rel•e•vant \ˈre-lə-vənt\, adj. having some bearing on or importance for real-world issues, present-day events, or the current state of society

Relevant is a huge buzzword among North American Christians.

Traditional mainline denominations, most of which have been hemorrhaging in their memberships since the 1960’s, are desperate for ways to be relevant in order to attract new members.

Evangelical churches, whose memberships have grown considerably in that same time period, often credit their ability to thrive with their ability to be relevant – adopting strategies described as user-friendly, seeker-sensitive and contemporary.

The worship service has been the primary event that Evangelicals have placed their focus on in their attempts to be relevant. While almost all Mainline churches still follow a traditional order of worship with a few offering the option of one with a contemporary theme, many Evangelical churches have no traditional service but provide different services that appeal to different tastes – contemporary, praise & worship, hard rock, rap & hip-hop, etc.

Churches spend large amounts of money and time in the pursuit of using just the right theme, technology and talent to keep people coming back. Close attention is paid to market analysis, demographics, cultural trends and other parameters in order to insure that a church is getting it right in terms of the target audience they’re trying to reach. If you’ve ever read Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church, you’re familiar with “Saddleback Sam,” the poster child for lifestyle enclaves everywhere.

So, I have to wonder, what would happen if we put that much attention, energy, creativity and money into local missions and outreach?

Now, by local missions and outreach, I don’t mean a church’s TV ministry, radio ministry, website or anything else related to institutional promotion. I’m not even talking about evangelism, if by evangelism you mean strategies to get the unchurched into church.

What I’m thinking about is what churches often refer to as compassion ministries, benevolence ministries or community ministries - the ways we are willing to spend and be spent without any real prospect of a return for the institution. The food pantries and clothes closets we operate, the turkeys we give away Thanksgiving, the toys we collect at Christmas, and the occasional help we provide for someone behind on their rent.

The same things that churches were doing, in one form or another, 100 years ago.

I propose that it’s time to bring ministry to the poor into the 21st Century. I wonder what a cutting-edge community ministries program would look like?

What would happen if, rather than just trying to make the institutional church relevant, we tried to make the Kingdom of God relevant – if we poured our passion into rethinking what it means to minister to the poor?

With all of the emphasis we’ve given to being relevant in our presentation of the message, why are we so out of touch in terms of how we apply the message? In my lifetime, we’ve gone from the fuzzy felt of flannel graph to NOOMA videos. With all of the creativity, energy and money that continue to be poured into Sunday morning why haven’t we tried to rethink our strategies for the other days of the week?

Too much of our work in the area of ministry to the poor, as well-intentioned as it may be, is nothing more than a rip-off of failed government programs – poor imitations of a lot of bad ideas. Bob Lupton puts it this way:

Take people who are able and strong. Place them in the wealthiest land on earth. Surround them with unparalleled opportunity. Then pay them not to work, not to strive, not to achieve. Pay them to accept nonproductivity as a way of life. Agree to subsidize their families with food, shelter, health care, and money if the fathers will leave. Do this for two or three generations and see what you produce. (Theirs is the Kingdom: Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America, p. 72).

But, before any of my conservative brothers and sisters interpret Lupton’s words as a stab at my liberal brothers and sisters, please answer this question – What are you or church doing in the area of ministry to the poor, community outreach or anything else that resembles obedience to the Great Commandment that is any different than what Lupton has described?

Just as responsible evangelism demands follow up discipleship, responsible ministry to the poor has to be more than one-way charity. Jesus has called us to be fishers of men and He’s also called us to be fishing instructors – to the whole person – body, soul and spirit.

The Great Commandment should not be the red-headed step child of the Great Commission. Because without the Great Commandment, the Great Commission is only a fraction of the Gospel, a shell of the fullness God’s Grace replaced by the emptiness of cheap grace.

If we can agree that 40 years after the beginning of the Great Society programs of the 1960’s, many of those programs have become part of the problem - that the Left got it wrong, then we can also say that the Right still doesn’t get it.

Many of the people who abandoned traditional Mainline churches in favor of more conservative Evangelical churches (this migration accounts for some of the growth of conservative church groups) did so because they disagreed with the support that Mainline groups gave to liberal social causes.

But, rather than formulate an alternative vision for how to speak to our social ills, most conservative churches have ignored the least of these as if the Great Commandment had never been given. Those that have tried to develop a social ethic have tended to concentrate their efforts on a narrow range of issues and their approach has often looked more like a secular political agenda rather than a ministry of Spirit-filled justice and compassion.

But, there is cause for hope. There is a new reality emerging – one that is neither liberal nor conservative, one that represents what is best about each but transcends both. I believe that it’s time for the Church to proclaim the whole Gospel – that God’s ultimate act of self-disclosure has happened in the death and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ – and that through God’s action in Jesus He has initiated the redemption of not only our souls but of all of creation – that the Good News we proclaim in obedience to the Great Commission and the Good Works we do in obedience to the Great Commandment are two sides of the same coin.

I believe there is a new consensus emerging, one that will no longer emphasize charity over dignity, dependency over self-sufficiency, entitlement over empowerment. One that will place just as much passion, energy, creativity, resources and conviction into the Great Commandment as we have into the Great Commission. One that will not only bring healing and wholeness to the least of these, but to the Church of Jesus Christ as well.

$5.00 a gallon gas hasn’t made it to Texas yet, but all indicators say it’s on the way. How will that impact the way we “do church?”

If you’re like me and you grew up in the 1970’s, you remember the original Energy Crisis.

Following the Yom Kippur War of 1973, OPEC informed the supporters of Israel that the party was over. Almost overnight we were told that without the oil we’d been getting from OPEC we’d be running out of the natural resources that drove our economy and underwrote our lifestyle. We were completely caught off guard. Most Americans had no idea how dependent we had become on foreign oil.

Conservation became a buzzword. A popular bumper sticker of the time said it all – “Energy: Use It, But Use It Wisely.”

Within a short time the oversized cruising vessels made by Ford, GM and Chrysler were replaced by Pintos, Vegas and Gremlins (oh, the humanity!) – and they soon had serious competition from the much better made products of Toyota and Datsun.

None of this really made much of an impression on my 12-year old mind until one Saturday morning when I made my usual trek up to the corner Ice House (that’s what we call convenience stores in San Antonio) to buy a gallon of gas for the lawnmower and three pieces of Super Bubble to enjoy as I cut the grass.

But, much to my shock, the quarter (as in 25 cents) that had covered the cost of the gas and the gum in the past no longer would suffice. Suddenly gas was over 40 cents a gallon. It was the end of the world as I knew it. Certainly the Rapture was near.

Besides the drastic downsizing in the wheelbase of the cars rolling off of Detroit assembly lines, there were other obvious ways that life suddenly changed. From that point on, the 1970’s became a time of shortages and runaway inflation. Adding to that were the looming Watergate scandal and the slow, tortured end of the Vietnam War. It was like a fog had settled in.

And there’s a lot going on in our world right now that is eerily similar – and much more dangerous.

About the same time as gas was doubling and tripling in price in the 1970’s, churches all over America were using buses to bring people in. What seeker sensitivity, user friendliness, mission statements and praise choruses mean to today’s megachurches, the Bus Ministry meant to the 1970’s practitioners of church growth in America.

Long before there were rear screen projectors, auditoriums without crosses and Rock Band for the Wiis in the Student Center, there were bus workers swallowing goldfish, giving away colored baby chicks at Easter and hiding money under the bus seats (sometimes referred to as Baptist Bingo).

With the rise of gas prices in the 1970’s, Bus Ministry became a larger line item for churches but more feasible for the riders, most of whom came from low income neighborhoods and apartment complexes. For all of its superficiality and focus on entertainment, Bus Ministry was, for the most part, a good way for poor people to get to church - most of whom were kids whose parents were thankful for the weekly respite.

I was one of those bus workers in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. When I was 17, a good friend of mine and I started a bus route from scratch, making cold turkey door-to-door visits on the Southside of San Antonio. Within three weeks of our first visit we had 61 kids on the bus and headed for Sunday School at Huisache Ave. Baptist Church.

As a college student I worked in the largest Bus Ministry in America at First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana from 1980-1982. First Baptist leased over 150 buses every weekend to pick up riders throughout the Chicago area and bring them to downtown Hammond for a taste of the old-time religion.

Like most methods, Bus Ministry ran its course. It’s still used by some churches (First Baptist Hammond still operates on about the same scale) but has seen its popularity wane since the early 1980’s and the ascendancy of the commuter megachurch.

But, as we head toward $5.00 a gallon gas, I can’t help but wonder if the clock is ticking on the commuter megachurch as well.

The megachurches on the outlying edges of suburbia are a 15-30 minute Sunday morning drive for many of their commuter members. Add to that men’s groups, women’s groups, youth group and other functions that keep a family going back to the campus three to four times a week and all of a sudden they’ve gone through a full tank on the SUV – roughly $100 a week.

What if, rather than drive past 20 churches on the way to the church with the big screens American Christians decided it would be better stewardship of God’s money to find a church within a reasonable driving distance or even walking distance from where they live?

What if, as a result of the money they saved on gas they could contribute more to the previously struggling neighborhood churches they had been driving past? Not to mention how much healthier we would all be if we walked to church.

What if one of the unintended consequences of $5.00 a gallon gas was a greater emphasis on the communities where we live as the place where we minister in the name of Jesus rather than seeing a building or an institution as the focus of our devotion?

What if, through this surge in membership and resources, neighborhood churches shifted out of survival mode and became agents of community development and change?

What if, over time, a new paradigm of church emerged, one that emphasized Christians as givers rather than consumers? What would it be like for American Christians to choose a church on the basis of what they could do for it, rather than what it could do for them?

Imagine the possibilities.

Dream out loud.

At high volume.

A couple of years ago I was driving my daughter Elizabeth, the oldest of my four kids, to youth choir practice one Sunday afternoon. Youth choirs usually have really snappy names like New Song, Chosen Generation and Strike Force – names that communicate the optimism of youth fused with an upbeat view of the Christian faith.

The church we were attending at the time called theirs Mainstream.

I always thought that was appropriate – certainly every parent hopes their child will grow up to be part of the mainstream, in the flow of life and able to take advantage of opportunities to achieve and prosper, to see their dreams fulfilled.

But, as I drove Elizabeth to rehearsal that day, I had an epiphany.

A big percentage of the kids in our city, the seventh largest city in the most prosperous country in the world, will never sniff the mainstream. They were born in the margins and most of them are being socialized to stay there.

At the time, I was working as a case manager for the local housing authority, interacting on a daily basis with people thoroughly entrenched in the margins. But, I was making plans and laying the foundation for a new ministry that could impact people’s lives with the Gospel without the constraints of a government agency. That child was about to be born, but I needed to give it a name.

It would have to be a name that would reflect its heritage. In a city where 65% of the population is Hispanic, that means something in Spanish. Corriente principal is the Spanish term for mainstream, but Corriente – “stream or river” would suffice.

But, Corriente Ministries isn’t just about bringing people into the mainstream. It’s also about transforming the mainstream. Because when the marginalized have their lives transformed and come into the mainstream, the mainstream will look different.

Sort of like going from white bread to pico de gallo.

There are three basic principals that Corriente operates on – Connect, Empower, Transform - We connect people to Jesus Christ so that they will be empowered to transform themselves, their families and their communities. We connect churches and ministries to a wider network and needed resources that will empower their mission to transform the people and communities they minister to. We do this in a holistic way that sees the body and soul as important to God.

As an organization, Corriente will probably never be that big, because we’re not interested in reinventing the wheel – creating yet another ministry that duplicates services for the sake of raising money.

As an organism, the potential for growth is unlimited – because rather than reinvent the wheel, our calling is to connect the dots. Those dots are sometimes people, churches or ministries already serving in the trenches, but needing encouragement, resources, partners or opportunities that will enhance their work for the glory of God and the growth of His Kingdom.

At other times the purpose of Corriente will be to challenge the Church through this blog, preaching, teaching and writing – to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” and to expose communities with resources and felt needs to communities with few resources and real needs.

If you’ve read the previous posts on this blog, you’ve probably sensed a certain amount of passion that goes into these missives. Corriente is about passion, but not in a way that is irresponsible or careless. After 47 years, the majority of which have been spent in some sort of ministry, I can usually tell the difference between heat and light - usually.

But the fire still burns. Paul put it this way:

We do not preach about ourselves. We preach about Jesus Christ. We say that he is Lord. And we serve you because of him.
God said, “Let light shine out of darkness.”—(Genesis 1:3) He made his light shine in our hearts. It shows us the light of God’s glory in the face of Christ.
Treasure is kept in clay jars. In the same way, we have the treasure of the good news in these earthly bodies of ours. That shows that the mighty power of the good news comes from God. It doesn’t come from us.
We are pushed hard from all sides. But we are not beaten down. We are bewildered. But that doesn’t make us lose hope. Others make us suffer. But God does not desert us. We are knocked down. But we are not knocked out. 10 We always carry around the death of Jesus in our bodies. In that way, the life of Jesus can be shown in our bodies.
We who are alive are always in danger of death because we are serving Jesus. So his life can be shown in our earthly bodies. Death is at work in us. But life is at work in you.
It is written, “I believed, and so I have spoken.”—(Psalm 116:10) With that same spirit of faith we also believe. And we also speak. (I. Corinthians 4:5-18, The Message)

Occasionally I’ll write about ways that Corriente is working with other ministries, churches and individuals to help them Connect, Empower and Transform. I hope those experiences will broaden your own vision for doing Kingdom work in the place where you are or to find a place to do it and get there as soon as possible.

When I was in seminary I had a professor who asked this question – “If Jesus preached the Gospel of the Kingdom, how did we end up with the Church?”

Of course, there are several ways you could unpack that question – several points of view from which it could be asked and answered. There’s a whole sub-discipline within Historical Theology often referred to as Jesus Studies that deals with those kinds of questions.

Just to set the record straight, let me say that I am thoroughly orthodox in that regard. My Christology is best summed up in the words of Thomas when he saw the resurrected Jesus – “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). Jesus is “the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.”

I do not in any way sympathize with or subscribe to the notion that the Deity of Christ was an invention of the church that came after Jesus and that to understand the true message of Jesus we must peel back the Creeds of the Church in order to get to the “real Jesus.” I’ve read Crossan, Spong, Funk, Mack, Borg and others and have found that I much more prefer the company of John, Paul, Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa.

The issue for me is not one of orthodoxy (right belief); it’s one of orthopraxy (right practice). Which raises the stakes considerably.

If Jesus is who He said He is, if the writers of the New Testament got it right, if the later Creeds of the Church did not invent but rather testify to God’s revelation in Jesus, then we have been charged with a great responsibility in rightly applying, living and following that Truth.

But, when one looks at the history of the Church, in terms of how it has or has not been the Body of Christ, the hands and feet of Jesus in the world, the ongoing incarnation of Jesus for the past 2000 years, you have to admit that we’re not even hitting at the Mendoza Line in terms of the ways we’ve behaved relevant to the message that Jesus preached.

As I’ve tried to understand this dichotomy, I find myself going back to Luke 4:18-19, where Jesus begins his public ministry by reading from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue in Nazareth:

God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, “This is God’s year to act!” (The Message)

Think about it, Jesus chose as the starting point for His ministry this text from Isaiah, who is encouraging his fellow Jews who have been exiles but now are returning home to rebuild a city that had been destroyed. Isaiah proclaimed a message of spiritual renewal that would translate into bricks and mortar, because in Isaiah’s vision, a spiritually healthy community would be a community living in a secure and productive city.

But standing behind the Isaiah text is yet another one – Leviticus 25. Isaiah tells those returning from exile that this season of renewal the people are about to enter into is the “year when God will set his people free” (Isaiah 61:2 NIRV) – an allusion to the Year of Jubilee (Leviticus 25) when liberty would be proclaimed throughout the land, debts would be forgiven, slaves set free and the prisons emptied.

When Jesus stood before the people of his hometown and read Isaiah’s hope for the Jubilee to become reality, He announced that Isaiah’s hope was standing before them, that He was and is the flesh and blood fulfillment of God’s Jubilee Year.

That changes everything.

So, how did we get to where we are today? How did the tangible, culturally transforming, Spirit-filled Gospel of the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed become the individualized, compartmentalized very nearly Gnosticized concept of personal salvation that is so popular among Evangelicals?

Of course, salvation is personal. But it is also corporate. The Gospel of the Kingdom preached by Jesus is not in conflict the Gospel of Justification by Faith preached by Paul. The cross and resurrection were not events unforeseen by God that caused the Kingdom to be delayed and Jesus’ words to be relegated to some future age.

The Church was not an accident, something invented by Paul - it was simply meant to be the means through which the Kingdom that Jesus announced and over which he is Lord would reach from Jerusalem to Judea then to Samaria and ultimately to every nation and people group around the world.

So, how have we done? How has the Church kept up its responsibility to be the conduit of the Kingdom, to proclaim that the crucifixion has not disabled God’s purpose, that God raised Jesus from the dead, that He has “highly exalted him and given him a name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9) and that through Jesus there is forgiveness, rebirth, redemption and liberation – for individuals and communities?

If, as my seminary professor suggested, there is a disconnect between the realized Jubilee of the Kingdom of God and the Church, what can be done to repair the breech?

How would the Church have to change in order to become Kingdom oriented?

How would that sort of change in the Church change the world?

Imagine the possibilities.

Dream out loud – at high volume.

We American Christians are a strange breed.

Every year at Christmas time some from our tribe, even some of our nationally known leaders, get upset because they seem to think Christmas is being taken away from us.

According to some, using the greeting “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” is a sign of the moral collapse of America. The absence of a nativity scene in front of City Hall is interpreted as a sign of persecution – even if the church next to City Hall has a nativity scene with a live Baby Jesus.

I’m suspicious of these annual campaigns to take back Christmas. Like a secular political campaign, they appeal to our irrational fears. And one of the easiest ways to get someone to reach for their wallet is to make them think there’s something or someone to be afraid of. People will send money to preachers and politicians if they think it will make the fear go away.

Just as retail sales make a huge spike each year from Thanksgiving to Christmas, so does the giving to many ministries that create an annual fear fest over the supposedly soon-to-be lost freedom of American Christians.

Personally, I’m not concerned about Christmas. While I do believe America is in a state of moral decline, I don’t buy the idea that if the school choir at my kids’ elementary school doesn’t sing Joy to the World at the PTA meeting just before the “Winter Break” that our religious freedom is somehow threatened.

If Christians in America really want to get upset about a holiday being taken away, may I suggest that we take it to the streets because of the fact that millions of households across America have done away with the celebration of Father’s Day.

The demise of Father’s Day didn’t happen as the result of a vast left-wing conspiracy. Neither the ACLU nor the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have conspired to topple this once sacred day.

We’ve done it to ourselves.

37% of all US children born are born to single moms
60% of all US children will reach their 18th birthday without their biological parents still married
85% of those kids from broken homes will not live with their fathers
70% of African-American children are born out of wedlock
50% of Hispanic children are born out of wedlock
63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes
85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes
80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes
71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes
75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes
24.7 million US children live absent of their biological father

The city where I live, San Antonio, TX, leads the nation in girls between the ages of 13 and 17 giving birth. Citywide, we’re over twice the national average for out of wedlock births and in some zip codes we’re three to four times the national average.

But, I have to ask, where is the outrage? How is it that a snowman replacing a nativity scene gets more Christians upset than the fact that there are more African-American men in prison than there are in college and 90% of those incarcerated grew up in a fatherless household?

Fatherless children have a higher probability of infant mortality, premature births, low birth weight, learning disabilities, behavior problems, emotional problems, not finishing high school, drug and alcohol abuse, incarceration, living in subsidized housing and having children out of wedlock – which perpetuates the cycle for yet another generation.

That’s why there are over 40 directives given in scripture regarding the special care and protection for the fatherless. God understands that a fatherless child is at risk in ways that other children aren’t. But most of the words of scripture that instruct us to care for the fatherless were written with the idea that children without fathers would be the rare exception, not the norm that it is for millions of US children. According to scripture, rampant fatherlessness is a sign that society is on the brink of chaos (Exodus 22:24; Lamentations 5:3).

We’re in the midst of a downward spiral, a pandemic of fatherlessness that threatens the social fabric. We’re getting ready to reap the whirlwind and we won’t even know what hit us.

All children who grow up without dads do so with deficits – dad-shaped holes that only a father can fill - but boys are especially impacted by fatherlessness.

In his book To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing up Without a Father, Donald Miller offers this insight on what it feels like to grow up without a dad:

Because I didn’t have a father, I felt there was a club of men I didn’t belong to. I would have never admitted it at the time, but I wanted to belong … I couldn’t have put words to it back then, but I felt it … I felt as though all the men in the world secretly met in a warehouse late at night to talk about man things, to have secret handshakes, to discuss how to throw a football or a baseball, how to catch a fish and know what kind it was … how to look a woman in the eye and tell her she was your woman and that she looks good in that dress and make it so your eyes say you love her but you could survive without her, and how to drive a stick-shift truck without grinding the gears. And then I secretly believed at the end of the meeting they gathered around and reminded each other that under no circumstances was anyone to tell me about these things.

Take Miller’s words to heart, because there are millions of boys all over our country who feel exactly the same way but won’t choose to articulate those feelings with words. In stead, they’ll be acting out in ways that will be destructive to themselves and society.

It’s time for the church of Jesus Christ to admit that we’ve taken our eye off the ball. We’ve allowed ourselves to be distracted by the zero sum game of the culture wars and the culture is going to hell as a result.

It’s time to take back Father’s Day.

If you’d like to find a place to start, here are five links:

Donald Miller’s Belmont Foundation “seeks to effectively respond to the crisis of fatherlessness by equipping the faith community to provide life long, trust based mentoring relationships with young men in an effort to affect long-term change.”

Big Brothers and Big Sisters is the oldest and largest youth mentoring program in the United States.

Mike Arnold’s Cross Trail Outfitters is doing great work leading boys to Christ and manhood.

Young Lives is a ministry of Young Life that focuses on mentoring teenage moms.

Agape Pregnancy Center and The Pregancy Care Center both provide care and guidance to teenage moms.

Why urban ministry?

That’s a question I’ve heard from others and even asked myself at times. Jesus often answered a question with a question, so I’ll give it a shot.

Why not urban ministry?

Of course, not everyone can or should do ministry in an urban setting. Obviously there are people who live in rural and suburban settings. They need the Gospel just as much as anyone in the hood. Their need of the Gospel may not be expressed in the same ways that are apparent in a neighborhood filled with crack houses, but if you followed some of the vehicles that spend 5-10 minutes in front of a dealer’s house, you’d end up in some of the most affluent neighborhoods of your city.

I know because I’ve done it.

At one time we had a drug dealer living directly across the street from us. I’d called Crime Stoppers on numerous occasions, reported the activity to police officers when I saw them at a nearby shopping center and talked to neighbors. This went on for nearly three years, but nothing was done.

Eventually, I resorted to taking down license plate numbers and occasionally following vehicles often driven by white teenagers with parking permits from high schools located deep in the suburbs.

Yes, the suburbs need Jesus too and they have many of the same problems as our neighborhood, but they tend to be covered over by the veneer of a gated neighborhood or an exclusive zip code. And enough money to buy the drugs sold in the hood.

Still, I have to wonder – Why do most people hear the call to serve Jesus in the suburbs but so few hear the cries of the inner city and urban areas of San Antonio or any other metropolitan area?

Why not urban ministry?

In my own town, there’s a stretch of highway that’s about 15 miles long – roughly 15% of the outer loop (1604) that circles San Antonio. From the starting point of Judson Rd. and Loop 1604 to just north of IH 10 W and Loop 1604 you will find about a dozen churches that average over 1000 in attendance each Sunday. Out of those 12, at least six of them qualify as megachurches (over 2000 in weekly attendance) and two of those average over 10,000 in weekly attendance.

Go along that same stretch of road and you’ll find parachurch groups like FCA, Campus Life and Young Life represented on most of the high school campuses from which those churches have built their youth groups.

But, once you get inside the inner loop (410) everything changes. For the most part, if you live inside Loop 410, you live in an urban area. The large churches are almost nonexistent, with the exception of a few established mainline churches, but none that compare to the typically non-denominational megachurches of suburbia.

Throughout the inner city and urban areas of San Antonio you’ll find churches struggling to keep their doors open or already closed. Buildings that once housed vibrant congregations on Sundays and were the hub of community activity throughout the week now sit in disrepair, seldom used and often seen as eyesores.

Like the valley of dry bones, they sit there - just waiting for someone to breath new life into them.

Parachurch ministries that are prominent in suburban schools and churches are nearly nonexistent inside of Loop 410. While some are trying to correct that neglect, the deficit will be difficult to overcome, unless donors can be convinced that ministering in urban and inner city areas is worth the sacrifice.

Many of those megachurches that populate that 15-mile stretch of Loop 1604 were once located in these urban areas, but left years ago, some citing that the areas where they were located had become “too Catholic” or that they were “landlocked and needed more room to grow.”

Many of the people who still live in the neighborhoods those churches left see it as nothing more than white flight.

I had a Sociology professor in college who used to say, “The most segregated hour of the week is 11:00 a.m. on Sunday morning.” If you drive that 15-mile stretch of Loop 1604 on a Sunday morning you’ll see that he was right.

I’m not saying it’s a sin to serve at or be a member of one of these suburban megachurches. But I am saying it’s a sin to continue to saturate and over serve one area of a city while we completely ignore the needs of those in urban and inner city areas.

A turkey at Thanksgiving or Elf Louise at Christmas without any relationship the other 11 months of the year is the 21st Century equivalent of “be ye warmed and filled” (James 2:16).

Spending tens of thousands of dollars for mission trips to foreign countries to the exclusion of investing in community development a few miles from your multi-million dollar facility doesn’t sound like a very good answer to WWJD?

Why not urban ministry?

Have you ever had an experience of God’s presence that was so real, so intense, so palpable that you could only use the word mystical to describe it?

I grew up in a part of the Church that was thoroughly cessationist – the belief that the “sign gifts” of the Holy Spirit such as healing, prophecy and speaking in tongues had ceased with the death of the last Apostle and the closing of the canon of scripture.

I no longer believe that, for several reasons. First and foremost is that I don’t see that view represented in scripture. Secondly, there’s a long tradition in the Church of anointing with oil for healing, experiences of ecstasy and other phenomena that have been documented by John of Patmos, Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila and thousands of other well-known and unknown Christians through the centuries. Thirdly, I’ve observed enough fakes to know the real thing when I’ve seen it.

I’ve even had a few encounters of my own which have led me to conclude there are certain thresholds of truth that, when experienced, lead us into mystical encounters with the Holy.

Sometimes those encounters are born out of great joy or take place during times of intense devotion, prayer and study. At other times they’re in the midst of difficult testing or a confrontation with Evil.

Regardless of the circumstance, this much I do know - when you hit one of those thresholds, you can never go back to where you were before and live your life with any level of satisfaction or fulfillment.

There’s a certain pattern of diminishing return in the life of the Spirit that requires you to keep moving forward - crossing one of those thresholds is a lifelong reminder that there’s no such thing as staying in the same place - and the disappointment and frustration of not moving forward is often what defines misery.

In some ways, a strong experience of God’s presence can ruin you.

As ironic as that sounds, I’ve seen it happen. Once you’ve seen the fire hit the altar, everything else is a poor substitute, a nock off that doesn’t come close to the real thing.

That’s contrary to the pop theology espoused by Your Best Life Now or even The Purpose Driven Life or the first of the Four Spiritual Laws - “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”

But I believe it’s absolutely biblical.

I like the way Shane Claiborne puts it in his book, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical – “I used to be cool. And then I met Jesus and he wrecked my life. The more I read the gospel, the more it messed me up, turning everything I believed in, valued, and hoped for upside-down. I am still recovering from my conversion.”

When I was a teenager I worked at a Christian youth camp for five summers. I spent nearly the entire decade of my 20’s doing church youth work of some sort. Counting my summers working at the camp and all the camps, work mission trips, festivals, ski trips and concerts I took kids to when I was in youth ministry, I think I’ve spent over two full years of my life in one of those settings.

I may have just come up with a new definition for hell. OK, I’m kidding.

The locations, themes and styles of those events varied greatly, but the ultimate goal was always the same – we wanted to put kids in a place where they would have a life-changing encounter with Jesus.

I’m not knocking the idea – but I do often wonder if we (the leaders and staff) really knew what we were praying, hoping and working for. What if it really happened? What if all those kids really did meet Jesus, submit to His Lordship and take seriously that old camp song I Have Decided to Follow Jesus?

I have decided, to follow Jesus …
Though none go with me, still I will follow …
The world behind me, the cross before me …
No turning back, No turning back

Is there a church out there that really wants their youth group or any other group in their church to follow the Jesus of the Gospels? Not the All-American Jesus, the denominational (or nondenominational) Jesus, the culture warrior Jesus, the hippy Jesus, the liberal or the conservative Jesus or any of the other Jesus’s they’ve been exposed to – I’m talking about the Jesus we read about in the first four books of the New Testament.

We need to be careful what we pray for – and not to stand too close to the fire – unless we’re willing to live with the outcome.

If you live in or around San Antonio, TX you’re within a few minutes drive of these realities:

Dropout rates at 50+% in urban schools.

Teenage pregnancy rates nearly twice the national average citywide and 3-4 times the national average in some zip codes.

Unbroken multi-generational cycles of dependency on government programs such as public housing and food stamps.

Rates of incarceration higher than rates of college enrollment in some groups.

Fatherless households seen as the norm in some neighborhoods.

There’s no doubt that these and other social problems facing San Antonio and other major metropolitan areas are interrelated and overlap at many points. My own experience working for 6+ years as a caseworker with federal prisoners and public housing residents (and 20+ years in local church ministry) demonstrated more than anecdotal evidence to prove those points.

That recognition begs questions like, “Where do we start? What are the root causes of these problems? Which one deserves more attention?”

But, as believing practicing Christians, we have a more important question to ask – What is the Church’s responsibility in these matters?

Notice, the question isn’t “Does the Church have a responsibility in these matters?” That responsibility is inherent in Gospel of the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed. In Luke’s account of the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, we see Jesus going to his hometown of Nazareth and there, in the synagogue on the Sabbath, he set the template for his ministry with these words from the Prophet Isaiah,

God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, “This is God’s year to act!” (Luke 4:18-19, The Message)

When interpreting this text, the Church has tended to either relegate these words of Jesus to his public ministry – saying they only have a spiritual application for us today; to the future – saying that they only apply to a yet to be realized Kingdom Age – or, they’re used as motivation for a host of benevolence and charity enterprises that too often encourage cynicism on the part of the givers and dependency on the part of the recipients.

Thank God for anyone who will respond to human need, who feels a sense of compassion and wants to do what they can to help those in need.

But, a century after the unveiling of The Social Gospel and nearly half a century after the birth of The Great Society, the social problems both ideologies sought to address have only worsened and given birth to other, more complex societal wounds.

It is time for a new vision, a new approach to urban ministry.

In his book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, Edwin Friedman states,

Leadership in America is stuck in the rut of trying harder and harder without obtaining significantly new results. The rut runs deep, affecting all the institutions of our society irrespective of size or purpose. It even affects those institutions that try to tackle the problem … These institutions are “stuck”…

In terms of how we are responding to the ongoing crises in the inner city and urban areas of San Antonio, the Church is just as “stuck” as any government bureaucracy.

One of the reasons this impasse exists is that the Church, when responding to the most basic of human needs – food, shelter, education and dignity – tends to imitate secular social service agencies.

Not long ago I was part of a group that was trying to organize a basketball league for inner city youth here in San Antonio. One of the more vocal members of our group, a member of one of the most conservative Evangelical megachurches in San Antonio, stated that the ultimate goal of such and endeavor wasn’t to just introduce kids to Jesus, it was to get them into therapy, because the problems they face in the inner city can’t be addressed just by the leading them to Christ.

In his mind, Jesus could save their souls, but it would take something more significant to actually transform their lives here in the real world. Of course, he did have a point, only it wasn’t the one he was trying to make.

The real problem is that for too long the Church has proclaimed a compartmentalized Gospel – one that segregates the spiritual from the physical – one that either dismisses works of justice and acts of mercy as divorced from the Gospel or sees them only as a lure to lead people to faith in Christ.

As a result, the only template the church can find when it does decide to feed the hungry and clothe the naked is that offered by failed private and government agencies still using 19th Century-style charity models of benevolence or 20th Century rights-based approaches.

Part of the irony in the proclamation of a compartmentalized Gospel is that every great social justice movement of the 19th Century – the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, etc. were initiatives championed by the majority of churches. There was, at one time, a seamless relationship between saving souls and saving lives. From Wilberforce’s cries to outlaw the slave trade to Charles G. Finney’s staunch support of the abolitionist movement to William Booth’s founding of The Salvation Army, Evangelical Christians were at the epicenter of societal reform.

But, by the middle of the 20th Century, it was obvious that things had changed. The Civil Rights Movement lead by Dr. Martin Luther King had some of its most vocal opponents in American Evangelical Churches. For some, that disparity was seen as motivation for Evangelicals to reengage the culture through political activism.

But, nearly 30 years after the emergence of the Religious Right, it’s obvious that we have lost our way. No one’s brand of political correctness - liberal or conservative - is the voice with which the Church must speak.

Every day the dreamers die, we need new dreams tonight – so wrote one artist/activist over 20 years ago – and those words are still true today. Unless we can dream new dreams – new ways of proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom – we will continue to be as stuck as any of the other dysfunctional bureaucracies that are part of the status quo and by default, part of the problem.

One of the root causes of the failure to dream those kinds of new dreams can be laid at the feet of the false dichotomy that separates the physical from the spiritual and the secular from the sacred.

The Evangelical world is filled with newer, better, hipper, more relevant and tingly ways to present God’s word. From praise choruses on the big screen to the sermon outline in PowerPoint to NOOMA videos – we’re all about getting the word out in ways that relate and connect.

But, when it comes to preaching the Gospel in deed (action), we’re practicing bloodletting and using blistering cups to treat terminal illnesses. The new wine may be flowing from the worship center, but we’re using vinegar out in the streets.

It all depends on where our priorities are.

As well intentioned as they usually are, food pantries, clothes closets, turkey baskets at Thanksgiving and Elf Louise at Christmas have not and will not achieve the radical transformation of individuals, families and communities that are the signs of the Kingdom of God that Jesus went to the cross for.

It’s time for the Church to embrace and proclaim the same Holistic Gospel of the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed at the synagogue in Nazareth – to tear down the artificial walls that imply the soul is more valuable than the body, to debunk the notion that the goal of Christian faith is primarily getting your ticket punched for the rapture bus and enjoying the security of a lifestyle enclave in the interim.

In his book Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life: Rethinking Ministry to the Poor, Robert Lupton warns,

To do for others what they can do for themselves is to make recipients the objects of our pity and deprive them of human dignity … This is not to say, of course, that those caught in dire straights – burned out of their home or starving from famine – should not be given aid. It does mean, however, that to provide free handouts to passive recipients without reasonable bootstrap expectations is to foster unhealthy dependency and promote an entitlement mentality.

My prayer is that we as a group can be part of something new that God is already doing in the inner city and urban areas of San Antonio. If you’re not in the San Antonio area, I hope this discussion can help you be a part of a new vision in your community. That new work is already happening in our ministries and in the ministries of brothers and sisters we have yet to meet.

I pray that we can leave behind the overly individualized concept of salvation that has seen the body as inferior to the soul and reduced salvation to intellectual ascent with little or no expectation of a radical transformation in the body, soul and spirit of the converted.

I pray that we can recover the Holistic Gospel of the Kingdom of God proclaimed by the same Jesus we call Lord, that we will embrace social and economic justice for everyone in our city as central to our own journeys of discipleship and sanctification through the power of the Holy Spirit.

I pray that this will be your prayer as well.

Tim Adams

Ps – There is much more to say about these matters, but this is enough with which to start. Feel free to add your own thoughts, questions, suggestions, comments or criticisms below.