KONY 2012 & MOVE:DC

Thousands of people are headed to Washington D.C. next Saturday, November 17, to put pressure on 10 world leaders to create a definitive policy regarding the arrest and trial of Joseph Kony.  My close friend Kelsey is a roadie for Invisible Children, the organization behind this event.  She came to Buffalo recently with her team and I got an interesting glimpse of what true desperation for social change looks like.  The four people that are a part of Kelsey's team care so much about stopping the Lord's Resistance Army and the atrocities that are being committed daily in Uganda, that they have committed to going for months without any pay, driving all day in a 15-passenger van, setting up for film screenings, sleeping on someone's couch, and repeating the whole process every day.  Their deadline is next Saturday, and they're going non-stop until then to see how many people they can motivate to head to Washington.
It's intense, and awe-inspiring.  There is a sense of urgency to their presentation, their speech, their energy, their movements.  They firmly and completely believe in what they are doing.  And they are doing it in the face of immense apathy, doubt and even hostility.  They are a great model for what Christians should be doing all the time.  Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Master Plan of Evangelism

Master Plan of Evangelism, Robert Coleman 

Question: Is it an effective evangelism strategy to pray for unbelievers to be saved? 

Robert Coleman explains that Jesus’ eighth and final method of evangelism through discipleship is an emphasis on reproduction—disciples making more disciples.  In this chapter, Coleman uses Matthew 9:37 and Luke 10:2 to argue that praying for the world is an ineffective way of making new disciples.  He asks “What good would it do?  God already loves them and has given his Son to save them.  No, there is no use to pray vaguely for the world.  The world is lost and blind in sin.  The only hope for the world is for laborers to go to them with the gospel of salvation, and having won them to the Savior, not to leave them, but to work with them…"

I argue that Coleman is partially correct—it is most important for believers to engage relationally with the world and with new believers—however it is also important for Christians to pray specifically and strategically for people with whom they have a relationship.  At a deeper level, Coleman’s emphasis reveals a lack of value for spiritual warfare as a means of advancing the kingdom of God.   

There’s no question that the evangelistic activity of the church today relies too much on a few hard-working individuals and leaves the vast majority of Christians sitting in the audience.  This is why believers need to pray for more laborers to work in the harvest and often to become the answer to their own prayers by giving more time and energy to the non-Christians and new Christians in their lives.  However, engaging in successful and productive relationships with these people must also include prayer.  Prayer is critical simply because the power of God can be facilitated through prayer, and the powers of darkness can be thwarted through prayer.  The power of the Holy Spirit to prepare and to change a person’s heart is not something that we can overlook as we approach evangelism, nor is the power of Satan to blind, deafen and block someone’s ability to hear truth.  As Christians, the way we exercise our authority over powers of darkness and our position in the kingdom of God is through prayer. 

Obviously praying vaguely that God will ‘save’ people or heal them is not the most effective approach.  However, a relational approach to making new disciples that ignores the importance of prayer is just as inefficient.  Intercession for non-Christians and new Christians should include praying for freedom from bondage, for emotional and spiritual healing, for Holy Spirit filling and anointing, against generational sins and curses, against demonic oppression and harassment, and against hardness of heart.  Those relationships should also include the normal aspects of a good friendship, including spending quality time, engaging in meaningful conversation, seeking to meet physical and emotional needs, and more.   

What is the gospel?

What Saint Paul Really Said, N.T. Wright

Question: How does Paul’s ‘4 part gospel’ according to N.T. Wright deconstruct and/or reveal as misguided the evangelistic efforts of today’s church?

In Chapter 3, Wright begins to unpack Paul’s usage of the term gospel (evangelion) in his letters within the context of Paul’s conversion and ministry.  According to Wright, Romans 1:1-5 is one of the flagship passages where Paul lays out “his understanding of God, the gospel, Jesus, and his own vocation.”[1]

It runs as follows:  "Paul, a servant of Messiah Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures—the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David’s seed according to the flesh, and marked out as God’s Son in power, according to the spirit of holiness, through the resurrection of the dead, Jesus the Messiah our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations for the sake of his name..."[2]

The four parts of the gospel that Wright pulls out of this passage are the crucified Jesus, the risen Jesus, King Jesus, and ‘Jesus is Lord.’  Jesus’ role as a servant—suffering and dying on the cross—is the foundation and center of Paul’s gospel, as it signifies victory over powers of sin and darkness.  As Wright goes on to explain later, the cross is also proof of Jesus’ fulfillment of the Jewish side of God’s covenant as the only truly faithful Israelite.

The risen Jesus is a profoundly Jewish fulfillment of God’s covenant, as he resurrects the one faithful Israelite (not at the end of history but in the middle), thus proving that He is faithful and that what Jesus accomplished on the cross was legitimate.  It also inaugurates a new age of which Christ is the first product, where Jesus’ victory over sin and evil begins to permeate the world and signs of God’s reign start to multiply.

Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, and the Anointed One are all synonyms for King Jesus.  The title is significant for a number of reasons, but what is perhaps most relevant because it is most often ignored is that Paul’s gospel is an announcement of a new world order initiated by the establishment of Jesus as King.  Jesus Christ or King Jesus is not just a name—rather it is a proclamation that God’s promise to the Jews for salvation is becoming available through the Messiah who also assumes the royal position as ruler of Israel through the line of David.

Finally, ‘Jesus is Lord’ takes the message of King Jesus and proclaims it to the whole world.  God’s covenant is no longer applicable only to Jews but also to Gentiles, women, slaves, and anyone else who will come to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus, thus becoming part of the family of God through adoption (Romans 10:12, Philippians 3:20-21).  This is also significant because it displaces anyone else—like a Roman Emperor—who would claim lordship of the whole world.

With these four parts and their major implications laid out, the question remains; what can Wright’s exposition of evangelion bring to the table in a contemporary evangelical discussion on ‘spreading the gospel?’

First, it becomes clear that any understanding of the gospel as the mechanism by which people ‘get saved’ is misguided.  It might be helpful to explain to someone who is interested in spirituality and truth that salvation consists of belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection along with confession of sin, but this is not the gospel.  The gospel is the message of what has happened and what is happening, and along with that message the reality and ramifications of its existence in our daily lives.  In other words, the gospel means telling people about Jesus’ life, ministry, death, resurrection and reign.  Sharing must be followed by demonstrating it to them and summoning them to a similar calling.  The gospel does not consist of programs.  Perhaps that is the biggest mistake in our understanding of what we must do with the gospel.  Many leaders and ministers in today’s church understand the gospel as a mechanical process in a person’s soul, rather than a tangible and visible experience of God’s kingdom coming, through the truth of Jesus.  The church needs to start framing evangelism differently.

More specifically, the first practical message of the gospel is one of suffering.  As Jesus said, “take up your cross and follow me.”  He followed up that speech by suffering and dying according to the will of His Father.  Contemporary church evangelism, instead of being a message of participating in the suffering and death of Jesus, has for years been a message of life improvement, self-help and even prosperity.  It is critical—for the sake of staying faithful to the life, ministry and death of Jesus and for the sake of a worldwide church who can grasp the meaning of sacrificial worship—for Christians to communicate the true cost of discipleship.  Furthermore, the gospel is a message from within the framework of Judaism.  It is not an appropriation of pagan religious ideas, but a logical and timely fulfillment of the one true God’s relationship with the Jewish people.  If we are to understand how the gospel relates to us as Gentiles, we must understand how God has related to His people throughout history.  We must look back and see how God’s promises to Israel have been proclaimed and worked out for the past four or five thousand years.  Taking Paul and Jesus out of their Jewish context are what have led to many misguided and even destructive movements in the church.  The church needs to start contextualizing the gospel better.

Along with the contextualization of the gospel, the reality of Jesus’ resurrection demands that we see the gospel as a message to a community, not a message to individuals.  If God raising Jesus from the dead points to the world-transforming faithfulness of God to His covenant, then it also points to the importance of community to the message of the gospel.  The Jews did not understand salvation as being a matter of individual faith, nor did St. Paul, and therefore the individualistic message of salvation that has often been preached by the American church is probably more cultural than it is accurate.

Since the gospel means a new kingdom with new values, it means through-and-through transformation.  The gospel is not just a set of philosophical commitments or emotional convictions—it is also power.  If Jesus died and was resurrected, then all of creation must go through a death and resurrection as it begins to participate in the family of God.  The power to make this happen—which comes from God—means very practical differences.  We must take Jesus’ ministry and his apostles’ ministry as models for our own outworking of the gospel.  More than social justice or Bible teaching, this also means signs and wonders of the Kingdom of God that have a certain magnetic ability to draw a response from people.  The church (especially in the US) needs to start praying and fasting, as the disciples did, for more power.

[1] Wright, What St Paul Really Said, 45.

[2] Ibid.

Fight Club

I was watching this excellent movie for the second time a few nights ago, and it struck me that it's actually a movie about male initiation.  I haven't read the novel so it's possible that the film version is a complete reinterpretation of Chuck Palahniuk's original story, but after doing some reading on male initiation and the effects of its massive deficit in Western culture, I could instantly recognize some of the major themes present here. 

I especially like this clip, where Tyler Durden gives the narrator an unexpected chemical burn and then goes on to explain why.  WARNING!  There is some strong language here.

"First, you have to give up.  First you have to know--know, not feel--that some day you're going to die."
"You don't know how this feels!"
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

One of my favorite authors lists the following as the five central tenets to male initiation:

1) Life is hard.
2) You are not important.
3) Your life is not about you. 
4) You are not in control.
5) You are going to die.

More men need to figure this out.  If they all have to have their condos blown up, get beat up night after night at underground fight clubs, get ceremonially burned, and face down their criminally insane alter-egos to get there, so be it.

Doing What Jesus Did

"The time is ripe for men and women to create a new type of community for which there is, as yet, no single name.  To get a notion of what I mean, add together this family of words: hearth (a nuclear area, a vital or creative center), hospitality (the cordial and generous reception and entertainment of guests or strangers), charity (the kindly and sympathetic disposition to aid the needy or suffering), celebration (to honor by engaging in religious, commemorative or other ceremonies or by refraining from ordinary business), community (a body of individuals organized into a unit with awareness of some unifying trait)."
~Sam Keen, Fire In The Belly


This is what Jesus created.  Lately--with the intimate involvement of the believers I'm connected to--we've been discussing, praying over, and attempting to live out a set of values that we think are central and vital to the ministry of Jesus.  We have defined them as follows:

• Intimately obedient to the Father
• Inclusive to outsiders
• At work for Justice and Peace
• Intentional discipleship

I like what we came up with (with the help of some really smart people who are much more intelligent and more experienced than we are!).  But then there's Sam Keen.  I was reading Fire In The Belly this afternoon. Keen's vision of a world where men and women are reconciled, with the vitality of the family unit as the top priority--and an eye towards development of a new model of healthy and sustainable manhood and womanhood--struck me as elegant and profound.  I think it captures the essence of the life of Jesus Christ, as well as the Church in Acts.

To me, the hearth is a symbol for the dwelling place of God; like the tabernacle or the sanctuary, it is a sacred space where we find rest, peace and new life.  What the dinner table is to a family or the mountaintop is to a guru, the hearth is to a group of believers.  It is sitting at the feet of Jesus.  It is worshipping God in a sacred and familiar space, amidst peace and rejuvenation.  

The next three, hospitality, charity and celebration, are trademarks of Jesus' life on Earth, and perhaps the most misjudged and misunderstood aspects of His ministry by the accepted religious establishment of His time.  He spent time with those who had nothing to offer society, who were criminals, sinners, unclean, social outcasts, and oppressors.  He ate with them, he gave himself to them, he served them, and he partied with them.  Does the modern church do this?

Community is a framework that undergirds all of the above.  Our inter-dependent relationships with like-minded believers are what allow us (with the power and presence of the Holy Spirit) to remove the barriers in our lives that prevent us from approaching God, from receiving His gifts, and from giving ourselves generously to the poor and needy people all around us.

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

A few days ago, the Supreme Court ruled on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as 'ObamaCare.' As far as I can tell, the 5-4 vote ruled in favor of most parts of the law, including the most shocking part (to me), which would force uninsured Americans to buy health insurance. However, their reason for upholding that part of the law was unexpected. Their decision stated that, in fact, the federal government can't force people to buy things they don't want under the 'interstate commerce' clause, which is what many liberals and Democrats were planning on. Instead the Court approved it as a part of the federal government's power to tax American citizens. The NY Times puts it this way: "the federal government is not permitted to force individuals not engaged in commercial activities to buy services they do not want. That was a stunning victory for a theory pressed by a small band of conservative and libertarian lawyers."

I'm a fan of that small band of conservative and libertarian lawyers. But I don't like the fact that the Supreme Court found some other reason to let the federal government tell me what to spend my money on. I don't think they should be able to force me to pay for insurance premiums if I don't want to. How is that a tax? A tax is "a compulsory contribution to state revenue, levied by the government on workers' income and business profits." Taxes are meant to allow the federal government to do the following things, according to the U.S. Constitution: print money, declare war, establish an army and navy, enter into treaties with foreign governments, regulate commerce between states and international trade, establish post offices and issue postage, and make laws necessary to enforce the Constitution. It's actually ludicrous and rather comical to argue that the federal government needs to levy a 'tax' in the form of mandatory health insurance for everyone based on the problems with overspending that have been created by the current Medicaid system combined with a lack of affordable health care. I would argue that the federal government has already stepped far over the boundaries prescribed to it in the Constitution by attempting to mandate, orchestrate and subsidize ANY nationwide healthcare system.

Unfortunately in the big picture this ruling was a significant decision in favor of federalism. It reduces the power of individual states to custom fit their policies to their own populations, and I think it undermines the representative and independent nature of American government. The reason why Bill Clinton's Welfare Reform act was so successful and so widely accepted in the 90's was because it returned the power of policy-making and representation (and therefore true democracy) to the state level. Welfare is one of those public goods created by the federal government that can easily become bloated, inefficient, and abused. Allowing individual states to control the size and shape of their own welfare programs is bound to reduce unnecessary spending and keep the program focused.

The bottom line for me is that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is largely unconstitutional. It allows the federal government to infringe on the rights and liberties of individual states AND individual citizens, it contributes to unnecessarily large federal government, and it continues the vicious cycle of excessive government spending which will eventually destroy the U.S. economy.

Thoughts on Western Education

I watched this video today and it helped me create some categories for the massive sense of dissatisfaction and anxiety over urban American education that I have been developing in the past year.  Take a look.

For the 2011-2012 school year, I have been working in a charter school in the city of Buffalo, teaching science to 6th and 7th grade students.  After private schools and honors programs skim off the top, many of my students are the brightest middle-schoolers in Buffalo.  They are creative, talented, intelligent, hard-working, overwhelmingly immature, and frighteningly moldable.  What bothers me is how useless this education is for the vast majority of them.  Most are smarter than their peers and could be learning at a pace that far exceeds the average.  Yet the State of New York mandates that we spent the first 7 months of a 9+ month school year teaching them from a 'core curriculum' that sets the standard for math and English at a pitifully low place.  If 75% of the students could be learning at faster pace on their own and the other 25% need some sort of individualized education program, what is the use of having a classroom?  Why have we arbitrarily separated students by 'date of manufacture' when most of them are at different stages of achievement in different subjects?  Why are we trying to 'level' them all out to fit a state-mandated curriculum, when each one has unique skills, areas of interests, home environments or cultural heritages that would enable them to excel in certain areas and require that they have extra help in other areas?  Why do we assume that an educational system designed to fit a white middle class protestant male is now just as functional when generalized to all socioeconomic classes, all races, all religions, and both genders?

My Kingdom for a Compass

The season I have been sitting in for over a year now has a theme word..."navigating."  I noticed just now that "navigate" or "navigation" would not fit exactly right, because the present progressive tense indicates perfectly how I am constantly and necessarily on alert to avoid running into some large obstacles.  My life is like a sailing journey, and like that Italian cruise ship captain who became infamous a few weeks ago, I often fail to consult the most basic maps that could help me steer.

My pride gets in the way.  "I've been through something like this a thousand times!  I know how to do it!  I don't need any help!"

The truth is, God knows what He is doing in my life way better than I do.  He keeps leading me through these obstacle courses that might seem boringly similar, but in fact my life keeps spiraling upward and outward and downward into a greater maturity and understanding of who I am and what my purpose is in Christ.  For example, living in a dorm room at a Christian college for 4 years was a great experience in Christian community.  One might assume that living in a men's discipleship house with 7 other guys would be boringly similar.  Ha.  How wrong that assumption is.  It has shown me how inexperienced I am, where my greatest weaknesses are, and where even my strengths need encouragement and wisdom and boldness to be exercised correctly.  Most of all, it has shown me that the unhealthy relational and emotional patterns that were ingrained in me growing up (either because of who my parents were or the choices I made in the past) will be endlessly repeated and rehashed in my new relationships, until God brings some measure of healing and restoration to my heart.   The hurts and wounds in me that I am constantly trying to cope with, medicate or ignore are still there.  They aren't just going to go away.  In fact, they might just keep growing and creating bigger and bigger problems between me and the people around me unless I turn, address them directly, and ask repeatedly for God to fix them.  It's humbling.  Which is, I think, exactly what God wants.

So I noticed that navigating real life doesn't become easier.  If I am doing well, it increasingly becomes a reminder of how I must rely on the Holy Spirit to guide and empower me.It becomes a reminder of how I must come to God in humility, seeking His path through unfamiliar terrain.  If I am doing poorly, it becomes a stinging redirection as my own intelligence and my own strength fails me again and again when I try to pridefully conquer every obstacle.