We will visit the slum projects in Kolkata and Motipur and visit with the Global Action staff in those places and pray with them and discern how our church can be more directly involved in these efforts in the future.
We will spend three days in Bhubaneswar where I will help lead a conference for young Christian leaders. The organizers who were originally hoping for 1,000 registrants emailed me today and said the number has swelled to 1800 and they are trying to think through the logistics of that many people crammed into the facility they have rented.
I am still a week away from boarding that plane and yet already I can feel a growing conflict developing in my soul. It is the cognizant dissonance I experience whenever I see the world's poverty on the one hand while living in the abundant material blessing we have in our own country on the other. It is the disconnect I feel from one reality into another. It is the disconnect I experience when I worship with believers in other countries who are persecuted for their faith and yet they gather for worship with incredible joy and eagerness to learn and soak up His word and yet they never look at their clock or complain about the music or the color of the carpet. It is the anxiety I feel when I think about believers who worry about how they will find the next morsel of bread for their children while the average person in America consumes SIXTY POUNDS of bread in one year.
It is what I see in myself when I think about how many millions of people in the world live with the anxiety of humiliating poverty while my biggest concern this week has been how the Sooners are going to get back on track after getting it handed to them on Saturday.
If I go to deep into that conflict I will enter into an even graver sense of conviction. It is the undeniable knowledge that Jesus talked about our responsibility to the poor more than he talked about our responsibility for worship or teaching or evangelism or fellowship.
In fact, He began His earthly ministry with this very striking pronouncement:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because He has anointed Me
to proclaim the good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom
for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
This was just the first of many examples of how Jesus continually calls us to identify with those who are on the fringe of culture. He even went as far as to say that our very judgment will be tied to how we clothe, feed and care for the poor. He says "if you have not done it to the least of my children you have not done it to me." (Matthew 25:35-36)
James, the half brother of Jesus and first pastor of the Jerusalem church stated plainly that if you SAY you believe in Him and yet you don't clothe the hungry or take care of the poor then what you have is not belief in Jesus but dead defiled ugly religion. (James 2)
As evangelicals, we have tended to push back against what we call "social" ministries because they remind us of the liberal theology of the early 20th century. But by doing so I believe we have allowed the enemy to blind us to the very heart of God. Jesus loved the poor, walked with the poor, healed the poor, welcomed the poor and told us we had to be like the poor. It was America's most famous and noted Evangelical theologian Jonathan Edward's who said that there is "nothing more clear in God's Holy Writ than the call of the Christian to the poor".
Do you see what I mean? I am still 8 days away from my trip and already I can see that there is a growing discontent welling up in me. I haven't even left yet and already I am devastated by what I see.
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