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.

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.

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.

Rick Reilly on World Malaria Day

A cool little piece from arguably the best sportswriter ever...

Ashton Kutcher isn't cool just because he's one of the few stars in Hollywood who played high school football. And he isn't cool because he recently promised to ding-dong ditch Ted Turner's house. He's cool because he just donated 10,000 nets at $10 a piece to stop the spread of malaria in Africa. Kutcher did it to celebrate becoming the first person to reach 1 million followers on Twitter, which inspired CNN to donate 10,000 nets, which got Oprah Winfrey to pitch in 20,000 nets. Perfect with World Malaria Day Saturday, April 25. But what if all million of Kutcher's Twitter-ers gave a net? That would be a million more lives saved! Now Turner has posed a challenge: If 10,000 more people join the Nothing But Nets campaign—the program I helped found with the United Nations Foundation—he's going to have Kutcher and his wife, Demi Moore, over for lunch If that happens, I'll donate 2,000 more nets myself. And do the dishes.

It’s 2009. Do You Know Where Your Soul Is? by BONO in the New York Times

A fascinating and brilliant essay on the spiritual and social and economic rebirth and redemption a world music icon sees in the story of Lent and Easter...and how it is deeply related to the state of our soul...

I AM in Midtown Manhattan, where drivers still play their car horns as if they were musical instruments and shouting in restaurants is sport.

I am a long way from the warm breeze of voices I heard a week ago on Easter Sunday.

“Glorify your name,” the island women sang, as they swayed in a cut sandstone church. I was overwhelmed by a riot of color, an emotional swell that carried me to sea.

Christianity, it turns out, has a rhythm — and it crescendos this time of year. The rumba of Carnival gives way to the slow march of Lent, then to the staccato hymnals of the Easter parade. From revelry to reverie. After 40 days in the desert, sort of ...

Carnival — rock stars are good at that.

“Carne” is flesh; “Carne-val,” its goodbye party. I’ve been to many. Brazilians say they’ve done it longest; they certainly do it best. You can’t help but contract the fever. You’ve got no choice but to join the ravers as they swell up the streets bursting like the banks of a river in a flood of fun set to rhythm. This is a Joy that cannot be conjured. This is life force. This is the heart full and spilling over with gratitude. The choice is yours ...

It’s Lent I’ve always had issues with. I gave it up ... self-denial is where I come a cropper. My idea of discipline is simple — hard work — but of course that’s another indulgence.

Then comes the dying and the living that is Easter.

It’s a transcendent moment for me — a rebirth I always seem to need. Never more so than a few years ago, when my father died. I recall the embarrassment and relief of hot tears as I knelt in a chapel in a village in France and repented my prodigal nature — repented for fighting my father for so many years and wasting so many opportunities to know him better. I remember the feeling of “a peace that passes understanding” as a load lifted. Of all the Christian festivals, it is the Easter parade that demands the most faith — pushing you past reverence for creation, through bewilderment at the idea of a virgin birth, and into the far-fetched and far-reaching idea that death is not the end. The cross as crossroads. Whatever your religious or nonreligious views, the chance to begin again is a compelling idea.

•

Last Sunday, the choirmaster was jumping out of his skin ... stormy then still, playful then tender, on the most upright of pianos and melodies. He sang his invocations in a beautiful oaken tenor with a freckle-faced boy at his side playing conga and tambourine as if it was a full drum kit. The parish sang to the rafters songs of praise to a God that apparently surrendered His voice to ours.

I come to lowly church halls and lofty cathedrals for what purpose? I search the Scriptures to what end? To check my head? My heart? No, my soul. For me these meditations are like a plumb line dropped by a master builder — to see if the walls are straight or crooked. I check my emotional life with music, my intellectual life with writing, but religion is where I soul-search.

The preacher said, “What good does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Hearing this, every one of the pilgrims gathered in the room asked, “Is it me, Lord?” In America, in Europe, people are asking, “Is it us?”

Well, yes. It is us.

Carnival is over. Commerce has been overheating markets and climates ... the sooty skies of the industrial revolution have changed scale and location, but now melt ice caps and make the seas boil in the time of technological revolution. Capitalism is on trial; globalization is, once again, in the dock. We used to say that all we wanted for the rest of the world was what we had for ourselves. Then we found out that if every living soul on the planet had a fridge and a house and an S.U.V., we would choke on our own exhaust.

Lent is upon us whether we asked for it or not. And with it, we hope, comes a chance at redemption. But redemption is not just a spiritual term, it’s an economic concept. At the turn of the millennium, the debt cancellation campaign, inspired by the Jewish concept of Jubilee, aimed to give the poorest countries a fresh start. Thirty-four million more children in Africa are now in school in large part because their governments used money freed up by debt relief. This redemption was not an end to economic slavery, but it was a more hopeful beginning for many. And to the many, not the lucky few, is surely where any soul-searching must lead us.

A few weeks ago I was in Washington when news arrived of proposed cuts to the president’s aid budget. People said that it was going to be hard to fulfill promises to those who live in dire circumstances such a long way away when there is so much hardship in the United States. And there is.

But I read recently that Americans are taking up public service in greater numbers because they are short on money to give. And, following a successful bipartisan Senate vote, word is that Congress will restore the money that had been cut from the aid budget — a refusal to abandon those who would pay such a high price for a crisis not of their making. In the roughest of times, people show who they are.

Your soul.

So much of the discussion today is about value, not values. Aid well spent can be an example of both, values and value for money. Providing AIDS medication to just under four million people, putting in place modest measures to improve maternal health, eradicating killer pests like malaria and rotoviruses — all these provide a leg up on the climb to self-sufficiency, all these can help us make friends in a world quick to enmity. It’s not alms, it’s investment. It’s not charity, it’s justice.

•

Strangely, as we file out of the small stone church into the cruel sun, I think of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, whose now combined fortune is dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty. Agnostics both, I believe. I think of Nelson Mandela, who has spent his life upholding the rights of others. A spiritual man — no doubt. Religious? I’m told he would not describe himself that way.

Not all soul music comes from the church.

Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE, is a contributing columnist for The Times.

A Lenten Prayer for Justice, Mercy, and Humility by Brian Swarts, Micah Challenge USA

I love this prayer from the director of a Christian organization committed to trying to help the Milennium Development Goals achieved by the year 2015...his words speak to my own fears and thoughts as I can so easily forget the economic impact felt so very personally by others...even as I begin to get ready to head back to Zambia again this summer I discovered that the Zambian currency had lost almost half of its value in comparison to the US dollar...it will cost us less to visit our friends there this summer because they are being devastated by the economic impact of our global recession...and I go to my knees asking God to live every day with their needs in mind...

Lord, hear our prayer:

Today we face the season of our redemption during a time of global crisis.

During this season teach us to understand the love that drove you to give up everything to save us all.

Give us the strength that only comes in weakness;

The renewal that only comes through death and resurrection.

Today many of us feel weakened, burdened, and overwhelmed by the challenges and uncertainties that lie ahead.

We ask that your strength be made perfect in our time of weakness.

While each of us is hurt by hard times, it is the people around the world living on less than $1/day, facing hunger, thirst, and illness, who bear the greatest burden of this crisis.

Just as your weakest hour proved to be the most generous, most life-giving moment in history,

We pray for that out of our own weakness comes a generosity of justice, mercy, and humility for those who bear burdens greater than our own.

Help us to remember that you are the God who, out of nothing, made everything.

The God who still has the power today to remake us.

So let us be remade, not overcome, by our global crisis;

Let us be purified, and not laid low, by injustice, greed, and inequality.

Let us commit ourselves to:

Act justly,
Love mercy,
And walk humbly with you, and with all those
who suffer or want.

This is our moment to change the world.

Because it is at our moment of crisis where your strength and your light, revealed to the world by our faith, become a force that is stronger than fear or death.

Today, move us to become the answer to our prayers.

Give us the strength to respond, in our own time of need, to the needs of those who have the least in our world.

Lead us to be your agents of hope and renewal during this season of redemption.

For it is only in You that we have
the power to change things;
It is only because of You that we have
the promise of renewal;
And yet is through us that You seek to do all these things.

Amen.

Surprised by Hope

It is often pointed out that some of the places most lacking in hope are not the industrial wastelands or the bleak landscapes shorn of beauty, but the places where there is too much money, too much high culture, too much of everything except faith, hope, and love.

Bishop N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope, p. 232