Bold
When I think of the first church in the book of Acts, the word bold comes to mind. They were bold witnesses. They had bold faith. Bold church planters. Bold givers. Bold to the point of death. Take the apostle Paul. He’s told that if he goes to Jerusalem it will cost him his freedom and his life. What does Paul do? Yep, he goes to Jerusalem and the prophecy comes true.
I want this boldness for my own life, and the life of our church (along with every church). I’m tired of theologizing my cowardice under cute evangelism strategies that so emphasize relationship, that they rarely ever get to the punch line of the gospel. I hate that we’ve conjured up quotes and attributed them to people who never spoke them, all in an effort to excuse Spirit-filled boldness- Tell the gospel often, and when possible use words, or something to that effect (That Saint of a man never said that, by the way). I don’t like getting off airplanes having completely ignored the Holy Spirit’s prompting to be a bold witness with the person seated next to me, a person I will probably never get a chance to see again, all because I didn’t want to be bold.
Lord help me.
Lord help us.
I have a love hate relationship with boldness, especially as an introvert. I shy away from boldness because it makes me uncomfortable. Yet I’m inspired by it. The people and stories that stir a fire in me to attempt bold things for Christ, aren’t the shy, timid one’s. They’re bold.
It’s that athlete playing hurt, yet risks everything to play in the big game.
It’s the person at the casino betting all the assets from their fledgling company, hoping to make payroll.
It’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. walking down the long highway towards Mobile Alabama.
It’s James Meredith’s first day at Old Miss.
It’s Deitrich Bonhoeffer’s refusal to stay and enjoy the security and comfort of America, but to board a ship to return to Germany, like Paul, knowing his return could cost him his life.
In 1939, Bonhoeffer wrote boldly of the need to risk it all to his friend Reinhold Niebuhr:
“I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people…Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make that choice in security” (Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas, 321).
That’s inspiring. Had Bonhoeffer played it safe his life would not have had the impact it did…it still does. But because of his boldness lines from his pen like, “When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die,” have a force of bold authenticity that moves us (The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer).
We’re drawn to bold. How else do you explain little boys and girls flooding the German Shepherd infested streets of Birmingham in 1963, standing up for their freedom? Or the juggernaut the first church became in a culture that was physically hostile to the exclusive claims of Christianity? Boldness isn’t the absence of fear, it’s just the refusal to be paralyzed by it. The same Jesus who boldly went to his death on a Friday afternoon, was described just hours before as being distressed as he poured out his soul to His Heavenly Father in the Garden of Gethsemane.
And Dr. King smoked.
I’m convinced that the most inspiring thing any church can do is to take bold steps together for the glory of God.
Those times I have leaned into the Holy Spirit and boldly shared my faith with a complete stranger I left with a feeling of unexplainable exhilaration. Euphoria.
I’ve never regretted being bold.
Join us this year at Fellowship Memphis as we attempt bold things for God. For more information, come experience our State of the Church Sunday on August 24th.
In Defense of Youth Revivals, Youth Days, Women's Days, Ushers Anniversaries...
At six p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, some time in the spring of 1990 I preached my first sermon. The sermon was hideous. The church was packed. I was only seventeen years of age. Because of the popularity of my preacher-father, when people found out I was venturing down his same path the opportunities to preach began to trickle in. I remember speaking at women’s day’s, men’s days, usher’s days, youth days, youth retreats and youth revivals. I know these days and events had to have been a headache for the pastors of these churches (no doubt they inherited them), but they were my training ground, allowing me the opportunity to hone my craft.
The acclaimed writer Malcolm Gladwell has argued that greatness in any field is not so much a product of giftedness, as it is hard work. It’s what he describes as the ten thousand hour rule. To prove his point, Gladwell references such luminaries as Tiger Woods, The Beatles and Chess Champion, Bobby Fischer. Tiger spent countless hours on the driving range and junior tournaments before he conquered the PGA Tour. Gladwell says that before the British Invasion of the mid-sixties, the Beatles developed their craft and chemistry in obscure night clubs in Germany. And before the world knew who Bobby Fischer was, he hung out in parks and homes mastering the art of chess.
I was at the driving range the other day inching my way towards my own ten thousand hours when I saw our club pro working with a boy who was hitting immaculate shots with what appeared to be minimal effort. Draws and fades; towering shots, and stingers- the kid could do it all. On a break I asked the pro if he thought the kid could make it on tour? Without any hesitation he prophesied that he would be on tour, that at the age of 12 this kid had it all. Curious, I wanted to know if the pro thought this young man was born with the gift, or if it came through hard work? Hard work was his response. This boy spends hours a day working on his game.
Preachers don’t get better unless they actually preach. As I look through the rearview mirror on my own development, I thank God for the driving ranges that the traditional African-American church afforded me. If it were not for these youth days (men’s days, etc) I would not have grown at the rate that I have. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying that I didn’t take these early opportunities seriously, I did. The people were never viewed by me as practice. I preached my heart out. Nor am I saying that hard work is more important than the Lord’s hand. However, what cannot be ignored is that the Lord used these Sunday evening services, and special days as part of his strategic ten thousand hour plan for my life.
I’m concerned for the next generation of preachers who do not have these “driving ranges” to hone their craft. It’s no secret that the proliferation of men’s days, women’s days, Sunday evening services and youth days are on the endangered species list. Our postmodern culture has little tolerance to endure those who are practicing. They want to hear greatness…now. If my pastor were to announce today that a seventeen year old kid was preaching his first sermon at the evening service, I’m pretty sure the house would not be packed the way it was in 1990.
Oh, and while I’m thinking about it, I also came up during an era when it was common to see little kids beating on the drums, or the keys after church as the people were beginning to leave. This was their own driving range. As they grew older they were allowed to play a song here or there, and then finally they became a part of the band. Today we don’t have time to let these little kids practice. We want great now, so we go out and pay for it.
As pastors we are called to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry (Ephesians 4:11-12). Equipping is not just dumping information on people, but it is giving them chances to actually do ministry under our watchful eye. In other words, we’ve got to allow people the chance to practice.
You know when the New York Yankees were at their best? It’s not now, when they’ve become the all-star team of the major leagues, cherry picking the best talent off other teams. Instead, the New York Yankees were the best when they patiently developed their own talent through their minor league farm system. Players like Mickey Mantle, and Derrick Jeter weren’t instant successes acquired through free agency, but they were cultivated through seasons of practice within their organization. They were allowed to hone their craft, and the results were championships.
I fear that the mega church movement has turned many of our churches into aspiring modern day New York Yankees who want to grow through free agency- bringing in the best and the greatest now- instead of slowly developing through their own farm system, allowing their leaders to practice.
Pastor, before you kill those special services and days, remember that every church needs a farm system. Every church needs a driving range.
Mid-Year Top 10
2014 is halfway over, and I’ve read some pretty good books this year. Here’s my top ten so far, with no explanations. I can’t imagine the top five not making the cut come end of the year.
#10- United: Captured by God’s Vision for Diversity, Trillia J. Newbell
#9- One Way Love, Tullian Tchividjian
#8- I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, The Staple Singers, and the March Up Freedom’s Highway, Greg Kot
#7- Every Good Endeavor, Timothy Keller
#6- Washed and Waiting, Wesley Hill
#5- Stokely: A Life, Peniel E. Joseph
#4- Is Marriage for White People: How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone, Ralph Richard Banks
#3- Michael Jordan: The Life, Roland Lazenby
#2- Setting our Affections Upon Glory, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
#1- Crazy Busy, A (Mercifully) Short Book About A (Really) Big Problem, Kevin DeYoung
Honorable Mentions:)
Letters to a Birmingham Jail, Bryan Loritts, editor
Right Color Wrong Culture: The Type of Leader Your Organization Needs to Become Multiethnic (August, 2014), Bryan Loritts
Revolutionary
It’s hard to believe that Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King Jr. were once ideologically aligned. As a young college student at Howard, Stokely spent his summers serving on the front lines of the civil rights movement in the bowels of Mississippi. Arrested numerous times, Stokely embraced the ethics of the non violent movement, refusing to return evil for evil. But something began to happen in his heart that would eventually manifest itself in a seismic philosophical shift. On a sweltering Mississippi summer evening in 1966, Stokely Carmichael reached his breaking point:
“We have begged the president. We’ve begged the federal government- that’s all we’ve been doing, begging and begging. Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt and the mess. From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell ‘em. Black Power!” (Peniel Joseph, Stokely: A Life, page 2).
Three years later Stokely would move to Africa, change his name, and continue the revolution from a far. Dr. King’s assassination the year before his exodus proved to be too much for Stokely. In his estimation, the approach of Dr. King and his non-violent comrades was insufficient. Sure the Civil and Voting Rights Bills had been passed, but there would be years before they were sufficiently implemented, in the mean time, southern whites were using violent and unjust means to protect the last vestiges of old man Jim Crow. Stokely’s anthem of “Black Power,” was an appeal to fight power with power, to use any means necessary to experience justice.
History has already cast her verdict. King’s slain corpse on a Memphis motel balcony proved far more effective, than Stokely’s raised fist. A voracious reader and student of history, Stokely missed the glaring message of past revolutions: Love always wins.
The reason why the Jews of Jesus’ day couldn’t buy into his Messianic claims is that they were looking for Stokely and not Martin. They wanted a defiant, fist raised, fight-the-power political revolutionary, not a gentle lamb who would be lead to the slaughter and buried in a borrowed tomb. Stokely Carmichael doesn’t heal the dismembered ear of his attackers, or stand silently before his accusers.
Someone once said that the duty of all revolutionaries is to make revolution. That’s what we’re trying to do here in Memphis. Every time I pass the Lorraine Motel I think of Martin’s bloodied body, and am thankful. Yet I’m also reminded that “the weapons of our warfare are not of this world”. Raised fists, hate and anger are not the bullets in our arsenal, only love.
Stokely lives deeply within. My years in multi-ethnic ministry have not been easy. Trying to lead a church with our white brothers and sisters who assume that their way of viewing the world and doing church is the right way. Putting up with people who pay no regard to the redemptive elements of your culture, while at the same time feeling as if you have to constantly play to theirs. One can become so used to contextualizing themselves that they wake up one day and feel as if they have lost themselves along the way.
There’s many Sunday’s I’ve wanted to raise a clenched black fist. Like Stokely I’ve wanted to exit stage left and head for more comfortable surroundings where people get it without any explaining. But what keeps me from doing this is that I don’t want to be marginalized like Stokely. I want something that is redemptive, something that pulls together, and not polarizes. That something is the emulsifier of love.
Church should not be a safe place. It’s a training ground for revolutionaries to continue in the path of the great Revolutionary, Jesus Christ. The life, death and life of Jesus Christ was anything but safe. He confronted government officials and racism. He sparred with the legalist’s, and Jesus Christ conquered the kingdom of darkness, all the while wielding only the weapon of love.
Is Marriage for White People?
I’ve been preaching a series on marriage at our church, and in preparing for the series I stumbled across this book on Amazon. Like you the provocative title caught my eye, and so a few days later I found myself immersed in its pages.
Ralph Richard Banks has written a disturbing assessment of the African American family. A professor at Stanford University, Dr. Banks has provided us with a heart breaking diagnoses on the state of the Black family. For example, he writes:
“Over the past half century, African Americans have become the most unmarried people in our nation. By far. We are the least likely to marry and the most likely to divorce; we maintain fewer committed and enduring relationships than any other group. Not since slavery have black men and women been as unpartnered as we are now” (p.2).
Of course any diagnoses of the crises in the African American community would have to deal with the absence of strong Black men:
“Black women of all socioeconomic classes remain single in part because the ranks of black men have been decimated by incarceration, educational failure and economic disadvantage. In recent years, two black women have graduated college for every one black man. Two to one. Every year. As a result, college educated black women are more likely than college educated women of other races to remain unmarried or to wed a less educated man who earns less than they do” (pages 2-3).
The fifty-percent failure rate in marriage has become a popular statistic, but in the African American community the divorce rate is close to two-thirds! It’s no wonder I found myself at various points in Dr. Banks’ book fighting back tears.
As the book progresses Dr. Banks dives into the question of why? Why are strong homes particularly rare in the Black community? The absence of strong men, interracial relationships, the educational and therefore the economic disparity, the disproportionate amount of available women to men, have all swung the pendulum in favor of the few viable African American men. Aware of this power, Dr. Banks offers, these available men play the field, sadder still, the women allow themselves to be played.
The result is devastating. Dr. Banks notes that, “Most alarmingly, almost half of all Black women have herpes” (p.64).
He goes onto write:
“According to incidence rates provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black women are nearly fifteen times as likely as white women to be newly infected with HIV. And they are more likely than white women to have contracted the disease through heterosexual contact. Estimates are that more than three out of every four HIV+ black women have been infected through sex with a man. And because women may pass the virus on to their newborns, African American children comprise nearly two-thirds of all HIV+ young children in the United States” (p.65).
Sadly, everyone knows that a tributary of the marriage crisis is abortion, and that is heightened even more in the African American community:
“Years of national abortion statistics reflect troubling racial disparities. Black women have a disproportionate number of abortions in the United States, as a black woman is four to five times as likely as a white woman to have an abortion in any given year. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African Americans, who constitute 13 percent of our nation’s female population, have more than one out of three abortions. Each year black women abort have a million fetuses. That figure exceeds the annual number of African Americans who are sent to prison, drop out of high school, or are victimized by violent crime” (pages 80-81).
Is Marriage for White People? provides the reader with a simple diagnoses, it’s just an Xray, with no real solutions being offered. Problems are exposed, yet help is not suggested. In an ironic sense I felt myself both devastated and inspired as I pored over the pages of Dr. Banks’ text.
Marriage is the first institution God created. Before government or the church, there was Adam and Eve. He planted this married couple in the garden and gave them authority to exercise dominion, and to be fruitful and multiply. Years later, as Israel was about to go into the Promised Land, Moses instructed them in the great Shema passage that the primary vehicle of influence in this pagan place was to be the family (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Dr. Tony Evans was right when he said that the primary venue for the transference of faith from one generation to the next is the home. Of course I am not pitting the church against the home, but it’s undeniable that Jesus, Paul and the leaders of the early church understood that there was an inextricable connection between strong churches and strong families (Matthew 19; Ephesians 5). Our churches need a steady diet of teaching on the family. Crisis counseling is not enough. Our people need to be shown consistently, from the Scriptures, God’s hopes and dreams for the home.
Is Marriage for White People? not only inspired my preaching, but my living as well. By God’s grace I want to be an example of an African American man who loves his wife for life. I want to love Korie as Christ loved the church. I want to show up for my kids, and uphold the vows that I took before God and the presence of several hundred witnesses on that warm Southern California July day in 1999.
On Interracial Marriage
In the summer of 1991 I remember taking my seat at the Union City movie theaters to take in the latest Spike Lee Joint, Jungle Fever. For months I had anxiously awaited this film that explores the intricacies of interracial relationships, not because I was a Spike Lee fan, but because I was doing my own bit of exploration.
The film dives head first in the heart rending tale of an African American family that is on the brink of destruction. Depending on one’s worldview Flipper, the lead character, finds himself in the amorphous position of protagonist/antagonist. He has not only committed the sin of adultery, but to the ire of his black wife and her girlfriends (along with the millions of black women who took in the movie) has done so with a white woman. At the same time his brother is addicted to another “white substance”- crack cocaine, and will stop at nothing to get his latest fix, even dancing for his mother, to the complete disgust of his father who ultimately shoots and kills him.
Spike Lee’s juxtaposition of these two brothers- one an upwardly mobile architect, the other comprising the lowest rung of African American life- is masterful and heartbreaking all at once. Leaving the theater it was impossible to not see them both as equal accomplices to the crime of murdering the black family. It was their addiction to the “white substances” of society that decimated the Black family unit. This maybe reading too much into it, but how can one not see that Spike is not for interracial relationships?
I was eighteen when I saw Jungle Fever. Just days before I had graduated high school where I wrestled with my own sense of identity. As a man I was growing in my fascination with the opposite sex, and had experienced the sheer joy and disappointment of dating. In that oh so tender age of life, my esteem was tied into how many women I went out with and beyond.
As a black man, the issues of identity in a southern diverse high school went much deeper. I soon caught on that it wasn’t just good enough to date, but that the varsity side of the manhood team were those black men who were “savvy and substantial” enough to score not just black women but white women as well. We at Creekside High had bought into the lie that those with the most “game” could bypass black women and fell a “much bigger prize”- white women.
So off I went. The first white girlfriend (if you call it that) I had was my freshman year. Under clandestine circumstances we would rendezvous at the local theater where we wouldn’t get caught in the light of day. When her father finally found out, he promptly called my home and called me a “black son of a bitch,” and forced his daughter to move hundreds of miles away to Savannah, Georgia to live with her mother. I was devastated, but I continued the hunt. After all, not being secure in who I was as a black man, much more as a follower of Jesus, I was unaware that my pursuit was not really after a white woman, but validation, significance and esteem.
Two months after Jungle Fever I found myself settling into my dorm there at college. Shortly thereafter I was wounded by evangelical racism- being called a nigger by one of my classmates who was preparing for a life of gospel ministry. My failure to forgive stored up the flood waters of bitterness, and unleashed in me a pro-black bitterness that sought to now find identity not in the cross of Jesus Christ, but in the color of my skin. I was a black nationalist of the Stokley Carmichael variety. No more white women for me. Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.
After graduation I was determined to no longer be around whites, and so I settled into life at a large, all black church in southern California where I continued to exclusively date my Nubian queens. They were black and beautiful (still are). I soon discovered that my prominent position, along with the scarcity of other Jesus loving black men in my context swung the pendulum favorably in my direction, which lead me to constantly seek to upgrade along the way. I wasn’t a dog, but I could be beyond choosy, a privilege I soon discovered many black women did not have then, nor now.
Then she walked in. I first laid eyes on the woman who is now my wife on a Sunday morning at church. Her olive skin and finely textured black hair made me pause and forget all of the familiar worship songs we sung that day. I would later discover that Korie is half Irish and half Mexican, and soon I was a goner, totally intoxicated with her. It’s here where I was faced with a dilemma. I was in love with her, at church, but in a sea of black women I knew that the better part of wisdom demanded that we keep our relationship a secret. I intuitively felt what Dr. Ralph Richard Banks said when he wrote, “Almost two-thirds of black women felt upset when black men married or dated white women. They felt unappreciated, inadequate, unwanted. As one twenty-nine year old black woman in Los Angeles says in another Ebony article, ‘Every time I turn around and I see a fine Brother dating outside his race, I just feel disgusted. I feel like, what’s wrong with us? Why do you choose her over me?’” (From the book, Is Marriage for White People). So just as I had arranged secret dates with my first girlfriend, Korie and I would steal away to such places as the Santa Monica Pier to get to know each other.
You know the saints can’t hold water, so when our relationship began to ease into the light, people, and mainly the Sistah’s, weren’t happy. What’s wrong with us? Why is it that all the successful Black men have to go outside their own race? These questions and more cut me deeply, not only because I felt as if there was some legitimacy to their questions, but more so because they were coming from my spiritual family who claimed to worship the Great Reconciler. Doesn’t my identity in Christ trump ethnic loyalties?
Korie and I made an agreement. We decided that our ethnicities would not be ignored, and at the same time would not become the ultimate focus of our relationship. If we were out somewhere and we saw people staring, giving us the evil side eye and whispering about us, we were just going to assume that we had spilled some ketchup or something on our shirts. Looking for racism under every rock, and assuming the worst in people is just a miserable way to live.
Now some fifteen years and three kids later, we have a strong and vibrant relationship both in light of and in spite of our ethnic differences, and these truths have helped us to navigate our interracial relationship to the glory of God:
1. What does the Word say? Korie and I want to build our marriage and family on the Word of God. And nowhere in the Bible is God against interracial relationships. In I Samuel 11, God’s concern with Solomon and all of his women (many of whom were of a different ethnicity) had nothing to do with the differences in culture or ethnicity, but everything to do with these foreign women leading him astray from his commitment to God and into idolatry. In fact, God was so ticked off at the racism of Moses’ contemporaries that he struck them with leprosy when they sought to castigate him for his Black wife.
2. We must fight daily to keep our identity in Christ. Korie and I have experienced some hurtful things because of our interracial marriage. Jack and Jill, a popular African American social club, denied us entrance, because Korie is not African American. This club has its historical roots in desiring to keep prominent African American’s in close social standing with each other (Lawrence Graham, Our Kind of People). My wife has at times mourned the fact that relationships with Black women have become arduous because of her not being Black. On and on we can go, yet we must keep coming back to the essential truth that we don’t hang our ultimate joys or disappointments on the color of our skin, or the ignorance of others. Our lives are hidden in Christ.
3. Intentional exposure. Our three boys are half African American, a quarter Irish, and a quarter Mexican. They are beginning to wrestle with their own sense of identity, and it’s scary and fun to watch all at the same time. Each has their natural leanings. One child clearly identifies more with African American’s. If he walks into a room and there’s one Black child in a room of fifty that’s who he’s going to kick it with. Another son leans more towards Whites, even saying that he finds White girls more attractive. And our other son is just a love everybody person. Korie and I sit back and listen to them, only butting in when their perspective needs to be aligned to the cross.
But more than that, we feel it is our joyful obligation to ensure that they are exposed to all of their ethnicities. No, we can’t pick their friends, but we do ensure that between their activities, schools and church that they are constantly in touch with people from all walks of life. As I write these words, two of my sons have friends over- one Black, one White and the other Indian. I’m encouraged.
4. Resolve. People will say and do ignorant things. Okay. Big deal. Not the end of the world. I’m not getting punched in the face, spit upon, or being bitten by German Shepherds in the streets of Birmingham, 1963. That was my parents generation. They were tough. They had resolve. And I need this same Christ-exalting toughness to not only keep moving when ignorance happens, but to love those who “mistreat you”.
5. Shut-up. Forgive the bluntness of it, but I’m in love with my wife. I want to be sensitive to you and your feelings, but I will not allow anyone and their aversion to interracial relationships to keep me from enjoying life with my bride. If you’re bothered by our presence get over it. Recently, I had one Black woman confess that she had severe reservations of joining our church because of Korie, not thinking that I was a real brother. Whatever that means. She’s joined. Glad she’s grown up. Outside of Jesus, no one is allowed to hi-jack my life.
At the end of Jungle Fever, Flippers’ wife forgives him, and he returns home to his Black wife, and his immediate family is restored. The message is deafeningly loud: Black men need to come back home to their Nubian queens if they want healthy families. Well I’ve got my queen, and by God’s grace I ain’t leaving. She just so happens not to be Nubian.
Engage Memphis
In 1878 the yellow fever pandemic ripped through our beloved city of Memphis with devastating effects. Just prior to the plague Memphis’ population was on par with Atlanta and Nashville; but when the be-deviled words of “yellow fever” began to be whispered down the alleys and streets of our city, twenty-five thousand hurriedly packed their belongings and left town. Of the fifteen thousand who remained, yellow fever killed thirteen thousand. The remaining two thousand survivors were African American’s. With such a sparse population, Memphis not only lost her status as one of the top cities in the south, but her charter as well. In a lot of ways our city has been struggling to find her way since the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Yellow fever no longer has the stigma in our society that it once had, this is in part due to the fact that we have found both the carrier and the cure for this once deadly disease. However, plagues of a different sort continue to devastate our city. Memphis’ poverty and infant mortality rates is on par with some third world countries. The educational disparity is so striking that many experts have conjectured that education is the new civil rights issue of our day. With the educational gap comes the ever widening economic chasm between the haves and the have not’s. Though our beloved city is close to seventy-percent African American, it’s our white brothers and sisters who control the purse strings.
Are you depressed yet?
So what are we to do as a church? Sadly, for many churches during the civil right’s era they were more than comfortable to preach fine homiletical masterpieces to homogenous audiences, while just outside their doors sanitation workers marched with huge placard signs shouting, “I Am A Man”. The historical problem of the church has been that she has preached a bifurcated gospel that makes a dichotomy between the body and the soul. Something is woefully wrong when the gospel that we herald doesn’t touch all aspects of a person’s life.
Jesus preached a holistic gospel. He called for people to repent, and he he healed their bodies. The first church both called sinners to turn from the error of their ways, and to sell their possessions and give to those who have need. Marching through the corridors of church history it was Christians who established some of the first hospitals, took down slavery and became a voice for the voiceless.
This month, Fellowship Memphis continues in the rich tradition of the early church by taking up what we have called our Engage Memphis Fund. Every year we come to you and ask you to give above and beyond your regular giving to help us give “a cup of water in Jesus name”. Because of your giving we were able to:
- Help people in crisis by providing food, shelter and clothing
- Invest in the next generation of leaders through our residency program
- Partner with such local ministries as our Memphis Union Mission, where we saw many come to faith in Jesus Christ, along with feeding their bodies
- Send people out on global missions trips
- Plant churches
Our commitment every year is to invest one hundred percent of your gifts in emerging leaders, people in crisis, missions initiatives, along with a host of other opportunities.
Beginning this Sunday we will start a two part series called “Engaged”. I will give more vision for our Engage Memphis fund, and you will also receive a detailed report on what we did with your funds this past year. In the mean time will you join our family by praying what God would have you to give? Help us to continue to reach the body and the soul.
“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich”- 2 Corinthians 8:9
Why I Wrote Letters
Today, my latest book, Letters to a Birmingham Jail, is released. As you can imagine, this book deals with the still delicate subject of ethnicity, and you maybe wondering why? Let me give you three clear reasons as to why I am convinced this book is needed:
1. We are still battling the enemy of passive indifference. Dr. King wrote this opus of the civil right’s movement in response to clergy who were embarrassed that he and his army were descending on their beloved city in the spring of 1963. These men of the cloth knew that national attention would be brought, and most, if not all of it, would not be endearing. So they begged Dr. King to wait, to be patient. King’s letter- which we have reprinted with permission in its entirety in the book- is his loving explanation as to why he had to exercise redemptive impatience. This portion of the book alone is more than worth the price.
If your view of racism is men parading about in white sheets, or dogs unleashed on passive protesters, then we do not need another book on race. However, if you believe that what the Jewish Rabbi who marched with Dr. King said is true, that the only thing worse than hate is indifference (Abraham Joshua Heschel), then you must agree that we are still dealing with the spirit of those clergy who were pleading with King to be passive. A take it or leave it approach to race, instead of a Christ-exalting intentionality that pursues people from every language, tribe and tongue continues to plague our society. Letters to a Birmingham Jail will inspire you towards redemptive impatience.
2. The tethering of the gospel and ethnicity. Admittedly there’s a proliferation of books on ethnicity. And admittedly there’s a deficiency of books that explicitly tether the sociological realities of ethnicity with the spiritual truth and hopefulness of the cross of Jesus Christ. Letters to a Birmingham Jail is not just another book that is amidst the many sociological treatises on what went wrong, offering human solutions to the problem. Instead, each contributor makes a clear call to get after horizontal reconciliation because of the vertical reconciliation that has been offered on a hill far away…on that old rugged cross.
3. A fresh approach. I am the editor of Letters to a Birmingham Jail, and just one of many authors. I felt deeply within my spirit that we needed to honor the legacy of Dr. King, and beyond that, the cross of Jesus Christ, by recruiting a multi-ethnic, multi-generational tribe of Jesus lovers who would call us to Christ-exalting diversity. The ages range from 83 to 33, black, Asian and white, pastors of urban multi-ethnic churches, to suburban homogenous churches (that are planting multi-ethnic churches), to leaders of large church planting networks, as well as professors (Dr. Mark Noll, history professor at Notre Dame, wrote the Foreword), all with the singular passion to show how Christ offers the cure for the plague of passive indifference when it comes to matters of ethnicity. To be blunt, I don’t know of a single book out there that has gathered the ensemble of authors, writing with the clarity and conviction that this volume provides.
As you read these pages your heart will be inspired to pursue Christ-exalting diversity.
On Guest Preaching
I’ve been preaching for over twenty-four years, and have had the opportunity to stand as a guest in another pastors pulpit hundreds of times. Looking through the rear view mirror I still wince over some huge mistakes I’ve made as a visiting preacher. Along the way there have been five basic guidelines I try to walk in when it’s time to preach in another person’s church:
1. Speak as a Barnabas, not as a Jeremiah. Unless the Lord makes it abundantly clear, your default as a guest preacher is to encourage the people, not to beat them up. Tilt towards tenderness, not toughness. These people don’t know you. They have no context for your words. They hear what you’re saying, they just don’t know your heart. Encourage. Now don’t hear me as saying don’t be truthful, just make sure you wrap your words in love. Your posture should be one of placing your arm around them, not pointing a defiant finger.
2. Be gracious. When you stand let the host pastor and the church know you are grateful for the opportunity to serve. Thank the pastor and the people. I’m not talking about flattery- which is saying something to a person’s face that you would never say about them behind their back (gossip is the reverse- it is saying something about them that you would never say to them). Find something you genuinely admire about the pastor and let the people know. There’s something redemptive that happens in me when I stand and go on notice that I’m just thankful for the privilege of preaching.
3. Time. Always, always, always ask the host pastor, or whoever is running the pulpit, two questions. The first is how long does the pastor normally preach. This is key because like working out, the audience has been cardiologically conditioned to listening for a certain period of time. Going beyond their conditioning will result in the people’s fatigue. Secondly, ask how long you have to preach, and don’t go over that amount. Remember, it’s always better to leave the people wanting more, than waiting for you to sit down somewhere.
4. Subject. I like to find out what the host pastor has been preaching on and to steer as far away as possible from that specific subject. If he’s been in a series on the gospel of Matthew, then I ain’t preaching Matthew no matter how bad that sermon might “kill the house” (I hate that phrase by the way). You never know what angle the pastor might be taking, or where he’s trying to lead the people. As the old folks used to say, “Stay in your lane”.
5. Don’t counsel someone elses members. Once you’re finished preaching you’ll probably shake hands with the people. Inevitably, my experience has shown me, that someone will want you to counsel them, and I’ve found it most helpful to point them to their pastor. Remember, that person is under that pastor’s authority, not yours. So I will offer a compassionate prayer, and keep moving.
Redeemed
In Helene Cooper’s book, The House of Sugar Beach, she tells of the time during the Liberian Revolution, in which her house was broken into by soldiers. These blood thirsty men took a young Helene and her sister down stairs into the basement with the intent of gang raping them. Right as they were going to commit this atrocity the door to the basement flew open. It was their mother demanding that the soldiers release her daughters. In return, the mother said that they could take her. These men smiled, and agreed to her terms. Helene and her sister were released, and for the next hour or so, they hid in their rooms listening to the brutal sounds of the soldiers as they took their turns ravaging their mother.
Helene and her sister had been redeemed.
The Bible goes to great lengths to talk about our redemption as followers of Jesus Christ. The very term means to buy back. Redemption presupposes slavery, peril and an overall unwanted prior position. Like Helene and her sister, we were perilously close to sin ravaging and destroying us. We were completely powerless against the soldiers of sin, a point Paul makes abundantly clear to the Ephesians (2:3). But at the last moment, the doors to the basement of our prison were flung open when like Helene’s mother, Christ provided the terms of our redemption: we would be released, and he would take our place. Paul expresses this most clearly to the Corinthians when he says of Jesus Christ, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”- 2 Corinthians 5:21.
What Helene’s mother and Jesus Christ teach us is that redemption is costly, and yet redemption is also freeing. In an individualized postmodern society like ours, I fear we have a great misunderstanding of freedom. We’ve taken freedom to mean the absence of responsibility, that one can do whatever they want, when they want. This is what many mean by freedom when they talk of freedom of speech. I can say what I want, even if it demeans and destroys you, because, well, I’m free to say it. Or many would say that I’m free in my sexuality to explore and have sex with as many people as I’d like regardless of how my actions may affect others. There’s even open marriages, where the spouse is “free” to have relationships with others, and this is esteemed as being “mature”.
Yet this is not how the bible views freedom, and redemption. Freedom is not the absence of responsibility, that’s chaos. Instead freedom, real meaningful freedom, is only enhanced by responsibility. We see this in redemption. Christ redeemed us at infinite cost to himself so that we might be free to serve him (responsibility). No one articulated this better than Paul when he said that he was no longer a slave to sin, but now that he’s been redeemed, he’s a slave to Christ, and to righteousness. Christ has bought us, both releasing us from the grip of sin and Satan, and setting us free to worship and find our joy in him.
In my years of pastoral ministry I’ve never met a joyful serial adulterer- one who had sex on their terms. What I have experienced are couples who have been faithfully married to one another for decades who are the epitome of joy as they have committed to selflessly seeking the other person’s happiness within the responsible boundaries of marriage. A person who is ruled by their appetites and spends money “freely” without any kind of responsibility, I can tell you now, that’s not joy. But the person who handles money responsibly, and goes to war with their material appetites, that’s joy. As my father is known to say, “ ‘No’ is the most freeing word in the English language”. Meaning in life is not found when each one “does what is right in their own eyes”, but when one finds satisfaction outside of themselves in a Holy Other.
If this be the case, then redemption is not for our restriction, but for our joy. Christ did not die for our duty, but for our delight. I have been set free, but this freedom is not an unfettered pursuit of my desires, that’s slavery all over again, it’s the joyful mission of bringing God pleasure because he has liberated and set me free.