KOH2RVA: Day 258

Today is graduation day for the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. Students who have been working for the last three or four years to acquire the tools of ministry will walk across the stage, shake hands with the president, receive their diplomas, smile for the camera, and then step onto the mission field.

It’s a different world than when I graduated 26 years ago.

Back then most of the graduates were white men, who would be called as pastors by churches that could afford to pay them a decent salary plus benefits. They might start at a church in a county seat town, but within a few years, if they did well, they could expect to receive a call from a larger church, in a bigger town, with an even better salary. Ministry in those days seemed almost like a reasonable career choice.

But today the graduates will include as many women as men, from a number of different ethnicities. Most of them will not have a job offer in hand when they walk across the stage. There aren’t a lot of churches out there that are hiring. And yet you can’t seem to discourage these graduates. I know; I’ve tried. I’m a trustee at the seminary and I’m around the students on a regular basis. I tell them it’s not going to be easy out there, but that only seems to make them more determined. They talk about all the creative ways they are going to engage the world with the gospel, many of which have nothing to do with traditional church ministry.

For example: Jay McNeal, who has worked as my intern this year, is planning to keep his job at the seminary library to pay the bills, but work in an unpaid staff position here at First Baptist (donations gladly accepted) to help us develop our Microchurch initiative. We have a dream of starting some 500 small satellite churches in the greater Richmond metropolitan area that would work together with us to bring the KOH2RVA. Jay may be out there week after week helping people organize their microchurches, access the technology, and join the network. It’s something that I couldn’t have dreamed of when I graduated.

So, pray for these graduates. It’s not going to be easy for them. But then, Jesus never said it would be easy, not for any of us. “If you want to come after me,” he said, “then deny yourself, take up your cross, and fall in line.” The surprising thing is that these seminary graduates are doing it with smiles on their faces, as if all they ever really wanted out of life was a chance to give it away for Jesus.

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KOH2RVA: Day 257

Someone was asking me about First Baptist’s year-long, every-member mission trip recently, and wondering how we organized it. “How did you find something for everybody to do?” she asked.

The answer: we didn’t.

I told her what I’ve said again and again since coming to First Baptist, that there must be a thousand ways to bring heaven to earth and that our responsibility is to look around for anything that doesn’t look like heaven and then roll up our sleeves and get to work. I’m convinced that if we look at the world through our own eyes, we will see the things that break our own hearts and call us to action.

That’s so much easier than trying to come up with one, big mission project that everyone can embrace, and so much better than giving someone an assignment and saying, “Here, go do this.”

It also leads to some interesting results.

For example: I heard from one of our members recently who said she was bringing heaven to earth by feeding the feral cats in her neighborhood. And she said she’s using the premium cat food, not the cheap stuff.

That’s pretty much all she said, but I can fill in the blanks. She’s telling me that when she sees those skinny, half-starved cats it breaks her heart, she feels moved to do something about it. And she is moved because she believes those cats are part of God’s creation, and that God has it in his heart to redeem not only his human creatures, but everything he has made and called good, including cats (Rom. 8:18-21). And so she has taken on this ministry to the homeless, and she dishes out the premium cat food because she thinks of cats as something God made and loves, and not as a nuisance.

Chances are good that if she had submitted this idea to the church it would have never been approved. Someone would have said, “We don’t want to encourage this kind of thing,” and someone else would have said, “Are we supposed to pay for the cat food?” But she heard me say, “There must be a thousand ways to bring heaven to earth,” and she looked around for anything that didn’t look like heaven and saw this—skinny, half-starved cats—and it broke her heart, and she rolled up her sleeves and went to work.

That sounds like a parable to me. I can almost hear Jesus say, “What is the Kingdom of Heaven like, and to what shall I compare it? The Kingdom is like a woman whose heart was broken by what she saw in her own neighborhood, and who had the gumption to get up off the couch and do something about it.”

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KOH2RVA: Day 256

I hope you will take five minutes to turn up the volume on your computer, click on the image above, zoom to full screen, and sit back to watch this remarkable video about a partnership between First Baptist Church, the Children’s Museum of Richmond, and Glen Lea Elementary School.

If this were the only thing we accomplished on our year-long, every-member mission trip, it would be enough.  But this is only one of the things.  There are dozens more, hundreds more, because every member of the church has been looking for a way to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to Richmond, Virginia.

David Powers and his team of volunteers in our communications ministry made it their goal to produce one KOH2RVA video each week.  That’s how they wanted to “bring it.”  David confessed to me recently that their goal was a little too ambitious.  Making a video is a lot of work.  But I hope that as you watch this one you will appreciate all that it took to record it, edit it, and present it in a way that tells the story and also gives you that good, warm feeling inside.

I’ve gotten that feeling each time I’ve watched this video–four times this morning.  Now I’m going to publish this post, make some oatmeal, sit down to breakfast, and probably, just probably,

Watch it one more time.

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KOH2RVA: Day 255

I don’t have a lot of time to blog this morning. I’m speaking at a conference called “Faith, Freedom, and Forgiveness” this afternoon and I’m a long way from being ready. My assignment is to help the audience move toward a theology of forgiveness, especially as it relates to the old wound of slavery.

As I was digging around in my files I came up with these notes from Martin Luther King Week at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2001, when I was (to my great surprise) invited to be the guest speaker. The title of my lectures was, “Living in the Lion Tribe: Confronting the Problem of Prejudice with the Power of Love and Imagination.”

On the first night I gathered with about fifty students in a large, upper room and started with this introduction:

Ken Medema is a blind musician with a remarkable kind of inner vision. I once heard him say something I wish I had written down, because I’m not sure I remember it exactly as he said it, but what I heard him say was something like this: “People don’t change because you tell them to. They don’t change because you shame them into it. People change when they can imagine a different kind of reality than the one in which they are living.”

I think that was one of Dr. Martin Luther King’s greatest gifts—he helped people imagine a different kind of reality than the one in which they were currently living. He talked about a day when racism would no longer exist. He dreamed of a day when black people and white people would join hands and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.” It may have been this gift of religious imagination, more than any other, that led to the success of the Civil Rights movement.

He learned it from Jesus, who asked his hearers again and again to imagine a reality he called the Kingdom of God. He learned it from Paul, who talked about the church as the living, breathing body of Christ. He learned it from his father and a host of other black preachers who knew the power of imagination to inspire and change.

And then we moved into a group activity, guided by these notes (written mostly to myself):

Tell the story of Ayla from Jean Auel’s book, The Mammoth Hunters. How she came to a tribe headed by a red-haired giant of a man named Talut who valued difference more than sameness (read the paragraph on page 286). Describe the others in the tribe: Ranec, dark-skinned and handsome; Fralie, angry and bitter, Druwez, a half-breed from the Clan; Tulie, an imposing headwoman. All of them part of the tribe even though some of them made things more difficult and made the tribe less welcome at the large summer gathering.

Talk about how Ayla was welcomed as a guest, and treated as special because she was tall and blonde (that is, different from the short, dark people from whom she had come). Her special abilities were her healing knowledge, her way with animals, her skill with weapons, and her talent for making fire. She was invited to join the Lion Tribe, and on the night she was “adopted” she revealed her fire-making ability to the astonishment of the others, and then gave to each member of her new “family” a piece of firestone and flint so that they, too, could make fire.

Here is a fictional community in which people are valued for what makes them different, not what makes them the same. Let’s take some time tonight to discover our differences and to learn how to value them.

Crane Hearth—blue
Fox Hearth—red
Elk Hearth—green
Bear Hearth—black

Each “hearth” will circle up and take some time to identify the unique contributions of its members. Members will take turns speaking by holding the “speaking stick” (a washable marker). When the hearth is satisfied that someone has a valuable difference to offer, that person will pass the speaking stick to his or her left and be welcomed into the Lion Tribe with its special mark—four, short vertical lines on the right palm. When each hearth is finished the whole tribe will circle up, its members will hold out their right palms, and be dismissed with this blessing:

“That which makes us different makes us valuable.”

I don’t know which of these notes, if any, will end up in my address today, but I hope you’ve found something here that will help you think about how we can work to overcome prejudice through the power of love and imagination. The alternative is to keep our hearts and minds closed, and go on exactly as we have.

And that’s not a good alternative at all.

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KOH2RVA: Day 254

Pray for the people of Oklahoma today, friends. The headline of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reads: “Massive Tornado Pummels Oklahoma.” The sub-heads carry the grim news that at least 51 people are dead and more than 140 injured; that a school was devastated and children, some dead, were pulled from the debris; that it was a powerful storm—a half-mile wide—packing 200 mph winds.

It’s that image of children being pulled from the debris of a school that gets me. There’s something about their innocence and vulnerability that makes that scene especially tragic. And even though I don’t believe this tornado was God’s judgment on the people of Oklahoma I still want to know why:

Why do children have to suffer?

I was asking that question on Sunday afternoon as I watched a documentary about modern-day slavery and human trafficking. Often it is children, some of them very young, who are the victims of traders and traffickers. Little boys forced to work in rock quarries or make bricks day after day in India. Little girls prostituted in brothels in Cambodia and hotel rooms in Richmond. It’s their faces that break your heart.

There is no joy there.

On the table in front of me on Sunday was the face of a boy from Africa. He was up for “adoption” through Compassion International. And even though I might never meet this boy face to face Compassion International assures me that for a little more than a dollar a day he can receive food, clothing, shelter, and education. In other words, he can be rescued from a life of suffering.

I already sponsor a child through Compassion (Yosselin, from Mexico, in the picture above), but on Sunday I thought about sponsoring at least one more. I like what Tony Campolo says, that “every Christian should have a kid’s picture on their refrigerator.” If we did that—all two billion of us around the globe who call ourselves Christians—it would make a difference. And beyond that we could support the work of the International Justice Mission abroad and the Richmond Justice Initiative here at home, both organizations working to set children free from slavery and the sex trade.

There’s not much we can do about tornadoes, but we can do something about this. We can do our best to bring people to justice who trade and traffic in human flesh, and we can give children a chance to live a different kind of life. Our efforts may not make a difference to all the children in the world, but as I look at Yosselin’s picture, above, I’m hoping they will make a difference to her.

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