Heard two great talks at Catalyst West today: one by our very own Rick McKinley and the other by Bob Goff. It was interesting how the two talks unintentionally played off each other.

Rick started off talking about how in church culture today we’ve gotten really big on the activism front, going out to “do stuff” and change the world—and often we find ourselves burned out and frustrated, or perhaps successfully able to get stuff done while having left Jesus behind. Neither really embodies the reality of Jesus’ kingdom. We are in danger when we neglect the inside-out, heart-centered transformation of our desires and affections that Jesus’ gospel is about.

Goff, on the other hand, opened with inspiring stories of people stepping out into risk-taking adventures on behalf of bettering our world. He encouraged those present to just get out and do something. He laid a heavy emphasis on action, getting out there, creative risk-taking and making something happen. He has found that often it is in the midst of such action that we encounter Jesus and find him shaping us. It initially led me to question: were these two messages compatible with one another?

My thought was Goff’s message probably speaks somewhat prophetically to a moralistic church context where people compete with one another to show off who knows more of their Bible but don’t actually step out to participate with God’s mission in his world. But this is not my context. My context tends to be all of us (former & would-be) activists who’ve stepped out and tried to change the world and fallen flat on our face and become cynical and disillusioned and depressed with how heartbreaking the world is outside the face of Christ.

For example, a friend of mine who has spent 10 years fighting human rights issues on behalf of marginalized people in the developing world confided in me his thoughts of suicide. He shared, “I feel like I’ve been rolling this boulder uphill for 10 years now, but every year that goes by I realize the boulder gets bigger and bigger from what I initially assumed; then I look to the side and see with all my pushing I’ve actually been going downhill. This world and its tragedy and trauma just seems to be building year by year.” I do not believe God’s word of hope for him and the many others like him is to just “get out there and do something” but is rather allowing Christ’s mercy and kingdom to press into their being, to shape their hope, affections and desires.

Rick shared three things that tend to distract us from God’s stirring of our desires for him:

• 1) Dishonesty: we put on the fake happy smile and are dishonest with God and each other about where we are truly at. “One of the problems within the church is that we’re nice but we aren’t really honest;”
• 2) Duty: we turn our life with God into duties to be followed rather than a treasure to be joyfully sought after. “Most of us pastors would probably prefer having Pharisees in our churches over our own people. They read their Bibles, pray, serve and get things done.” Duty can motivate people so far, but it is opposed to gospel-centered transformation of our heart and soul with affection for God;
• 3) Death: we all live under the foreboding shadow of death (like my friend in the story above). If this life is really all there is, we might as well go after all the money, sex and fun we can get in while we still can. But to hope in the power of the resurrection means to find joy in the God of life as we sacrificially live out our obedience to him in pursuing his justice and righteousness in our world.

I am grateful for both Rick and Bob’s messages, and believe there is a synergy between being and doing that they both affirm: Christ overwhelms our affections and desires which are at the core of our being with his very presence which motivates us into joy-filled, sacrificial, creative action in his world. In the context of this action, Christ continues to encounter us through his word and in his Spirit, shaping us as his people for his glory.

Around that same time, I was talking with my close friend and mentor, Dr. Tom Hauff, who was writing a book about prayer. (Tom is a professor of Bible and theology at Multnomah University.) In one chapter of that book, he probes the idea of repetitive prayer for the salvation of the lost, and in our ongoing conversation, he has challenged me with a few mind benders.

On the surface, we probably make this request because we care deeply about people, and we want them to taste freedom and live the life Jesus offers. It is good to tell God what we care about. But below the surface, the repetitive request for the salvation of others might be born out of ill-conceived assumptions that conflict with our own beliefs about how salvation occurs, and it may show us that we do not know who we are, who God is or how he operates.

I started wondering if my repetitive prayer for the salvation of my sister was actually a waste of time and breath.

Consider the two prominent perspectives that have characterized Christian discourse about salvation for some time, say 2,000 years. We either understand salvation as a freely given way of eternal life that God long ago “predestined” some to receive, even before he built this world. He chose us and called us to himself according to his own decision making process; it is God’s choice. Or we understand our salvation as freely offered eternal life that we either accept or reject. God reveals himself and his Gospel to us, but, ultimately, it is our “free-will” decision to either accept or deny Jesus that determines our salvation. It is our choice.

Now, consider again the request for God to save my sister. If I hold the first view, I am asking him to change his sovereign choice. And if I hold the second view, I am asking God to overpower freedom and control her choice, which trumps “free” will altogether. From either perspective, then, the ongoing request for God to give her salvation conflicts with my own fundamental beliefs about God.

And here’s the real kicker. It seems like the New Testament writers were onto this same truth because you do not see them directly asking God to save other people. They express deep love and compassion for others. They ask that their lives could help people see the truth, that they might be part of the harvest, that doors might be opened for them to preach the Gospel, that there could be a witness of unity, love and wisdom among believers to the world around them. But their prayer is not, “God, please save so and so.” It is always, “God, please help us become the most accurate witnesses of Jesus that we can possibly be.”

The more I think about it, the more I understand that useful prayers for the lost are really prayers for Christians and the Church. I need to ask God to help me grow up. I need to stop repeatedly asking him to do something I believe would actually contradict his character and plan for saving people.

While I “faithfully” prayed for my sister’s salvation, I treated her like crap. ( I think I also prayed imprecatory prayers on her poor boyfriend: “Wreck that dirtbag, God! Make him hurt!”) When she and her boyfriend wanted to visit me, I said no. She ought to feel my disapproval, I thought. When she drifted even further from Jesus, I prayed even harder. “Please, please save her.” And then all of this dawned on me….

Maybe God answered my request to “show her the way” by putting me in her life.

“You’re supposed to show her who I am, to be my accurate witness, Ben,” he said. “What exactly are you telling her? That you would prefer to sit alone and keep hurling ignorant requests at me rather than love her as a friend and sister?” Whether I intended to or not, I had been telling her and her boyfriend that Jesus was a far-removed jerk who was annoyed by their questions and needed them to clean up before approaching him. If we need to get cleaned up before approaching Jesus, though, then we’re all in big trouble.

It felt so good, so empowering, to believe I could alter the very character and plan of God. And to vomit nonsense at God over and over was simply effortless. Learning to love, however, to shed pride and to seriously trust God was much more difficult – that was tough.

I finally quit the white-knuckled pleading for her salvation, and when I finally said, “My doors are open; welcome to my home and my life,” my sister and her boyfriend saw a more accurate witness of Jesus. They started to see that Jesus intended to know and love them, imperfections and all. They tasted in some small but real way the life Jesus offers. Now, they are both loving Jesus and seriously committed to learning about his Word.

The Apostles and Disciples seem to accept the fact that God’s plan for salvation is his own. They do not ask him to alter his sovereign decisions regarding the salvation of lost, nor do they suggest he ought to trample free will. It looks like they try to avoid such ill-conceived and contradictory assumptions. But as they write about loving and ministering to those who have not encountered the Gospel, they do seem to be praying for the growth and maturity of Christians in Jesus’ Church.

I needed to exchange wasted-breath pleas, however earnest, for useful requests. Carefully self-reflecting, now, I’m wondering if my life accurately depicts a Savior who loves Christians, who loves the Church, who cares deeply about all human life, who respects authority and who craves justice. As those inaccuracies surface, I spend time purposefully asking God to help me become a disciplined, effective, mature Christian who loves Jesus so that friends, family and everyone else around me might encounter an accurate witness of the Gospel. Unless I’m totally crazy, this seems like a wiser use of the limited breaths I’ve been given.

Families were grouped with their neighbors into construction groups of five. The deal was: you only received roofing materials if you agreed to help the other four families in your group build their roofs as well. The families got to work together in rebuilding their community, receiving not only shelter over their heads but dignity in being a part of the process and a deepening of relational bonds with their neighbors. Parties took place during and after the roof-building days where the families celebrated what they had accomplished together. One of the things that struck me visiting with the families that had received roofs was the sense of dignity they expressed: they were not merely passive recipients of aid but active participants in the transformation that took place in their community.

I was struck by a number of things. First, my general gut-response in situations like this is to want to build the roofs for the community myself. You see this a lot: whether church mission teams or mainstream humanitarian organizations, we are often tempted to come in as outside ‘experts’ and do development to the community. We want to be helpful, and it feels good to be the hero. The irony in a situation like this is most all of the people in the community have the skills and know-how to build their own roofs, to make the shelter they need. Utilizing the skills and resources in the community broke down the stereotype (for us and them) of the Western heroes and the helpless poor. Rather, we were brothers and sisters together bringing what gifts and resources we had to the table.

Second, a process like this takes longer. It takes time to build the relationships, to cast the vision, to coordinate the families, to organize the construction. It would be a lot quicker and easier to hire an outside construction firm to come in and throw the roofs up. If the ultimate goal was getting as many roofs up as possible in the quickest amount of time, this might be sufficient. But lost in the process would be local dignity and ownership of the process. More so, it would likely breed dependency where local initiative was undermined by the expectation of continued outside aid.

So what does all this have to do with a theology of work? God created Adam to tend His garden, to cultivate the soil. God creates Adam (in part) to work. (Gen. 2:15)  I believe there is a dignity that comes with work. God Himself is a worker: God spends the first six days in the work of creation. He is thereafter interactively involved in the work of redemption. God is a worker.  God creates Adam in His image to tend His garden, to steward His creation, to cultivate and bring forth new things from the world God has made. We were created (in part) to work. Sure: work has been frustrated by the Fall (Gen. 3:17-19), and there is the danger of a work-a-holism where we don’t rest as God rests (Sabbath), and the image of God is much more multi-faceted than work (creativity, reason, relatedness, sovereignty, etc). But work is nonetheless an important part of human identity and calling. In international involvement, if we take over the opportunities for our local brothers & sisters to work and participate meaningfully in their community’s transformation, we can breed an unhealthy dependency on outside aid that undermines long-term local initiative and fosters an unhealthy savior complex in ourselves that sees us as more important than we ought. I believe a God-centered theology of work calls us to give extra time and energy to see how we can involve the recipients of aid in the process of their community’s transformation, to experience the dignity God has created them for in the cultivating of the soil, the providing for their families, the building of their communities, the stewarding of creation, in the dignity of work.