We had evangelism training the other day as a leadership team. It took place at the community center in the middle of our French city where we all have chosen to live in proximity to each other. What was amazing about this training is that it was actually sponsored by the mayor's office. And the entire town came out to attend!
Before I mislead you into thinking we have had great revival in our suburb of Grenoble, let me explain that the "training" was actually the annual Forum des Associations. Every year in September, to coincide with back-to-school, most towns and cities in France organize a fair where all the clubs in each locality promote their cause or activity and invite people to join as members and volunteers. The tables at this year's forum in our commune had sign-ups for everything from the Friends of Palestine to hiking to Qi Gong.
We asked each of our team members to check out the offerings at the forum and commit to join a club that interested them in order to be more involved in our community, make friendships and rub shoulders with unbelieving, unchurched people. We have also asked each of our student leaders to launch an affinity group among their friends and classmates that gathers regularly around a shared interest, such as role games, scrapbooking or movies. We still have our weekly worship gatherings and discipleship groups. But we don't necessarily expect your average French person to just walk in our doors.
This coincides with some pretty interesting statistics I came across the other day:
- 73% of French say that religion plays no importance in society
- 45% of French do not believe in any God, higher being or life force with only 25% believing that a God exists.
To most in France, the church is not relevant and God is not real. So we need to do a better job of living and believing together as Christ-followers among our culture in a way that pleasantly surprises a jaded and suspicious society. And we have to answer the question of how we can see God's loving presence in this world become an undeniable reality that invades the consciousness of those who have neither the room nor the need for God in their lives.
Making the church relevant is what many intelligent leaders have been trying to accomplish for quite awhile now. But it doesn't seem like our efforts are impressing our post-modern, secular culture much. Part of the problem is that many Christians have zero non-Christian friends. We know, live next to and work with unbelievers. But I am talking about spending quality time, getting deep into people's lives, and being trusted to share in their private, every-day reality. It is a fact that 65% of all Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists say they do not personally know even one Christian. No wonder these faiths contain the largest numbers of unreached people groups in the world.
The chance to invite people to love and follow Jesus often comes at a price of investment of time and relationship with those who need Him. Caring deeply, listening well and highly valuing people for who they are, as they are, takes emotional energy. No one wants to feel like a project or a promotional target, which is often what flyers and tract distribution communicate. We want to take people seriously. So as a result, some of our team will be cooking or painting or playing volleyball with others in our community most weeks. Hopefully we'll make some good friends, have them in our homes and also get the chance to hear about what is really important to them. And if we care with enough sincerity, maybe they will in turn care enough to know about Who is important to us.
Some of these "unbelieving", rational, secular people we will be spending time with are also those who have no issue with visiting a psychic or spiritual healer if they have a physical or emotional problem. These sometimes militantly secular people read horoscopes faithfully and proudly display Buddha statues, crystals, Hindu goddesses and African shaman masks in their homes. It's not that they are closed to religion, per se. They've just decided that western religion has nothing worthwhile to offer them, while remaining partially open to the enticement of spiritual connections elsewhere.
We are looking forward to one day earning the privilege to pray for our new friends when they have a need and see God's power undeniably revealed to them. Like when our next-door neighbor, and avowed atheist, ran to our door to ask us to come and be with her son who had just experienced a terrible seizure. As we prayed for Him in the Spirit and saw his symptoms subside, we also learned that this young man had a burgeoning faith in God, to his mother's chagrin.
We won't downplay our speaking in tongues or belief in prophetic utterances. We will jump at the chance to speak blessings over homes and businesses and pray for people to receive freedom from spiritual oppression, sleep disorders and addictions. Fully engaged in serving and loving our community. Fully engaged in revealing a powerful, mystical God to a community infatuated with the exotic and spiritual. All in the context of organic, authentic, daily relationship. It's our effort at being culturally connected as well as spiritually engaging.
Want to make Christ relevant? Join the club.
The Grave
It's a space where they place
The dead. Where those displaced from the ranks
of the living go to taste the regrets of time wasted.
Encased in a dark and dank resting place
that doesn't rest well
with the rest of the human race,
Who ALL face the inevitable, ignominious, and imminent departure
from the face of this terrestre
Where we are said to embrace what some boldly,
but others barely and naively believe
is just another, but much better, place.
We're marked by the stark and bold foreboding shadow cast
by the cold grave over young and old.
Over plans of life that end too fast
and, as it turns out, don't last
like fool's gold.
So we look longingly for something longer
than these short-lived dreams
and shortened dramas
dragged down by thoughts that dredge-up
an undesirable and undelayable death
and dwell on the demoralizing details of an unknown,
dreaded after-life.
But for those chasing after life, life after death is just an afterthought,
cause they thought that after this life we just stop living.
The Grave; Don't say, "C'est pas grave"
because the gravity of its finality
lingers and clings to us like a maladie,
its grave reality engraved on our conscience.
This consciousness we've been given
of a mortality that ends our livin'.
For every one of us
it's the one thing ahead we most dread -
the unconscionable thought of ending life dead.
It's messin' with our head,
enough said.
Where's the hope?
I'm glad you asked
Because by asking, we stop acting like members of a cast
in costumes and masks,
and instead start facing the facts
That there's someone who adores me, who already went before me
My Messiah, the Sign o'God's desire
to save us from the fire, a Redeemer,
my ransom's buyer with an eye on my plight, who fought my fight
so I don't have to face the grave alone.
Cause what Jesus did when He died was he didn't stay dead,
but His greatest deed went down the day He was dealt
the death blow by his destiny.
You see, the devil desired to defeat Him
by delaying him from the tree,
determined to undermine him and demoralize him.
Even those who had wanted to immortalize him
would later cry out, "Crucify him."
But you can't hold down or outlast the everlasting.
That's the last thing ever
you can try and do.
See, He was the Firstfruit, bringing to fruition from the past
the plan of God that a perfect man, called the First and Last,
should cast himself into the calloused hands of sinful man,
To fulfill the promise to take our thirsting, fallen lives
and make them fruitful,
The Firstborn from among the dead, throwing down his crown,
adorned by a wreath of thorns,
endowed and re-crowned with power,
now and forever,
his renown gone out for how He overpowered
mighty sin and the grave.
Being God, He who loved human beings with all of His being,
was laid in a tomb like a seed sown in the soil.
Unseeing behind the stone,
they closed Him in that dark empty room..
It seemed that the tragic scene that had seen Him bleeding and beaten,
berated and naked
had now ended in being sealed in a soiled shrowd of shame.
But the Forerunner, foreknown as the One who would go before us,
this author and finisher of our faith,
when His blood had sufficiently finished running down,
all poured out,
Shouted, "It is finished". He routed
and finished off the whisperer,
the accuser of the brothers, the sisters.
Cause what followed three days and nights of silence and sorrow
was that death was swallowed up in life.
Mortality, decay, and destruction clothed itself in immortal reality.
Reduced to a formality of life,
the finality of death never ever again having the last word.
'Cuz the buzzards that used to hover above have been plucked
and that swarming buzz of fear that used to linger
in your ear is no longer heard,
cause death has lost its stinger.
The grave's victory is now history.
Death is no longer menacing, missing meaning in inscrutable mystery,
cause the ministry
of our High Priest achieved for us an ability
to live for eternity.
His resurrection rectified everything defiled by the Fall,
finally effecting everlasting living
for every breathing being
who puts their belief in Him.
The fruit of His affection
for those who used to be left bereft by the effects of death
is that we think in a new direction;
The fear of the grave is no longer a perplexing infection. Upon reflection,
our future is now sure, and though surely
we share pain and sickness and
there be shadows and questions,
be assured of the lesson of the grave, now empty:
We were dead,
Christ died,
He rose,
we rise,
It's Paradise.
Spring is beautiful in Grenoble. Gray gives way to green and the surrounding mountains cut a fantastically sharp horizon against brilliant blue skies. Enjoying this panoramic view today, I was mowing the pitiful piece of greenery in front of our door I generously refer to as our lawn. The smell triggered a very powerful springtime childhood memory of being on the baseball field and taking in the intoxicating, refreshing aroma of newly cut grass. As I was reminiscing about my early years when a love for baseball was instilled in me, a few images from America's national pastime ran through my mind. One was rather horrifying, considering I am a diehard San Francisco Giants fan. Like a painful memory dredged from the depths of my subconscious, this dark secret I have kept in lonely silence all these years surfaced suddenly and sent shudders of shame through my soul. When I played little league baseball in my small hometown of Quincy California, my team for three of those years was, and it pains me to say it, the Dodgers. That's right, I actually wore a blue Dodgers uniform each summer, one identical to my Giants' most bitterly hated Los Angeles rival. The realization almost made me sick to my stomach, but a few chants of "Beat L.A." uttered under my breath restored my resolve to push past the pain and finish my yard work.
A more pleasant memory was of my favorite player growing up - Johnny Bench. He was a catcher, and so was I. He wore number five, and I did the same. I wanted to play just like him. He played for the Cincinnati Reds, whose dominance of the league from 1970-1976 won them numerous world series and league championships, as well as the name "the Big Red Machine". Bench is a member of the Hall of Fame now, and is widely considered one of the best catchers of all time. His equally famous teammate was third baseman Pete Rose, who today is banned for life for having bet on baseball while a player and manager. Despite having the most hits, games played, and at bats of any player in history, and being voted an all-star 17 times, he is still not part of the Hall of Fame nor allowed to participate in any league activities. Despite many appeals, Major League Baseball has never once seriously considered forgiving him and lifting the ban. To the commissioner of baseball charged with upholding the image and sanctity of the game, Pete Rose is enemy number one. But imagine if one day, Bud Selig or the commissioner that will soon follow him, decides that even though he is guilty, they will no longer hold this punishment over him. Imagine if Pete Rose is forgiven and reinstated. Do you know what that would be like? Like us experiencing peace with God. We were guilty and enemies of God. Even though we deserve punishment, He doesn't want us to remain separated by a ban or an old mandate of justice. He wants to reconcile with us and let us back in the game, like former enemies who forget the past, are forgiven, and become reconciled. I hope it happens one day for old Pete. And I hope it has already happened for you, too.
Another vivid baseball image for me is of the home plate umpire There is no worse feeling than watching a ball whiz past you, hearing the thud in the mitt of the catcher, followed a "Stee-rike" thundered by a much older and less athletic masked man behind you. With almost a feeling of poetic justice, I recently saw an umpire get hit with a ball that had deflected off of a bat. As he was leaning in close enough to smell the catcher's brand of shampoo, he took a fastball to the shoulder and came away wincing. But that is a hazard of the job of carefully considering every decision on every action of a game where balls are thrown at you in excess of 90 miles-per-hour, with fairness and an eye for precision. The umpire hovers just behind the catcher, making a call whether the ball just thrown is on target (a strike) or out of the strike zone (a ball). He also makes the call at the plate to decide if a runner sliding into home plate is safe or out. Either way, his call must be clear and loud enough to be heard by all. And just in case one is hard of hearing, his ruling is accompanied by one of a variety of demonstrative gestures indicating the call. His decision is definitive and binding. Well, that is, until this season when they decided to introduce instant replay, but that is another subject entirely for this baseball purist. When Colossians 3:15 says "Let the peace of God rule in your hearts", it is this image of an umpire that is being used. The peace of God hovers close and gives a definitive ruling on the small and big decisions of our life, helping us to know whether a job, a marriage, a move, or any of a million possible actions and activities, are "safe" or "out", on target, or outside of the approved zone. We can argue or dispute the call, but God's ruling needs no instant replay. He gets it right every time.
So the next time you are either watching baseball or catch a whiff of freshly cut grass, let it remind of you of God's peace. Peace with God and the peace of God. That's a pastime we can all not get enough of.
