First things First

I was reading an article today in the Chattanooga Times Free Press about the dramatic increase in teens dying from accidental overdoses on prescription meds. The interview featured a parent who was devastated by the loss of his daughter. He related the call he had received from his ex-wife who was screaming into the phone that his daughter would not wake-up. The call and the story were heartbreaking. He went on to relate how his daughter had begun experimenting with drugs when she was fifteen years old and he didn’t know what caused the problem. He felt like he had done everything right as father.

 

How many times over my twenty-three years of ministry have I been faced with parents bewildered over the choices their teenagers and young adults are making. It’s sad because their hearts are breaking for their children. They literally feel that they have done it all right; and in the eyes of the world they have.

 

The Bible states in the book of Proverbs, “There is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way to death (Pr. 14:12)”.

 

We have been sold a lie by our culture as to what makes a good parent. The advertising companies and marketing machines spend billions of dollars trying to convince us that what our kids really need is stuff. They need great clothes, they need subscriptions to cable or satellite T.V.’s with the kids plan, they need their own room in a large home, they need to be involved in every activity a good parent can afford, they need cell phones, computers, mp3 players, tragically hip parents, they need the latest and greatest this and the latest and greatest that. If you are a good parent in the eye’s of this world you will do whatever you can to provide your child with these things.

 

The world does not just stop at stuff though. It tells us those with great stuff win and we want our children to be winners. The way that they get to be winners is through achievement. Our kids need to achieve academically so that they can get the right opportunity and land the right job that is going to allow them to get the right stuff, they need to be invested in the right activities and we should be willing to drop or sacrifice whatever so that Suzie Q can play soccer or Bobby Joe can play football because athletic success is the real ticket. They might be able to land a scholarship or maybe even one of those 100 million dollar pro sports contracts. Just think of all the stuff they could get with that!!!

 

No really, I just want them to be happy, and I know that if I had more stuff, more success, a prettier body I’d be happy so I darn sure want my kids to have a better shot at happiness than I’m having.

 

“There is a way that seems right to a person, but in the end leads to death (Pr. 14:12).”

 

George Barna, a pollster who has conducted surveys of the American people for the last 20 years, has a book called Revolutionary Parenting. It’s quite interesting, especially for someone who is a Christ follower. In the book he surveyed 2000 young adults who are committed Christians, love God, and are active and generous within their churches. These were kids that weren’t perfect but they experienced none of that teenage rebelliousness we’ve been taught is normal. When he surveyed them he found that most all of them had pretty amazing parents and so he surveyed parents as well. What he discovered is that “Revolutionary Parents” had some universally shared values, and these values seemed to produce some pretty amazing kids. I’ll share a few of them with you. These are going to be shocking so get ready.

 

1. The parents loved God deeply and sincerely, and this love for God influenced every area of their lives.
2. These parents saw parenting as their greatest responsibility in life.
3. These parents saw the goal of their parenting being to raise kids who grew up to love and serve God (over academics, athletics, or anything else).
4. These parents loved their spouse and were committed to their marriage for a lifetime.
5. These parents took responsibility for the education of their children (whether public, private, or home schooled both academic and spiritual).
6. These parents were consistent in their discipline.
7. These parents did not try to be their kid’s best buddy.
8. These parents made whatever economic sacrifices were necessary so that they could be involved in their children’s lives (instead of trying to give their kids more stuff, they gave them more of them; in almost every case one spouse was at home).

Some of these values might make you angry, but remember these are not Jeff’s eight values. These are some of the values that Barna discovered through his survey. They are just facts derived from statistical information. However, I have found that these values have worked in my life and in many, many other people I know.

 

During this fall quarter Kellie and I are going to be co-leading a growth group with some Revolutionary Parents Scott and Laura Lillard on the topic of how to be the best parents we can be. Those of you with kids that go to our church I highly recommend you attend this growth group, but after reading the article today I felt compelled to blog a bit on this topic.

 

Out of all the things God has given us to steward in our lives our children are the most precious. I have never once heard one person on their death bed say I wished I had spent less time with my children. I have seen many people who have been heartbroken over the direction of their children’s lives wondering what they could have done to prevent the reality they find themselves and their kids in. Well there are eight values that if internalized and lived out will be a huge dose of preventative medicine.

 

I’m writing this because I don’t want you to ever wake up to a daughter who is dead because she was using drugs to escape the world. I kept the first sentence of the story I related at the beginning of the blog intact because if the girl died at 22 and started doing dugs at 15 it doesn’t take brain science from the context of the story to figure out what happened that shattered her world to the point she wanted to go numb on drugs. Did you catch it? If not reread it over and over again until you clue in.

 

The good news is even if your parenting has been miserable; you can always make a fresh start. Recommit. Because if you look hard at this, all that is really being said by the results of the survey is be the person you want your kid to be. If they respect you they’ll want to be like you.

 

Jesus said, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added unto you”. I think this holds true for parenting.

 

 

 

Couch Surffing in Calcutta: A Pespective on Ministry to the Marginalized

This post is by a friend of mine, Chris Heintz, who has attended the Vineyard Chattanooga since he was in the 8th grade.  Since graduating from high school Chris has been caught up in many an adventure for Christ.  He attended Christian college in California, has lived in a Christian communal setting, has had several neat experiences in other countries, and is now interning at monastery in Conyers GA.  Chris and I had coffee a couple of weeks ago where he shared with me his experiences with the Sister's of Charity in Calcutta India.  I thought what he shared was s interesting that I asked him to write it down so I could share it with you.

Two years ago I was given a plane ticket from my grandparents for my college graduation. A ticket to anywhere in the world. I had spent time in Europe and Japan while I was in high school and had seen how other cultures in the so called "first world" lived differently and how they lived similarly to those of us comfortably in the United States. But what I hadn't yet seen was the world most people lived in. The very world Jesus lived and died in. The world of the marginalized, the excluded, and the outcast. The world many of would prefer not to acknowledge. The world of the poor.


And so I decided to travel to Calcutta India to work with the Missionaries of Charity, the order that began with Mother Teresa. By the time the plane landed in India, I still didn't know exactly where I was going to stay those two months, but somehow I wasn't too worried. I finally connected with the Indian man I found online through couchsurfing.com who lived on the outskirts of Calcutta (or Kolkata, as it's officially called today) and was willing to let me stay with him. A stranger, willing to welcome me into his home. And all was well. At least where I would sleep.

That first day in Calcutta was about as much of a shock to the system as any place could have been. The kind that feels impossible to describe. People EVERYWHERE! Cars, mo-peds, motorcycles, rickshaws, buses, and taxis all happy to reduce the pedestrian population. All moving in mass anarchy to the constant honk of every horn. And trash... trash, everywhere. Calcutta could sometimes make Skidd Row in Los Angeles seem like a safe, quiet neighborhood to raise a family. For the first few days, the poverty was all I could see. You'd try to escape it in air-conditioned book stores or coffee shops, something, anything to give you a taste of home. But all you could taste sipping your latte as malnourished children would bang on the glass windows, begging for food, was your own guilt.

But I arrived in India precisely to see this. To see the world in all its reality. And what was beginning to stir in me was the reality of the Gospel. The reality of a God that would rather be born among the poor in ancient Palestine, in a filth covered manger, than in the palaces of Rome. That it was precisely to the weak and powerless, to those sick and in despair, to those shoved to the margins that Jesus said, "follow me".

After several days of trying to adjust to everything I was experiencing, I began working in Kalighat, the home for the sick and dying, there with the Sisters of Charity and volunteers from around the world.

I had heard stories of people, friends of mine, who had traveled to Calcutta to work with the Sisters in Mother Teresa's various "homes," and I came somewhat skeptical. I heard of how homes could often be flooded with volunteers who weren't really needed, who came to earn a badge or "check off" a life experience. I came with the (feeling) that the homes were more for volunteers than for the patients, and I heaped on it all the criticism I had gathered for "short term" missions. But what I experienced there was very far from what I anticipated.

It was a place unlike anything I'd ever experienced. It was a place of poverty and pain so real you could feel it inside your bones. But it was also a place permeated by the thick love of God. It was a picture of the church. A picture of the Kingdom of God. People literally from all over the world, speaking all different languages, came to serve the very people the world considered least. To bathe them, to dress them, to feed them, to wash their soiled clothes, to bandage their wounded bodies.

And God was there. There in the gentle hands of the Japanese man who cleaned the sick with soap and water, there in the West African nun who radiated with love and humility as she directed volunteers to the back to wash dishes or the roof to dry clothes, and there in the emaciated face of the Indian man too weak to feed himself. Here in a place of so much despair was the Kingdom of God breaking out. A sign of the Kingdom that will one day come.

Everyday was filled with so much beauty and so much pain. Every morning we would carry patients every bit as starved as images from Auschwitz. Many had bones exposed or limbs black with gangrene. The patients had no anesthetics except to squeeze our hands or to be held tightly against our chests as the nurse would clean their horrific wounds. And many mornings we would arrive to find patients who had become our friends, covered in white sheets.

One particular morning, there were four people that had passed through the night. One of the sisters pointed to me and three other volunteers to carry them out from the "cold room" onto the bus and to the crematorium. And so we carried them, first on a cold metal stretcher and then by our hands into the crematorium. Death. In our hands. Cold. Utterly lifeless. And we laid them on a platform and watched as they were slowly moved into the furnace.

It's an image burned into my memory. This was poverty. An empty, silent funeral with no one to mourn. Burned into ash with no hope of resurrection.

But here... it was here that Christ died. Beside the poorest of the poor, among the utterly abandoned, among the god-forsaken. I began to see how much it is that this is the God we worship.

Somehow by God's grace, after several days away to process through what I had experienced, I returned to work at Kalighat for several weeks until I finally returned home.

The transition from Calcutta to Chattanooga again was nearly as jolting as it had been when I arrived in India. But I had changed. I began to see things clearly that before I saw only in a blur. The poor. As I would read scripture, every passage about the poor and marginalized would jump out. It would come with the face of that little girl that tugged my arm for food. Or that older man I carried in my arms to bathe.

I began to see God's heart for the weak and invisible illuminating every page of scripture, as one of its most central themes. From the Exodus to the New Jerusalem. I began to see where it was and to who it was that we were called to proclaim the reign of God. To the sick, to beggars, to sinners, to the demon possessed, to the unclean, to children, to the poor. To the very people most shoved to the margins. I learned too, that this call to the margins meant not simply to "minister" to "them" at a distance, from above. But beside, as Jesus did. Remembering that we too are the sick our physician came to heal.

God doesn't call us all to Calcutta. But he does call us to our neighbors. Our lost, lonely, hurting, forgotten neighbors. Because the good news of the Kingdom of God, hope in the midst of despair, the hope of resurrection, is good news indeed.

Value 2: Ministering to the Marginalized - Conclusion

How Do We Do It?


Several years ago I was going through the line at a discount grocery store. There was a young mom in front of me and she had two little children with her and one on the way. When she got through the line she realized she did not have enough money to buy everything she needed. She stood there with the cashier deciding what she could do without, so she could get within the dollar amount she needed. I noticed that what she was having the cashier put away were not frivolous items but just basic food products. It wasn’t ice cream and coke, but baby food and bread.

The Holy Spirit began to nudge me. He said “Offer to buy what she can’t afford”.

I said, “Lord I’m shopping at the discount grocer not because I’m trying to be thrifty but because I can’t afford anything else.”

The Spirit said, “Jeff, am I not your provider? I will make sure you have enough.”

So I waited until she had culled her groceries down to a level she could afford and then I spoke up saying that I would purchase the groceries she had separated out and that I would give them to her. It totaled somewhere near fifty dollars, which was a small fortune for me at that time. The woman and the cashier both looked at me in shock. I smiled and simply said that it was something the Lord wanted me to do so that she would know God loves her.

I paid the bill and guess what, my family didn’t starve.

There are opportunities every day for us to partner with God in loving the marginalized. It could be in the grocery line, the parking lot, walking along a city street, in our schools, neighborhoods, or even in places where there have been great disasters. The first thing that is needed for us not to miss these opportunities is awareness.

Awareness

In the gospel of John, Jesus tells us that his Father is always at work and that he too is working. What that means is that God is always up to something. No matter where we are or what we are doing, God is at work. Opportunities abound! God is at work in your workplace, at your school, in your neighborhood, and with your friends. The trick for you is to open your eyes and see what He is doing. You need to develop an awareness of where God is working.

The hard part about this is retraining our brain to not be centered on ourselves. I know that I walk around in a self-centered fog most of the time. I call it a fog because when I’m only concentrating on myself it makes it impossible to see the needs that are all around me.

I remember one time being in the Home Depot parking lot with a friend. We were picking up some tools for an outreach project our church was involved in. We hopped in his truck to head back to the building and my mind was already focused on my “to-do list,” when my friend stopped the truck and looked at me and said, “Come on.” In the parking lot was an older man wondering how in the world he was going to get this packaged hot water heater in the back of the truck. My friend ran right over to him and said, “My friend and I will help you.” With the three of us helping, it took a grand total of three minutes to get the water heater in the back of the truck.

I looked at my friend amazed. He was aware enough to see the need. I had not been. If we want to make a difference in the lives of the marginalized the first thing we’ve got to do is open our eyes and perceive what is going on around us; God is always at work.

Listen

Just as we’ve learned that God is always at work, we also know that he is always speaking. One of the things that we see in the book of Acts is that the Holy Spirit is constantly communicating with His people; guiding them and directing them on their mission to make disciples of all nations. He speaks to them in visions, dreams, signs and wonders, angelic visitations, in a still small voice that seems to urge them on, through each other, and through the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. In the New Testament we get the picture that God is intimately involved in the decision making process with His people. The question we must ask ourselves is “Do we get any indication that this process is supposed to cease?” Some may try to point to 1 Corinthians 13 where the Apostle Paul says that tongues will cease and prophecy will be stilled. A closer reading of the text reveals that this will occur “when perfection comes” or an easier way to understand that might be to say that when Jesus returns and “sets all things to right” we will no longer need the spiritual gifts of prophecy and tongues because God will be all in all. Until that day, we need God’s Spirit speaking and directing our life in every way possible. God is speaking to us; all the time. We need to learn to listen.

So how do we do that? First we need to ask God what He’s up to or what He wants us to do in a given circumstance. There are many times when I’m in conversation with someone and I realize the question they are asking me is way out of my league, so as I’m talking to that individual I send up a silent prayer, and the prayer is usually, “HELP!!!!!”

That happened to me the other day when I was volunteering with some kids. I was working with some teenagers and we were talking about reading. I asked them what they were reading right now and was it influencing their lives. Each one of the kids began to talk about the book he or she was reading and what he was learning from it. One of the kids talked about a book called the “The Secret.” It is one of those self-help, “I am God and can have whatever material thing I desire” - type books. In other words, it’s the gospel according to Oprah. I was in a setting where I was not allowed to talk about my faith openly and was wondering how to handle this conversation. I immediately felt out of my league. So I silently let go a favorite prayer, “HELP!” and I tuned in and began to listen.

Sure enough, the Spirit began to speak to me. He told me not to belittle or tear down the book but to ask what he liked about the book. So I did, I asked him what he liked about the book and he told me that it talked about having a dream or a destiny and not giving up on that dream or destiny. He said the book talked about the fact that many people would try to get you to give up on your dream. I replied that I knew what it was like to have a dream, and that I too had discovered that there were many voices that would come and try to convince me to give up on that dream. Some of the voices were very familiar; they could be family, friends, or colleagues. I said I had also discovered that those voices seemed to be influenced by something bigger, something that wanted me to give up and be discouraged.

One of the girls said, “That voice is the voice of the devil.” I said, “Really, tell me about that?” She began to explain how she had learned in church that the devil hated us and wanted us to amount to nothing, that he spoke very negative things into our life. I asked her if she had experienced that before and she said yes as did all the other kids and they began to share stories about how there seemed to be voice that spoke into their lives that was negative and would try to get them to believe hurtful things.

I asked if that was the only voice they ever head and the same girl said no that God would speak to her and he would tell her positive things, encourage her and build her up. I asked what the rest of the group thought about that and some said they had experienced the same thing, others said that made a lot of sense. I thought God you are so cool. I had just watched a teenager tell her peers how to hear the voice of God by simply asking one kid what he liked about a book that I did not feel was a very theologically healthy book to read.

I don’t know about you, but I’m just not smart enough to navigate life without God’s direction. I’m also too self-centered to be aware of what God’s doing around me if I don’t take the time to ask. However, I find most of the times when I ask, God is more than happy to share with me exactly what He is up to.

Act

I know this sounds self-explanatory but when God asks us to do something we need to be the type of people who actually do it. To incorporate action into our lives is going to mean one thing; risk.

Let’s face it, when God asks us to do something we feel uncertain about it. We ask questions like “Is that really God? “Am I just making that up?” and “What if I’m wrong?” Rachel Garvey presented a message to us the other day and said the greatest enemy to action is not laziness but excuses. We will talk ourselves out of just about anything that involves risk.

But faith is all about risk. It’s about stepping out into the unknown and realizing that God really does have our back.

A year and half ago God asked our church to take the greatest risk in its history. He asked us to trust Him. Instead of walking the path most every other church travels by taking on lots of debt and building a building, God asked us if we would be willing to identify our self with our community. Were we willing to be incarnational? Would we move into a fifty year old high school, go portable, and wait on Him to reveal to us our next step? We said, “yes,” not being fully aware of what He was asking us to do.

Now a year and half later we’ve come to realize that the key to changing our city lies with the people who are served by our public schools. Within the lowest performing schools in our city are Chattanooga’s marginalized. 42% of the kids that go to Howard, Brainerd, and Tyner High Schools never graduate. I have it from some reliable sources who say that percentage increases to even greater heights when you think of the kids who are just passed through the system. Chattanooga’s other high schools are not graduating much higher percentages (All high school graduation rates for Hamilton County schools is on the Hamilton County Department of Education website). Every year thousands of young adults are spilling into our city without even having a high school diploma. What kind of job can they get? What kind of future do they have? What types of opportunities are open to them?

When this happens over a period of years, crime increases, infant mortality goes through the roof, poverty, desperation and hopelessness set in and our taxes are raised because it puts a drain on every social system our government provides. This is exactly the challenge our city faces today. Do you want to imagine what the consequences will be if we ignore this problem for another five or ten years?

This is the issue God has asked our church to deal with. I can’t tell you how excited I am by this, because I can think of no other area of investment that has the potential to yield as great a Kingdom return. But this endeavor is for the risk takers. It is for those who want more out of their relationship with God than being comfortable. Within our first year of being in Tyner, 50% of our congregation left, but 50% stayed! Our church is now like Gideon’s army in the Old Testament. We are a group of seasoned warriors ready to take the fight to the enemy.

This is faith in action. It is what happens when we become aware of what’s going on around us. We listen to what God says, and we take action. I’m going to make a bold prediction. I believe the more we engage in the risky ministry that God has given us; the more we champion the cause of the least, last, lost, and lonely, the more people will join us in our efforts. People want to be a part of something significant. This will do more than give our city a cosmetic face-lift, like the investment in our downtown (which is cool). It will change the nature of our city.

Engage

How do we begin? We’ve got to learn the habit of engaging. We’ve got to roll up our sleeves and get involved. It will start out as a spiritual discipline at first. Something we begin to do because we know that it is right. It then becomes normal, and before long we wonder how we ever lived without serving the marginalized as a consistent part of our lives.

The way we are doing this at the Vineyard is through our different outreach opportunities. Once a month our Patton Towers team goes downtown and delivers groceries to the handicapped in a government subsidized housing complex. Every week we feed the hungry in Miller Park after church on Sunday’s. Some of us engage in servant evangelism where we do simple acts of kindness as a means of communicating God’s love through Kindness is Normal. Others do service projects at the Tyner Schools, and some go out on the streets and pray for people. These activities are highlighted in our bulletin every week and are a regular part of our church’s life. You just need to make a discipline of jumping in and getting involved.

If you will seize these opportunities, they will develop a habit in your life. The habit over time will become what’s normal. This is where the rubber hits the road. It will be in these practical exercises of risk, service, and faith where you begin to grow spiritually like you have never grown before. This is where you start. Take the risk.

God has always loved the marginalized. He has asked us, the people of the Vineyard Chattanooga to do the same. As for me and my family, we will see it done.

Value 2: Ministry to the Marginalized IV - The Age to Come

The Age to Come

The book of Revelation describes the cosmic battle between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Darkness. In the midst of this battle we realize that God is holding back on our enemy so that the nations of this world might have the opportunity to become the nations of our God and King by giving their allegiance to Jesus, creation’s true Lord. The book of revelation uses the pallet of metaphors from the prophets of Israel’s past to describe this new thing God is doing. At the end of this beautiful and mysterious book we read this passage.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

"See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;

Each line is filled with meaning. We see the language of the “new” heaven and earth being used. The old heaven and earth had been broken by man’s rebellion and sin and by the enemy’s deceits. But the enemy and his lies are being dealt with once and for all and the sins of mankind are being judged. Now we have a new heaven and a new earth, joined together as they were intended to be. This new creation will not know the touch of evil. It’s described as having no sea. In the Old Testament the sea symbolized chaos and disorder; this has been done away with, overcome by Jesus.

The apostle John sees the heavenly Jerusalem, the true royal city of God, descending from Heaven and coming to rest on earth. Heaven and earth are joined together in relationship as they were always intended, and God says that He has made His home among humanity. When this happens there is no more need for faith, because God dwells with us. We are able to see Him and experience Him face to face.

And what does that mean for us? What happens when Heaven and Earth unite under the rule of our loving God? It means everything is set to right!

REV 21:4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away."
REV 21:5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, "See, I am making all things new."

The power of these words is incredible. God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. As a pastor I have been with people during some of their worst moments. I’ve had to tell children that one of their parents has died. I’ve had to sit with parents after the death of their children. I’ve had to help people work through the pain of a murdered loved one. I’ve consoled women who have been raped, women who are dealing with the pain of an abortion, or who have felt their heart ripped out as they’ve given their child away for adoption. I’ve counseled many soldiers dealing with the pain of what they witnessed and participated in on the field of battle. I’ve watched marriages dissolve, people ruin their lives, fortunes come and go. I’ve watched people live pay check to pay check; maxed out in debt, lose their jobs and be cast out onto the streets; the list of pain that I’ve seen has been staggering. When people find themselves in the midst these situations, they are the marginalized. They are the least, the last, the lost, and lonely.

The Bible says that at the end of the age, when Jesus sets all things to right, that He will wipe every tear from our eyes. He will comfort us in our pain, and our pain will be no more. He goes on to say death will be no more. No longer will we have to contend with the loss of loved ones. Mourning, crying, pain will all be things that were part of the old creation. In the new creation no one will be marginalized. There will be no least, last, lost, or lonely because these things will have passed away. There will be no more poverty, murder, death, war, sin, or sickness because these things will have passed away. God will have made all things new.

This is the trajectory of the Kingdom. One day through Jesus there will be no under performing schools. Children who want to learn will all have the opportunity to learn. There will be no need for ministries to the homeless, there will be no need to speak up for the enslaved or the oppressed. These people will be free.

As the church, we are the community of this coming age. We are already residents of this time. When we hear Paul use language that we are foreigners or aliens to this world, or when he says we are in the world but not of it, he is describing the fact that we are the people of the coming Kingdom. So wherever we are, there should be visible signs of the old order of things being set to right; poverty, sickness, slavery, and the marginalization of people disappearing as the world and its systems encounter the people of the Kingdom; the people of the future age.

What we have to understand is that the conditions of poverty, marginalization, sickness, slavery, and violence are all reminders of the brokenness of the world. Followers of Jesus are to serve notice to the world that these conditions will come to an end completely one day by working for their eradication now. Every time we feed the hungry, comfort the mourning, befriend the lonely, heal or care for the sick, or bring peace to areas of violence we pointing towards the future God is bringing. We are demonstrating the life of the “age to come”. This is the life that will be normal when Jesus sets all things to right; it’s the life we give our broken world a glimpse of every time we act to bring the Kingdom’s order to the broken chaos of this age.

This is our duty. This is our message. This is our privilege! Paul in Roman’s 8 says that all creation literally stands on tip toe waiting for the revealing of the children of God. Every time we love the marginalized we are giving creation a sneak peak of what it’s longing for!

Value 2: Ministry to the Marginalized Part III - The New Testament

The New Testament

Like the Old Testament before it, the New Testament is not silent on the issue of the poor. The New Testament continues to affirm God’s love for the marginalized as being foundational and that His people are to incorporate caring for them into their lifestyle. In the ministry of Jesus we see his care for the marginalized as a sign of the in breaking of His Kingdom.

Let’s read the words of Jesus as he is getting ready to set out on his public ministry.

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

LK 4:18 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captive
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
LK 4:19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

LK 4:20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

Jesus said that the Spirit of God was empowering him to proclaim the message of the Kingdom through both word and deed to those who had been marginalized. He is to preach the good news that God has remembered the plight of the poor. He is to heal those who have been crippled, restoring them to the worshiping community of Israel. He is to release those who have been enslaved, and proclaim to the debtors that their debts have been canceled, and that is exactly what He did.

Jesus came to an impoverished world in poverty through his birth. Think about it, he was born the child of a teenage peasant in ancient Israel. He was born in a barn! He grew up like any other average child in Israel going to synagogue school and learning the trade of his earthly father. He did not grow up in the metropolitan hustle and bustle of Jerusalem. He grew up in the sticks. He was probably considered a country preacher with a rural accent. They made the same jokes about where he was from that we do about north Georgia or Kentucky here in Tennessee.

Yet these experiences gave him an ability to identify with the common people of Israel. They gave him the background he needed to communicate deep truths to them in a way they could grasp and understand. Just think about how many of his parables pertain to farming, fishing, family, and weddings, topics the ordinary people of his day would be familiar with. Jesus was one of the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely. Yet he was full of the Kingdom of God, and wherever he went he brought hope and life with him.

In his public ministry he healed the sick, related to prostitutes, tax collectors, and lepers. These were outcasts; people who were outside the worshipping community of Israel. Every time Jesus touched one of these people lives it was an object lesson in how his Kingdom operates. The good news is proclaimed to the poor, the sick and diseased are healed, the captives are set free, and debts are forgiven. Those who were outside were invited in, because Jesus’ kingdom is accessible to all.

I bet as you read this you are saying to yourself, “Yes and amen!”, after all this is what Jesus does and as His followers we should be doing the same. Not so quick. Do you understand what this looks like? I remember when we first started feeding the homeless in Miller Park. One of our members began to really invest in the people that they were feeding. He attended our small group and began to bring some of the people to whom he was ministering. These folks might not have had a shower for several days and they smelled really bad. They were hungry and would absolutely devour all the snacks, and they didn’t really know how to appropriately interact with people. This was an uncomfortable experience and I really wrestled with it. What are you going to do if the outcasts are invited to the party? Do you think you could handle it? I really struggled and honestly I still would.

We’ve been reaching out to a middle school where many of the children have been raised with a different set of values than a bunch of suburban white kids. What if all of a sudden fifty of those kids decided to start coming to our youth ministry? What would you do? Would you pull your kids from the youth ministry? Would you think the Vineyard is just not what it used to be, and quietly slip out to the church down the street where you don’t have to wrestle through the same uncomfortable feelings? Does Jesus really desire for us to be an invitational people and love the poor?

Being an incarnational presence in the schools is just the first step. If you think the wooden seats in the auditorium are uncomfortable, just wait until we start making serious head-way into our mission. I’m not saying this to scare you, but I’m asking are you really willing to follow Jesus wherever he might lead?

Jesus loves the poor. He loves the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely. He has commissioned his church to do the same.

When we read about the New Testament church, we read about a group of people who continued to love those no one else was willing to love. One of the first things the early church did was minister to the poor. They organized a feeding ministry for widows and orphans in Jerusalem. God blessed this ministry by empowering the followers of Jesus to do many signs and wonders as they blessed the poor and marginalized. In the letters of Paul, we read of him encouraging the church to remember the poor. Paul writes a whole letter in the Bible on behalf of a slave. The early church was marked by a love for the poor. This love for the marginalized permeates the New Testament scriptures and is always a sign pointing to what Jesus will one day do all in all.

One of the ways the early church grew was due to their care for the marginalized. The Roman culture had a practice called exposure. When parents or a person had a baby that they did not want they would take the child and place it on the city walls so that the child would die of exposure. This was a very common practice in the ancient world. Christians, however, believed that every life was sacred, even the lives that nobody else wanted. The Christians would go to the city walls at night and rescue the exposed infants and raise them as their own. Many of these children became the backbone of the church as they grew.

In the name of Jesus, the church has championed the cause of the marginalized for two millennia. The first hospitals were started by the church to take care of the sick. The church built orphanages to care for children without parents. The church started public education so all might have the opportunity for a better life and people could read the Bible for themselves. The church has faced down infanticide twice in its history. The church abolished the slave trade once, and as it raises its ugly head again, it is the entity on the frontlines of modern abolition. I cannot even begin to list the difference the church has made in the lives of the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely over the last two thousand years. Why has this been part of the church’s historic witness to the world? It is because God loves the poor, Jesus loves the poor, and his church has loved the poor. These are all signs of the future Jesus is bringing. The question for us is are we willing to follow Jesus and love the poor as well?

Value 2: Ministry to the Marginalized II - The Old Testament

The Old Testament


God's heart for the poor and the marginalized permeates the pages of the Old Testament.  In the Old Testament we see God's plan to fix a world broken by sin unfold, and one of the primary ways we see this plan in evidence is through the way He cares for the poor and calls his people to care for the poor.  We see it in the way He protects Cain even after he has murdered his brother Able. We see it in how He calls this nomadic tribesman, Abraham, and promises to make him a mighty nation that will bless all the nations of the earth. We see it in the way He cares for Abraham’s slave, Hagar, and the child, Ishmael, that she bore him after Abraham left them for dead in the desert. We see it in how He takes a spoiled child like Joseph and refines his character through horrible circumstances until he is made steward over all Egypt. We see it in His protection of Joseph’s brothers and their families even though they had meant him harm. We see it in how He hears the cries of Abraham’s enslaved descendants in Egypt. We see it in how He rescues an enslaved baby boy condemned to death by a fearful pharaoh. We see it in how this baby boy is found by a princess of Egypt in his basket of reeds where they have hidden him. We see it in how this baby boy grows up as a prince of Egypt. We see it in God’s calling him to deliver His people from slavery in spite of the fact that he has been so beaten down by the world that he can’t even speak without stammering. We see it in the way He frees a community of slaves and turns them into a nation of priests. We see it in His patience with the nation of Israel’s habitual sinning and running to idols. This list could go on and on. The Old Testament is filled with stories about God’s love for the marginalized; the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely, and about how he expects his people to care for them.

Read what He says through the prophet Isaiah:
Shout out, do not hold back!
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people their rebellion,
to the house of Jacob their sins.


ISA 58:2 Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgments,
they delight to draw near to God.


ISA 58:3 "Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?"

The Lord is coming to the nation of Israel with a word of judgment. He tells Isaiah to announce boldly to the nation that He is not pleased. Yes, from the outside they look religious. They put on a good show, but there is a reason He is not responding to their fasts. There is a reason He is not noticing them.

God’s words to the nation of Israel through the prophets always seem to hit me right between the eyes. He could speak these same words to the church, at least the church in the United States. Why, oh church, do I not seem to respond to your call? You make million dollar cathedrals dedicated to me, and put my name on t-shirts and in your popular music. You send your children to private schools that cost thousands of dollars a year that are run out of these same churches. You support entire industries based on the selling of books, videos, music, and movies that tell you how to better please me, but I’m not pleased. I’m not pleased with this.

Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers.


ISA 58:4 Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.


ISA 58:5 Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?

 ISA 58:6 Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?


ISA 58:7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

God tells us exactly what he wants from us. He wants us to bring the light of His compassionate kingdom to the forgotten of society. The fast the God chooses for his people (a fast is the act of denying oneself to draw close to God) is that we do the work of the Kingdom by championing the cause of the marginalized; the cause of the least, last, lost, and lonely. God wants our acts of self denial to be acts that care for those who have been beaten down by the broken condition of the world. When we do this we are anticipating the day when poverty, loneliness, and abandonment will be undone.

I’m going to call some things out here, and I’m not doing it to be mean, but I feel that God has called me to speak with a prophetic voice on this issue, and I feel we (The Vineyard) have the right to be that prophetic voice because we’ve chosen to walk a different path. Every day I pass by a church that has a huge private school attached to it. This church and school is literally a quarter of a mile from the school our church meets in. They are just finishing up a multi-million dollar expansion to their sports and recreation fields; fields that could rival a college campus. Just a quarter of a mile down the road the three minority, public schools we meet in are playing on ball fields that are so desperately in need of renovation that it is just sad. Last fall the coach of the baseball team from this high school was literally begging the community to invest ten grand in the ball field so it would be playable. It floods every year. These kids can’t play home games because the condition of their field is so poor. Not only that (I know this is going to sound unbelievable but it’s true), these kids are wearing uniforms that were new in 1968! I wish our church had the financial resources some of these churches have because I would have written the check on the spot. Do we profane the name of our God when just a quarter of a mile down the road the wealthy, who can afford to invest the thousands of dollars a year, have college level ball fields, provided for them in the name of Jesus, when the poor are left behind? Is this where God wants His resources spent? Is this the fast God chooses for us?

Just a stone’s throw from our schools that were built in the late 1950’s, that have roofs that are leaking, where the air conditioning units don’t work properly, with more problems to their physical campuses than you could shake a stick at, goes up a multi- multi-million dollar church campus. This facility is built for the glory of God and hey, they are doing it debt-free. I promise you, people are being asked to take on financial fasts to see this thing built, but is this the fast that God wants when the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely who are literally sitting a stone’s throw from them are going severely without? Are these the acts of self denial that God is calling His people to? Are we seriously to believe that God wants us to invest millions and millions of dollars simply on ourselves? I don’t think so.

Now let me say, I think all of this happens through the best intentions. The leaders of these churches are good people who dearly love Jesus. They desperately want to see people come to know the Lord and live their lives for Him. My critique is in the American way of doing church. We have defined success in such terms that it takes mammoth facilities and budgets to be thought of as being relevant. This leads to a trap of catering to one particular group of people, the type of people who have the kind of resources that can fund this type of programming. I don’t think God has called us to compete with theme parks. I don’t think we are in the entertainment business. I think God has called us to partner with Him in seeing heaven touch earth.

I’m telling you right now, Chattanooga, arguably the most Christian city in the world, will not experience all that God has for it, until we, the churches, repent of this waste and turn our hearts to the true work of the Kingdom. It should be an affront to us that our school system is the worst performing in our state. Seriously, as Christians we should be embarrassed by what is happening to our city, because the presence of so many Jesus following people should be changing the very fabric of our society.
ISA 58:8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.


ISA 58:9 Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,


ISA 58:10 if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.


ISA 58:11 The LORD will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.

This is but one of literally hundreds of passages where God talks about his heart for the poor. The prophets are all looking forward to the Day of the Lord, when the great reversal of fortunes takes place. When the tears of the marginalized; the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely, will be wiped away once and for all. Those who thought of themselves as having been forgotten will realize that they were always very close to the heart of God.

The Old Testament teaches us that God loves the poor and He expects His people to love them too!

Value 2: Ministry to the Marginalized - Part 1

A couple of Christmases ago I was inconvenienced. Our house is the first house in our subdivision and sits on a busy street. Literally thousands of cars drive by our house everyday.

We had some real estate signs that we had made for our church to help people know where we were located. Then we got this brand new sign that was much more effective, so I brought the real estate signs home to my house. Since I lived on such a busy street, I decided to put one of these signs in my yard because it had our web address displayed so predominately. I thought, free advertising, people pay major bucks to have advertising access like this, so the signs sat proudly displayed in my front yard.

Chattanooga is home to a thousand churches. I mean that in the most literal sense. Christian researcher and analyst, George Barna has remarked that Chattanooga is the most churched city in the United States, and seeing that the U.S. is the most churched nation in the world, that means we must be close to the most churched city in the world.

I figure that is true because from time to time people would remark on how they thought our church met in our home because of the sign. I didn’t think much of it; I just hoped they’d check out the website.

All that changed one Christmas afternoon.

Life for a pastor’s family is pretty busy. We are constantly around people; hosting things, leading things, and that is especially true during the Christmas season. For a pastor it doesn’t let up until after the Christmas Eve service which our church hosted two of that year; one in the early evening and one at 11pm. That year the service itself ended at 12am. I was lucky to be home by 1am and then there was the putting together of presents. My day that year ended about 3:30am on Christmas morning. My kids were up just a little after 6am, but it was all good, because it was just us this particular Christmas; just the six of us. No one else was coming over. There was no set time for anything. It was just enjoy the day, and we were, until…

Right as I was getting ready to start dinner there was a knock at my door. It was a homeless woman. I wish I could tell you my heart was filled with Christmas love and cheer, but all I could think was, “No Lord, not today, not on Christmas!”. I asked what she wanted and she said she saw the sign in my yard. She figured we were either a church or that a pastor lived here, she asked which it was, I said pastor. She asked if she could come in. I said yes. We made her a glass of hot wassail and asked what she wanted.

She gave me about three different stories which is pretty common among people who are begging. The truth was somewhere on the edge of those three stories. She was trying to tell me anything that would touch on my heart so that I would allow her to stay. You’ve got to understand that lying to a pastor is kind of like lying to a cop. We’ve heard it all before and we are pretty good at tracing the misdemeanor to the felony. What it boiled down to was she was homeless and didn’t want to spend Christmas in a shelter. She had been walking in this area trying to find someone who’d let her have Christmas with them. She didn’t say that, but I knew what she was after.

I got my associate pastor on the phone because he was the one who dealt with all of our benevolence issues. I told him the story and asked what I should do and he laughed. He told me he’d find out what shelter was open and he’d give me a call back. So I went in to her and said my associate pastor was making some phone calls and was finding a shelter that could take her for the night. I could tell that she was not very pleased with that idea and she began to ask what we were going to have for Christmas dinner. I was thinking to myself nothing, because dealing with you is taking up to much time.

I looked over at my family, and it was funny how quickly the atmosphere had changed. What half an hour before had just been light hearted and completely stress free was now tense and uncertain. They didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do. The only one who seemed happy with the current state of affairs was the homeless lady. About 15 minutes later my associate pastor gave me a call back with a shelter’s name and directions. I was relieved. I was ready for this to be someone else’s problem. I went in and told her we had found a shelter for her and that it was better equipped to take care of her needs. I said that there would be food there, a warm bed, and a place to get cleaned up. So I told her to come and get in the car and I would drive her to the shelter. She said O.K.

From the moment we got in the car she started telling me how horrible shelters were. She told me how she didn’t want to go, and by the time we are about three miles down the road she told me to let her out, she didn’t want to go to a shelter. I was tired of arguing with her so I said fine, and pulled over into a parking lot and let her out.

I began to drive back home thinking, “Well, I tried to do the right thing.” One of the things that can really stink about being a Pastor is you know the Bible really well, and the following passage of scripture popped right into my mind.

MT 25:31 The Judgment of the Nations

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33 and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 34 Then the king will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.' 37 Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38 And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39 And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' 40 And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.' 41 Then he will say to those at his left hand, 'You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' 44 Then they also will answer, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?' 45 Then he will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.' 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

God began to speak to me. He said, “I came to your house for Christmas dinner Jeff, and you turned me away.”

The condition of my heart was laid bare before me. I realized I talked a good talk but my action did not line up with what my heart professed to believe. I have come to believe that was one of my worst moments, one of those things that if I could step back and do differently I would. Can you imagine the teachable moment for my family if we had treated that lady like Jesus had come to visit us on Christmas? The impact and lesson that could have been driven into my kid’s hearts is unfathomable, instead they learned we shouldn’t be inconvenienced on Christmas.

When I got home I walked right over to that stinking sign in my front lawn, pulled it out of the ground, and threw it across my back yard. There was something wrong with my heart. My actions did not match up with my beliefs. I still feel sick to my stomach every time I think about it.

I think I’m not alone in this. My experience is that lots of people like to talk about how important it is for the church to have a heart for the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely, but very few people are willing to be inconvenienced to the point of actually doing something.

God has really done some work on me with this one. Compassionate ministry to the marginalized of society is not an option. It certainly is not an option according to scripture. If we are serious about following Jesus then developing a heart for the least, last, lost, and lonely that works itself out through practical consistent action is a must.

Over the next couple of days we are going to be looking at ministry to the marginalized. We will see how God has a heart for the forgotten in both the Old and New Testament. We are going to look at how serving the marginalized is a sign of the coming Kingdom, how the failure of our public systems is creating more and more marginalized people in Hamilton County, and what I believe God’s plan is to address these issues through the Vineyard Church. Those of us who faithfully commit to this will see God’s Kingdom come to earth in a very special way.

Value 1: Apprenticing the Next Generation III

So how do we do this? How do we practically apprentice the generation underneath us?

How do I do it?

Each one of us bears responsibility for apprenticing the generation underneath us. None of us gets a pass. The first thing we need to know is what it looks like to apprentice someone.

For most of history the way people learned something is they apprenticed themselves to someone highly skilled in what they wanted to learn to do. They usually lived with this person. They observed their way of life, the way they organized their time, and the way they interacted with people. There was no detail that was too small to learn. This is why so many stories contain the archetype of a wise old man who imparts his knowledge to a younger student.

So in a culture like ours, that does not value apprenticing as a teaching model any more, how do we do this? How do we bring back the art of apprenticing?

Just a note, during this section I am going to use the terms apprenticing and mentoring. These are the same phrase to me, so do not get thrown off when I use them interchangeably.

1. Recruit:
You find someone younger than you that seems interested in learning what you know and you invite them to begin to do life along side you.

You can’t begin to invest in the younger generation if there’s no one younger than you that you are pouring yourself into. If you are a parent this is easy. Your first and primary responsibility is to help your kids know and love God and to teach them how to serve Him. No one else can do this like you can, so take your job seriously.

If you don’t have kids, there is this wonderful fact of life; kids are everywhere! They just seem to spring up everywhere, like weeds. In your church there are children’s ministries, youth ministries, college students, young adults; each of these groups need people who are willing to mentor them. In your community there are sports leagues, schools, universities, community theaters, new employees fresh out of college. If you can’t find someone younger than you to invest in it is because you don’t want to.

When I first became a Christian at the end of my senior year of high school I wanted to let junior high kids know that they didn’t have to make the same mistakes I had made. I set up an appointment with the pastor of the church that my family attended faithfully every Easter and Christmas. I went in and asked if I could be a camp counselor for the junior high kids. I was technically supposed to have finished my first year of college, but he could see that I was sincere so he pulled some strings and I got to go.

This was the first time I got to tell the younger generation about what Jesus had done in my life, and unlike my peers, many of them listened and responded! It was at this camp that God began to speak to me about my calling to pastor. Reaching out to the younger generation literally changed my life. You’ve got to find someone to mentor.

So open your eyes, look around, and find a few younger people you can invest in. Your kids (if you have them), of course, and a few others. You will need to be the initiator. You will need to be invitational, but I promise you, finding young people to mentor is not hard.

2. They Watch
Once you find someone to mentor, you bring them along with you and they watch what you do. Let’s take Josh Gott, our associate pastor at the Vineyard Chattanooga, as an example. Josh and I have been ministering together as a team since he was twenty and over the last decade he has literally been with me in every type of meeting and ministry situation. A couple of things have happened during that time. First, Josh has picked up the things that are most important to me for our church. He totally owns the vision. He owns it so well that he can call me on it when I begin to veer off track. The second is that he has learned my best practices and is aware of my worst. All this has come about through being with me. We talk, argue, study the bible together, and share input. Josh knows me well. Whoever you mentor needs time up front to simply watch what it is you do. But what does this look like on a practical level?

Let’s say the person you are mentoring is learning how to use a sound board. Then they need to stand by you as you’re doing sound. As you adjust the different knobs or are setting the whole system up, you explain to them what you are doing and why you are doing it. You give them some time to observe. Then after each time ask them what they learned. Make them explain it back to you. If there were things you wanted them to see that they didn’t talk about, then say, “remember when I did…I wanted you to learn…” Let them give feedback as well. When they watch you in an intentional way you are able to impart to them the basics of what you do.

Say you are a children’s ministry small group leader. Again, have the person you are mentoring sit in the group with you. In this case I’d have them sit across from you so they can watch the way you manage the group dynamics. They can watch how you manage rambunctious kids, how you draw out the children to talk, how you prepare before the kids get there, and how you pray with kids and teach kids to pray.

This part of the mentoring needs to take place long enough that the person is comfortable with the routine of small group time. They have seen you facilitate during some different situations and challenges so they have an awareness of how to deal with a variety of circumstances. After the kids have left, the two of you need to sit down together so that you can explain why you did what you did. Allow them to ask questions and give them your best answer. Sometimes instead of answering ask them how they would have dealt with it. You see this is how you mentor/ apprentice someone.

3. Together
This is the step where you become a team. I love this step because your work load in some senses becomes a little lighter. Each time you’re together give them a part of your job to do. Go for mastery here. Let them do this part of the job until they have it down pat. The first couple of times they are going to be coming to you and asking you a thousand different questions. You are going to be thinking to yourself. “This would be easier if I just did it myself,” and initially it might be. However, over time they will become proficient at the task you’ve given them to do. Once you feel like they’ve mastered that part of the job give them the next component to do, while still doing the initial job you’d given them. Remember to build in times to talk about how it’s going. Coach them; give them tips that will improve their skills. Eventually they will have become so proficient they can handle the entire thing. When you’ve worked yourself out of a job you’ve won!

4. You Watch
Once the person you’ve been mentoring has become proficient enough to do the job on their own, let them. During your debrief the week before you say, “I believe you can do this on your own.” Tell them next week they are going to be responsible for the whole thing. Let them know you are going to be there but only as a safety net and as a confidence booster. When next week comes around, back off. When people come to you to ask you questions refer them to your apprentice and let them handle the questions. Take notes so that you can give them feedback. Do not intervene unless they ask you to and then only if what they are overseeing is going to fail completely. If failing is not going to hurt anything or anyone, let them fail because we learn as much from our failures as we do our successes. Give them feedback and then let them do it again. Let them do it as you watch for as many times as it takes for them to be successful consistently. Once you’ve done this, you have successfully apprenticed someone and it’s time to find another person to mentor because now you have a peer. Remind your young apprentice that they are to apprentice someone as well.

5. Coach and Resource
Coaching is actually something that you are doing during this entire process. It is the art of giving critical feedback in a way that does not tear your apprentice down, but builds them up. Whenever we give critical feedback, we are honest but not hurtful. We don’t make them feel stupid, or use language that makes them feel inadequate. Instead we tell them these are the areas that need work. Here are some things you can do to improve, and here is what I saw you do right. Resourcing is simply helping them come in contact with the things that are going to make them more effective in doing their job. It might be a great book, an article, or a conference. It’s just getting things to them that are going to help them take it to the next level.

In conclusion let me say that it is everybody’s job to apprentice the next generation. If you are doing a job at the Vineyard Chattanooga, I should be able to walk up to you on any given Sunday and be introduced to your apprentice. I have a couple and they are there every week. There names are Josh Gott, Jon Meek, Zach Anderle, and Josh Anderle. A couple of them are able to do exactly what I do and more, another one of them is getting pretty darn close, and the youngest one is simply learning how to serve. They are there with me every week, and be of good cheer, if I was to drop dead they could take this thing and we wouldn’t miss a beat.

Who are you apprenticing? You haven’t done your job if you can’t answer that question. I’m not saying that as a condemnation, I’m saying that as an affirmation. You can do this. You have something to impart! Part of what it means to be part of the people who are the Vineyard Chattanooga is to apprentice the generation underneath you.

Let’s set a goal, by the end of the summer, I want each of you who are involved in leadership (from being a member of the set-up crew – to staff) to have someone you are apprenticing to do what it is you do. I want to be able to walk up to you on a Sunday Morning or in one of our growth groups, or on our outreach projects and say introduce me to who you are apprenticing and you can say, “This is so an so” and I can ask them, “What are you learning?” and they can give me a good answer.

Can you imagine what our church would be like if each of us took the value of apprenticing the next generation seriously? We would be a disciple-making farm! Can you imagine what your families would be like if each of you took seriously the idea of apprenticing your kids! Wow!

I think it would be like the Kingdom of Heaven come to earth!

Value 1: Apprenticing the Next Generation II

The Nature of the Curse

I’m going to be giving a few specific examples of which there are literally hundreds to choose from. As you read these you might discover that you might fall into one of these groups. I’m not calling these out to heap condemnation or guilt upon you for the choices you’ve made or have had forced upon you. Remember there is no condemnation for those of us who are Christ Jesus. It’s the enemy who would want you to wallow in guilt. He would want you to be paralyzed thinking there is nothing that can be done. The Lord however would call you to think about how you can begin to partner with Him in setting things to right. Believe it or not, God even wants to set to right the areas of our life in which our own personal sin has reaped destruction. God doesn’t want the brokenness to remain; he wants healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, and growth. With that spirit let’s read the two examples I’ve provided.

Think of the epidemic of divorce our culture has experienced over the last generation. So many adults have abdicated their responsibility to protect and nurture their children because they have emotionally detached from the spouse of their youth (I’m not talking about areas of physical abuse, or addiction here). Let’s face it, relationships are hard, and a healthy loving marriage is hard work. To make a marriage work requires great sacrifice by both spouses time and time again. Sometimes people make unwise decisions and marry a jerk. O.K., but does that give us the right to inflict the emotional damage on our children that divorce brings? Adults get over a divorce, the children never do. They always have to live with it, and if the children are young (by that I mean not out of the home and responsible for themselves) a divorce will breed deep seeded issues of abandonment, insecurity, loss of innocence, confusion, anger with God, I could go on and on. Here’s a hard question, “Do you love your kids more than you love yourself?” Do you love them enough to make your marriage work during the hard times, during the times when you don’t feel “in love”? When we don’t, we bring forth a generation of latch-key kids shuffled from home to home confused and disconnected. I promise you, that brings a curse on the land.

Statistically speaking, 33% of all marriages end in divorce. I know many of you who are reading this have gone through divorce. Here are a few things you can do if you’re divorce involved children to help them not feel so disconnected and lost thus lessening the effects of the curse.

First own up to the problem. When my parents got divorced I was very young. One of them had an affair and did not want me to know this. The other parent was very bitter because of the infidelity and did not have much contact with me because it meant they had to have contact with their former spouse. I grew up thinking this parent did not care about me; that wasn’t the case. They simply didn’t know how to process through the anger appropriately. Both of them were embarrassed by what happened and did not know how to talk about it. Now granted, when I was six was not the time for this discussion, but in little ways when I was feeling abandoned or confused about my place in this world, helping me understand in age appropriate manners that it wasn’t about me, it was about them and that there were very understandable if not always justifiable reasons as to why circumstances were what they were. By the time I was a teenager full disclosure needed to happen. It would have helped my emotional growth immensely and eliminated a lot of confusion.

Second maintain a friendship. Unless your spouse was physically abusive to you and you and your children are in physical danger by being near them, you don’t get to hold a grudge. Who loses when your kids are shipped to one house and the next living out of a suitcase? Who loses when you don’t want to be around your ex so you don’t go to a birthday party or to a school event? Who loses when you don’t maintain geographical proximity to one another? Who loses when you make your kids a messenger between the two of you? Who loses when you insinuate that your ex doesn’t really have the appropriate types of character qualities? The children lose. I can’t tell you how stressful it is for a kid to have to deal with those types of issues when they are a child. So forgive. Get over it. Let it go. For the sake of your children you need to become friends with your ex so you can talk and share with one another. Your children need this from you, and frankly it’s your responsibility as their parent.

Depending on Institutions to Raise Our Children brings a curse on the land. Nobody can instill your values, develop character, or impart a genuine love and sense of service towards God like you can. Public/Private school and church programs are not to be substitutes for instilling your values or parenting your kids. These institutions can assist you in developing your kids. One hundred years of Sunday school can never accomplish what a parent that genuinely lives his or her faith, and takes the time to instill those lessons in the life of their children can. Your children will learn far more about God and His character as they see you in small group praying with your friends, they will grow more as you genuinely help them wrestle through their questions about God because you yourself have wrestled through the scriptures and can give them an answer born of experience. Your kids will learn far more about developing a heart for people and a being a servant as you take them with you to serve the poor or help at church.

The same is true for education. You cannot let the school system parent your kids; it was not designed for that. Yet many of us become consumed with our careers and think that the eight or more hours our kids spend at school is time that we can coast. If we are not involved with our schools, volunteering and being a presence there, then guess who parents your kids during that time? It’s not the teachers, it’s their peers. If you don’t take the bull by the horns on this one, the primary influence in the lives of your kids will become their peer group. Peers parenting their peers are the blind leading the blind. Children don’t have the wisdom to give truly good counsel all the time; they simply don’t have the life experience. Think how hard it is for you to navigate this world as an adult. Our children don’t have to try to navigate life without us. We have the ability to help our kids find their way through this tricky world if we take our role seriously. When we relinquish this role to institutions the results are gangs, rampant promiscuity, gross materialism and consumerism, no moral compass, the list could go on and on. Let’s suffice it to say the land experiences a curse.

And lest we think these problems are simply relegated to those with kids let’s think again. This is actually what we are experiencing in Hamilton County, today. According to PSK12.com , a website that helps parents decide what school district they want to live in based on comparative standardized test scores, Hamilton County is cumulatively the lowest ranked school system in the state. It scores at the bottom of the pack in elementary education and in middle school education, and we are ninth from the bottom out of 150+ high school systems in the state. According to a study done by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee as reported in the Chattanooga Times Free Press our county has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country. We have several zip codes within Hamilton County with higher Infant mortality rates than are in third world countries. Also weekly we hear reported problems with gangs and gang violence disturbing the scenic city. Where do these problems come from? It’s a parental problem, it’s a political problem, it’s an educational problem, it’s a societal problem but you can boil it down to one common denominator. There are groups of adults, parents, politicians, and school council members who are all choosing to put their own wants and desires above what’s best for the emerging generation. This attitude is brining a curse on our land. This curse raises our individual property taxes, it results in the vandalism of our city, It creates a lack of safety on our city streets and in our public parks, it effects businesses hiring decisions.

Each of us knows kids who are in less than great home situations. We can take these kids under our wings and become mentors to them.

When my children were little we lived in a suburban neighborhood in Houston Texas. In the evenings Kellie and I would take a walk through the neighborhood with our children. A few doors down were some neighbors who sat in their driveway, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and listening to heavy metal. I remember thinking, “There is the scourge of the neighborhood.”

One day shortly after Christmas I was on my roof taking down my Christmas lights while my oldest son was riding his new bicycle up and down the street. I noticed the kid of my rough neighbors hiding behind a truck with one of his friends. When my son rode past them they jumped out and attacked him. A fist fight ensued. I yelled at them to stop but the fight didn’t break-up until I was able to get off my roof and get near them. Once the boys saw me coming they bolted across the street into their home.

I asked my son what had happened and he said they just ran out and started hitting him. That didn’t sound right, people just don’t jump out of nowhere and try to beat you up unprovoked. I wanted to get to the bottom of it so we walked over to my neighbor’s house and knocked on the door. The wife who was in her mid-thirties answered. She was dressed like the teenagers in my youth group at the time. She had a corona beer sleeveless t-shirt on and skin-tight jeans with holes in them. A fad at the time was to write on your jeans with a pen; she was fad current. I related to her what had happened between my son and her son and his friend. She went and got the two boys and asked them what had happened. They said, without a clue to the inappropriateness of this comment that they just wanted to see what it was like to beat someone up.

I was horrified. I explained to the kids that we never should do anything like that, and then walked away with my son. I was in shock. In my mind I was hurling all sorts of curses and judgments their way. Then God began to speak to me. He said, “How many times have you walked by those people’s house when they were outside?” I said almost every night. He said, “How many times have you tried to talk to them or build a friendship with them?” I said that hadn’t, not once. He asked me whose fault it was that my kids had been beaten up? Was it the people who were trapped by darkness or was it the one who knew the truth but failed to reach out.

You see I had a responsibility to that family and to that kid to reach out to them with the love of Jesus. I realized then, that those children and their families were my responsibility, and if I didn’t love people and befriend them, I was as much responsible for the curse through my inaction as they were through their action.

We all have a responsibility to the next generation.

So I repented. Repent is a biblical word that simply means to change course, to do a 180. After that experience I went home to my wife Kellie and I told her what happened. We sat down our kids and we told them that they were to consistently invite that little kid over to play. We began to build a friendship with him, to earn the right to be heard and to speak into his life. We began to invest in him. I wish I could give you the rest of the story, we moved about 6 months later so I don’t know his life turned out, but I know for 6 months there was a family that loved him and was teaching him right from wrong.

These are just a couple of examples out of literally hundreds, but the biblical truth is this, if we as adults don’t take an active interest in teaching and modeling for the generation underneath us how to live, and love, and invest ourselves in their lives we will reap a curse upon our land.

The Nature of the Blessing

Now enough with the negativity, because in this passage of scripture is also found a blessing and a promise.

If we turn the scripture around and state it in the positive we get something like this: If the parents will turn their hearts to their children and the children will turn their hearts to their parents I will bless the land. Now that is encouraging. If we will focus on helping our kids become all that they were created to be and if our children will honor our instruction, God will bless the land.

If we think of the overall context of the passage from Malachi we begin to realize that not only will the land be blessed but this action, unlike any other, prepares our hearts for the arrival of the Kingdom of God. There is a reason that this is the last thought that God wanted us left with at the conclusion of the Old Testament. There is something central about the generations loving each other and wanting the best for each other that brings the Kingdom to earth in a unique way. I think in some ways it’s the practical application of the golden rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and the Great Commandment of loving God with all that we are and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves because in a very real sense it is laying down our lives for others.

I think we learn this when we begin to allow God’s dreams for the next generation to be the motivating factor in our lives. When we realize God would like us to leave the a world a better place than we found it, a little more like the coming Kingdom he is bringing, it motivates our actions. When we also understand that leaving the world a better place than we found it means that the generation underneath us has to understand and take that mission to the next level, it focuses us on how and with whom we seek to accomplish that mission. I can’t leave the world a better place if the generation coming up after me does not desire to do the same. When you have multiple generations seeking to leave the world a better place than they found it, then the land is blessed indeed!

There are people who are reading this blog right now who have experienced the truth of this. I will spare the names to save the embarrassment, but I think of a particular Christian counselor in Houston Texas. I fist met him when he was in junior high, and he was an angry young man. His father was an alcoholic and he hated people, but there were several key adults who saw something special in this young man and began to love him to life with the love of Christ. It didn’t take long for his heart to be softened to the love of God. Today instead of hating people he loves people, and is investing his life in helping people find peace in Christ just like he has. What would have been a curse was turned into a blessing because the hearts of the fathers were turned towards the children.

I think of a young lady whose parents went through a rough divorce. She wanted to give up on God, but a group of adults in her church surrounded her and loved on her. It took her a little time to work through her anger but by the time she was in college the love she had experienced gripped her heart in a powerful way. She went on to start a camp that teaches junior high kids how to serve the elderly and indigent. She is leaving the world better than she found it! What could have resulted in a curse has been turned into a major blessing through some adult small group leaders who loved this girl in the name of Jesus and as a result the land is being blessed.

So how do we do this? How do we practically apprentice the generation underneath us?

Apprenticing the Next Generation

Value 1: Apprenticing the Next Generation

I had a really cool moment the other day. I was watching my 17 year old son and some of his best friends lead worship at a Christian high school. Their band HighPoint had been mentored by a young man who had come to our church when he was eighteen. He was a fantastic keyboard player and also had a wonderful mind for finance. He later came on my staff as our business manager but still took the time to teach my son and his friends how to lead a praise and worship team. He taught them how to manage practice sessions, how to run a sound board, how to make a song theirs instead of a reproduction of a studio track, and how to put together a worship set. That morning he and I sat smiling as we watched our kids lead several hundred students in worship. They were great, not only were they musically great but they were sensitive to the Spirit. They listened for God, and ushered those kids into a time where Spirit came and ministered in a very powerful way. These were things that they had learned as they were apprenticed by the generations that had come before them. We were all blessed by this.

As I sat there and watched this I had the satisfaction of knowing another generation had really gotten the heart of the Kingdom. That these young men would take what they had learned from me and the men and women I had mentored and pass it on to the generation underneath them. When I think about that I want to get up and do back flips, because that’s what it’s all about and you know the Bible seems to back me up on that.

In the book of Acts we read about the birth of the church on Pentecost Sunday. The church is the community of the “age to come”, the time when Jesus returns and sets all things to right, as it exists in the midst of this present age. The church plays by a different set of rules than the world does (or at least it should). The church is ruled by the values and characteristics of what the world will be like when everything is set to right. In the church love, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, selflessness, gentleness, and kindness are the daily DNA of life because that is what life will be like in the “age to come”.

On the day the Church was established, the Spirit of God came and empowered each person who had placed his or her faith in Jesus. All heaven literally broke lose at that time. Manifestations of the life of the “age to come” began to break into this present age through God’s empowering presence at work in the followers of Jesus. The gift of tongues went forth reversing the curse of the confounded languages at Babel. The followers of Jesus began to proclaim Jesus as the true Lord of all, their fear of retribution overcome by the courage the Spirit brings. To explain all this Peter says to the crowd that had gathered:

AC 2:14 Peter Addresses the Crowd

…"Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

AC 2:17 'In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.

AC 2:18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.

God’s Kingdom was forcefully breaking into the world. What Jesus had set into motion through his death and resurrection was continuing through His people who were empowered by His Spirit. This is what had been promised by the prophets of the Old Testament, a reversal of the way things were, an end to the status quo. This Spirit-empowered people were bearing witness to the world of the complete reversal that Jesus would bring in all of it’s fullness in the “age to come.” Peter, quoting the Prophet Joel, says that one of the major signs of the in breaking of the Kingdom is young and old engaging in Spirit-empowered ministry side by side.

Listen to the language; sons and daughters, young and old, men and women! When the Kingdom comes young and old, male and female will be serving God side by side! Therefore, one of the signs of the “age to come” breaking forward into the present is young people being empowered by their spiritual mothers and fathers to engage in Spirit-led ministry.

This is a reoccurring theme with the Old Testament Prophets. Listen to the last sentence of the Hebrew Scriptures found in the book of Malachi.

MAL 3:16 The Reward of the Faithful

Then those who revered the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD took note and listened, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who revered the LORD and thought on his name. 17 They shall be mine, says the LORD of hosts, my special possession on the day when I act, and I will spare them as parents spare their children who serve them. 18 Then once more you shall see the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him.

MAL 4:1 The Great Day of the LORD

See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. 2 But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. 3 And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts.

MAL 4:4 Remember the teaching of my servant Moses, the statutes and ordinances that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.

MAL 4:5 Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes. 6 He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.

Just like the rest of the Old Testament prophets Malachi is looking forward to the Day of the Lord, the day when God will decisively act in setting the world to right. Malachi says part of what prepares our hearts for this event, part of what makes us ready to experience God’s Kingdom in all its fullness, is the hearts of the parents being turned towards their children and the hearts of the children being turned towards their parents. This is an incredible picture, a picture of seasoned adults not being focused on achieving for themselves but their desire is for their children to be all they can be. It’s the children not looking at the older generation with suspicion and rebellion but acknowledging the gift that is being given to them by their mentors. Out of that knowledge is born a love and respect for those who are sacrificially focusing on them.

God says this has to happen so that the land is not struck with a curse. Think about that for a second, when the older generation refuses to invest in the younger generation the land is cursed. I can think of many reasons why the land would be cursed when the older generation refuses to invest in the younger generation because of the things I’ve seen in my quarter century of experience in ministry.