Dispatches from Youth Culture, No. 2
It’s fair to wonder why Christians spend so much time and effort each year on youth missions when there’s so much work to do back home.
Take Salmon Creek Church, for example. Here in Vancouver, 16 ½ percent of us live below the poverty line, which equals a population about 120 times the size of our average Sunday-morning attendance (services combined). Just here in Vancouver School District, if we were to take just the students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and stand them side-by-side in a line, they would span almost 3 ½ to 4 miles—of kids. “Many of our students come to school to eat and rest,” said Theresa David-Turner, principal of Truman Elementary School, at a breakfast for faith leaders last fall. “Some sleep at their desks and eat the two meals they will have for the day.”
Those of us in the faith community need to be awake to statistics like these, especially when there’s such disparity in income between the richest and poorest in our city and across the culture. The notion that there is work to do here at home is quite correct: there are people hurting and hungry in the zip codes that begin with 986—to say nothing of the other forms of oppression and injustice that show up every day around town.
Jesus’ heart beats sorrow for such a status-quo. “I was hungry and you gave me food,” he says in the famous sheep-and-goats narrative of Matthew 25; “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink” (Matt. 25:35). In identifying as the poor and needy around us, Our Lord tells us that when we serve someone in need, we are, quite actually, serving Jesus himself. Why leave town when there’s such abundant missional need around us?
An answer can be found in the first chapter of Acts—here again, in the Lord’s very words: “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). See the geography that Jesus is playing with there? The apostles will be witnesses “in Jerusalem”—which is where this dialogue is taking place (1:4). And then they will also be witnesses “in all Judea”—across the country, removed from the locale of Jerusalem—“and Samaria”, a foreign land and culture.
In local terms, Jesus might have said: “You will be my witnesses in Vancouver, and across America and around the world.” Nothing is out-of-bounds: the world is our mission-field, which includes everything from Highway 99 to as far away as any and all of the other 190 or so countries that populate the world today. To obey our Lord of Love is to keep a global missional scope at all times.
But there’s another reason why we go outside Clark County to serve the world with love: another type of poverty—our culture’s low supply of the virtue of self-sacrifice. I myself wrestle with it every day, and it doesn’t take more than a quick channel-surf to see how powerful our temptation is to love self at the expense of others. Short-term missions, as Jeff Keuss used to say in my seminary days, are valuable because they provide an opportunity for kids to spend a week in service and never once think about themselves.
That also goes, by the way, for adult disciples like me, and for all of us who live in a culture that places personal fulfillment ahead of self-giving love of others—something I’m tempted to do every hour of every day. This summer, as we bless our students’ decision to be servants in another locale, it’s not that we’re abandoning our duty here in Vancouver or teaching them to do so as well. Quite the opposite. It’s a form of obeying the Lord’s command to go to “Judea”—whatever country lies just outside of our comfort zone—and be the hands and feet of Christ so that others may experience the love of a God who moves beyond just one place.
And it’s a chance to forget, for the moment, the culture’s obsession with the hoops of self-fulfillment—AP scores, career advancement, social standing, entertainment, and all the rest—and focus, even if just for a few days, on someone else, someone whom God loves every bit as much as he loves you and me, and who needs that love just as urgently as you and I do.
Vancouver will be waiting when they get back. For now, let’s pray for these young missionaries as they step forward into how God would call them to serve. And as the faith community that has adopted them, may we at Salmon Creek Church give these teens tons and tons of affirmation for their willingness to “empty themselves” (see Philippians 2:7) and spend a week serving people they’ve never met and may never see again.
This article appeared in the February, 2015 edition of The Circuit Rider, the magazine of Salmon Creek Church in Vancouver, Wash. Visit Salmon Creek Church, which is a United Methodist ministry, at www.salmoncreekchurch.org.
Sources include:
U.S. Census Bureau
Vancouver School District data at www.vansd.org; most recent data posted is for 2013–14 school year.
Scripture is nrsv unless noted.
It’s fair to wonder why Christians spend so much time and effort each year on youth missions when there’s so much work to do back home.
Take Salmon Creek Church, for example. Here in Vancouver, 16 ½ percent of us live below the poverty line, which equals a population about 120 times the size of our average Sunday-morning attendance (services combined). Just here in Vancouver School District, if we were to take just the students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and stand them side-by-side in a line, they would span almost 3 ½ to 4 miles—of kids. “Many of our students come to school to eat and rest,” said Theresa David-Turner, principal of Truman Elementary School, at a breakfast for faith leaders last fall. “Some sleep at their desks and eat the two meals they will have for the day.”
Those of us in the faith community need to be awake to statistics like these, especially when there’s such disparity in income between the richest and poorest in our city and across the culture. The notion that there is work to do here at home is quite correct: there are people hurting and hungry in the zip codes that begin with 986—to say nothing of the other forms of oppression and injustice that show up every day around town.
Jesus’ heart beats sorrow for such a status-quo. “I was hungry and you gave me food,” he says in the famous sheep-and-goats narrative of Matthew 25; “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink” (Matt. 25:35). In identifying as the poor and needy around us, Our Lord tells us that when we serve someone in need, we are, quite actually, serving Jesus himself. Why leave town when there’s such abundant missional need around us?
An answer can be found in the first chapter of Acts—here again, in the Lord’s very words: “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). See the geography that Jesus is playing with there? The apostles will be witnesses “in Jerusalem”—which is where this dialogue is taking place (1:4). And then they will also be witnesses “in all Judea”—across the country, removed from the locale of Jerusalem—“and Samaria”, a foreign land and culture.
In local terms, Jesus might have said: “You will be my witnesses in Vancouver, and across America and around the world.” Nothing is out-of-bounds: the world is our mission-field, which includes everything from Highway 99 to as far away as any and all of the other 190 or so countries that populate the world today. To obey our Lord of Love is to keep a global missional scope at all times.
But there’s another reason why we go outside Clark County to serve the world with love: another type of poverty—our culture’s low supply of the virtue of self-sacrifice. I myself wrestle with it every day, and it doesn’t take more than a quick channel-surf to see how powerful our temptation is to love self at the expense of others. Short-term missions, as Jeff Keuss used to say in my seminary days, are valuable because they provide an opportunity for kids to spend a week in service and never once think about themselves.
That also goes, by the way, for adult disciples like me, and for all of us who live in a culture that places personal fulfillment ahead of self-giving love of others—something I’m tempted to do every hour of every day. This summer, as we bless our students’ decision to be servants in another locale, it’s not that we’re abandoning our duty here in Vancouver or teaching them to do so as well. Quite the opposite. It’s a form of obeying the Lord’s command to go to “Judea”—whatever country lies just outside of our comfort zone—and be the hands and feet of Christ so that others may experience the love of a God who moves beyond just one place.
And it’s a chance to forget, for the moment, the culture’s obsession with the hoops of self-fulfillment—AP scores, career advancement, social standing, entertainment, and all the rest—and focus, even if just for a few days, on someone else, someone whom God loves every bit as much as he loves you and me, and who needs that love just as urgently as you and I do.
Vancouver will be waiting when they get back. For now, let’s pray for these young missionaries as they step forward into how God would call them to serve. And as the faith community that has adopted them, may we at Salmon Creek Church give these teens tons and tons of affirmation for their willingness to “empty themselves” (see Philippians 2:7) and spend a week serving people they’ve never met and may never see again.
This article appeared in the February, 2015 edition of The Circuit Rider, the magazine of Salmon Creek Church in Vancouver, Wash. Visit Salmon Creek Church, which is a United Methodist ministry, at www.salmoncreekchurch.org.
Sources include:
U.S. Census Bureau
Vancouver School District data at www.vansd.org; most recent data posted is for 2013–14 school year.
Scripture is nrsv unless noted.
No comments:
Post a Comment