It’s no secret I love Brant Hansen. I’m also unsatisfied with the American version of Christianity (my own version included), I’m infatuated with what that phrase “kingdom of heaven” meant to Jesus and early Christians, and I believe when we don’t love “the least,” we don’t truly love Jesus…at all…it’s impossible. All of these loves and thoughts collide in a new way in an open-hearted post from Brant. Well worth your time to read the entire thing, but here’s one of the most inspiring snippets:
I think I’ve taken one too many trips. I can’t listen to “Where the Streets Have No Name” anymore without crying. Here are a few of the faces I see:
In Calcutta, I met a little girl who looks just like the other uniformed girls in her Christian school in the slums. One difference: When they shut the lights off at the school, and everyone goes home, she stays in the darkened building. She lives in the hallway. No parents, and no chance, save her Compassion International sponsor.
In Sumatra, I met a Muslim Imam who hated Christians—until our little group cried with him as he searched for his little boy after the tsunami. After just a week, he said he now understood we were not his enemies, we loved him, and he wondered why his “brothers” were not helping. The church there, somehow still there, needs our money.
I looked out the window at buildings, still containing bodies, during an underground worship gathering of about 20 people in Banda Aceh. They had no money, only the clothes they were wearing, the smell of rotting bodies was still in the air, and they sand, a capella, in their language, “How Great Thou Art.” I couldn’t sing.
In the slums of Costa Rica: People positively mobbing us to get their very own copy of the Bible.
Most memorably: In the slums of Nairobi, there’s barbed-wire around some church gathering-places. When some hungry Compassion kids get their food—other kids try to jam themselves through the wire, from without. I watched crowds of moms, and kids, watch from without, while the kids within had a chance.
In Kibera, Kenya, we visited a desperate church with a “job-training” program: They trained girls to be cosmetologists. They proudly showed us their two old-school hairdryers, and they proudly showed us a few half-empty bottles of shampoo.
Please tell me, again, about how we need to “attract” more Americans, using more features, to a building, when in some places, they have to fence kids from the church building, for lack of funds?
This really IS a big deal to me and Carolyn. I don’t know how to get around this. I’m sorry. Again, please be patient with me. I can’t figure this one out. The overhead should not be this high.
Thanks for the honest public wrestling, Brant. It’s helping me think through what it is I value exactly and what my next steps are in living that out.
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http://takeyourvitaminz.blogspot.com/2006/12/leaving-church_27.html
I posed some thought on Brant’s post here. I applaud his courage and questions.
I do have some reservations/questions that I would love to interact with him on. You can read this above.
Dang.
Ditto. I feel the same so often in church here in the UK. In Rob Bells book “Velvet Elvis’ he talks about how church in Jesus day was much more community orientated, how the Scriptures were read/heard in community etc, and that way people learnt together, corrected each other when someone got it wrong… there was dialogue about faith etc. I think it’s something the traditional and megachurch models miss. Maybe I’m way off in saying that though?
While I appreciate that many churches are trying to plug mission and having a lifestyle of worship, I think it’s way to easy for people to appease their conscience by throwing their money into a basket during the appeal, and still miss the fact that there are people, faces, stories, at the other end of the appeal.
But wait? Isn’t our most important job as Christians to make sure people don’t have abortions and don’t marry the wrong person, and to put on really cool Christmas shows with real camels and then go shop in our church’s bookstore afterwards and then go read our book in the coffee shop while we suck down a $4.00 cup of mediocre latte??
Beth you hit the nail right on the head on what it means to be a Christian…well atleast most would think that.
Matthew 22:36-40:
36″Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 37Jesus replied: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Or as my pstor puts it…”Love God. Love people.”