Dear Friends,
Thank you for your prayers during this past month. Although Lenutsa and I are getting back into things in Galati, we’re finding that it takes more time than we anticipated in readjusting. Even when we aren’t doing too much, we come home at the end of the day completely exhausted. As we’ve read some books on sabbatical and spoken with others who have taken sabbatical, we understand that this is normal. But we do ask that you continue to pray for us.
I’ve gotten more involved with the pastoral committee of the church in which Lenutsa and I participate. I’ve been taking part in their weekly meetings and helping organize their department for social aid. Please pray for this church that we would be faithful to God in responding to the poor and needy.
This month we will receive an intern, Kelsey, from George Fox, who will be with us through July. While Lenutsa and I were in Oregon, we took a training course called Brighter Minds, which focuses on brain development. Kelsey went through this training and wants to help us implement it, particularly with the children at the Community Center who struggle with attention deficits. Please pray that we would develop a good tool for the kids and that God would use it to help the children as they face the many challenges in their lives.
A few years back, two of our children from the Center were abandoned by their mother, who left them with extended family to work in Italy. The situation was dire for these two kids. Thankfully, God sent a family to receive them in foster care, which was an almost perfect environment for this brother and sister – although it still meant a long battle with the state authorities for approval. Sadly, after two years the family decided that they could no longer care for them. So, the two youth went to live with an aunt. They lived there for a few months until the aunt decided she could no longer keep them. They then went to the Center for Minors, a building packed with youth that are transitioning out of difficult homes and into other homes under the state’s care. Initially, the mother of our kids said that she would come from Italy to take care of them, but that proved to be an empty promise. After much prayer and deliberation, Paul and Ana decided to take them into our community home. This is a big decision for this young couple, and it means yet another home for these two kids. Please pray for Paul and Ana and for our two kids, Eleni and Florin, that they would quickly adjust to life together and that it would be a healthy and healing place for them all.
Next week we are holing our annual community retreat. The theme is discipleship. Please pray that our relationships would grow and that we would be touched and refreshed by the Spirit of God.
I also plan on going to Moldova in June to visit our young community there and to discuss with them their organizational structure. I would appreciate your prayers for that time.
I started a blog in April. If you are interested, you can subscribe at the site address: http://fragmentsandreflections.wordpress.com/ Here are some of the topics I wrote about:
I have posted two other reflections below.
Thank you for your prayer and support,
david
Gaining Perspective
Romania celebrates May Day as their Labor Day, and most will go out to a lake, a park, or the Black Seato celebrate. Usually, we rent a big bus and take the kids from the “Valley” Community Center to a nearby forest. Although the drive only takes about 20 minutes, it’s always interesting to see the excitement of the kids and to hear their comments as we get out of the city.
For some of the children, it is their first time outside of the city. I sat next to a 12 year old boy, who has been coming to the Community Center since last September. He could barely stay seated as he fought with the bus curtain in order to see everything that passed by. He constantly said, “Look!” or asked “What’s that?” He saw his first wind turbine. He saw his first airport, although it is small and only used for crop-dusters. As he looked out over the vast field, he didn’t understand the differences in color and shades. I explained that the bright areas are where the sun is breaking through the clouds, the darker areas the shadows of the clouds, and the bluish area a large lake.
What was interesting for me was not only the sense of awe that this young boy had before a wide panorama of nature but also the fact that he was just noticing these things for the first time. I thought about how this simple and short excursion outside the norm of city life brought a different perspective on the world – one that is difficult to see from within the confines of tall apartment blocks and asphalt streets.
This young boy’s questions reminded me of another place marked by the sun and the clouds: Shadowlands. The movie includes one of C.S. Lewis’ famous statements: “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God- it changes me.” Of course, with numerous examples in Scripture of God being moved and changed by human prayer, Lewis’ words are only partially right. Still, his statement carries a particular weight in a culture that so often understands prayer as a means to changing God. Predominantly, we pray that God will answer our wishes, intervene in our circumstances and act on our behalf or the behalf of those we care for. And this is good and right, but not when we forget that when we pray, we are not primarily asking God to do our will but to reveal to us the will of the Father. We are placing ourselves before God and inviting God to change ourselves. When we spend time before God, we are changed – our desires, our values, our perspectives. It is like taking a trip out of the city and getting away from all we know and from all that has become normal, especially the normal that we fail to recognize as sin, dehumanization and all that is less than God’s desire for us.
In the Church, May Day is a celebration of Saint Philip and Saint James. In the midst of a culture, much like ours, that constantly competes to define our perspectives on life and promises to satisfy, Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and then we shall be satisfied” (John 14:8). Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?” (14:9). Philip, like us, is so used to the world’s perspective that he, like my 12 year old friend, cannot differentiate the water and the fields from the shadows of the clouds. Gaining perspective comes from seeing Jesus. Jesus said to Philip, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father…” (14:9). When we see the Father, we have the perspective to identify the lights and shadows and a world that shimmers and sparkles in the springtime sun. As if seeing the world for the first time, we too sit with a sense of awe.
Perceiving the American Church’s Approach to the Poor
Before receiving our sabbatical this past year, I had not spent more than three weeks at one time in the U.S. since coming to Romania 10 years ago. While I noticed changes on every visit to the States, there is only so much you can see and sense in such a short time. Having the opportunity to spend an 6 months in the U.S. allowed me to get in tune with the deeper changes in American culture.
One of the most obvious changes that I observed was in the church’s attitude towards the poor. When I lived in the U.S. in the 1990s and was becoming aware of what Scripture said about the poor, I felt like I had to convince friends in the church that responding to the hungry, naked and poor is Christian. It seemed to me that serving the poor was seen as a special call for certain individuals or organizations. It was seen as something secondary to or the means for converting people and growing churches, or it was dismissed altogether as liberal or communist. I was deeply encouraged to see that in the various churches that we visited in different parts of the U.S., “caring for the poor” is part of the church’s regular vocabulary and that it is not seen as optional but an inherent task of the church.
Although this represents a fundamental change in the church’s mentality, I still often heard aggravating statements like this: “Make sure you don’t just care for the poor but that you also lead them to Jesus.” While I agree that Christian ministries among the poor should be explicitly Christian and distinguish themselves from non-Christian social work, the prevalence of statements like this seems to show that the church’s turn towards the poor is superficial or partial. There are a few reasons why this disturbs me.
First, it assumes that because our community includes caring for the physical and social aspects of a person that we exclude spiritual aspects. So, the question itself betrays the inquirer’s modernist compartmentalization of a person – a perspective that is not only non-biblical but anti-biblical. Think of Jesus’ feeding of the multitudes, healing bodies and forgiving sins. These actions, for Jesus, were unified not compartmentalized. Likewise, in our community, we seek to minister holistically.
Second, the very question is dehumanizing to those who are already socially and economically marginalized. The question implies that our friends, who are in need, are the objects of ministry. It assumes that it is all right to help them with their needs as long as you tell them how to be saved. But Scripture doesn’t set up these false dichotomies. Rather, we are called to love. We don’t see the beaten, robbed and dying man on the roadside and give him a tract. We tend his wounds and care for him. Why? Because we love. Likewise, we tell the poor the Good News that God has invaded our world and paved a way to salvation. We don’t do this because that is the goal of our ministry but because we love them. And the authenticity of our love can be tested by whether or not we continue to love even when our message and our God is rejected.
It seems to me that the view that separates Christian proclamation from Christian presence can only be held by those who are isolated from relationship with the needy. I have, for example, painful memories of sitting with young children in coma and dying with AIDS. I could hold their hand. I could sing to them and pray for them. But I could not give them the 4 step plan of salvation. If the church’s message of salvation has any traction at all, it must confront and give hope to those suffering from disabilities, disease and hunger.
Lastly, those that are making these statements, asking me to “remember the disembodied souls,” are not saying to those who focus on teaching, evangelistic campaigns, or other media based forms of church activity, “Make sure you remember the poor” (Galatians 2:10). This reveals a lingering mentality that holds a hierarchy of needs and, thereby, values Christian ministries that claim to tell and teach above those that serve and care. But, if feeding the hungry and thirsty, welcoming the stranger and clothing the naked is an inherent part of Jesus’ gospel, then why don’t demand this from all Christian ministries? Somehow it is accepted that we go around telling people how to get saved from sin without caring for those impoverished by our sinful world. James condemns this behavior flatly saying, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (2:14-17).
Although we may moved further into the realization that the church is called to respond to the poor, we still have much further to go.