As we get ready to send off our senior class at Wheaton Academy this year, I was reminded in reading this article how much hope they have for what God will invite them to do in the future and how that hope resides so deeply in me as I see them have faith that is real and authentic...it causes me to love being a sender of students into our church and culture and world...and only God knows the great things He will be up to in and thru them...
Earlier this month I spent a weekend in Nashville, Tennessee, at the Mount Zion Baptist Church, which is led by my friend Bishop Joseph Walker, III.
Bishop Walker had invited me to preach to his congregation on a day devoted to honoring those who were graduating from one level of education to another.
Early in a two-hour (plus) service, the graduates paraded, single-file, to the front of the sanctuary to be acknowledged by the audience, to receive a gift, and to pose for individual photos with the Bishop. I'm guessing at the number of people in that parade, but I'll bet it was well north of 200.
First, came beautiful children who were transitionng from kindergarten to first grade. They were followed by handsome teen-agers who graduate this month from high school. After them: a dignified line of college graduates and those who have just received master's and Ph.D. degrees.
As each—from the smallest to the oldest—was introduced by name, a word was said about what they intended to do with their lives.
The five and six years olds: "This is James H. Brown, and he wants to be a police officer . . . this is Leticia T. Clark, and she wants to be a surgeon." On and on it went. This child wanted to be a pilot; this one wanted to be a film-maker; this one wanted to be an Olympic track star. There were future basketball players, barbers, astronauts, and firefighters. Some indicated a desire to be actors, teachers, or musicians. There was even a wanna-be preacher or two. Every child had dreams of doing something. No small thinking at among them.
Each high schooler was introduced by name and by the college or university they would attend in the fall. They were all headed somewhere up the educational ladder. One girl was headed for Princeton; others were on their way to University of Tennessee, Spellman, Morehouse, and Georgetown.
And the college grads? More than a few of them were pointed toward graduate school with the intention of tackling medicine, theology, law, biology, or music. You had the feeling that each of them was going to do something very, very good in the coming years.
As each child, youth, and young adult stepped to the bishop's side for his or her picture, the audience (extended families, friends, and even me) cheered, and whistled, and applauded. You would have thought that these young people were superstar athletes being celebrated by a sellout crowd at the Tennessee Titan stadium just a few miles away.
To me the whole affair was like a great church party. And I found myself as enthusiastic as anyone even though I had never met anyone in the parade. Why?
The answer, I suddenly realized, was that I felt a rush of simple, unadulterated hope. In these young men and women, I saw possibilities for tomorrow. I had visions of them carrying the love of Jesus into airplane cockpits, classrooms, biology labs, and operating theaters. And the visions made me glad.
You get this kind of a celebration in a church where older men and women make the development of the younger generation their highest priority, where those of us who have been around the block a few times engage with younger people in order to teach them, tell them our stories, and affirm them as they listen for God's voice.
You get a lot of hope boiling to the surface when the generations connect with each other as they appear to do at Mt. Zion.
The last six months haven't been that hopeful for a lot of us. We have come to dread the morning news because so little of it has been good. We've watched economies tank, suicide bombers create havoc, leaders crash in scandal, and tornadoes and floods destroy ways of life. .It's been like living in the tabloids
But the weekend at Mt. Zion altered my mood. It provoked some fresh thinking. Chief among my thoughts was an upgraded commitment to do whatever I can as a spiritual father to encourage younger people to aspire to the greatest heights God has intended for them.
There once was a man named Zechariah. In his aging years he and his wife birthed a son named John. Of this child, Zechariah sang these words: "And you, my child, will be a prophet of the Most High; for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him … "
And John did. But only because an old guy, his father, started pouring hope into him when he was still fresh from the womb.
And that's what they were doing at Mt. Zion last week: pouring hope into young people. Why not the same in every church?
Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Are You a Good Christ? By Francis Chan From Catalyst Monthly
A fantastic and thought provoking piece by a church leader who I see living out his faith and serving as an example for me in truly powerful ways...
I think it's time we stop asking ourselves the question: "Am I a good Christian?" We live in a time when the term "Christian" has been so diluted that millions of immoral but nice people genuinely consider themselves "good Christians." We have reduced the idea of a good Christian to someone who believes in Jesus, loves his or her family, and attends church regularly. Others will label you a good Christian even though your life has no semblance to the way Christ spent His days on earth. Perhaps we should start asking the question: "Am I a good Christ?" In other words, do I look anything like Jesus? This question never even entered my mind until a friend of mine made a passing comment to me one day.
Dan is a long time friend of mine. In fact, he's the pastor who performed my wedding. He was talking to me about a pastor named Von. Von has been working with youth in the San Diego area for decades. Many of his students have gone on to become amazing missionaries and powerful servants of God. Dan described a trip to Tijuana, Mexico with Pastor Von. (Von has been ministering to the poor in the dumps of Tijuana for years). Dan didn't speak of the awful living conditions of those who made their homes amidst the rubbish. What impacted Dan the most was the relationship he saw between Von and the people of this community. He spoke of the compassion, sacrifice, and love that he witnessed in Von's words and actions as he held these malnourished and un-bathed children. Then he made the statement that sent me reeling:
"The day I spent with Von was the closest thing I've ever experienced to walking with Jesus."
Dan explained that the whole experience was so eerie because he kept thinking to himself: "If Jesus were still walking on earth in the flesh, this is what it would feel like to walk alongside of Him!" After that discussion, I kept wondering if anyone had ever said that about me-"The day I spent with Francis was the closest thing I've ever experienced to walking with Jesus." The answer was an obvious "no." Would any honest person say that about you?
What bothered me was not that I hadn't "arrived," but that I wasn't even heading in the right direction. I hadn't made it my goal to resemble Christ. I wasn't striving to become the kind of person who could be mistaken for Jesus Christ. Isn't it ironic that a man can be known as a successful pastor, speaker, and CHRISTian even if his life doesn't resemble Christ's?
1 John 2:6 "Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did."
When John made that statement, he wasn't speaking about how to be a church leader or even how to be a "good" Christian. He merely stated that anyone who calls himself Christian must live like Jesus did. So how did Jesus live? You could make a list of character traits to compare yourself to, but it would be far more beneficial to simply read through one of the Gospels. After you get a bird's-eye view of the life of Christ, do the same with your own. Are you comfortable with the similarities and differences?
It's easy to get caught up in the pursuit of "success" as American church-goers define it. The thought of being well-known and respected is alluring. There have been times when I've been caught up in the fun of popularity. I've even mistaken it for success. Biblically, however, success is when our lives parallel Christ's. Truth is, there are many good Christs that you'll never read about in a magazine. They are walking as Jesus walked, but they are too focused and humble to pursue their own recognition.
May we make it our goal to someday have someone say of us: "The day/hour/15 minutes I spent with ______ was the closest thing I've ever experienced to walking with Jesus."
As Christians in America, we often complain about how antagonistic people are toward Christ. Personally, I'm not sure that Americans are really rejecting Christ. Maybe they just haven't seen Him.
Try to be COMPLETELY honest with yourself right now. Is the following true of you?
You passionately love Jesus, but you don't really want to be like Him. You admire His humility, but you don't want to be THAT humble. You think it's beautiful that He washed the feet of the disciples, but that's not exactly the direction your life is headed. You're thankful He was spit upon and abused, but you would never let that happen to you. You praise Him for loving you enough to suffer during His whole time on earth, but you're going to do everything within your power to make sure you enjoy your time down here.
In short: You think He's a great Savior, but not a great role model.
The American church has abandoned the most simple and obvious truth of what it means to follow Jesus: You actually follow His pattern of life. I pray for those who read this article- that we don't become cynical or negative toward the church. Instead, let's make a personal decision to stop talking so much and begin living like Jesus. Then we can say as the apostle Paul, "Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ" (1 Corinthians 11:1). My guess is that you've never had someone say that to you, and you've never said it to anyone else. Why Not?
Francis Chan is the pastor of Cornerstone Church and the president of Eternity Bible College in Simi Valley.
I think it's time we stop asking ourselves the question: "Am I a good Christian?" We live in a time when the term "Christian" has been so diluted that millions of immoral but nice people genuinely consider themselves "good Christians." We have reduced the idea of a good Christian to someone who believes in Jesus, loves his or her family, and attends church regularly. Others will label you a good Christian even though your life has no semblance to the way Christ spent His days on earth. Perhaps we should start asking the question: "Am I a good Christ?" In other words, do I look anything like Jesus? This question never even entered my mind until a friend of mine made a passing comment to me one day.
Dan is a long time friend of mine. In fact, he's the pastor who performed my wedding. He was talking to me about a pastor named Von. Von has been working with youth in the San Diego area for decades. Many of his students have gone on to become amazing missionaries and powerful servants of God. Dan described a trip to Tijuana, Mexico with Pastor Von. (Von has been ministering to the poor in the dumps of Tijuana for years). Dan didn't speak of the awful living conditions of those who made their homes amidst the rubbish. What impacted Dan the most was the relationship he saw between Von and the people of this community. He spoke of the compassion, sacrifice, and love that he witnessed in Von's words and actions as he held these malnourished and un-bathed children. Then he made the statement that sent me reeling:
"The day I spent with Von was the closest thing I've ever experienced to walking with Jesus."
Dan explained that the whole experience was so eerie because he kept thinking to himself: "If Jesus were still walking on earth in the flesh, this is what it would feel like to walk alongside of Him!" After that discussion, I kept wondering if anyone had ever said that about me-"The day I spent with Francis was the closest thing I've ever experienced to walking with Jesus." The answer was an obvious "no." Would any honest person say that about you?
What bothered me was not that I hadn't "arrived," but that I wasn't even heading in the right direction. I hadn't made it my goal to resemble Christ. I wasn't striving to become the kind of person who could be mistaken for Jesus Christ. Isn't it ironic that a man can be known as a successful pastor, speaker, and CHRISTian even if his life doesn't resemble Christ's?
1 John 2:6 "Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did."
When John made that statement, he wasn't speaking about how to be a church leader or even how to be a "good" Christian. He merely stated that anyone who calls himself Christian must live like Jesus did. So how did Jesus live? You could make a list of character traits to compare yourself to, but it would be far more beneficial to simply read through one of the Gospels. After you get a bird's-eye view of the life of Christ, do the same with your own. Are you comfortable with the similarities and differences?
It's easy to get caught up in the pursuit of "success" as American church-goers define it. The thought of being well-known and respected is alluring. There have been times when I've been caught up in the fun of popularity. I've even mistaken it for success. Biblically, however, success is when our lives parallel Christ's. Truth is, there are many good Christs that you'll never read about in a magazine. They are walking as Jesus walked, but they are too focused and humble to pursue their own recognition.
May we make it our goal to someday have someone say of us: "The day/hour/15 minutes I spent with ______ was the closest thing I've ever experienced to walking with Jesus."
As Christians in America, we often complain about how antagonistic people are toward Christ. Personally, I'm not sure that Americans are really rejecting Christ. Maybe they just haven't seen Him.
Try to be COMPLETELY honest with yourself right now. Is the following true of you?
You passionately love Jesus, but you don't really want to be like Him. You admire His humility, but you don't want to be THAT humble. You think it's beautiful that He washed the feet of the disciples, but that's not exactly the direction your life is headed. You're thankful He was spit upon and abused, but you would never let that happen to you. You praise Him for loving you enough to suffer during His whole time on earth, but you're going to do everything within your power to make sure you enjoy your time down here.
In short: You think He's a great Savior, but not a great role model.
The American church has abandoned the most simple and obvious truth of what it means to follow Jesus: You actually follow His pattern of life. I pray for those who read this article- that we don't become cynical or negative toward the church. Instead, let's make a personal decision to stop talking so much and begin living like Jesus. Then we can say as the apostle Paul, "Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ" (1 Corinthians 11:1). My guess is that you've never had someone say that to you, and you've never said it to anyone else. Why Not?
Francis Chan is the pastor of Cornerstone Church and the president of Eternity Bible College in Simi Valley.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Running for Maggie
Below is a piece I recently wrote for a feature section highlighting our 6th annual 5K Run/3K Walk for Zambia this coming Saturday May 16 at 8 am at Wheaton Academy...this year our school student body is working toward providing bikes in partnership with World Bicycle Relief for students who need them to continue their education! And we are once again partnering with Bright Hope Intl to host this event. I would love to have you join us if you are interested, and I am also gathering sponsors to help raise funds for our project and would invite you to sponsor me if you'd like! You can find out more info and register for the event at this website:
http://www.runforhungrychildren.org/westchicago.php
And you can donate online or find the address to donate offline at the website I have created below:
http://www.firstgiving.com/chiphuber
For the last seven years, the student community at Wheaton Academy, a private Christian high school in West Chicago, has developed an unusual passion and compassion for the needs of a group of people on the other side of the world in the sub-Saharan African nation of Zambia. The student body has raised over $650,000 to help provide the resources to build new medical clinics to reduce the transmission of the HIV virus from mothers to their unborn children, the first school to ever exist in a village community, new wells that provide clean water, long term food security supplies and training to battle famine conditions, bikes for students to be able to attend high schools that were too far to walk to, microloans to help entrepreneurs start their own small businesses, and a child ministry center for area churches to together offer hope and healing to the hundreds of orphans and vulnerable children in the community.
Close to 100 students and faculty members have had the chance to go and visit the Kakolo Village community in north central Zambia and see first hand what life is like in a place very different from the suburban world we live in every day. Poverty is overwhelming at times, as many families live on less than $1 per day, and the HIV infection rate has caused one in every five people to live with a disease that affects or infects every person’s life in their community. You are frankly overwhelmed by what you see at first…but then you begin to get to hear the stories and know the people of Africa and there is hope and joy and life in the midst of a seemingly hopeless situation. I am heading to Zambia for the fifth time this summer with another group of students and many of my friends and acquaintances ask me to explain why I care so much about people who live thousands and thousands of miles away from my own home and world.
My answer is honest and somewhat complicated. Seven years ago I don’t think I could have picked out Zambia on a world map. I had some notion that I should be concerned about the needs of the poor, but my own existence didn’t cause me to have to deal with the question very often. But then I met some children in this little village in Africa who literally changed my life in almost every way imaginable. You see, millions of people starving and affected by disease is a pandemic, but the loss of one life that you know and shouldn’t occur becomes a tragedy. One girl’s story in Zambia helped me to understand what is really happening in our world and why I am responsible to help end the suffering of others around the globe. I first met Maggie when she was eight years old. On our first visit to Zambia, the local community wanted to thank us for our gift of resources to build this new school they had been praying God would provide for them for years. They sang and danced and even gave us gifts as expressions of gratitude for what we had done. Their final gift to me as the group leader was a bit surprising: a live chicken, one of the most valuable things they possessed in their village. I bowed in thanks holding this cackling chicken and then wondered to myself, “What do I do with this animal?” One of our hosts suggested we take it back to our guesthouse and ask the cook to prepare it for our dinner, but we had plenty of food and I wasn’t sure I could convince my group of students to eat the gift we had received.
After talking with some of the Zambian staff serving that community, we decided we would give it to one family in the local community. I remember hearing Maggie’s story for the first time as we headed over to her home to give her this gift. Maggie was a 7-year old girl who lived in a small one-room hut with her great-grandmother. The hut had a leaky thatch roof and was smaller than my office at my school. Maggie’s great grandmother was her only living relative. Her parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandparents had all died from the diseases ravaging her village. She was an AIDS orphan with little food and so many fears and questions about her future. As I gave the still-squawking chicken to these two new friends, I knew that this little girl is the reason why I have fallen in love with Africa and believe so deeply in caring for the needs of the least in our world. The next time I went back to Kakolo Village Maggie and her great-grandmother proudly showed me their new three-room home and she showed me the work she had completed at the new school she was now attending. Her future was clearly still clearly uncertain, but there was hope and there was new life because of the resources given by some students on the other side of the world.
I have discovered joy and meaning and community in ways I never could have imagined as I have followed God’s plan for us to serve and care for the poor in Jesus’ name. I have gotten to know beautiful and gifted people like Maggie and hundreds of others in Zambia who have inspired me and changed me as I have watched them live and grow in the midst of great challenge in their lives. Bright Hope International is caring for and changing the lives of children like Maggie in the places where hunger and need is the greatest in our world today. The Run for Hungry Children on Saturday May 16 is a our chance to touch the lives of kids who are praying that someone will care and someone will help them. I’ll be running that day with a smile on my face thinking of Maggie in Zambia…I hope you’ll join us…a hungry child in Africa, Asia and Latin America will forever thank you!
Chip Huber is the Dean of Spiritual Life at Wheaton Academy and the coordinator of the school’s global initiatives to care for children and families in need in Kenya and Zambia.
http://www.runforhungrychildren.org/westchicago.php
And you can donate online or find the address to donate offline at the website I have created below:
http://www.firstgiving.com/chiphuber
For the last seven years, the student community at Wheaton Academy, a private Christian high school in West Chicago, has developed an unusual passion and compassion for the needs of a group of people on the other side of the world in the sub-Saharan African nation of Zambia. The student body has raised over $650,000 to help provide the resources to build new medical clinics to reduce the transmission of the HIV virus from mothers to their unborn children, the first school to ever exist in a village community, new wells that provide clean water, long term food security supplies and training to battle famine conditions, bikes for students to be able to attend high schools that were too far to walk to, microloans to help entrepreneurs start their own small businesses, and a child ministry center for area churches to together offer hope and healing to the hundreds of orphans and vulnerable children in the community.
Close to 100 students and faculty members have had the chance to go and visit the Kakolo Village community in north central Zambia and see first hand what life is like in a place very different from the suburban world we live in every day. Poverty is overwhelming at times, as many families live on less than $1 per day, and the HIV infection rate has caused one in every five people to live with a disease that affects or infects every person’s life in their community. You are frankly overwhelmed by what you see at first…but then you begin to get to hear the stories and know the people of Africa and there is hope and joy and life in the midst of a seemingly hopeless situation. I am heading to Zambia for the fifth time this summer with another group of students and many of my friends and acquaintances ask me to explain why I care so much about people who live thousands and thousands of miles away from my own home and world.
My answer is honest and somewhat complicated. Seven years ago I don’t think I could have picked out Zambia on a world map. I had some notion that I should be concerned about the needs of the poor, but my own existence didn’t cause me to have to deal with the question very often. But then I met some children in this little village in Africa who literally changed my life in almost every way imaginable. You see, millions of people starving and affected by disease is a pandemic, but the loss of one life that you know and shouldn’t occur becomes a tragedy. One girl’s story in Zambia helped me to understand what is really happening in our world and why I am responsible to help end the suffering of others around the globe. I first met Maggie when she was eight years old. On our first visit to Zambia, the local community wanted to thank us for our gift of resources to build this new school they had been praying God would provide for them for years. They sang and danced and even gave us gifts as expressions of gratitude for what we had done. Their final gift to me as the group leader was a bit surprising: a live chicken, one of the most valuable things they possessed in their village. I bowed in thanks holding this cackling chicken and then wondered to myself, “What do I do with this animal?” One of our hosts suggested we take it back to our guesthouse and ask the cook to prepare it for our dinner, but we had plenty of food and I wasn’t sure I could convince my group of students to eat the gift we had received.
After talking with some of the Zambian staff serving that community, we decided we would give it to one family in the local community. I remember hearing Maggie’s story for the first time as we headed over to her home to give her this gift. Maggie was a 7-year old girl who lived in a small one-room hut with her great-grandmother. The hut had a leaky thatch roof and was smaller than my office at my school. Maggie’s great grandmother was her only living relative. Her parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandparents had all died from the diseases ravaging her village. She was an AIDS orphan with little food and so many fears and questions about her future. As I gave the still-squawking chicken to these two new friends, I knew that this little girl is the reason why I have fallen in love with Africa and believe so deeply in caring for the needs of the least in our world. The next time I went back to Kakolo Village Maggie and her great-grandmother proudly showed me their new three-room home and she showed me the work she had completed at the new school she was now attending. Her future was clearly still clearly uncertain, but there was hope and there was new life because of the resources given by some students on the other side of the world.
I have discovered joy and meaning and community in ways I never could have imagined as I have followed God’s plan for us to serve and care for the poor in Jesus’ name. I have gotten to know beautiful and gifted people like Maggie and hundreds of others in Zambia who have inspired me and changed me as I have watched them live and grow in the midst of great challenge in their lives. Bright Hope International is caring for and changing the lives of children like Maggie in the places where hunger and need is the greatest in our world today. The Run for Hungry Children on Saturday May 16 is a our chance to touch the lives of kids who are praying that someone will care and someone will help them. I’ll be running that day with a smile on my face thinking of Maggie in Zambia…I hope you’ll join us…a hungry child in Africa, Asia and Latin America will forever thank you!
Chip Huber is the Dean of Spiritual Life at Wheaton Academy and the coordinator of the school’s global initiatives to care for children and families in need in Kenya and Zambia.
Friday, May 8, 2009
How to Handle the Next Pandemic by Mark Galli, Christianity Today
A thoughtful piece in the swine flu era...we talked about this very response in my senior class discussion from Andy Crouch's Culture Making book...may our church embrace this idea for the current and future pandemics rather than trying to stay in our medically protected worlds...and we may watch the world be drawn to the church in ways not seen in thousands of years...
I can't decide which better reflects the current contradictions of American life: last week's media hype over the swine flu, or the media hype about the media hype.
Last week, we were treated to a plethora of headlines that seemed designed to scare the virus out of us:
* World Health Organization Raises Swine Flu Alert Level
* Asking for More Funding, U.S. Steps Up Flu Response
* Swine Flu Vaccine May Be Months Away, Experts Say
And these are from the reserved New York Times. Look at less responsible papers, and it seemed that the end times were at hand. But even in careful reporting, the event had a vocabulary that instilled anxiety—mutate, pandemic, H1N1, and "level 5"—all of which have an ominous feel.
These stories, in turn, raised a pandemic of responses. It wasn't a day or two into the week before media naysayers were condemning their own kind. By Tuesday of last week, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post noted the "fever pitch" of coverage, and that "the sheer volume of media attention suggested a full-blown crisis." The point was made, less judiciously, by bloggers across the world.
I'm hardly the first to note the 24/7 news cycle that encourages the hyping of such stories, which prompts media-hype-critiques, which prompts what's-wrong-with-the-media articles—all of which prompt excitement and readership. It makes one wonder if in this we're not seeing a lot of informal but mutual back scratching between the media, pharmaceutical concerns, and government health service bureaucracies—all of whose "business models" thrive at such times.
So the first contradiction is this: It is democratic capitalism that has made 24/7 news possible, and it is 24/7 news that is making democratic capitalism a difficult thing to manage with wisdom. We've gotten to the point where the President of the United States has to spend chunks of his day just managing perceptions of his handling of the crises because, as a New York Times story put it, "political management of a crisis, and of public expectations, can be as important as the immediate response."
* * *
The media would not be tempted to overhype the swine flu if it didn't believe people were genuinely worried about it. But it's hard to understand why the swine flu elicited such fear. Even when we are told that flu viruses kill some 36,000 Americans annually, and that the swine flu has yet to kill five—well, it doesn't seem to calm us.
That may be because the "normal" flu tends to kill only infants and the elderly, while the swine flu can kill perfectly healthy people in the middle of life—people like us! While we pride ourselves on our compassion for the defenseless (i.e., infants and the elderly), this hints at another contradiction: We can live comfortably with the fact that viruses kill tens of thousands annually—as long as the victims are infants and elderly. We only panic when we hear that people like us are threatened, even if only a few dozen of us.
* * *
Christians believe that our faith helps us live bravely in the face of fear. Still, it is not easy to do so, and it's no surprise that among the people who irrationally panic in face of pandemics, many are Christians. But we do have resources that can help us to transcend fear and to experience a different type of contradiction.
In The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark describes those dark times in Roman history when city-wide epidemics wiped out whole sections of the population. The empire would do its best to quarantine sections of cities, and those remaining were abandoned to a slow and painful death. The only people willing to risk life to care for these suffering souls were Christians. Many of them flocked to the areas most infected and literally gave their lives to care for the dead and dying. This heroic example was one reason the empire took a second look at this outlandish sect.
Last I heard, some churches were creating preparedness plans in the case of a flu pandemic. One 3,000-word plan I read tended to focus on institutional survival. It encouraged churches to answer questions like: Will staff come into the office? How will the church communicate with members if public gatherings are forbidden by the government? If the church does meet for worship, how should members share in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper? And so on.
It's all well and good, but I wonder if churches would be better served by asking its members to read Stark's account. That would be the most crucial form of preparedness, no? That would prompt us to start thinking about the discipleship choices that will face us in a real pandemic: Who should visit the sick and dying, and who should not? Should clergy protect themselves from the disease at all costs to guarantee ongoing leadership, or is effectual leadership at such times to model sacrifice? If vaccines are in limited supply, as news reports indicate, should entire churches forgo their right to a vaccine so that others can be protected?
Christians at their best concern themselves less with the church's institutional survival, or even their own survival, and more with the welfare of the suffering. We live with a host of contradictions that give us courage in the midst of a culture of panic. We've learned that in weakness there is strength, that in giving we receive, and that in losing our lives, we save them—all because of history's greatest contradiction, that story about a suffering God whose death brings life.
I can't decide which better reflects the current contradictions of American life: last week's media hype over the swine flu, or the media hype about the media hype.
Last week, we were treated to a plethora of headlines that seemed designed to scare the virus out of us:
* World Health Organization Raises Swine Flu Alert Level
* Asking for More Funding, U.S. Steps Up Flu Response
* Swine Flu Vaccine May Be Months Away, Experts Say
And these are from the reserved New York Times. Look at less responsible papers, and it seemed that the end times were at hand. But even in careful reporting, the event had a vocabulary that instilled anxiety—mutate, pandemic, H1N1, and "level 5"—all of which have an ominous feel.
These stories, in turn, raised a pandemic of responses. It wasn't a day or two into the week before media naysayers were condemning their own kind. By Tuesday of last week, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post noted the "fever pitch" of coverage, and that "the sheer volume of media attention suggested a full-blown crisis." The point was made, less judiciously, by bloggers across the world.
I'm hardly the first to note the 24/7 news cycle that encourages the hyping of such stories, which prompts media-hype-critiques, which prompts what's-wrong-with-the-media articles—all of which prompt excitement and readership. It makes one wonder if in this we're not seeing a lot of informal but mutual back scratching between the media, pharmaceutical concerns, and government health service bureaucracies—all of whose "business models" thrive at such times.
So the first contradiction is this: It is democratic capitalism that has made 24/7 news possible, and it is 24/7 news that is making democratic capitalism a difficult thing to manage with wisdom. We've gotten to the point where the President of the United States has to spend chunks of his day just managing perceptions of his handling of the crises because, as a New York Times story put it, "political management of a crisis, and of public expectations, can be as important as the immediate response."
* * *
The media would not be tempted to overhype the swine flu if it didn't believe people were genuinely worried about it. But it's hard to understand why the swine flu elicited such fear. Even when we are told that flu viruses kill some 36,000 Americans annually, and that the swine flu has yet to kill five—well, it doesn't seem to calm us.
That may be because the "normal" flu tends to kill only infants and the elderly, while the swine flu can kill perfectly healthy people in the middle of life—people like us! While we pride ourselves on our compassion for the defenseless (i.e., infants and the elderly), this hints at another contradiction: We can live comfortably with the fact that viruses kill tens of thousands annually—as long as the victims are infants and elderly. We only panic when we hear that people like us are threatened, even if only a few dozen of us.
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Christians believe that our faith helps us live bravely in the face of fear. Still, it is not easy to do so, and it's no surprise that among the people who irrationally panic in face of pandemics, many are Christians. But we do have resources that can help us to transcend fear and to experience a different type of contradiction.
In The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark describes those dark times in Roman history when city-wide epidemics wiped out whole sections of the population. The empire would do its best to quarantine sections of cities, and those remaining were abandoned to a slow and painful death. The only people willing to risk life to care for these suffering souls were Christians. Many of them flocked to the areas most infected and literally gave their lives to care for the dead and dying. This heroic example was one reason the empire took a second look at this outlandish sect.
Last I heard, some churches were creating preparedness plans in the case of a flu pandemic. One 3,000-word plan I read tended to focus on institutional survival. It encouraged churches to answer questions like: Will staff come into the office? How will the church communicate with members if public gatherings are forbidden by the government? If the church does meet for worship, how should members share in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper? And so on.
It's all well and good, but I wonder if churches would be better served by asking its members to read Stark's account. That would be the most crucial form of preparedness, no? That would prompt us to start thinking about the discipleship choices that will face us in a real pandemic: Who should visit the sick and dying, and who should not? Should clergy protect themselves from the disease at all costs to guarantee ongoing leadership, or is effectual leadership at such times to model sacrifice? If vaccines are in limited supply, as news reports indicate, should entire churches forgo their right to a vaccine so that others can be protected?
Christians at their best concern themselves less with the church's institutional survival, or even their own survival, and more with the welfare of the suffering. We live with a host of contradictions that give us courage in the midst of a culture of panic. We've learned that in weakness there is strength, that in giving we receive, and that in losing our lives, we save them—all because of history's greatest contradiction, that story about a suffering God whose death brings life.
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