Tag: Church

  • Sabbath Breakers

    “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

    Exodus 20:8-11

    Kristen and I are drawing more and more clear lines around Sunday– the culturally accepted Sabbath day.

    Our new family rule is:

    Church activities on Sunday are limited to the worship service and children’s church only. No meetings. No nothing.

    There have been two general reactions to mentioning this new rule on my Facebook profile.

    1. People who don’t work at a church applaud. They feel the same pressure to get involved with everything at church and want to reclaim Sunday morning as a time of worship-only as well.
    2. People who work at churches don’t appreciate my sentiment quite the same. (Staff at my church get it.) The over all impression I’ve gotten from church staff is that they wish they could make Sunday a Sabbath for themselves, but they have too much work to do and try to turn either Saturday or Monday as a Sabbath.

    Now… let me be fundamentalist for a second.

    Under what circumstances is it OK to willfully break the 4th commandment?

    None. The principle of Sabbath is just as clear and relevant today as all of the other commandments. It’s not OK to covet my neighbors wife if it grows the congregation, is it? It’s not OK to steal if I do good, is it? It’s not OK to create an idol for the sake of expanding a ministry, is it?

    So why is it OK to willfully break the Sabbath by doing a million things on Sunday morning in the name of church?

    I don’t think it is. Hence, we’ve drawn a line. (Here is a good time to mention we’re not asking anyone else to do this, it’s our personal conviction.)

    This is where the grey area comes in

    The command of Sabbath is a trust issue. You work the fields six days a week and you trust God to provide for you and your family on the 7th. Generations of God followers have taken that literally. But we’ve entered into an age where that is seen as a figurative command.

    Jesus talked about the Sabbath a few times and he seemed to have a non-legalist perspective on the Sabbath. (See Mark 3:1-6)

    In fact, Jesus gave 11 examples of when it was lawful to break the Sabbath. (source)

    1. Pulling an ox out of a ditch on the Sabbath was permitted.
    2. Circumcision is permitted on the Sabbath.
    3. It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.
    4. The precedent of David and his men eating the shewbread.
    5. Priests work on the Sabbath and are blameless.
    6. The ministry of the Messiah is greater than the ministry of the Temple.
    7. God desires mercy from His people and not sacrifice.
    8. The son of man is Lord of the Sabbath.
    9. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
    10. It is lawful to lead animals to water on the Sabbath.
    11. The Father works on the Sabbath.

    Back to my house, bring this home

    The principle of Sabbath is abundantly clear. All throughout the Old Testament we see that God’s people struggled to maintain the Sabbath (trust issue) and God punished His people as a result. (Numbers 15 is the most extreme example for habitual individual Sabbath breakers, for an en masse examples, just look at the exiles.)

    I’m audacious enough to believe that God still cares about the Sabbath. I can’t lead my family to sin by working seven days a week and in turn expect God to bless my family. (Just like I couldn’t expect God to bless me financially if I didn’t manage my money well. Or other areas of clear trust/sin issues. You can’t expect God to bless areas of your life in which you exhibit willful sin.)

    As I talk with church leaders– we all treat Sunday morning as our big day. It’s the day we try to cram as much as we possibly could into the service as well as the opportunity people’s attention and presence afforded us. Sunday morning is anything but Sabbath.

    And for people in the pews its inborn hypocrisy. We say, “Put God and His ways above the ways of the world.” And yet, by our actions as leaders, we put the ways of the world ahead of the 4th commandment. By our desire to cram as much into Sunday as possible, we exhibit willful disobedience.

    Our words say, “Run to the Lord of the Sabbath and He will give you rest.”

    Our actions say, “Flee these crazy church people who want to make your Sunday even crazier!”

    As I think of the hundreds of staff meetings I’ve attended, planning hundreds of worship services, I want to go back and ask myself this simple question: “Instead of trying to maximize what we can do on Sunday morning, why don’t we talk about how little we can do? What would happen if we modeled Sabbath on Sunday’s by doing the maximum 6 days a week and called our people to a minimalist experience of worship?”

    There is another way

    This is where our family is headed. We want to trust God with our church life. We trust Him with our money. We trust Him with our children. We trust Him with our marriage. We trust Him for safety, security, and most importantly… our salvation.

    So now we’re going to trust Him with our church. We trust that as we turn Sunday into a Sabbath day for our family and willfully skip the busyness our church provides… that God will bless our church.

  • Observing vs. Engaging at Church

    I first made this discovery at work but then noticed it in my own life.

    As you can imagine, I’m a little schizophrenic at the National Youth Workers Convention. I hold several different roles simultaneously, which keeps me constantly moving and shifting from one role to another. And during our general session– I’m all over the place in that room. I’m welcoming people as they come in. I’m backstage saying hello (and thank you) to our speakers and artists. I’m making sure we’re capturing all the media we’ll need for the next year. On and on.

    The net result is that I’m typically working during the entire general session… I have to be very intentional about sitting down and listening to the speaker. (This year I need to listen to the speaker since I’m interviewing them right after their talk with some follow-up questions.) It’s a crazy transition to have my mind moving at a million miles per hour and then to just sit down and listen at 100-120 words per minute.

    It’s in that hectic, moving about the room, that I made this discovery.

    There’s a big group of people who willfully don’t sit in chairs during general sessions. It really is like a middle school dance. The vast majority of the people are having a good time, laughing and dancing and highly engaged in what happens on the stage. And the “teachers” are all hanging out on the fringes loosely engaged at what is going on– but firmly in observation mode. My movement around the room is completely invisible to those engaged in the general session. But to those who are just observing on the outside, utterly disengaged, they watch me. They wave at me. They wave me over to say hello.

    Those observing and not engaging are present but not connected. The implication is that the session isn’t for them… they are just present.

    That discovery has haunted me the for weeks as I realize how many times I slip into observation mode during church.

    • I engage in worship, but disengage during the message.
    • I engage during the social times, but disengage during communion.
    • I engage when we do announcements in Spanish, but disengage when they are given in English.

    Sure, I don’t sit in the back of the room. But I willfully disengage as if to say, “This isn’t for me.”

    Problem #1

    This habit of disengaging began as I worked at churches. Much like I have to work during general sessions at NYWC, most people who work at churches are working during the church service. Sure, the staff may be present… but they often have a million things on their mind. They are thinking about the lesson they just taught or are about to teach, or what they will say when they have to go up front, or keeping their head up to make sure that stragglers make it back in the room… if they are gone too long they feel they ought to go see what’s going on.

    The end result is that few people who work at church ever get to fully participate in church.

    Problem #2

    Problem #1 leaves us with a pretty strong contradiction. We want to create an atmosphere where people engage with God and yet our staff is utterly unable to do so in the same space. So, our actions are actually teaching people that if they want to be leaders in our ministry they need to be really good at looking engaged when, in fact, they are merely observing.

    The end result is that our actions are teaching people that in order to be a leader you need to be able to disengage at church.

  • When your kids hate church

    When your kids hate church

    My kids don’t get excited about going to church most Sunday’s. That’s putting a nice bow on it, isn’t it?

    Let’s take the pretty bow off for the sake of this post.

    They hate going to church.

    Yesterday, I sat in the car with a child who refused to participate. Not all Sunday’s are like that. But sometimes the feet literally stop moving and the tears start flowing. It’s hard to look in your child’s eyes and see them tearfully say “please don’t make me go,” and then force them to go.

    I can’t stomach it. That is, clearly, not the type of relational connection I want my children to have with Jesus.

    To my dismissive friends– it’s not just our church. It’s pretty much any church we’ve tried out. Trust me, we tried to blame the churches we attended. It’s not their fault. And it’s been going on for a very long time. Yeah, they even hated churches I worked at.

    I don’t know any other way to say it. They hate going to church.

    [Insert our painfully banging of heads against the wall.]

    [Insert the fear of all the comments I’ll get with suggestions for how to make them love going to church. I know, it’s easy for you. Thanks in advance for reminding me I’m a failure.]

    [Insert Freudian comments and Freudian comments veiled as Bible verses– trust me when I say we’ve thought them all already.]

    As a parent I could get lost in the emotions of this. I mean, how is it that mom and dad can have a first love… Jesus and his church… and our kids aren’t loving what we love?

    This is where the rational side of our brains takes over and comforts us.

    • We don’t want them to fake it for our sake.
    • We want to raise independent, critical thinkers. That includes giving them the freedom to question us within the boundaries of our authority over them.
    • We believe Jesus wants to capture their heart, not their body. It’s OK if that takes time. Jesus’ offer to love the church stands the test of time, he is patient.
    • We recognize that there is a difference between rejecting Jesus and not liking the action of going to church. They don’t hate Jesus, they hate going to church.
    • We believe ultimately that it’s more important that the kids go to a church their parents love than one that the kids love and the parents tolerate. I find church strategies that try to hook parents with a McDonald’s approach to kids ministry often have equally crappy methodology elsewhere.
    • We recognize that some of the reason they don’t like church is that daddy used to work at one, like 60+ hours a week. And repairing the equation that church equals dad loving other people’s kids and making other people’s kids a priority over them will take years to repair.
    • We are willing to find expressions of church they might love. We’ve introduced Awana on Wednesday nights. It is is so developmentally appropriate for them that they are really digging it. (Even though it makes dad cringe a bit.) And this summer they will go to camp. For Kristen, Awana was a big part of her middle childhood. And for me, camp was huge from about 4th grade through high school. (Even though letting them go for a week makes Kristen cringe a little bit)
    • We are willing to look in the mirror enough to recognize that being compliant at church does not equate to loving church. When I went to church as a child, I hated it and swore that I’d hate it forever.
    • We aren’t going to give up simply because they don’t count down the days until Sunday. Their attitude towards church doesn’t drive us to make stupid decisions as parents. So it’s not like we’re going to stop going to church as a family.
    • We are willing to lose the occasional battle for the sake of hopefully one day winning the war. That’s a crude way of saying we don’t force them to participate. We expect that they will, but allow them some ability to say no.

    Maybe I’m not supposed to talk about this? Maybe writing this makes me look bad? Or maybe, just maybe, my kids are normal?

  • Level of Difficulty

    Does your skill level match the level of difficulty in your ministry?

    I’ll admit it. I’m a recovering video game junky. Up until Madden 2005 I used to incessantly play anything football EA Sports produced.

    One of the fun things about the Madden games is that you can adjust the level of difficulty to match your skill level in the game. So, if you were new, you could set it to easy and still have a good time. Then, theoretically, as your skills improved you could turn the game up so that it remained challenging.

    One of the great injustices in the ministry world is that there is often a disconnect between the skill level of a staff member and the level of difficulty in a ministry setting.

    In general, those who have a low skill level (new to ministry) are only able to get jobs in ministry locations labeled difficult or expert. Meanwhile, veteran church workers tend to flow towards jobs on larger teams in healthier ministries where the level of difficulty is significantly better matched to their skill level. (Not easy, per se. But ministries which match their skill level.)

    In the past few years I’ve had countless conversations with pastors in way, way over their head. They’ve been in ministry a short amount of time and are in situations with no support, politics leaning hard against them, and socially isolated from people who think like them. They slump their shoulders as we sit down for breakfast, “Adam, am I crazy? Why does serving Jesus hurt this bad?”

    Why are these people hurting?

    Because they are in ministry settings where the level of difficulty is a miss-match.

    The Way it Works

    We have a Darwinian approach to ministry jobs. Our church culture dictates that the newest, greenest, and least capable among us serve at the gnarliest of ministry sites. A youth pastor takes her first time job, replacing a youth pastor fired for sleeping with a student. A worship pastor hired from a larger church to lead a ministry from traditional worship to contemporary. A senior pastor right out of seminary replaces a long-tenured wise owl who retired after 40 years of successful ministry. A children’s worker will accept a calling to a church plant where they have to go out and raise their support while somehow trying to create a children’s program from scratch.

    All expert level ministry jobs performed by newbie staff members. They don’t stand a chance.

    A large majority of these newbies will get washed out of their first jobs in the first 2-3 years. Battered and bruised, about half will lick their wounds and find non-ministry vocations before they’ve even paid off their seminary loans.

    Yet, a small minority will learn their lessons from these impossible ministry situations and move to more healthy levels of difficulty. Eventually, through survival of the fittest, a small minority manage to work their way into roles that are matched with their skill level… or maybe a little mismatched so that they are in jobs significantly easy compared to their skill level. (You know who you are.)

    In other words, those of us with high levels of expertise gravitate to the easier jobs while our success in roles made to look easy encourages countless others into the flames of despair at the hard jobs.

    The Way it Ought to Work

    Ministry experts should flow to the expert level jobs. Jobs in healthy ministries should hire more newbies for shorter periods of time in order to increase their skill level and help match them with jobs that best suit their long-term skill level and interest.

    This would perpetrate a mantra of healthy churches helping unhealthy ones instead of visa versa.

    But that would be too much like right.

  • What Would Judas Do? Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and You

    The youth ministry world is wrestling through the ramifications of what Christian Smith coined as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

    What is MTD?

    After interviewing 3,000 teenagers, the authors found that many young people believed in several moral statutes not exclusive to any of the major world religions:

    1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
    2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
    3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
    4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
    5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

    Link

    Since the original study came out about five years ago, youth workers have been scratching their heads, more research has been done, many books/articles have been written, and essentially we are all just trying to figure out both how we got to this point and how we can rebuild our ministries in ways that combat this.

    As a simplest– I have often wondered if MTD in our students may be related to MTD in their youth pastor? In other words, are we even willing to consider that our own relationship with Jesus  (or lack thereof) may be leading students to follow our lead into MTD?

    As I look in the mirror I am left to ask myself and my fellow youth workers some difficult questions.

    • Is youth ministry my vocation or is it my calling? (The latter isn’t an independent evaluation)
    • Am I still passionate about my relationship with Jesus?
    • Do I still love and chose to be faithful the Bride of Jesus? (His church, all of it.)
    • Are my actions reflective of my first love? (personalize Revelation 2:1-6)
    • Am I setting expectations in my teaching that are realistic for my students walk with Jesus? (Am I teaching Scripture in a way that is approachable and personal?)
    • Do I consider myself a manager of a program or a minister of the Gospel?
    • Do I still have the passion for lost teenagers that I had when I dedicated my life to this cause in 1993?

    Let us look at ourselves with sober judgment and search our hearts; making adjustments and repentance a necessary part of that self-appraisal.

    As I minister to students it is always my heart that they pick up my faith.

    My fear is that in too many cases they are picking up a faith that is vastly different than the faith we want them to pick up.

  • Giving and Receiving at Church

    Photo by Vintage Collective via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    Confession: There are times when I am frustrated with my church.

    • To the point of not wanting to go.
    • To the point of wanting to give up on organized church.
    • To the point where I think the action of attending church may actually be hindering my ability to live out the Gospel in my life.
    • To the point of wanting to withhold myself, my money, my children, my thoughts, and even my prayers.

    This causes me to search myself, my motivations for the action of going to a church, and even what Scripture does or does not say about what goes on at church.

    Lately, at the bottom of that barrel I am left with this thought:

    Going to church is about giving and receiving simultaneously like the heart pumping blood in both directions. When I’m dissatisfied I am either unwilling to give of myself or I’m unwilling to receive ministry created for me (as part of the congregation). Conversely, I will be most satisfied with the corporate worship experience when I go with my heart pumping a desire to both give an receive.

    In other words, I think too much and I must be more simplistic in this exchange with the church. I need to discipline myself to give what I can (in its various forms, not exclusive to money) and receive what I can. (in its various forms, not exclusive to teaching)

    It’s a two-fold relationship. When I go more needy to receive I don’t go with a heart to give of myself. When I go needy to give of myself I don’t go with a heart to receive.

    Questions for Reflection

    I’m not accusing anyone of ever being dissatisfied with their church. I’m only confessing that sometimes I am. But if you find yourself discontent, here are some questions for reflection that have helped me.

    • What is the thing that drives you nuts, that has become a block between you “truly coming to worship God?“
    • What category would you place that thing in? Personal preference? Desire for excellence? Biblical accuracy? Effectiveness? Something else?
    • Is that really a big deal or do you just have an attitude problem?
    • Could you chose contentedness with that issue if it never changes?
    • Where areas are you contributing to your church?
    • If a leader thinks about you, would they label you as someone who contributes significantly to the vision and mission of the church? (Not just money, but your actions and heart for the congregation.)
    • Are  you comparing what you want with what you’ve seen at another church? Is that a fair comparison?
    • Is the root of your dissatisfaction a personal sin issue that is manifesting itself as dissatisfaction with something at church?
    • Are you seeking out relationships with people in your congregation or are you waiting for those relationships to pursue you?
    • Are you just being a jerk?

    This is what I know

    I know that Jesus expects us to live inter-dependently with a community of other believers. As I read the New Testament I never read about the early church being a place of comfort, cushy chairs, mono-cultural, or without tension. Instead, I see a church which gave of itself fully, which recognized that some people were mature while others were immature, was as functional and dysfunctional as a family, and was all about giving and receiving fully of themselves.

  • When did ministry become an office job?

    Photo by t. magnum via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    Somewhere along the way ministry became a desk jockey job.

    When I read the book of Acts and even the pastoral epistles I get the idea that being a pastor was action packed.

    • John didn’t kick it in staff meeting for 2-3 hours per week.
    • Peter didn’t make edits to the bulletin.
    • Matthew didn’t work late to attend the facilities team meeting.
    • Phillip didn’t put on a collared shirt and sit in a swivel chair from 8-4.

    Even if you go back 50 years the pastoral staff wasn’t all about programs and project managing. They were out in the commnity visiting elderly, the sick, and doing house calls. If the staff had an office it was for study. If the staff met it was for prayer. There was an administrative staff that did admin work and project management. Not pastors. Pastors were out doing, not sitting behind a desk.

    But somewhere between there and here all ministry jobs became something else. If we’re honest the ministry job became 75% administrative and 25% ministry on a good day. New people in a church always say the same thing... this isn’t what I thought it would be.

    At least once per week someone will ask me if I miss working in the local church. The truth of the matter is that I have the same level of contact with high school students today as I had in nearly a decade of full-time church ministry as a youth pastor. I’m not in a rush to go from actually doing ministry to riding a desk in the office and talking about ministry. If I ever accepted a call to a church again, the role would be radically different… or else I’d go insane.

    Life in ministry isn’t meant to be boring

    But for many people the jobs that pay are boring.

    Too many meetings and not enough ministry. Office hours and office gossip and office meetings and trying to look busy.

    The goal is all jacked up. Where does the desk jockey model lead too? More desk jockeys running more complicated programs. We need to rebel against it because we know where this leads. With less than 10% of the population actively engaged in a local church… seriously, we know the current way of doing things doesn’t work!

    Stop it.

    Radical change is required in the way church staff operates to reverse the trend.

    We don’t need a revival. We need full-time ministers to do full-time ministry.

    Exceptions: No doubt, there are objectors to my generalization. That’s the nature of hyperbole, isn’t it? But at the same time compare the hours per week that your own church spends in the office vs. the amount of time the New Testament church did. They didn’t even have an office! So it was 0%. The biblical model is 0%. God’s Word is true, right? God is unchanging and unchangeable? Did I miss the memo in my Bible? How can we justify 50%, 75%, or 90% of our hours doing office work?

    Church, we have an office problem. (Misappropriation of funds if you ask me.) And if we want to reach more than the 10% we currently reach, we need to change or watch that 10% shrink to 5%. We know where this leads.

    Stop what you are doing and think about a new way.

    What’s the solution?

    Follow the church planters. That’s where the growth happens, right?

    Close the church office. Morph your ministry staff into field agents. Tell your team to go out and visit the sick, serve the poor, feed the hungry, teach the Bible “out there,” and minister to the widows and orphans. The pastoral epistles give us a pretty good vision for what to do. The reality is that we don’t want to do the job laid out there.

    Remove the office temptation and lease the office space. Pastors who are lazy will just set up offices in coffee shops or their homes. Fire them. If the church is to change, we will need agents of change and not desk jockeys.

    Church planters do it every day. It’s funny that they come up with all sorts of fancy statistics as to why they think their new plants stop growing after 12-18 months. Maybe it’s not the movement that slows, missiologically. Maybe it’s the staff that stops trying and starts with office hours?

  • Nehemiah vs. The American Church

    Photo by Nick Chill via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    I love the audacity great faith brings.

    It’s idealistic. It’s over-the-top. It’s incomprehensibly arrogant simplicity. It’s stupid fun to be around.

    And that’s why I love my church.

    This little church in the city truly believes they can be instrumental in seeing a new San Diego rise up to be an amazing place to live.

    Right now, we’re in a sermon series on the book of Nehemiah.

    As I read the narrative I can’t get past step one.

    Step one of rebuilding your city? Chapter 1… lay on your face and be honest in confessing to God.

    O LORD, God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and obey his commands, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel. I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s house, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees and laws you gave your servant Moses. Nehemiah 1:5-7

    What I love about Nehemiah and its message to the church is obvious… it’s not about your church, people. The purpose of the church isn’t to build a little empire. It’s to bring life to a dead and dying city. It’s to see the gospel bring renewal.

    When I look out over the landscape of church culture I can’t help but see that we’re missing step one.

    We need to deal with our own hearts. And we need to focus on the city and not our fiefdom.

    This next passage absolutely wrecked my view of the local church. At the end, when Jesus comes to judge the church, Revelation 2-3 gives us a glimpse of how he judges the church… it should change how you and I do business.

    v. 1 “To the angel of the church in Ephesus write”

    v. 8 “To the angel of the church in Smyrna write”

    v. 12 “To the angel of the church in Pergamum write”

    v. 18 “To the angel of the church in Thyatira write”

    3:1 “To the angel of the church in Sardis write”

    v. 7 “To the angel of the church in Philadelphia write”

    v. 14 “To the angel of the church in Laodicea write”

    In case you missed it. Jesus isn’t judging the work of a single, local church. He’s judging the work of His body in each city.

    Can I get an Amen?

  • Apocalypse Now – Life and Theology in Haiti

    24 hours into my second trip to Haiti and I started crafting this phrase:

    Theology and culture always co-mingle. You just hope that theology and culture never conspire against the goals of the church.

    In America: Theology and culture conspire to destroy the church through our belief in the American Dream and pursuit of happiness.

    In Haiti: Theology and culture conspire to over-spiritualize everything.

    At least that’s my opinion after my second visit. The first go-round, I was doing my best to look past all of that so I could focus on evaluating the needs of the people. But this time, it became clear to me that the desire to blame everything on the spiritual world was seriously hampering rebuilding.

    God may have been in the earthquake. But there were certainly human factors at play as well.

    Walking around Carrefour, the epicenter of the January 12th quake, is like a scene out of a movie. Not the beginning and fun parts. And not even after the credits roll. It’s like that sense of curiosity you have when you watch a movie like I Am Legend. What would happen if people re-inhabited the set? That’s the feeling you get walking around the effected areas. You are on the set of a movie about the end of the world.

    “The world has ended.” These are the words of some church leaders. Most Christians in Haiti seem to believe that January 12th was the beginning of the tribulation. And who can blame them? On a single day half the cities people became homeless. Almost 10% of the cities population was killed. Countless homes, business, churches, and government buildings either collapsed or were severely damaged. If this isn’t tribulation than the real tribulation is truly something unimagineable.

    Last week I documented some signs of hope in Haiti. This time I wanted to be fair and share some signs of despair. (And evidence that you need to be involved!)

    • Some rebuilding has begun. But with no building codes, horrible materials, and skilled labor lacking… people are just making the same mistakes that lead to so many deaths. It’s easy to blame God, but one major contributor was faulty construction practices.
    • Billions of dollars in foreign aid will be distributed mostly to wealthy oppressors. Joel spoke with a Spaniard on his way out of Haiti. He had been in the country for 3 years and is leaving because he can’t handle the corruption anymore. “Want to know where all the aid is going? The Haitians the NGOs are hiring are selling it out of the back door.” Enough money has been given to Haiti to completely level and rebuild Port-au-Prince. Unless people intervene all of that money will be squandered away bit by bit. Sorry if that’s shocking to you.
    • While there are thousands of NGOs on the ground, very few have camp managers like Sean Penn. Like it or lump it, each camp needs a foreigner who will go to the various NGOs and leverage social currency selflessly on behalf of people. Spiritual needs are great to meet. But there are still plenty of physical needs unmet too. A camp manager who checks in 1-2 times per week isn’t going to cut it. It takes people who make running the camp their life mission to make things happen.
    • The earthquake shook the people, but a culture of dependency is hard to loosen. Americans have a “fix-it” mentality. It’s in our cultural DNA and we exhibit it everywhere we go in the world. As the recipient of generations of this, Haiti (and other places in the world like Haiti) have a “foreigners fix-it” mentality. Our cab driver in Ft. Lauderdale was the perfect example. His wife is a doctor in Haiti and he sends home money to support her. When I asked him when he would move back to his country he told me, “I will move back when I find a white man willing to partner with me on my water and ice business.” When I told him that, in my opinion, the only hope from Haiti was if the Haitian people lead themselves and stopped depending on outsiders… he just laughed. “I wish that same thing, but the Haitian people just like to buy and be given things by white people. It means it is a better gift or business than a Haitian can create.”
    • The government of Haiti is dragging its feet. A major problem facing rebuilding efforts are the myriad of 18th century property laws that govern ownership. You need a permit to remove rubble. And if you are renting you need to get the owners permission. The owner might live in another country, and he may only have a share of the ownership with dozens of cousins. And, of course, to prove you own the land you need to go to a government building which collapsed. Round and round you go. Months go by and nothing gets done. Unless you pay a bribe, that is.

    Is there hope for Haiti? Obviously. I believe to the core of my being that Jesus brings renewal of the soul and the land. While this is an incredible time of spiritual revival in Haiti it is also the greatest opportunity in our lifetime for Christians to get involved at the grassroots levels and help root out corruption and see the best interests of the people served.

    If not you than who? Want to change the world? Think you are crazy enough?

    Step one.

  • The Kingdom of God is a Place Where Orphans Dance

    Those were the words of my friend and teammate, Mark Helsel.

    Our team was overwhelmed today as we joined in the craziness of an orphanage running in the backyard of a doctor turned pastor.

    Today we got a glimpse of an amazing ministry here in Carffuer, the Sons of God orphanage.

    What is it? Well, it’s nothing and everything at the same time. Upwards of 100 children live in a makeshift orphanage. The conditions are very rough. It’s messy and smelly in the backyard where the kids play. There are chunks of broken concrete and piles of mud. Little boys urinate in a drain next to workers doing laundry.

    But this isn’t about the squalor of the conditions. It is about the condition of their spirit. The children all wear huge smiles. They are warm and affectionate. They are clearly loved and safe. And thanks to the efforts of people like Ed Noble (Journey Church, La Mesa) and Doug Paggit (Solomons Porch, Minneapolis) they have plenty of food and supplies.

    This is what joy is! It is knowing that you are an orphan and have been brought from life threatening danger to life giving security. That’s why, when the singing begins, so does the dancing. Joy erupts from the very fact that you are loved and taken care of.

    Oh, to be a person that opens your home, life, and family to the needs of your community! What satisfaction and honor that must bring to the family in God’s eyes.

    Maybe, just maybe, this is what the church ought to be doing?

    A refuge in life’s earthquakes.
    A family when you have none.
    Security when you are left insecure.
    A future where there was none.
    Sharing to the point of poverty.

    I’m now back to the place I was in February. I simply cannot reconcile the world Iive in with the world I know exists here.

    That’s why I leave you simply with the challenge.

    Haiti: Pray. Give. Go.