Who is My Neighbor?: The Call to Fight Gun Violence

This post is a participation in “Presbyterian Bloggers Unite: Gun Violence.” To read more posts on gun violence by other Presbyterian bloggers, click here.

As a New Church Development pastor, I’ve been spending the past year or so getting to know my new neighborhood, and searching for needs which the church might meet. Frankly, gun violence is not one of them in Squirrel Hill. In fact, Squirrel Hill has one of the lowest crime rates of all of Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods. A critical factor in this is the Squirrel Hill Urban Coalition’s “Cizizens’ Patrol” program. Every night, a Squirrel Hill resident or family drive the streets of the neighborhood and report any suspicious activity to police. Since the program was initiated, gun violence and other crimes have been steadily on the decline.

I recently attended the most recent Squirrel Hill Urban Coalition meeting, though, and was somewhat saddened by what I heard. The coordinator of the Citizens’ Patrol appealed for more volunteers and stressing the need to take action in our neighborhood. He also remarked (quote not verbatim), “Someone once criticized the Citizens’ Patrol, saying that what we should really be doing is patrolling neighborhoods like Homewood (a less wealthy neighborhood with a higher crime rate). That person misses the point. People in Homewood should be patrolling Homewood.”

This comment made me cringe. I immediately thought, “Well, yes. Ideally, Homewood residents would patrol their own neighborhood. But does that ideal excuse us from responsibililty?” Afterall, is it reasonable to expect a neighborhood with a higher rate of poverty to have the same financial resources to start a Citizens’ Patrol? Can they afford the vehicle signage, radio equipment, and training programs that are necessary? Does anyone in that neighborhood even have a vision for such a program? Couldn’t we provide some resources, or at least the creative inspiration for them to create such a program in their own neighborhood?

The coordinator of this program then acknowledged that the Citizens’ Patrol has effectively pushed crime out of Squirrel Hill… and into neighborhoods like Homewood. It seems to me that as long as we only take care of our own, the problem of gun violence is only going to shift from one neighborhood to another. Jesus calls us to love our neighbors, and he also redefined who our neighbors are. The problem of gun violence is not just a problem for churches in high-crime areas to solve. It’s a problem for the whole Body of Christ to face together.

A Quick Example of Good Missiology

Last week on vacation, my friends and I spent about a week in the Berkshire Mountains in eastern Massachusetts. Among the small towns we visited, Stockbridge was of particular interest to me because of its history. Stockbridge is home to a church where Jonathan Edwards served as pastor until moving to Princeton. Edwards took the place of John Sergeant, the first missionary/pastor to serve in that area in the mid-1700s. Sergeant’s primary call and passion was to spread the gospel to the Mahican Indian’s of Stockbridge. During our visit, we took time to visit the “Mission House,” a log cabin that Sergeant lived in with his wife. While the tour guide was somewhat critical of Sergeant’s “Christianization” of the Mohicans despite the “good intentions” he had, the guide did say one thing that I though was a great example of good missiology.

While Sergeant was still studying in Yale, he invited ten young Mahicans to come and live with him. Sergeant wanted to learn Mahican culture and customs before even stepping foot on their territory.

Charlie Hall – Mystery

This Sunday at Upper Room, we’re going to be singing Charlie Hall’s song “Mystery” to prepare our hearts for coming to the Lord’s Table. SeungJin shared AWESOME video with me of Charlie Hall and band playing the song in a big semi-empty house. Really cool stuff…

How Presbyterian Should Presbyterian Campus Ministry Be?

Our moderator, Bruce Reyes Chow, has encouraged us Presbyterian bloggers to participate in a monthly “Presbyterian Bloggers Unite.” This month, the focus is campus ministry.

I’ve been involved with campus ministry in some form or another for 7 of the past 8 years. After four years at a Presbyterian college where I was involved in a few different campus ministries. Then I went to Pittsburgh Seminary for three years and in two of those three years I worked part-time for a Korean immigrant church, heading up their campus ministry at Carnegie Mellon University. Now, I work half time as a Presbyterian church planter and three quarter time as a campus minister to grad students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon and Pitt through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

As I reflect on these experiences in campus ministry for Presbyterian Blogger day, what I find most interesting is that my experiences in campus ministry have been the “least Presbyterian” of all my experiences in ministry. Grove City is a Presbyterian college, yet my time there actually did more to expose me to alternative Christian traditions than it did reaffirm my “Presbyterianism.” My experiences at Grove City included my first exposures to charismatic worship, to parachurch organizations, and to people who didn’t think my baptism as an infant was an actual baptism. When I worked for the Korean church, which was Presbyterian, very few of the students were actually Presbyterian; many came from backgrounds in the Assembly of God or “non-denominational” churches. And the ones who were Presbyterian usually didn’t care to identify themselves that way. And now I’m working for InterVarsity, a national parachurch ministry whose staffworkers include Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists and a multitude of other Christian backgrounds.

The significance of this is that most college students could care less about their denominational identity. College students don’t care about growing as a Presbyterian (or whatever denomination they come from). They want to grow in the core of the Christian faith: a life of walking with Jesus as his follower and disciple and in maintaining community with his body, the Church universal.

The problem is most Presbyterian congregations that I’ve seen are more concerned with keeping their college students Presbyterian, or worse, keeping their youth as members of their congregation when they leave for college. I’ve heard members of many Presbyterian churches complain that when their young people leave for college, they rarely come back. So, these churches will respond by doing what they can to keep college students connected to their congregation. One of their students will travel across the country to go to college, and the church will get their new address to send them church newsletters. Really ambitious churches will send care packages and cards. These are all fine ministries, but these things don’t provide students with what they really need and want: opportunities to grow and walk with Jesus in their new context on campus.

It’s in light of all this that I’ve realized the importance of parachurch campus ministries like InterVarsity.

I’ve only been working for InterVarsity for a short time, so a big chunk of my work at this point is raising my support. I’ve talked with a lot of leaders, pastors, and mission committees from a lot of congregations. I expected the churches near the university campuses to be the most interested in partnering with me. Ironically, they’ve been the least interested; they already have their own campus ministers working out of their church building. The churches who have shown the most enthusiastic support in partnership with me have been congregations further from campuses. These churches can’t hire their own ministers for college students; it’s not financially feasible and they simply aren’t located near any campus. But, supporting me, even in small amounts, gives them an investment in campus ministry. My ministry is now their ministry too.

On top of that, they’re not only partnered with me, I’m also partnered with them. I join them in wanting to see their students stay connected as they go into college. But, I want to see them do it by growing in their own context. As a staff worker for InterVarsity, I’m connected to campus ministers all across the country. As my partner churches send off their high school graduates to universities all across the country each fall, I’ll be contacting the campus ministers at each of those campuses with the names of those incoming freshmen. These campus ministers may or may not be Presbyterian, and the students may or may not be Presbyterian by the time they graduate from college, but they’re considerably more likely to still be a follower of Jesus when they leave.

The future of Presbyterian campus ministry has to include a lessening of distinct denominational identity. At the congregational level, it needs to include a desire to see students continue in walks with Jesus regardless of whether they continue in membership. Successful campus ministry has to be approached in light of the work of the larger Body of Christ on earth.

“Merry Christmas” vs. “Happy Holidays”… part two: the issue isn’t persecution. it’s effective witness.

Last week, I began reflecting on the “battle” fought every December over whether the greeting “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays” is more important in public discourse. I questioned whether Christians ought just to give up the battle and begin seeing the “Holiday Season” as a holiday completely different from Christmas. You can read it in its entirety, along with the comments, here. The post generated more comments than anything else I’ve ever written on here (granted, soliciting comments through my facebook status probably helped that). Based on people’s comments, and on my own further reflection, here are some conclusions I’m coming to:

It’s simply erroneous to imply that stores instructing their employees to say “Happy Holidays” and not “Merry Christmas” is anything resembling persecution for customers who happen to be Christian. Not to mention, doing so would also be insulting to those saints from previous ages and currently in other parts of the workd who have faced actual persecution and even martyrdom. That being said, if a store clerk wanted to say “Merry Christmas” and faced negative consequences from his employer for doing so, that would raise some free speech issues and be closer (but still probably not equivolent) to persecution.

The fact that this battle is happening, though, does raise contextual issues for Christians seeking to give faithful witness. Christmas has been commercialized. So much so , I would argue as I began to do in the last post, that the result is a completely different holiday bearing little-to-no resemblance to its original significance. The problem is that most Christians have responded one of two ways. Either they’ve completely given in to the whims of the culture and no longer celebrate Christmas as a Holy Day, or they just complain a lot and expect the culture to change back to the way things were. Actually, most Christians, paradoxically do both.

Christians need to find a new way to respond. For the church to simply go along with this cultural change is to give up on giving faithful witness to Christ. For the church to try to change things by flexing the flabby remnants of its influential cultural muscle is simply delusional, and borderline unethical. Christians need to respond in a way that is subversively counter-cultural, not for the sake of winning back Christmas, but for the sake of showing the world the value of following Jesus.

So, what does that look like? I have a few ideas, but I”m more curious to hear what you all think? How do Christians faithfully celebrate Christmas and subvert our culture’s commercialized “Holiday Season”?

The Unavoidable Crucifixion, or: Reflections On The Beginnings of My Vocation

In Seminary, Andrew Purves taught us in his pastoral care/theology courses that the ministry of the pastor needs to be crucified, so that Christ’s ministry might flourish in him/her. In other words, the role of the pastor is not to trust in their own skills, but rather to bear witness to the work of the living Christ in the life of a congregation, community and world. As I learned this, it made sense to me. In fact, I considered it gospel. What great news that “my ministry” is not really mine at all, but Christ in me.

What I’m quickly learning is that the “crucifixion of ministry” is a painful, unavoidable experience. As I learned from Dr. Purves, I think I was assuming that learning about the need for my ministry to be crucified with Christ meant that it would somehow be less painful, or not painful at all. Or maybe I thought that I could somehow avoid the crucifixion piece of things and get straight to the risen Christ in me. This was just foolishness. Crucifixion hurts, and knowing that it’s coming doesn’t change that. Just ask Jesus.

As Chris and I, along with the rest of the seed group, have begun the work of church-planting, I’ve been finding ministry to be an incredibly emotionally-probing experience. Every day, I keep encountering my weaknesses, limitations and sin-problems, and as I do, the Spirit has also been bringing back to mind experiences in my past that have contributed to, and perhaps even caused, these particular limitations in my life. This increased self-awareness has not, however, been coupled with knowledge of solutions to my problems. In fact, at times I get so overwhelmed by my pride, selfish need for affirmation, and ‘introvertedness’ (among other limitations) that I begin to question why God would even call someone like me to church-planting in Squirrel Hill. To put it another way, I’m finding myself being crucified, and longing for resurrection to come.

This morning, I think I found the first glimmer of resurrection in my personal devotional time. I was reading Psalm 37, and verse 3 stood out to me: “Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.” I think I’ll be reciting this verse for a while. Even if I don’t understand why I’m here, I’ll continue to “dwell in the land,” trusting in the LORD, doing good, and befriending faithfulness, with the hope and prayer that I’ll be a vessel through which Christ works.

New Blog Title!

So, I was never really satisfied with my previous blog title “scenes from my race.” When I was putting the blog together, I couldn’t think of anything else, so I went with it. Last night, though, I began studying the Psalms with the help of Patrick Henry Reardon’s book Christ in the Psalms. The book introduced me to a delightful Hebrew word “hawgooth.” The word carries several meanings including “meditation” and “musing,” which pretty much sums up my blog posts. The word can also mean “groaning” or “lamentation,” which for the most part doesn’t describe my blog posts, but I suppose it’s nice to have that kind of “emotional bandwidth” in my blog title just in case…

I should also point out that I made the title in the Hebrew plural, but the word never appears in the plural in the Old Testament, and I’m really rusty on my Hebrew. So, if making “hawgooth” a plural requires anything other than adding the feminine plural ending, then “hawgoothoth” probably isn’t an actual Hebrew word and the title of the blog would mean absolutely nothing. Hear’s hoping I’m right… Any Hebrew scholars out there?