You know how I know? He took me. I was a homeless, alcoholic wreck. Nobody wanted me, but Jesus wanted me, and I know he wants you too.” That day in the park, those who had been forgiven much, loved much. A well of grace was springing up from the core of their beings, overflowing to others.
The church has always struggled to understand God’s grace. Many Christians still think it enables people to get away with murder, rather than catalyzing a person from the inside out. They fear that grace means the lowering of standards. Although God has never indicated that his definition of sin has changed, our lives may not be completely stitched up this side of heaven. Like everybody else, members of the LGBT community come in with a lot of baggage and their transformation isn’t instantaneous.
Jesus modeled reaching out to the Samaritans by sitting with the woman at the well. John tells us, “He had to go through Samaria” (John 4:4, emphasis mine). Had to? It was miles out of his way, but if Jesus had to, we do to. The disciples were scandalized by the fact that he was having anything to do with the woman because (a) she was a Samaritan, and (b) because she was a she. They were further scandalized that he was holding a conversation with her. How are we going to reach the unreached if, honestly, we don’t even want to be seen with them? Think of the unspoken rules your own church might have about who does or doesn’t belong. Going with the example at hand, when someone from the LGBT community walks through the doors of the church our approach is crucial. If our first question is, “Are you going to stop your homosexual behavior?” we become spiritual TSA agents, erecting metal detectors and demanding that they empty their pockets of everything sinful before we let them through. It’s one of the times we make sin a barrier at the gateway. To everyone else we clearly explain that God will receive, forgive, and cleanse. We emphasize that they’ve been given the righteousness of Christ, and that sanctification will follow along their journey. Not so here. We want a pound of flesh. We want to ensure they don’t try to sneak something lethal on board that might explode the airplane. Like Jesus told the Pharisees, we shut the door of the kingdom in people’s faces and prevent them from entering.
In contrast, Jesus invited scandalous sinners to follow him. Although it seemed a simple, unrestricted invitation, there was an implicit recognition of Jesus’s complete mastery over every area of life. Like leaven, it would infiltrate every area of the follower’s life; but it would happen along the way. Remember, as was the case with the disciples, and ourselves, it is more the journey with Jesus that facilitates our transformation than our initial introduction to him. Who can pinpoint the moment at which the twelve were truly converted on their journey with Jesus? After walking with individuals from the LGBT community, I’m convinced that transformed lives result from going on a journey with Jesus, not from making an instantaneous decision—just as it is with heterosexuals.
We want purity in the church, but at what price? We have our clean, orderly, sterile churches, and as a result, the world is kept out. If God himself made his grand entry into a slurry-soaked stable that reeked of crap, then I’m pretty sure we can handle lesbians holding hands in church as they hear the gospel. Bonhoeffer, in his classic work Life Together, quotes Luther, “Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. … And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared.”
CHURCH STINKS
In my experience, the churches that are the most effective at reaching the community smell like alcohol on Sunday mornings. Lesbians have sat in our midst holding hands. Some are visibly withdrawing from substances. In order to reach people, you’ve got to be willing to be patient. Bonhoeffer observed, “The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship.”3
That launch day, the woman wanted to know what Jesus thought of the homosexual lifestyle, and we shot straight with her. We were careful to emphasize that her sexual orientation may never change, but that to be tempted is not a sin. We don’t choose the object of our attraction. Those with same-sex attraction don’t care how you think they got that way, be it from abusive fathers, or being born that way. The reality is that the LGBT community tells each other, “It’s how you are. We accept you.” The church should be no different when it comes to welcoming people from every walk of life. Welcoming people as they are does not imply that God will leave them as they are. Within our rows every Sunday morning, people sit confused, silent, and suffering with conflicted desires warring within their flesh. Like Jesus, a leader needs to exemplify the courage to break away from the chatter of the Pharisees debating, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) and dismiss the question altogether. Like the man born blind, the argument is irrelevant. It’s not how he got there, it’s that he’s there now. They need the reassurance that nobody is blaming them.
COMMUNITY BEFORE CONVERSION
Although it’s trendy to talk about discipleship in community within leadership circles, the LGBT community needs the church community as part of the process of transformation. When working properly, the church community actually becomes a tool of conversion. The difficulty with forcing them to check their baggage at the door is that the LGBT community is so supportive. They’ve come from a lifetime of rejection because of their sexual orientation and lifestyle into a community that has embraced and accepted them. In order for an individual to fully leave the LGBT community lifestyle, the church community has to be as strong as the community that they’ve left. This will never happen if we’re in our defensive stance at the metal detector, TSA badges flashing, guns fully loaded. The community of Christ must therefore become the support system that functions like a trapeze to grab hold of before the other one can be let go.
Evangelicals have always placed conversion before discipleship, equating the unconverted as outsiders, but we’ve found that discipleship starts from the moment we come into contact with someone. Conversion happens somewhere along the way. This shift in approach has been the key strategy to fulfilling the Great Commission, and consequently preaching peace to those that may seem distant from the faith.
In the past, the order of belonging to a community was: Belief, Behavior, Belonging. In order to be a part of the community (or church), you had to believe (or be converted). After that, you could attend a church, but your behavior had to conform to everybody else’s. Once that happened, you were no longer viewed with suspicion, and were welcomed into the community as “one of us.”
In church planting, you need to reorder the equation to look like this: Belonging, Belief, Behavior. In other words, people are made to feel accepted, no matter what they’re going through or doing. It’s the way that Jesus operated, and it’s the very thing the Pharisees criticized him for. You’ll get your fair share of it too if you operate like he did. The belonging allows people to track with us long enough to hear and believe. Baptism becomes the formal transition into the community, but until that time, they’ve already been welcomed and feel if you could accept them, then maybe God could too. Allowing your church to function like this will also turn community into an evangelistic tool in and of itself. A number of people in our Long Beach plant have left alternative lifestyles, but we had to be patient with them. People who don’t eventually repent don’t last long with us, but we’ve had to last long with those who do eventually repent. Baptism has served as a natural unspoken barrier for people ready to change. Churches are uncomfortable with this approach, however. But who better to reach those in alternative lifestyles with the love of Christ than those from alternative lifestyles? What would it look like to become all things to all people in regards to this cross-section of Samaritan culture?
A CHURCH JESUS WOULD GO TO
When I was planting in Los Angeles County, I had moved to San Diego County in hopes of handing the church off to another planter. My neighbors would see me drive off to Long Beach and ask me what my church was like in the inner city.
“I attend a church Jesus would go to,” was my typical response.
As the neighbors paused and their brows furrowed, I could see the gears working. Though the knowledge people have about the Bible may be limited, what they know of Jesus is enough of a key to solve the equation. When you think of the kinds of people Jesus attracted, you can envision what his church would look like; a church of people that nobody else knows what to do with.
Tony Campolo told the story of flying from Chicago to Hawaii. Because his clock changed time, but his body didn’t, he ended up at the counter of a greasy spoon diner at 3:30 a.m. As he sat on the bar stool, a group of eight or nine boisterous women came through the doors after a night’s work, and sat on the stools on either side of him. Campolo recounts the conversation he overheard:
Their talk was loud and crude. I felt completely out of place and was just about to make my getaway when I overheard the woman beside me say, “Tomorrow’s my birthday. I’m going to be 39.”
Her “friend” responded in a nasty tone, “So what do you want from me? A birthday party? What do you want? Ya want me to get you a cake and sing ‘Happy Birthday’?”
“Come on,” said the woman sitting next to me. “Why do you have to be so mean? I was just telling you, that’s all. Why do you have to put me down? I was just telling you it was my birthday. I don’t want anything from you. I mean, why should you give me a birthday party? I’ve never had a birthday party in my whole life. Why should I have one now?”
Campolo said as soon as he heard that, he’d made a decision. He motioned for the guy that ran the diner, whose name was Harry, and asked him if those girls came in every night. When Harry said yes, Campolo asked if he could throw a party the next night by decorating the diner and getting a cake. Harry’s wife came out from the back and said that the woman’s name was Agnes. She said that although Agnes was nice, and always helped people out, people never did anything nice for her in return. Harry said he’d bake the cake, and at 2:30 a.m. the next morning, Campolo returned to the diner to decorate. At 3:30 on the dot the diner doors swung open and the parade of prostitutes rushed in as usual. Agnes was stunned and shaken. As they all sang Happy Birthday to her, her friend had to steady her so she didn’t faint. They asked her to cut the cake, but she just stared at it, unsure what to do. Campolo continues, “Agnes looked down at the cake. Then without taking her eyes off it, she slowly and softly said, ‘Look, Harry, is it all right with you if I . . . I mean is it okay if I kind of . . . what I want to ask you is . . . is it O.K. if I keep the cake a little while? I mean, is it all right if we don’t eat it right away?’ ”
When she left, there was a stunned silence, and Campolo suggested they pray for her on her birthday. Campolo prayed God would bless her, save her, and change her life. When he was finished, Harry sneered that he didn’t know Campolo was a preacher, and then asked what kind of church he went to. Campolo’s answer is classic, “I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for whores at 3:30 in the morning.”
Harry waited a moment and then almost sneered as he answered, “No you don’t. There’s no church like that. If there was, I’d join it. I’d join a church like that!”
Wouldn’t we all? Wouldn’t we all like to join a church that throws birthday parties for whores at 3:30 in the morning?4
That’s the type of church Jesus would go to, and I think it’s the kind of church he came to create. Anywhere Jesus went he threw parties for sinners. Well, Matthew did anyway (Matt. 9:10).
In the short time I was at Refuge, a.k.a. “the last stop before hell,” we had more funerals because of overdoses on relapse, people murdered, AIDs, or death by some other hardcore lifestyle taking its toll on the body. Churches may tend to follow the white, middle-class trajectory and plant in those neighborhoods, complaining of how tough it is to reach people, but they’re ignorant of the low hanging fruit that exists in the neighborhoods where they’re afraid to go. Jesus said, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few” (Matt. 9:37). Perhaps the workers just weren’t willing to go where the harvest was.
Spend enough time on the front lines of mission work and you’ll come out feeling like part firefighter scraping body parts off the road with a shovel, part combat veteran fighting for your own life and those around you, part RN administering CPR, and part cop being called to murder scenes where the blood is still fresh and the brown paper bag you brought is for the lunch you’ve already eaten. Being on the front lines of ministry will expose you to things that will twist up your mind, and send you reeling from the depths of depravity. You’ll conduct funerals for addicts who knelt before Jesus, but lost the fight with addiction, or for a reformed gang member shot to death by police crossfire when the gang member they’re ministering to resists arrest. You’ll be called to the scene of a teenage suicide where the body is still hanging but the family is falling apart. Nothing prepares you for the carnage of lives that have been stolen, killed, and destroyed. Although there is often more weeping in tears then there is rejoicing in the sheaves, nothing can extinguish the joy from baptizing a member of the Aryan Brotherhood next to a member of the Mexican Mafia. But if we don’t do it, who will?
I’ve seen it time and again: today’s lost are tomorrow’s disciple makers. From the ashes, God will begin to resurrect a fiery phoenix from divorcees, former racists, abortionists, prostitutes, ex-cons, and all of society’s second-class citizens. It’s what made up the core of the crowd that followed Jesus. People who live in No Man’s Land are the kinds of people who mess your church up, but are precisely the type of people who make a church the type that Jesus would actually go to. If we’re going to see people the way Jesus sees them, then we need to see them through his eyes. Have you ever noticed the way Jesus dealt with people in sin? He saw the whole person. He didn’t just see the woman at the well as a filthy, man-eating whore. She says, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did” (John 4:29). Ironically, that statement had always meant shame when she’d uttered it in the past about any other man whom she had entrusted her heart to, but not with this man. This time, her very statement is reborn, as her heart was reborn. The shame was buried in the baptism of forgiveness. There is no trace of shame but relief. It was as if the sin that emptied out of her had created a vacuum, and the fresh air of liberation and freedom rushed in and filled the void. Instead of seeing a tart, Jesus saw a little girl with dreams and aspirations, who all her life dreamed of her future wedding day. Jesus knew something had happened to that little girl along the way.
Similarly, there was the woman caught in adultery. As the sound of her exposed flesh hitting pavement fills the air, along with the rabble of men’s heavy steps, a sneering challenge cuts the air, tinged with violence. “The law requires we stone her; what do you say, Rabbi?” Rather than telling her that “the fire that burns in ye loins shall reach full combustion in the fires of hell!” Jesus appears to trace the journey that led her to this harsh, cold stone pavement. Perhaps he knows about the uncle who molested her, or the neighbor who whispered unfulfilled promises as he took advantage of her body through her young and naive romantic vulnerabilities as she dreamed of someone to love her. On the other side of soppy fantasies strangled by lust, it isn’t just her heart that has been broken. It is her dignity, her sense of worth, and along with it, her life, that are the casualties of war.
EAT THE UNCLEAN
We all have been guilty of being the priest or Levite passing the broken and bleeding man on the side of the road. We’ve all been shocked to find that the Samaritan of the story is the hero. God is using the “trash” of the world to show where the treasure is. There was a subtle switch on my computer a few years ago. It was so subtle that I still don’t remember exactly when it happened, but I remember thinking how strange that my “trash” bin had been renamed “recycle” bin. This is how Jesus sees people. Whereas some only see trash, Jesus sees something that he can recycle for his own glory. A prostitute can be so transformed by Jesus that a year after her conversion, nobody would suspect that she first came to you asking if God would forgive her for turning tricks again when she couldn’t pay the rent. A homosexual used to be scandalous, but now the most scandalous thing that a homosexual can do is to repent. That’s still too scandalous for the world. They’re not ready for it. Yet Jesus is still breaking society’s taboos, and he will continue to do so until he returns. He will prioritize the rescue of the down-and-outs. Will you?
This is how Jesus calls us to love the unlovable. We come away from ministry smelling like pot because the people we minister to reek of it. We learn to fist bump instead of shake hands because hepatitis infects the unwashed hands of the people we feed. We all eventually learn to touch the unclean. We all begin to resemble Jesus who left the immaculate throne room of a sin-sterile heaven, and waded up to his eyes in our human sewage until it pulled him under and drowned him at the cross. God touched lepers. Jesus ate with tax collectors. The Spirit filled prostitutes. Paul ingested pork. Peter ate with gentiles. Eventually, we all hear his voice saying, “Rise up. Kill and eat.” We can only resist for so long, but a world that is sick with sin and in desperate need of mission awaits those who are willing to rise up. Will you be one of them?
There are Samaritans out there who need saving, so that they can go and do some saving. Think about it. What if the church is merely frustrated because it’s exhausted the opportunities to save the middle class? What if it’s time to cast the nets to the other side of the boat? The other side of the tracks? If the apostles could tell you one thing—no, scratch that—if Jesus could tell you one thing, it’d be, “Make your church a church I’d actually go to.” A scandalous church. A church where the cross-dressing prostitute using the ladies room isn’t even your biggest problem on a Sunday; cleaning up the barf on aisle twelve from the guy withdrawing from heroin is. Listen, if families aren’t concerned for their children because of the types of people they’re being exposed to at church, then you’re probably not reaching the unreached.
UNROLLING THE SCROLL
When Jesus unrolled the scroll in the synagogue at Nazareth, he said, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). The poor are another marginalized people, and God moves stronger within the poor communities than we realize. Like the apostles reminding Paul as he set out for Asia Minor that he should not forget the poor, church planters need reminding that they shouldn’t build the church merely with middle class Americans. The gospel travels in middle class white people channels because middle class white people like reaching out to middle class white people. The church in America is largely within the middle class strata. This isn’t a problem in and of itself, but we keep reaching the people just like us. The problem is, we don’t tend to go beyond our socio-economic boundaries and reach the people who are different than us. The beauty of the early church was that it brought people from Caesar’s household to worship next to slaves.
An abundance of monetary success easily replaces dependence upon God. Even King Agur knew that too much of the green stuff makes you forget God (Prov. 30:9). But our priorities get misplaced so easily. During the sixties, the hippies were cutting edge of non-materialism in society, and they brought that dynamic into the church. Ten years after the height of the hippy movement however, the idealistic hippies morphed into yuppies, as did the churches they founded. I witnessed this at the church where I started my Christian pilgrimage. Other churches felt sorry for the small organic movement known as Calvary Chapel that couldn’t afford their own buildings, met in schools, and attracted non-ordained “blue jean preachers” who had never gone to seminary. Rumored to be a cult, we lacked big buildings, respect, and money, but we experienced the presence and power of God. I witnessed miraculous healings, supernatural occurrences, and unexplainable exorcisms in the eighties. In the nineties we exploded numerically, but traded in all of the supernatural power for renovated warehouses with more seats. The parking lot was fuller, but the church somehow seemed emptier. It felt as if we experienced God less, only with more people now. Instead of seeking God in prayer together, we were entertained by the worship. There had been a subtle, yet perceptible shift. We hardly noticed.
We filled the seats, outgrew our warehouses, signed bigger leases, and got rich. Our movement seemed like it had finally “arrived.” Former draft-card-burning hippies climbed into bed with mainstream American culture, unaware they were sacrificing the dynamic and attractive power that came with being a radical, underground, countercultural movement in the first place. People vaguely remembered the days of old when crazy things happened, crazier stories were told. As one born out of that time, I listened to the same stories for twenty years, wondering why it didn’t happen like that anymore, but nobody seemed to be asking that question. We were too “successful” to care.
Over a century ago, E. M. Bounds warned:
This is the day of great wealth in the Church and of wonderful material resources. But unfortunately the affluence of material resources is a great enemy and a severe hindrance of strong spiritual forces. It is an invariable law that the presence of attractive and potent material forces creates a trust in them, and by the same inevitable law, creates distrust in the spiritual forces of the Gospel. They are two masters which cannot be served at one and the same time. For just in proportion as the mind is fixed on one, will it be drawn away from the other. The days of great financial prosperity in the Church have not been days of religious prosperity.5
We have merely to go to the poor to be where Jesus is, on mission to preach the gospel to them. His ministry hasn’t changed. The Lord is still near to the poor, and he pleads their cause. When you give a homeless person money you become an extension of the gospel itself. You embody grace. People are quick to point out, like most rich people do, that the money will be used for drugs, or that we’re acting as enablers for people’s irresponsibility. I like to ask those people how many homeless people they’ve seen get off the streets. The answer is always zero. That’s not my answer, so I stand by my results more than their words. When D. L. Moody was told by a listener that his methods of bringing the lost to faith were wrong, Moody replied, “Oh? How do you do it?” The critic stammered that he didn’t. “That settles it then,” said Moody. “I like the way I do it better than the way you don’t.”
One thing we’re careful not to do is belittle people that have less than we do. At Refuge Long Beach, we found out the kids who attended the school where we met generally only ate one meal a day at home. The school was the only one in the district that served breakfast to ensure the kids got two meals a day. We decided to eat breakfast as a church before doing anything else on Sundays. First time attenders frequently come to the church wanting to join us in “serving the poor.” We always remind them it’s not like the Time Bandits depiction of John Cleese’s “Jolly Good” Robin Hood, where he’s so upper class that the poor are a project to him. He introduces the poor: “The poor are going to be absolutely thrilled. Have you met them at all? The poor. Oh you must meet them. I’m sure you’ll like them. Of course they haven’t got two pennies to rub together, but that’s because they’re poor (laughter).”
It’s insulting. Here’s the truth. Everybody has pride, and if you make people feel like your Eagle Scout benevolence project, they’ll resent you for it. When you reach out to people, you need to help them maintain their dignity in the process. You let them know God values them. We tell the newcomers to our church that we don’t feed the poor. We eat breakfast together as a family before church. See the difference? We’ve helped a number of people off the streets, but the big turning point came when we started announcing to the homeless, “The only thing separating you from the rest of us is you have no place to lay your head down at night. You’re in good company. Jesus was also homeless. Welcome to the family.” Right now, we’ve even got a home study running in the park, taught by a formerly homeless person, because for some of our peeps, that’s their living room, and Jesus is meeting them right where they’re at.
THE ROAD TO JERICHO
The gentile world was ready for the gospel. It was Peter who wasn’t ready for the gentiles. We probably don’t think of the apostles as racists when they started, but it’s all there in the text. Can you imagine how great the prejudice was in Peter’s heart towards the gentiles if it required Jesus appearing to him in a vision, not once, but three times to go and reach them? A lifetime of prejudice is not easily broken. It’s also not helped by radio talk shows or your news station of choice. Each side of the cultural divide talks about the other like sheer lunatics and morons as they pump out their propaganda that fuels hatred, brings advertisers, and keeps the machine running. If you’ve been imbibing on that kind of division, it’s a demonic ploy to keep you from reaching others with the gospel. Jesus tackled racism frequently because it was just another division that keeps us from the unity he created us for. The Road to Jericho was a story that intended to make the marginalized pagan half-breed the hero. Jesus masterfully contrasted the godly behavior of the despised Samaritan against the Pharisees and priests, or those who should have known better. The point in all of these scriptural examples was that the gospel motivated people to launch out of their own group. What are you doing to cross cultural barriers, showing Jesus as the reconciler of all things?
Jesus was way ahead of his time in reaching homosexuals, people of other races, and the poor. But the world has been ahead of the church. We should have had a two thousand year head start on these issues after seeing how Jesus interacted with people from all walks of life. But like Peter, it’s not too late for us.
There is no formula for this. If you’re reading this, taking notes, I’d suggest doing something very simple. Put the notebook down. Lay your pen to rest. Get on your knees, and ask God to give you his heart. When he writes the law on your heart with his Spirit, there’s no more need for the letter of the law written in a notebook. When you actually roll up your sleeves and start working with people, God will give you the wisdom to deal with those situations. Experience is God’s best classroom. Get out there, to the people you don’t want to hang out with, in the places you don’t want to go. Samaria is waiting.
Discussion Questions
(For Dr. Jones, the Princeton Professor in you)
1. Who are the people you don’t want God to send you to?
2. What would it look like to become “all things” to that particular people group?
3. Who do you think God is using to reach them today?
4. How can you be a part of reaching them?
5. Do you think God uses people who naturally find it hard to share the gospel? Why or why not?
Adventurous Actions
(For Indiana, the Temple Raider in you)
1. Go to “the other side of the tracks” this week and reach out to somebody who is not like you and get together with them.
2. Ask them what barriers they have to becoming a Christian. Ask them how the church could overcome those barriers.
3. Ask them if you were to start something like that, if they’d be interested in coming along.
4. With a small team of partners, start a group and invite those from “the other side of the tracks.”