Frustration, tiredness, and irritation. The meeting had just ended with the church leaders and it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Just weeks before, we had been having a great time hanging out with the kids in a converted bay of the garage in the church parking lot. Weeks had been spent planning and designing the space to make it a comfortable place to come hang out that didn’t require people having to come into the church if they were intimidated in any way. There is a lot of people that just don’t want to walk into a church, especially those that we wanted to be around. So, we put up temporary walls, set up a café serving free espresso, Italian sodas, and other drinks and selling candy and stuff to help cover the costs and then had some café tables set up with chairs so that we could all hang out, play games, listen to music, and spend time together. The big hiccup in the whole plan was that we took up space in the garage where lawn equipment used to be parked. We had carefully arranged and cleaned the remainder of the garage so that all the equipment had a space and could be easily moved in and out of the other garage bay but it still got on someone’s nerves. Needless to say, the youth ministry didn’t win that battle, we had to move back inside, and we decided it was a good time to change scenery.
This may seem like a trivial thing but I think is representative of how far much of mainline church has gotten off track. We say we are about people, changing lives, changing the world, but sometimes the functioning of the church itself becomes the end and not the means. We spend endless amounts of time in meetings every week to plan one or two hours of missions. Or, the flipside is that we don’t plan and don’t do. We meet together every week to preach to each other and hang out and eat cookies, but the majority of people don’t allow any of it to really change how they do life.
I would argue that the majority of people who attend church would not have their lives significantly changed by not attending church. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that church doesn’t have a purpose, I’m saying that I don’t think the majority of people have any clue, or have forgotten what the purpose of the whole church thing is. So, we continue to show up and discuss the Bible, Church, and missions like they are fine wines but in the end we just end up drunk and asleep on the couch.
A valuable lesson was learned when we were living for 9 months in Togo on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. We couldn’t wait to get there and help make all these awesome changes and make a world of a difference. We spent most of the 9 months sitting there allowing the kids to climb on us, sorting out fights, talking with the older kids, helping to set up a budget, communicating back to the people in the states and hiding in our house because we were too overwhelmed to do anything else. The whole thing wore us out.
It was incredibly difficult to live in Togo because life was so different from what we knew. First of all, every day was 90-95° F and 90-100% humidity. The roads were drivable at best because we lived in the poor part of town. There was no real government interaction in the day to day lives of individuals and the interaction that they had was not usually positive. Everything could be done faster if you were willing to slip in a little gift to the government official (lesson learned while registering the car we purchased), and police weren’t always there to protect (lesson learned when pulled over for running a “red” light which was actually green and having to pay the officer and his military “buddy” to get my passport back.) To top it all off, you couldn’t communicate effectively with the kids, the people around you, or with those back home because of language and technology barriers. The life changing part was realized at the end of this crazy adventure. When we sat down to do an “exit interview” with the orphanage director he said something that changed the way that we looked at missions and mission work. He said, “By watching you two interact with the kids and each other I learned how to be a better husband and a better father to the kids.” In that moment we realized that missions were not about what was said. This world is not changed by words, this world is changed by the actions of people that step out into areas where the people know that you shouldn’t be there and you still are. The world is changed when people live in front of others that demonstrate their respect for people, their respect for the Earth, their respect for themselves, the respect for other cultures, the respect for other faiths, the respect for everything.
I grew up believing that it was my God given duty to get people to “accept Jesus into their hearts as their personal Lord and Savior.” My duty is to become part of restoring this world to the way it was intended to be. This means to treat the world, the people, the animals, the environment as if it is all God’s on loan to me, and when I do this and treat everything and everyone with this kind of care and love then I won’t have to use words to tell people that the “Kingdom of God is here.”
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