Who is Doing the Lord’s Work?

Today, I came across Laura Leigh Parker’s missionary blog where she apologizes on behalf of missionaries and chastises them for how often there is a subtle (or sometimes not so) message in their communications “back home” about how they are ‘finally’ being the hands and feet of Christ now that they’ve left their secular job to enter the world of the full time Christian worker.

Parker expresses her regret at how such messages are self-elevating and in effect put down everyone holding down the fort and supporting those self same missionaries. To her, I express my deep, heartfelt thanks for her awareness, her humility to admit the issue exists, and boldness to confront it. Such an address best comes from someone in her shoes.

Sadly, I have been aware of the tendency since college. There, I was heavily involved in an excellent parachurch campus group throughout my studies. Yet, an integral part of my life story is a bit of rebellion and even resentment over the constant and not-so subtle pressure put on by the staff members for us to all go, or at least consider going into “full time Christian work.”

My actual, literal thoughts in those days were, “If all Christians went into full-time Christian work, who would run the post office?” It made me bound and determined not to go into full time Christian work, but to engage in such “FTCW” in the context of my secular, academic career.

Religious Freedom

I’ve been saving this op-ed from The Economist for a few weeks for various reasons. I probably should have included it as additional material in my recent post regarding an Ayaan Hirsi Ali article on a similar subject, but in retrospect repetition is a valuable tool in learning, and this is particularly true for unpleasant topics.

We need to take our Lord seriously when He promises something, and He promised persecution and trouble. It doesn’t help when our own human nature invites it, but that doesn’t mean that persecution is any less real. The Economist article discusses how Christianity is not only thriving but expanding rapidly among people in Africa and actually across the world of Islam, and those converts are paying the price in blood that Jesus paid.

Ivory Thoughts

Ivory is what all mammalian teeth are made of. The word itself traces its roots back to the ancient Egyptian word for elephant, as that has historically been the primary source of commercial ivory.

This brings to mind all sorts of witticisms when one thinks of the ivory tower (a group of people long in the tooth; dead but ornamental, a place where knowledge is chewed, ground down, etc.).

Looking at scholarship from this perspective can give us something to chew on. We take the wonders of nature, the mystery of human behaviour and dissect them, examining from every angle, and then regurgitating it in an arcane language devoid of life.

Faculty Mindset

In the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is an article entitled, “The 2011 Mind-Set of Faculty (Born Before 1980).” The author, Professor Bruce Krajewski is playing off of an annual list published by Benoit College describing the current mindset of entering freshmen for the benefit of faculty and administrators. Krajewski responds by describing twenty-two aspects of the academic worldview of current faculty. Most of them apply, as the title indicates, to the generations of faculty born before 1980, though some apply to generations pre-1970.

My first response upon reading it was “A-MEN.” I said so in replying to the friend who forwarded the article to me. Krajewski  accurately describes many of my thoughts on education and the role of faculty and their interactions and expectations of students. I found myself wishing that students (and administrators) understood that better and that the administrators would support and back us in these things better.

Then I started thinking, rather than reacting emotionally.

Flyover Folks

Burnet, Texas is a small, hill country town about an hour northwest of Texas. It is pronounced, “Burn-it,” with the local quip being, “Burnet, durnit! Learn it!” First Baptist Church of Burnet, since 1993, has been performing the “Main Street Bethlehem” on the first two weekends in December. They have build from the ground up, a 3-D, full-size mock up of the town of Bethlehem, with a synagogue, jail, family home, shops with crafts going on inside, a tavern, tax-collector station, Roman soldiers, stables, (with real livestock, from chickens to camels) and of course an inn and cave manger. The members of the church are the cast in period costumes. Think Colonial Williamsburg on a small 1-acre scale. This is popular enough that the line to enter got to at least 5-6 blocks long, and that is normal.

In the candlemaker’s shop, I made the mistake, upon seeing the straw bed in the corner, of asking the ladies making candles if they got to go home afterwards or were staying there. Without looking up, they said, “This is our home.” Duh. I forgot that everyone was in character.

The entire thing has been carefully researched to be as authentic as possible. At the end, they have free cookies and cocoa. Everyone with whom I interacted was as amazingly nice and gracious as they could be (or their characters would let them), and the members working outside the ‘city’ were genuinely glad and grateful for every person that attended. They seemed to be humbly honored that folks would come.

This brings me to my point. We in the academy are surrounded by highly educated, intelligent people, who know they are among the top in their field. There is this air of sophistication, and often elitism, among the university community. Often, we are so submerged in the culture of the ivory tower, we forget what just plain folks are like. We can easily view them as uneducated hics that need to be saved from their ignorance and small-mindedness. We forget that some of our colleagues are small-minded, too, just in a different way.

We need to get out of the ivory tower often, to interact with people more grounded in daily life than we are, people who are ‘closer to the earth’ and understanding that the real world doesn’t really care about theories about the way it ‘should’ operate, people who realize that our ‘control’ over our environment is largely in appearance only. We need to submerge ourselves among people of good cheer, hospitality, common sense, and yes, intelligence. Main Street Bethlehem is not run by redneck hics, but brothers and sisters in Christ who care about their faith, sharing it with others and doing so accurately and dramatically.

While Main Street Bethlehem is unique, the people behind it are in every small town and even in many big cities in this country. They are the folks the media refer to as “flyover country”—the ‘boring’ part of our nation that is just taking up space between the centers of power. The joke is on them, however. When I read my Bible, I see that these are the very people and places God uses to shame the elite and to demonstrate His power.

Even though I have been blessed to be in a center of worldly power, I refuse to lose touch with the places and people with whom God tends to associate Himself. It seems like the wise thing to do.

SDG