Prayer, Service, Development | Revolution in Jesusland

Prayer, Service, Development October 10, 2007

Posted by Zack in Missouri , trackback

Yesterday, Elizabeth and I caught the first day of Mission America’s “Loving America to Christ” conference in Kansas City. Then we drove over to St. Louis for the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) conference, that started today.

The two conferences represent two different, but overlapping, movements among Christians to serve, improve and “show Jesus” to their cities.

Yesterday’s conference and all the people we met there were amazing. Once again, I can say I’ve never seen anything like it. But it’s going to take a whole lot of translation to explain without making a mess of it. I’ll have to attempt to translate what these folks meant when they talked about “grace,” “prayer,” “spiritual warfare,” “the Kingdom,” “the Body of Christ,” and the “hands and feet” thereof. It’s going to have to wait until next week, when I have a block of free time.

Right now I’m at one of the first CCDA classes. This one is on “Empowerment,” led by Bob Lupton, who’s done incredible neighborhood economic development work over decades in his city of Atlanta—and has taught others all over the country. (Thanks to UrbanMinistry.org, you can listen to many different classes and lectures by Bob here. I highly recommend listening to one of those talks. He’s a great speaker and he’s speaking from decades of humble and brilliant trial and error.)

He just told a story about a talk he was invited to give recently at a “very, very biblical” college.

He asked the students, “What is the number one mandate in the Bible?”

One student answered, “Evangelize!”

He pressed them, and finally another answered, “You mean ‘love God and Love your neighbor’?”

Bob answered, “Yes. And so, who teaches the courses on neighbor loving here?”

Blank stares.

“You have a whole department here on evangelism,” Bob said to them, “But you’re telling me that you don’t have a single course on neighbor loving? No ‘Love Your Neighbor 101′ here?” And then he joked with them: “You know the problem with this place? You’re not biblical enough.”

He told us (I’m paraphrasing): “You get what they were doing? They were skipping over the great command on their way to the great commission. You can’t do that. The commission flows through the command—it’s a by product of the great command.”

I don’t think we’re going to hear much about direct evangelism at this conference. But yesterday’s “Loving America to Christ” conference was directly and explicitly all about evangelism. However, they really were doing it Bob’s way (Bob would say: Jesus’ way). When they talked about “showing our cities Christ” they were talking about providing health care, housing, counseling, etc…. To them, service and Jesus were literally one in the same thing. And I mean, LITERALLY. They believe that when they serve, they are acting as the physical body of Jesus on Earth and talked about it explicitly like that, very often with tears in their eyes. The folks at this CCDA conference, believe that too, though the terminology is a lot more accessible to non-Christians.