Cultural Pinballs
Imagine: spending an entire day just driving around town praying for your city. Today my buddy Miller and I spent the majority of the day together in prayer; the first couple of hours in our abbey’s living room, and the rest of it in his old pick-up truck driving around the city with our eyes open to what God wanted us to see. Now that is graduate education – the kind that gets you out of a sterile classroom and onto the streets.
Of course, we were idiots for driving around town in the middle of the day’s heat (104!?!) expecting to see much more than closed up homes. It was facinating to see how cultures can change drastically from one side of the street to the next. We began thinking about how our prayer and hope of seeing a “vibrant family of Jesus in close reach culturally and geographically of every Abilenian” was much more complex than we ever thought. How can we ever hope to watch God saturate a city with his family when one person’s geography has absolutely nothing to do with their culture? Let’s say a man lives on the Northwest side of the city, but he frequents the bars and parks on the Southwest side, because that’s where he finds life – that’s where his friends are. Where does this man find plant/find his “vibrant family”?
How do missionaries move forward in systematically saturating a city with God’s presence and his family when the people of that city are bouncing all over the town’s community wells like pinballs????
Whatever it means, I know that we are changing our paradigm of what it means to live as ministers and missionaries in this country. We don’t have all the answers, but we know that the attractional methods of evangelism “come to our nice program!” will not cut it. The church is not a program, its a people. People can not “come to church”, they are “sent as a church“. Today when we were praying for this house or that house to become an outpost for God’s Kingdom, I couldn’t help but think how overwhelming all of this is. There is nothing else I’d rather put my energy toward.
