3 Questions About Jesus: Jason Clark

This week Jason Clark responds to our 3 Questions About Jesus: Who is Jesus the Christ? What has he done? And why does it matter? (Previous installments: Jason Coker | Jesse Schroeder | Cari Jenkins)
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We all try to make sense life, what the meaning of life is, asking what is my purpose here, what is a good life, at least for myself?  And we all seem to get one shot at this life, one chance to take all that we are and invest it into our best answers to those questions.  At this time in history, and even when I was younger (I know it was some time ago), life seems about competition, survival of the fittest, and doing to others before others do it to you. Or as my gentle white haired grandma used to say, ‘take care of yourself grandson, because in this life I’ve learned no-one else will’.

It’s not that we don’t want life to be about more than this, it’s just that in our fast paced consumer world, being successful, getting ahead, looking out for yourself, is what our friends and family and so often we default to.  And even if you wanted to, you can’t jam the system, there is no way to opt out of the juggernaut for getting ahead in life. It’s the way things are, so either drop out, or get stuck in.

And the effort and investment to get ahead, is kept alive and made worth while by the prize of what we think life is about, maybe a great career, great family, holidays, living somewhere cool, and retiring early.  Where we live, what job we do and what relationships we have reveal the answers to what we really think the meaning and purpose of life is about, they are the real investments we are making, daily with all we are.  It’s our life, we are kings of our kingdom with our decision and choices, as we decide who and what we are, and what we bring into our lives, as we make a life.

Jesus was someone who understood what life was about, and decided to invest his life very differently. Instead of getting ahead, he said he had come to serve others, that his investment was into a different reality and economy, which he called ‘The Kingdom of God’. That life, this life was about investing all we have, time, energy and money, our heart, soul, body and mind in a different reality. He said that jobs, where we live and relationships are very important, we’ve got that part right, but how we invest ourselves for those aspects of life is very different.

He even told us not to worry about all these things, that the reason we worry is because we fear losing things we shouldn’t be putting our heart and soul into in the first place.  And he did more than talk about this new reality, he lived it.  Every day, every breath, every step, he invested his life in helping others see that life was about knowing God, and entering into the plans God has for us. Using our gifts, and skills, passions and interest to invest in God’s economy.  And he said that if we do that, God will give the best life we could ever have.  And he said that if we practice this life investment, our lives will continue, after death into eternity.  Jesus brought a warning too, reminding us to take care.  That where we invest our lives determines who we become now and forever, so choose wisely.

Jesus invitation seems so impossible, it was as impossible 2,000 years ago as much as it is now.  In fact people intent on investing in a way of life much like ours today, eventually put him on a cross and killed him. And as they looked at him dying with no friends, no job, no career, no success, and no status they asked him, ‘where is your God and this way of life now’?

I was 17 the first time someone explained to me who Jesu was and is, and why it mattered, and maybe if I tell you what that friend told me, it will sum up what I’m trying to say here?  My friend said that, investing my life in Jesus, taking all that I am and giving it to Him, might not make my life easier, in fact in lots of ways it would be much harder.  But he promised me that, I would have something to live for and something to die for, that there wouldn’t be a day when I wouldn’t know meaning, adventure and purpose.

I chose to make that investment, and 24 years later, I have experienced the most amazing life, with all of that and more.  The depth and richness of discovering who I am, the most amazing experience of life with others, as I daily try to invest all I have in Him, has been stunning.  I’d love to tell you more about that sometime. Choosing Jesus was the best investment I ever made with my life.  Where are you investing yours?

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Jason Clark (www.deepchurch.org.uk) is British, recently turned 40, and lives on the SW edge of London, UK. He has three teenage kids, and is celebrating 20 years of marriage to Bev later this year. He is midway through a PhD in theology at Kings College London, holds a D.Min from George Fox Seminary, and is the senior pastor of a Vineyard church that he started with his Bev 13 years ago, having been involved in Vineyard churches for 23 years in total.

Technorati Tags: 3 Questions About Jesus, Gospel, Jason Clark, Stories

3 Questions About Jesus: Cari Jenkins

This week we asked Cari Jenkins to respond to our 3 Questions About Jesus: Who is Jesus the Christ? What has he done? And why does it matter?
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I was in front of my home taking down twinkle lights one year just after Christmas when I saw a young girl walking down the street towards me. She was too young to be walking alone and I noticed tears streaming down her cheeks. I ask if she needed anything two times. And two times she turned me down. She paused at the end of my driveway and I asked a third time. This time she responded with a yes. She used my phone to call someone to come get her.  Over the next hour I learned that she had run away from home the night before. Then my door bell rang. A man stood desperate at my front door. He was singularly focused, “where is my daughter!” I invited him in and watched as the two were reunited. I stood in the kitchen, giving them space and trying to keep myself composed as I was invited into this very intimate event of a relationship being restored. It was beautiful and powerful.

A friend had an old piece of furniture. It was cracked, paint was peeling and it was literally falling apart at the hinges. He didn’t see the dilapidated mess which I saw, he saw what it was originally designed to be. Over the next few months he spent hours restoring this piece of furniture. He poured over it with love, sweat and patience. Then one day I got the call, he had finished. I stopped by his home and before me was a beautiful, masterpiece. The once old chest of drawers was fully restored to its original design and it was beautiful.

Both of these stories speak of Jesus. He restores broken relationships. He restores people, like my friend restored that chest of drawers, He restores us to our original design. He restores us in our misguided beliefs and He constantly is making old things new again. Jesus, He is the one who brings restoration to this planet and to all people everywhere and His restoration is perfect and we, you and I get to share in it. It is powerful and beautiful and it constantly invites others into restoration as well.

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Cari lives in downtown San Diego, Ca where she founded The 11:29 Project. An initiative that seeks to connect people to the rest and restoration found in Jesus and advocates for the marginalized. She blogs a carijenkins.wordpress.com.

Technorati Tags: 3 Questions About Jesus, Cari Jenkins, Gospel, Jesus Christ, Stories

Resolved, To Embrace Christ as the Embodiment of Healing and Hope

I have to admit, although the people at Resolved had been a pleasure to interact with, by Saturday evening I was resigned to be continually frustrated by the preaching. Thus far I’d found the messages to be pedantic, fallacious, and repressive – not so much in content, but in the way the story of Christ had been conveyed and applied.

For a brief few hours that all changed Saturday night when C.J.Mahaney took the stage.

I was taken by surprise when he began by drawing attention to a woman and daughter he had met in the airport. They were finally able to attend the conference after being held back for several years due to the degenerative illness of the husband/father. Sadly, he had recently died and, though grieving, they decided to attend the conference this year in his honor. C.J. was deeply moved by their story and in front of 3000 people honored their loss and offered them comfort. It was the first display of compassion I’d seen thus far at Resolved. It was a genuinely powerful moment.

He then began his message, titled “I wish I’d been there,” launching into the first truly expositional teaching of the weekend. He read from the story of the Gadarene Demoniac in Mark Chapter 5, effectively immersing us into the social fabric of the time, the interpersonal tragedy of the affliction, and the inherent suffering and triumph of the story itself. He spoke with sincerity and expressiveness, with humor and creativity, and with a powerful sense of dramatic suspense. He was the only great storyteller of the weekend.

He addressed the obvious difficult subject – whether or not Christians can be demonically afflicted – handling it constructively and reasonably, without ridiculing opponents or propping up straw men. He did not try to scare us into believing he was right. In fact, quite the opposite: his tone and tenor he made it clear that standing with Christ was the safest possible place to be, and that nothing need be feared in the light of the gospel.

It was nothing short of a tour de force of gospel preaching.

Mahaney pointed out how this amazing story of deliverance demonstrated Christ’s authority to save people from all manner of sin and oppression; how we are all – like the demoniac – ruled by the prevailing powers that work death and destruction in our lives through our own brokenness; and, most importantly, how the infective mission of the liberating gospel was there too, in Jesus’ commission to send the man back to his own town to be a witness of this new, liberating Kingdom.

It was the gospel and it was all there in the story, plain as day and easy to see. C.J. was there in the story as well – he pointed himself out several times in the image of the demoniac – but I was there too…and so were you. Indeed, Mahaney started his message by saying, “I wish I’d been there,” but by the time he was finished we all had been. Each and every person in that room had just seen Jesus – the living embodiment of the healing, hope, and power of the Kingdom of God – and we would never be the same. It was now clearer that through Jesus all bonds could be broken, all wounds could be healed, and the distant and long-suffering promise of a truly good and liberating life had rushed in from the future, crashing headlong into the powers of death and oppression.

I had been sitting in a kind of lobby area, listening over the sound system and taking notes on my laptop, but halfway through I was compelled to get up and walk into the main hall so I could see for myself what was happening on stage. I was transfixed for the next 30 minutes or so. The message he gave us wasn’t merely audible. He actually seemed to bear the weight of it on his person and so preached it with his whole being. The experience changed me.

There was nothing resembling an alter call, and I don’t really even believe in alter calls anymore, but afterward it was all I could do to keep from rushing toward the stage and falling on my face before God in gratitude. It took all my powers of restraint to keep from disturbing the conference at the renewed and deeper realization that the Kingdom had come in the person of Christ.

Now anything was possible.

Technorati Tags: C.J. Mahaney, Gospel, Jesus Christ, Mark, Preaching, Resolved Conference

Resolved, To Not Think Wrongly About Jesus (But To Speak Uncharitably About Our Enemies)

I honestly feel I’ve approached the Resolved conference with an open mind. I’m not saying I had no bias – my initial post made that bias quite clear. But honestly, as each speaker has taken the stage I’ve found myself inwardly excited about the possibility of hearing something true, edifying, and spirit-filled. After all, these are some of the most highly acclaimed preachers in this particular evangelical camp.

However, I spent the majority of Saturday rather disappointed.

First up was Al Mohler, who chose to preach on Jesus as the high priest and mediator of a new and better covenant. Mohler stressed the Holy requirements of God and the desperate need for a perfect substitute to satisfy the wrath that resulted from the human failure to meet those requirements. It was clear from the beginning that Mohler wasn’t really there to speak about Jesus, so much as to press a particular – and for most people, obscure – agenda about Jesus’ death: namely, penal substitutionary atonement. Towards the end he hammered his point home:

“The shortest summary of the gospel in the NT is, ‘He saves.’ Jesus is our savior. We all desperately need a savior. He is the high priest who brings salvation. This is the doctrine of penal substitution and without it there is no gospel.”

In other words, to put Mohler’s teaching as precisely as I can, faith in Jesus isn’t the defining marker of salvation – rather, it is the ability to understand, agree with, and articulate a particular kind of technical belief concerning how and why Jesus died. This theme of salvation hanging on the apprehension of a technicality is one I would hear several more times throughout the conference – although, interestingly, not always in relation to theories of the atonement. Apparently, according to some of the Resolved preachers, there are several finely nuanced abstract constructions one must think about properly in order to be “saved.”

Mohler never explicitly defined what he meant by “salvation,” but in listening to his message it becomes quite clear that according to him what we’re saved from is God (meaning God’s wrath).

It’s not that I disagree with the notion that we must strive to have a proper conception of God. Actually, I do agree. I just don’t agree that thinking wrongly about God eternally condemns us. If it does, we’re all buggered. Making doctrinal purity salvific is the fundamentalist equivalent of Pentecostals making mystical encounters salvific. Both camps say that in order to be saved we must “know” God. Fundy’s make such “knowing” about doctrinal assent, while Pentecostals make it all about having a sensory relationship with God. (I’ve pointed out before that Jesus didn’t say we have to know him in order to be saved, but rather that he must know us).

My problem with both camps is, either way, they’ve made “God” and faith and salvation into boundaries of division rather than bridges of reconciliation.

A good example of this tendency to divide in Al Mohler’s preaching was his constant use of insults and fallacious rhetoric, which he aimed at his ideological opponents. For example, he unfairly caricatured liberal Christianity by referring to some feminist theologians who declared Christ’s crucifixion was an example of “divine child abuse.”

Again, it’s not that I completely disagree. Such extreme theologies are silly and absurd. My problem is that pointing to the most extreme versions of liberalism doesn’t accurately portray the vast, legitimate spectrum of differing theological opinions. He’s not engaging other’s views, he’s hen-picking the worst examples of his opponents and painting all “liberals” with that brush. In doing so he effectively creates an “us vs them” posture for this community. He did the same thing with the Catholic practice of mass. Rather than honestly engage with Catholic theology on this point (which would have been off topic) he merely took a cheap opportunity to vilify all Catholics in a snide tone that communicated not only disagreement, but disdain.

(He also engaged in a rather bizarre rant about P.E.T.A. and the necessity of the animal sacrifices in the OT to cause real and extended suffering for the animals involved. He seems to believe that mere sacrifice wasn’t enough for propitiation; suffering was also required (how much suffering Mr. Mohler?). With this strange and completely unfounded argument he seemed to be going for a hat trick: defending penal substitutionary atonement, legitimizing eternal conscious torment in hell, and associating the opponents of those two beliefs with radical animal extremists.)

Let’s face it: It’s easier to rally people around the differences they have with others than it is to rally them around the commonality we all share. He’s protecting the boundaries of fundamentalism because it’s easier than ministering reconciliation. This kind of technique is simply a manifestation of violence, and hence, a total affront to the gospel. His tactics were fear, shame, and coercion; the gospel, on the other hand, is about Christ, the God-man who totally abdicated such tactics.

What really bothered me was that all I’ve ever heard about Al Mohler is how brilliant the guy is. After all, he has a Ph.D. in Systematic and Historical Theology from Southern Baptist Seminary. I would expect an awful lot more intellectual even-handedness and charity from a Christian scholar. At the very least, I’m quite sure he’s a hell of a lot smarter than I am, so I honestly expected someone who was reasonable, intellectually honest, and frankly, utterly convincing.

Instead, I was saddened and disappointed by what I heard.

Technorati Tags: Al Mohler, Atonement, Gospel, Penal Substitution, Resolved Conference

Galatians Series at Ikon Community Starts Today

This week at Ikon we began a series on Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians. We kicked it off last night with a gathering centered around one of the major themes of the letter, and today I started the daily reading with an introduction of why I think this should be an important series for our little group.

As usual, any of you are welcome to join us!

Technorati Tags: Galatians, Gospel, Ikon Community, Paul

What Does The Gospel Really Look Like?

What does the gospel really look like in practice, on the ground, in the city, walking the streets, in the boardrooom and the legislative session, among the neighborhoods and schools of North America?

That was essentially the question asked by JR Woodward last year of 50 missional church practitioners, including myself. What would you write about the good news in your local paper if given the opportunity?

The 50 responses have now been collected and published in a wonderful little book called ViralHope: Good News From The Urbs to the Burbs and Everything In Between. It was humbling to contribute my small chapter to this book as many of the other men and women featured on the pages are people I have admired and emulated for years. Others I’m just discovering and getting to know. As Alan Hirsch writes in his endorsement of the book:

“ViralHope is a unique and enticing collection of postcards from a veritable who’s who of the missional church from across the Western world. It provides us with articulate and varied perspectives on how missionaries to the West are conceiving the good news in and for their various contexts. A worthy read.”

ViralHope would make a fantastic 50-day personal devotion, small group study reflection, or church-wide reading series. You can click here to get your own copy from Amazon.

Technorati Tags: Books, Christianity, Good News, Gospel, JR Woodward, missional, Missional Church, ViralHope

The Prostitution of the Gospel Through Marketing

A while back I wrote a post called 5 Arguments Against the Use of Media and Marketing in Church (I followed up with a related post about hologram pastors here). Not surprisingly I received some pretty irate feedback from other pastors. But today Eric Seiberling posted a very even-handed response disagreeing with me that is worth reading if you’re interested in this subject. I really appreciate Eric’s thoughtful response. Having said that, Eric and I definitely disagree:

Marketing and media is just another tool.  It changes the dynamics of reach, immediacy and immersion of a message, but it does not change it. The message is the message.

If tools are neutral then he’s right. We can put the gospel on a postcard and all we have to worry about is being faithful to the message. But there are two problems with that. First, tools are not neutral; hammers, televisions, and guns are all engineered for purposes and with technology which prejudice their use. At the very least tools participate in the shaping of their subject in ways that are beyond the control (and sometimes beyond the awareness) of the operator. At worst they dominate to the point of becoming the message and even transforming the operator (yes, like a ring of power!). Personally, I think the degree to which that domination occurs depends on the amount of power the tool facilitates (for example, guns prejudice their own use and shape the character of their operators more powerfully than, say, hammers). There are few tools more powerful these days than media.

But there’s a second problem beyond the prejudice of tools. If you think the gospel is a propositional message meant to lead people to an action (like the sinners prayer) then any delivery system will do – indeed, the more powerful and compelling the “call to action” the better. But the gospel is not merely information to be conveyed, it is a person who must be both proclaimed and demonstrated. And because that person is not physically available to us, the means of proclamation becomes a demonstration of his reality. Hence, there’s simply no way to proclaim the gospel of Christ without personally, locally, and relationally demonstrating him. Marketing seeks to bypass that inefficiency, and in doing so eliminates the presence of Christ from the gospel. Do we really want to personify Christ in the same way that Madison Avenue personifies, say, Oprah Winfrey or Colonel Sanders?

Is it even possible to represent Christ with postcards, television commercials, and propaganda films without irreparable misrepresentation (Ceci n’est pas une Christ? – HT: Chris Nelson)? As far as I know, there is only one ikon that embodies the image of Christ on earth – the Church – and that ikon is so obviously flawed that dressing it up in marketing lipstick just makes her look, to the rest of the world, like a cheap prostitute.

Case in point: is this really an accurate embodiment of Christ?

Or this?

Or, my personal favorite:

Each of these are real examples of church marketing products (mass-mailer postcards) from one of the largest and most successful church marketing companies in the U.S. (yes, there’s profit in this). I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that these postcards distort Christ in ways that range from mildly perplexing to blatantly idolatrous. Especially in the last two, the medium really is the message, and the message is most definitely not the gospel. Moreover, this is not just about the intent of the user or designer (although that clearly is a factor); marketing inherently tends toward expressions of leisure, affluence, and power in the same way that hammers tend toward expressions of blunt force. Otherwise they just don’t work because of the prejudice of their technology and design.

I’ll admit there are many nuances to be explored in this topic, and I do think media can be used by churches in missional and educational ways. Perhaps I’ll explore some thoughts on that in the future, but in the meantime I think my friend Bill Kinnon says it best:

What we win them with, is what we win them to. Win them with entertainment, and you’ve created customers – who expect to be continually entertained.

Picking up our crosses and following Jesus is not particularly attractive. Buying into a worldview where the last are first, and the first are last doesn’t win us any earthly popularity awards – and seems antithetical to the North American Dream.

Death to self. Becoming weak and poor. Identifying with the marginalized. Relinquishing the American Dream. Try putting that on a postcard and see who shows up.

Technorati Tags: Church, Eric Seiberling, Gospel, Jesus Christ, marketing, Media

Been There, Done That

Today the Ikon folks met at Grape Day Park in Escondido to have a Thanksgiving meal with our friends who live in the Park. For the past six months Cory and Crissy Verner have spent every Saturday having coffee and donuts with these folks, making friendships and immersing themselves in the lives of people who are typically overlooked. Once a month a few of us join them, bring real food, get to know people, offer haircuts, etc. Today they wanted to share the holiday with their new friends in a meaningful way.

Several things surprised me about the gathering, but one thing didn’t.

I was surprised how many people turned out. There were probably over 100 folks there today, and at least 30 of them came to bring food for our friends in the park. Wow.

I was surprised at how peacefully the event unfolded. I’ve done a ton of feeding programs at churches and non-profit centers as a pastor, and it’s not uncommon for a large gathering like this to grow tense (or worse) with people cutting in line, jockeying for position and taking more than their share. There was none of that today. I think this is because our approach all along has been that we’re not feeding the homeless, we’re eating with our friends. Cory and Crissy embody this approach perfectly and did a great job of setting it up like a large family picnic. People chatted in line, piled their plates, and plopped onto blankets in small groups scattered around the area. Kids played football and stormed the playground. It was genuinely fun and restful.

I was surprised we didn’t get a ticket. The Verners have been progressively harassed by the Park Police over the past few months because it’s illegal to feed the homeless there. We do it anyway because we think that’s stupid, immoral, and discriminatory – but we’ve always been discreet about it and it’s always been much smaller than this. Today a Park cop showed up, saw all the people sitting on blankets laughing and eating together and said, “This is a good thing. I’m not going to call it in.” Then he stayed and chatted for awhile. Wow again.

I was surprised how many different churches were involved. As I walked around meeting people I counted 6 different churches from a variety of traditions represented. This wasn’t intentional. As word organically spread over the past few weeks other churches jumped on board, officially and unofficially. It was inspiring and humbling to see.

I wasn’t surprised when someone expressed disappointment that we weren’t sharing the gospel. I’ve come to expect this from Christians. We’ve been telling ourselves for a couple hundred years now that the gospel is an intellectual formula about Jesus and heaven, so it comes as no surprise to me when people expect a speech about that formula.

I was proud of my wife Jenell who replied, “These people already know about that, they don’t need to hear it again from us. Actually, I think most of them have more faith than we do. What they need now is relationships.”

Exactly.

Every Saturday around the time Cory and Crissy go to the park another man shows up with his bible and preaches a message. Every week he says the same thing: “You’re sinners; you’re filthy and depraved; your addictions are keeping you from God and you’re going to Hell; turn to God and be saved.” This means saying the sinners prayer so they’ll go to heaven when they die – because that’s what’s really important. Additionally, the natural, yet deeply superstitious implication is that if they do so, some of their immediate problems might start going away too.

Now – never mind for the moment that I don’t think this is the gospel – Jenell and I have taken an informal poll, and as near as we can tell they’ve all been there and done that already…multiple times in most cases. In fact, in 15 years of ministry in 3 different States we’ve never met a homeless person that didn’t profess Christ. They’re so desperate they’ll pray anything if it means getting some relief for their hunger, their illness, their woundedness, and their hopelessness. You would too.

But it doesn’t help.

Praying a sinner’s prayer won’t fill your belly. It doesn’t fix mental illness, it won’t get you a job and it won’t dry your addictions. I don’t even think it will get you into heaven when you die (but that’s another blog post).

Here’s what does help: people. God, yes…but God through people. What helps us is deeply committed, compassionate people who are willing to get to know us, suffer with our dysfunctions, love us in spite of our shit, help us re-build our lives, and include us in the little things. As John says,

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹²No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (1 John 4:7-12)

That’s where God resides. That’s where we “see” him – in the vacuum of human need, which then fills to overflowing with life as the abundance of God flows from person to another. This is a significant implication of the incarnation of Christ, and every time we do it we’re literally “sharing” the gospel.

Sadly, not may Christians I’ve met have been there and done that. It’s way too hard, too messy, and too frightening. But that is where salvation lies, for both the giver and the receiver. In my recent series on the Kingdom and Economy I quoted Bryant Myers, and he’s worth quoting here again:

“Poverty is a result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable.”

There’s an indispensable place for proclaiming the audaciously disruptive news of Christ’s Kingship, but for those who’ve already heard, our urgent task is to demonstrate the gospel as a life of deeply just and harmonious relationships that manifest redeeming love between people.

Technorati Tags: 1 John, Bryant Myers, Gospel, Grape Day Park, homeless, Ikon Community, Jesus Christ, poor, poverty, Salvation, Thanksgiving

Church Told to Stop Feeding Hispanics

In an astonishing decision, a local zoning hearing has determined that a Phoenix church can no longer serve a weekly pancake breakfast to Hispanics.

Retired Arizona Supreme Court justice Bobb Crockeran, serving as a hearing officer, ruled Monday that feeding the Hispanics at a place of worship can be banned by city ordinance. The decision affects all Phoenix churches with underlying residential zoning.

Over the summer, city officials maintained that the church violated Phoenix zoning code by feeding the Hispanics on its property, a use that can only occur in commercial or industrial zones. City officials said the decision is effective immediately.

The church argued that it is within it’s constitutional rights to serve people’s needs on its property according to its religious beliefs. But the Crockeran disagreed:

In a 19-page opinion, Crockeran said the city can restrict where Hispanics can be fed and that zoning regulations apply to everyone equally. Additionally, he said that trumping land-use regulations is not a constitutional right.

The controversy over the weekly pancake worship service arose last spring after neighbors complained about an increase of Hispanics sleeping and loitering in alleys, incidents of burglary, aggressive panhandling, vandalism, public intoxication, prostitution and public urination. Parents of preschool students on the church campus complained that their children encountered Hispanics in school hallways.

North-central Phoenix resident Stephen Tozier said he’s pleased with Crockeran’s decision.

“This decision is more about protecting a residential area than anything else,” he said. “The nice part is the church can support the Hispanics elsewhere [...] but we can’t move the residential neighborhood.”

Peter Barres, a Phoenix neighborhood activist who spoke at last month’s zoning-adjustment hearing, said churches must be mindful that zoning rules and restrictions apply to everyone.

“It’s not a Hispanic issue, per se, it’s the fact that you need to have some control, and that’s what the zoning ordinance provides,” he said. “It’s not a problem with Hispanic people in wealthy neighborhoods. That would be a matter of prejudice. This issue would be setting churches up to avoid zoning ordinances.”

Oops, there must be something wrong with my keyboard! Everywhere it says “Hispanics” it’s supposed to say “poor and homeless.” My bad (okay, I changed the names too). The whole news story is here.

Actually, the issues are exactly the same.

These are the very same fear-based arguments that have always been made to rationalize the prejudicial dehumanization of hated groups of people, be they of a different color, a different nationality, or a different socio-economic group. Whether it was mid-century Jim Crow laws, modern immigration vitriol, anti-gay hatred, or intolerance of the poor, marginalized and hated people are always unjustly characterized as disgusting criminals and the laws that promote discrimination are always whitewashed in the benign language of “community concern.” Notice, too, how a local ordinance that actually promotes the dehumanization of an entire group of people is characterized as as protecting equality.

The dehumanization of any person never produces equality, never truly protects anyone, and is never in the best interests of a community. It’s time to stop treating certain people like a sub-species. This is what the gospel is for.

Technorati Tags: charity, Equality, Gospel, homeless, mission, News, poor, poverty

The Arrogant Bastard Church

Ever since I wrote The Mega-Freeloader Church I’ve been thinking about a blog series that examines different cultural phenomena in the West as a way of re-imagining certain aspects of church ecclesiology. When I saw David Fitch’s post today – A Warning List For Those Who Would Join the Missional Church – I knew I needed to start my series with this:

Introducing “The Arrogant Bastard Church.”

No, I’m not talking about Mars Hill (either of them). For those of you who love beer you may know that I’m talking about some of the best beer known to man – and, happily, it’s practically made in my own backyard at fabulous place called Stone Brewery. Have a gander at the prose on the back label of a bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale: Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Arrogant Bastard Ale, beer, Church, David Fitch, ecclesiology, Gospel, Jesus Christ, missio dei, missional