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.

Consistency

We humans are remarkable creatures in many ways, not all of them good. In particular, we have an amazing capacity to rationalize our morality, seeing others' shortcomings and ignoring our own. It is difficult to “judge rightly,” as the Bible calls it. (John 7:24)

Well targeted was Christ’s command to pull the log out of our own eyes so that we can see clearly the speck in our brother’s. We even judge each other on judging. We quote, “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” but fail to remember the rest of the quote that says we will be judged by the standard we use to judge others.

Breaking Stereotypes

{Note:  This is the manuscript of my essay for “The Truth That Makes Them Free" Anthology, described in this post. Thus it is longer than most posts.}

 “Always share your faith. If necessary, use words.”

      St. Francis of Assisi

"Ooh", said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he...quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion!"

"That you will deary and no mistake", said Mrs. Beaver. "If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly."

"Then he isn't safe?", said Lucy.

"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver. "Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? Course he isn't safe.....but he's good. He's the King I tell you."

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

I grew up in a normal American family—my parents and a younger sister. We were Americans, so that meant we were Christians. Then, when I was around the second grade, my dad was urged by his father, “Kevin, you get those kids into church!” So, we started attending a Methodist church. My sister and I didn’t find the services terribly interesting, but I seemed to absorb the Bible stories in Sunday School. Several years passed, and Dad’s Sunday School teacher began to challenge him to take the Bible’s claims about truth seriously. Thus began a bittersweet time for my sister and I—we went from listening to music in the car to all of these radio preachers, hardly an enticement for young kids to be interested in spiritual things. 

Top of the World, or, Bottom of the Heap?

I was staying with a relative this weekend and today she was watching Fox, and Glenn Beck was on. He and two guests were discussing something about secularism versus Christianity. I didn’t have time to stop to hear what they said, but one thing I did catch was very interesting. On a chalkboard they had a pyramid split vertically down the middle. Going up the left side were a series of words, starting with “Earth” and ending with “Man” with various typed of plants and animals in between. It was a picture of the order of Creation in Genesis. Down the right side of the pyramid was the same list, but inverted, with “Earth” at the top and “Man” at the bottom, representing the secular, extreme environmentalist, view. (If you want to see the 3 part video in context, I found it through Google at http://michiganredneck.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/glenn-beck-let-there-be-stuff/ --I saw part 2 on TV.)

Beck’s point was that the two worldviews have an inverted view of the relative value of various parts of the natural world—Christians see humanity as the culmination of Creation and therefore of most worth, and the secular view sees humanity as the lowest factor and elevate the planet and animals as having more worth than humans, and therefore, why many positions held by secular environmentalists are seemingly anti-human.

I’m not a Beck disciple and his picture is way over-generalized and I only caught a few seconds of it. Aside from being an interesting, eye-catching graphic, it does remind me that different worldviews are different because they value things differently. (Boy, is that profound!) Academia is a microcosm of most of the worldviews on the planet, so we get a chance to explore them daily. Therefore, understanding them and finding points of commonality is a critical step in earning the right to be able to share yours. Paul did this in Athens very effectively (Acts 17).

Even in the inverted system Beck discussed, a point of commonality is the stewardship of the Creation. God created us last and most advanced because we were tasked with managing the place, which is one aspect of the secular environmentalist worldview. Starting there, we can discuss why this stewardship is important and how stewardship is a method of balancing needs, and not an all or nothing proposition.

What worldview is most dominant in your area? What are the points in common between it and your Christian worldview? Why do each value those commonalities? Where do they begin to differ and why?

SDG

PS- As I am posting this, I'm watching the video, and the guests seem pretty reasonable.