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HIRED GUNS FOR JESUS #7
SAME STORY, NEW TITLE
In the classic book, The Cross and the Switchblade – which goes back to the late ‘50s and the gang / drugs conversion stories of big, bad New York City, Pastor David Wilkerson tells about a kid named Martin Ilensky. He was a high school senior, and one day went to a “vodka party” at another boy’s house. Six boys, four girls. After about an hour, the booze ran out, and the guys took up a collection to go out and get some beer. Martin refused. One of the other kids pulled out a 12-inch German sword, and a few seconds later, Ilensky lay dying on the kitchen floor.
As you may remember, Teen Challenge, the youth ministry founded by Wilkerson, organized street witnessing groups. The “halfway house” they ran for heroin addicts, hookers, and runaway kids trained the teens in sharing Christ. And so one evening, during worship, there in the chapel on 416 Clinton Avenue, he called all the kids around: “Okay, you’ve got this kid, Martin Ilensky, who’s going to a party. By the end of tonight he’ll be dead. That’s his fate. But you have the chance to talk to him NOW. Question: what would you say to him?”
One boy raised his hand. “I’d tell him that Jesus saves.”
Another girl suggested: “Tell him he needs to be born again”?
And Wilkerson hit the pause button. “Hold it right there.” He asked them to just stop and think of those expressions. “Jesus saves.” “Be born again.” “Surrender your life.” “Give God full control.” And then he gave this warning: “Kids, we have to be careful that we don’t just parrot clichés that don’t have meaning outside this chapel. These are heroin addicts. These are gang members.”
And he turned back to the girl who had suggested the “born again” line. “Tell us,” he said. “What happened to you when YOU were born again?” She began to pour out her own story of fear and loneliness. Her life wasn’t going anywhere. Then one day a friend took her to church, and she really had invited Christ to enter into her life. “Is your loneliness gone now?” Wilkerson quietly asked. Yes. “How about your fear.” Yes. What made the difference? Jesus. Not a word or a phrase? No. Jesus.
Isn’t that beautiful? And you know, even though it’s true in all generations and cultures that “Jesus saves,” it’s our wonderful challenge to find new, inventive, appropriate, and continuing-ly powerful ways to tell people that Jesus saves.
I just bumped into this reality myself. Early in 2003, our Voice of Prophecy team was in Columbia, South Carolina, for a four-week satellite evangelistic series entitled THE VOICE OF PROPHECY SPEAKS. Twenty-six full-length sermon presentations, with computer graphics, illustrations, title blocks, etc. It was a frantic but exciting time.
Well, just a few months after that, it was time to buy plane tickets again. In fact, plane tickets, health cards, passports, and pith helmets – so to speak – because now we were going clear around the world to Lusaka, Zambia. And so a preacher’s initial thought, as you zoom from one boarding gate to the next one, is: “All right, same 26 sermons. Simply scroll back to #1 and hit the ‘play’ button again.”
But then we faced the reality that, no, you can’t do that. The way we say “Jesus Saves” in Columbia isn’t the way you say it in Lusaka . . . and I’m not just talking about translation and languages. Idioms are different. Stories that work here are a complete bomb over there. The PowerPoint graphics all need to be redone, not just to accommodate the new illustrations, but also to look more like the culture you’re speaking to.
Back in ‘93, some of our team members were over in Moscow for a series, and a medical professional was along to deliver some health talks. And this man, a Dr. Weaver, was a clever, winsome, effective speaker. He had one-liners and bits of humor that just sparkle here in the States. But as he ran his Smoking Cessation seminar there in the Olympic Stadium, and had a Russian translator helping him out, I want to tell you, those stolid-faced Muscovites just sat there. For seven decades, it seems, the Communist system had squeezed much of the laughter out of them, much of the free-spirited humor. Once in a while, they would crack a half-smile, but that doctor went back to his little Moscow hotel room night by night wondering, “What’s it take to make the Christian message of abundant living come alive for these dour, discouraged babushkas disembarking at the Prospekt Mira subway stop?”
I’ve always enjoyed the great missionary story entitled China Doctor, where the renowned Harry Miller, consulting physician to Presidents Taft and Wilson, served in China early in the 20th century. He and his friend Arthur Selmon, soon after arriving in that distant land, decided they should wear their hair in the long ponytails or “queues” that Chinese men wore as a sign of submission and loyalty to the emperor. So they shaved their heads and attached artificial “queues” from the Peking version of “Hair Club for Men.” Their wives almost passed out when the men came home from the barbershop. The guys also tried on the long, silk pajama-style robes the Chinese men were wearing, but could hardly keep from splitting their pants with every step. It was a time of high adventure and great challenges, but these visionary couples were willing to go the extra mile – on a longboat or in a buffalo cart if necessary – in order to make the good news that “Jesus saves” palatable to their new audience.
This must be what Paul had in mind when he wrote in First Corinthians 9 about his own witnessing stratagems.
“Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible,” he writes. “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not HAVING the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.”
I appreciate how the recent Message paraphrase – itself a project to keep the gospel expressions relevant and new-every-day – puts it:
“I have voluntarily become a servant to any and all in order to reach a wide range of people,” Paul writes. Then he adds, maybe as a warning. “I didn’t take on their way of life. I kept my bearings in Christ – but I entered their world and tried to experience things from their point of view.”
There’s a wonderful book going back to 1992, by John Stott, entitled The Contemporary Christian . . . which is really what we’re thinking about here. Interestingly, he writes about traveling to West Africa and seeing Gothic spires rising above the coconut palms, African bishops “sweating profusely” in their full-length European, Anglican robes, clerics trying to master western music and Elizabethan English. “We need ‘naturalization’ of the gospel,” he lamented. Later in the book, he points out that believers seem to get stuck, maybe, at one of two poles. On one side, one extreme, there is total fixity.
“Some Christian people seem to be in bondage to words and formulae,” he writes, “and so become prisoners of a gospel stereotype. They wrap up their message in a nice, neat package; and they tape, label and price-tag it as if it were destined for the supermarket. Then, unless their favorite phraseology is used (whether the kingdom of God, or the blood of Jesus, or human liberation, or being born again, or justification by faith, or the cosmic lordship of Christ), they roundly declare that the gospel has not been preached.”
He observes, perhaps with a wry smile, that when we think this way we’re failing to notice the rich diversity in the Bible itself, its many and varied ways of telling us God’s story.
But then, on the other side of the faith-sharing superhighway, is another ditch, and Dr. Stott calls this extreme total fluidity. So there’s “total fixity” and also “total fluidity,” where the gospel has no fixed truths, no absolutes. He quotes a British bishop who said:
“There’s no such thing as the gospel in a vacuum. You don’t even know what the gospel is until you enter each particular situation.”
And that, Stott feels, goes too far. Friend, the fixed, eternal reality is that “Jesus saves” . . . however we may express it. It is true now, and always will be, no matter what time zone you’re in, that the Cross of Calvary is a necessity, that Jesus is coming again, that there is life after death for all who believe. Stott reiterates in no uncertain terms that the Gospel is both a paradosis – “a tradition to be preserved” – and a parathēkē – “a deposit to be guarded.”
So the present, the gift, is always the same. It’s the wrapping paper that should be new every day.
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