american dream

I’m tired of the “Don’t blame me, I voted for…..” bumper stickers. Here are some I’d like to see instead:

“No griping about the welfare state until you’ve mentored a teen mom.”

“Yes, abortion is wrong. How many of those unwanted kids would you like to adopt?”

“I got a good education so I’m tutoring someone who didn’t.”




Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a branding strategy meeting with Matthew Barnett and other leaders of the Dream Center in Los Angeles. In a city where 11,000 people sleep on the streets and 17% of all families live below the poverty line, the Dream Center is making a real difference. Food trucks feed 22,000 people each month. Dorm-style housing provides a place for the addicted to begin again. A mobile medical clinic offers treatment, lab work and pharmacy services to the destitute on Skid Row. (In true California style, the Dream Center even provides free chiropractic services at its headquarters.)

It’s trendy for churches to be involved with “social justice” initiatives, and many of them do a lot of good. But Barnett and his team are more interested in sharing the Gospel (thousands worship at Angelus Temple each week) and social transformation (in the Dream Center’s first four years, local prostitution and gang violence dropped 73%, the homicide rate dropped 28% and rape dropped 53%).


The Dream Center operates under the assumption that the Church—not politics, policy or government programs—is the answer to society’s spiritual and tangible needs. Instead of pointing fingers at dishonest politicians, they focus on restoring wholeness to a city ravaged by the father of lies. Instead of waiting for political hope and change, they’re offering real Hope (and a hot meal) to anyone in need.


I was inspired by my day with them, but also frustrated when I opened Facebook that night to see the usual status updates of context-less Bible verses interspersed with opinions about Obama, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, Fox News and Sarah Palin. I wondered how many of these friends, across the political spectrum, not only trumpeted their views online but quietly volunteered to improve a specific problem in a specific city.

As Christians, we don’t get to complain because we voted for the other guy. We don’t get to blame everything on the red states or the blue states or sit at home wringing our hands over the state of society. We don’t get to say “the local church is the hope of the world” but be content with community outreach consisting of Upward basketball and scrapbooking.

Instead, we get to partner with God in the restoration of all things. The church can do what politicians cannot, and now I’m dreaming about how to be part of it.

connect 4

My friend David is teaching a class at church on contemplative spirituality, and kicked it off with a discussion of the four main ways to relate to God. (He discovered this model in “Gospel-Centered Spirituality” by Allan Sager; you can buy used copies at Amazon here.)

Here’s the chart:

Here’s what it means:

People tend to gravitate to either an emotional (heart) or rational (mind) understanding of God. That’s the vertical line. They also tend to believe God is either more mysterious or more knowable (the horizontal line). The combination determines the way a person prefers to connect with God.

Like any such quadrant-based chart, you can be closer to or farther away from the center based on the strength of your identification with the variables. For instance, you may have a strong preference for relating to God with your mind, but your take on whether God can actually be known is pretty neutral. Your preferred avenues to connecting with God will look different from someone who shares your affinity for the rational but believes strongly that God can, in fact, be known and understood.

The coolest thing, I think, is the connection to Mark 12:30, where we’re told to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. It’s easy to match each of those areas with one of these quadrants.

Here were some additional insights from our class:

—Because of the connection to this verse, we cannot choose to live in only one or two quadrants. Although we all have a natural affinity toward one, we are commanded to love God with all four parts of our being, and therefore should make an effort to connect with God in each way.

—It’s easy to think your preferred quadrant is the superior one. We can probably all give examples of people who promote social justice, prayer and meditation, a personal emotional experience or right doctrine as the highest expression of faith.

—Each of the four can be healthy, but taken to an extreme each one can also be toxic.

—Because these preferences are so ingrained, I think they can affect our theology. For example, I’d say my quadrant is the inner life. But if I spend all my time in centering prayer and silence and lectio divina I’ll miss the many attributes of God that legitimately find expression in service, worship and study. It’s that old “if you just have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” thing. Again, balance is the goal.

What do you think? Does this chart have merit? What is your preferred way to connect with God?

shop, in the name of love

Some problems are so overwhelmingly big. How can I, just one small person, address the physical, spiritual, and educational needs in Africa? How can I preserve what’s left of the beautiful world God created? How can I get all reality TV off the air?

Human trafficking is another one of these issues. According to Kevin Bales’ book Disposable People, 27 million people around the world endure forced labor as slaves. According to UNICEF, more than 2 million children are exploited in the global commercial sex trade each year. And according to the U.N., the total market value of human trafficking is over $32 billion. That means slave traders make more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined.

So, no, I can’t fix this myself. But as with poverty and AIDS in Africa, the pollution of our oceans, or the new season of Real Housewives, we can all do something: Sponsor a child. Invest in a microloan. Turn off the TV.

And shop! Yesterday Emily Hill launched Stop Traffick Fashion, a site filled with beautiful and very reasonably-priced bags, necklaces and earrings made by adults and children rescued from human trafficking. Your purchase guarantees you a unique accessory while supporting these workers; best of all, a percentage of all sales goes directly to STF’s partners to help rescue others.

Emily reads this blog and has kept me posted about this new initiative. I’m so impressed with her creativity and determination to make the world a better place. And I’m planning a meeting to see if we can do something about Jon & Kate.

In addition to sharing the latest news from our ministries, brainstorming topics and authors for future issues, and generally having a great time being together, the Christian Standard contributing editors also participated in a significant discussion of social justice during their meeting earlier this week.

The hours-long, far-ranging conversation was sparked by a presentation from Doug Priest, Executive Director of Christian Missionary Fellowship and a new member of the team. He pointed out that, demographically speaking, the “average Christian” lives south of the equator. The people in this area are marginalized and powerless, and the churches are poor.

“Since theology arises out of the human context of its adherents,” Doug shared, “and since that context is now the majority world, Christian theology will increasingly focus on the issues of wealth and poverty, injustice and oppression, over-population, pluralism, and the environment as well as evangelism and church planting.”

Our team discussed the evolving evangelical response to such problems: at first, churches focused on social action or evangelism. Slowly they moved to a position of evangelism primary and social action secondary. Today, churches are growing toward a more holistic understanding with evangelism in a place of ultimacy—ultimately, evangelism must happen but involvement in many areas and engagement with a variety of issues can be the entrance point.

Because I’ve sometimes wondered what my afternoon building houses with Habitat for Humanity or my semester tutoring fourth-graders has to do with advancing the kingdom of God, I appreciate this perspective. And because I routinely become irritated with those who equate care for our planet and its poor as being “liberal,” I especially appreciated Doug’s comment that “concerns for peace, environmental action, human rights, liberation, material welfare, health, hunger, HIV/AIDS and host of other problems fall within the scope of mission, if indeed mission is concerned with the bringing of the abundant life for which Jesus came.”

What do you think—are you threatened by Christianity’s center shifting to the southern hemisphere? Are “externally focused” church programs and community service initiatives a way to ultimately share the Gospel and reach unbelievers, or are they nice things without real “results?” What’s the scorecard for ministry effectiveness? And what is the church called to do, here and overseas, for those living in poverty, walking through rivers of sewage, and selling their bodies for food?