Urban Leadership Foundation

Enter! The Person of Peace

Reference: Grigg, V. (2005). Cry of the Urban Poor. GA, USA: Authentic Media in partnership with World Vision.

We need a prince who becomes a pauper, if he would govern like a king.

NOTHING MATCHES THE THRILL of entering a community, seeking to bring the kingdom of God to it, and extending the kingdom of God over it. It takes all our physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental energies. No other lifestyle is so demanding. No other lifestyle can be less rewarding on this earth, and so greatly rewarded in the heavenly places.

This lifestyle begins in compassion, leads to interces­sion, advances through living out the incarnation, and is based on the long, hard obedience of a disciplined and sac­rificial life.

 

Friends of the bottle
    He became my best friend. He was a soft man at heart, with a great understanding of life, but the pain of his wife’s death had never left him. He was an alcoholic.

Pastor Jun and I had compassion on him and spent many hours with him, talking over life, God, and freedom from the power of the bottle. It reduced him to continual inebriation. He died calling for Pastor Jun and me. He died in the knowledge of God’s love. He died an alcoholic.

He was the first of the four to go. There were four of them, four friends in the demon grip of alcoholism. We took compassion on all of them, and they became our friends. One came from a rich family but now lived in the slums. When I last visited, he was the only one of the four still alive. Each of the others died painful deaths.

“I’m the only one left,” he said. “I know God has his hand on my life, but I cannot break the power. I am sending my wife and children every Sunday to the church.”

Compassion means much love, a little response and great pain. Compassion is the heart of ministry. It is the source of identification. It is the wellspring of proclamation. Its multiplication is the heart of church growth. It is the motivation for seeking justice.

Compassion leads us into intercession. But there is a price to pay for the power that moves the hand of God and establishes the kingdom in the heavenlies. The price is in­carnation among the poor.

For richer churches, this ministry of intercession means collective commitment to a simple, sacrificial lifestyle, cou­pled with a growing experience of the power and gifts of the Spirit. If, because of history or doctrine or lethargy, a church is unable to pay such a price, it should not even begin to consider this kind of a call to serve the poor.

In closed societies, where public proclamation of the gos­pel is impossible, there is a place for aid programs in this entrance phase as a means of establishing rapport with the people. The danger is that workers may come to perceive these programs as the primary entrance point of the king­dom. The kingdom breaks open new territory through proc­lamation—not through aid programs.

Entrance through a Brazilian man of peace
    It was early on Christmas Day. I wandered up the small stream along the rows of plywood homes—a favela in Brazil. Since it was Jesus’ birthday, I wanted to give him a gift. Perhaps he could lead me to someone among these poor—someone with an open heart. At the end of the stream, I crossed a hill of middle-class homes. There before me, stretching out to the airport, lay a favela waking lazily in the Christmas morning sun.

As I found the track down the hill a favelado laboring upwards shouted a greeting. Down among the houses a group of people were chatting. I stopped and inquired about the favela in my halting Portuguese, and told them I had come to preach the gospel

Farther down the track, the valley opened out and here was another favela—a quieter one. Somehow it looked peaceful. The homes seemed sturdier.

On the afternoon of my birthday, I came back to talk with some people there. The first person I spoke with was a drunkard. I left him quickly, remembering Jesus instructions to find the “man of peace.”

A tall man with a beard was standing by the road.

“Now, I have observed that bearded people tend to be more sensitive and wise,” I thought, stroking my own beard. I stopped and talked with him. He and his wife had lived in the favela for eight years. Most of the favelados came from the northeast.

We talked for an hour. He showed me the Catholic Bible he and his family read each day. We opened it to Mark and there was the passage about preaching the kingdom of God . . .

This was my point of entrance.

There is no single model for entry to a community. The Apostle Paul gained entrance to cities through a combina­tion of family connections, speaking in public places, taking advantage of the patronage of Jewish leaders, or through the conversion of the Roman officials who dealt with him. Sometimes he went to his own ethnic group, the Jews, or to his occupational group, the tentmakers.

Jesus gave us some useful principles, however:

And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it, and stay with him until you de­part. As you enter the house, salute it. And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town (Matthew 10:11-15).

Incarnation: becoming one of the poor
    Jesus’ effectiveness in evangelism was partly because of his dependence on the poor:

Freely you have received, freely give. Do not take any gold, or silver, or copper in your belts; take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals, or a staff; for the worker is worth his keep (Matthew 10:8-10).

What does it mean to depend on those to whom you go to minister? The specific instructions here are not to be re­produced, but the principles may be. In the biblical in­stance, the disciples were on an evangelistic trip. Our situation is different. Particularly for those who are looking at church planting in another culture, we have initially to consider a more stationary model than did the apostolic twelve. Unlike them, we have to learn a new language and a new culture.

Permit me to suggest how this biblical pattern might work out for us today. We need to live among the people at their level—not independent of them—despite our re­sources. As a typical single missionary among squatters in Manila, I once listed the following in my house:
                -Equipment for a single missionary
                -small one-cup water heater
                -220 v/6v adaptor
                -a good cassette recorder for language study with a small AM/FM radio which replaces expensive   
                -newspapers
                -chess set
                -string
                -watch with date, alarm (replaces calendar, alarm clock) potted plants
                -toiletries
                -small container for coins for phone
                -frying pan
                -sandals

             -shoes
                -coconut husk for cleaning
                -plastic bags
                -stapler
                -stamps/envelopes
                -small two-burner and gas tank (as cheap as kerosene or wood and twice as efficient
                -good rug
                -two small pots
                -anti-bacterial soap
                -3 sets knife, fork,
                -spoon, plate, glass (for two guests)
                -dustpan
                -hard broom
                -yearly planner
                -Iron
                -chairs (can be made there)
                -tray for dishes
                -3 pillows
                -3 sleeping mats
                -can opener
                -scoop for water
                -tea towel
                -pot scrubbers
                -hangers
                -writing equipment
                -Bible and reading material
                -3 sets clothing (wash one set each day)
                -formal dress
                -3–4 Christian music tapes
                -small Philips screw driver, cutters, hammer, chisel
                -umbrella
                -language/music tapes
                -mouth organ
                -small broom
                -large knife
                -egg slicer
                -two buckets
                -washing basin
                -water jug
                -chopping board
                -3 blankets
                -3 mosquito nets
                -electric power cord
                -light socket
                -medium size fan
                -desk (can be made there)
                -typewriter
                -fly spray
                -40 gallon drum for water
                -Vitamin B capsules
                -small travelling bag
                -scissors
                -2 towels
                -3” mirror
                -songbook and guitar

 Acceptable roles
    Drs. Tom and Betty-Sue Brewster, who were instrumental in initiating the USA-based Servants Among the Poor, have popularized five roles that are fitting for new workers moving into an area: learner, servant, friend, storyteller, and intercessor.¹ As we play these acceptable and non-threatening roles, relationships and cultural understanding can develop that lead to effective ministry.

The humble person can move into many situations and earn people’s trust. Likewise, the person who enjoys their humanity and loves life can move into many situations and earn peoples’ love.

Effective missionaries are those who are wise enough to earn an acceptable status in the community so that their voice will be heard, and who can learn to accept with grace their ascribed status—a status that is often given by the people because of class, race, color or role. They know that as guests they are often honored more highly than they truly deserve.

We cannot identify with “macho” sins of drinking, gambling, and immorality, but we can humble ourselves to ac­cept tasks that define masculinity or femininity in that culture — tasks such as building houses, fetching water, cooking or raising children.

Winning hearts

Ministry to children is frequently the entrance point to a community. It should not, however, become a strategy for long-term church planting. A wiser, more lasting strategy is to minister to the needs of children by concentrating time and energy on their parents.

And if anyone gives a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward (Mat­thew 10:42).

In most societies, women come to the Lord first. Perhaps the reason for this is that women in most poor societies have only one major relational question to answer when they convert—what will be the effect on my husband and children?

For men, the issues are far more complex. They must consider carefully the impact of conversion on their rela­tionships with other men in the community, particularly in the face of the accusation that they are no longer men, or no longer part of the society. A man’s conversion will in­volve relatives, friends, job security, status and self-iden­tity.

Male church planters must be careful not to give all their time and attention to the first female converts, but rather through them reach the men of the community. It is not caring for women to bring them into the church without their men folk. The church planter must always aim to reach enough men for the kingdom so that a stable elder­ship may emerge from them.

Perhaps the saddest ministry lesson I have learned took place when I returned to an early fellowship and saw what had happened to the marriages of the first converts. I sat up one night counseling one who is engaged to a man with another wife, and another whose husband, a non-believer, is now a drug addict, and another whose marriage was birthed in immorality—all because we failed to push through to reaching enough single marriageable men.

Notes

1.       Brewster, E. Thomas and Elizabeth S., Language Learning IS Communication—IS Ministry!, Pasadena, California: Lingua House, 1987.

© Viv Grigg & Urban Leadership Foundationand other materials © by various contributors & Urban Leadership Foundation,  for The Encarnacao Training Commission.  Last modified: July 2010 Previous Page