tough love & city lights

Last weekend, we had an outreach opportunity that was pretty awesome called “City Lights”. It’s been an ongoing project for 4 years, operating a few times per year. Each time, multiple churches from Auckland join together to reach out to the local community in different ways – to be “lights” to the city – thus the name.

On Friday night, there was a kick-off to the day of service where we just heard a little bit about what we would be doing, and a young pastor named Brooke Turner gave a message about service and evangelism and what it looks like in modern times. His message was seriously convicting, in such a good way. Instead of many of the messages we hear these days about how the church is failing and the world is hopeless, he did point out that the church is “missing the mark” (the definition he gave for sin), and that it was our responsibility to do something about it. And that it is TOTALLY possible for us to do that.

He talked about how for so long, the model of evangelism has looked like this:

Where there is this paradigm that we as Christians are separate from non-Christians, yet the cross brings us together... and if they would only walk across that cross to come and meet us on the other side, things would be great! And we’re just so afraid of falling into death and destruction that we wouldn’t dare walk across to meet them. And really – this model is correct from a theological standpoint – the cross DOES bring us together in that we are sinful, desperate people and God is savior of all, but this doesn’t work from a methodological standpoint. We can’t just yell from across the great divide and expect people to come running to join us on Sunday morning. Rather, we create some COMMON GROUND where we can both meet in the middle. And let me be the first to admit that I overthink, overanalyze, and just generally mess this up. That’s what was so great about his message – it confronted me with the fact that I’ve done this and instead of just making me paralyzed with condemnation, it spurred me on to (a) laugh at myself for being so ridiculous and (b) realize that I can stop overthinking it and just be a normal person - don’t make it weird and don’t have an agenda with each non-Christian I meet, but just be their friend. Just ask how their day was. Simple. Not as scary and complicated as it has seemed in my mind sometimes. I don’t know if that makes sense – I have a feeling other people have faced that same issue from time to time, because we are kind of taught to believe in an “US” and “THEM” attitude, which leads to a lot of separation and weirdness.

Anyway, it was a great way to kick off the day of service. On Saturday morning, we got up really early and met at our church. We got into our groups, which went to different places around the city (about 6 places), and my group was going to the United Maori Mission, an organization that seeks to bring in troubled Maori men in need from across New Zealand and give them a place to live and have a safe environment. Our task was to clean, plaster, sand, and paint the hallways of their residence area. There were about 10 of us from YWAM, and one guy, Johnny, our fearless leader who had been a painter one summer a few years back.

We had a great time – it was a lot of hard work, but I realized that I really like doing things like that, like manual labor (which some of you will find hilarious to read because I have been notoriously lazy at times...) but yeah, I think it’s just the signing up part that I don’t like – I actually do like the work and can motivate myself to do it. I even used a power sander for the first time in my life – which I actually didn’t like – I just don’t think I was meant to operate dangerous machinery. Once I realized, “Wow, I could really sand my finger off”, I went back to the old sandpaper and elbow grease method, which worked just fine. And the painting was great too – all that practice of painting with Kendal on her clients’ houses...on my mom’s house when we did renovations... it really paid off. I was giving tips and teaching people about how to cut in on corners, how to roll most effectively, etc. So thank you Kendal for always being so generously willing to tell me I was doing it wrong... tough love pays off sometimes.