derasha: movement

This Wednesday, we will have our first Mid-Week Teaching. We will ask the question, "Did Jesus Come to Start a Non-Porfit?" Below is an excerpt from Chapter 01 of Derasha: This Thing Called Church Vol. 002. If you would like more information on how to get a full copy of Derasha, please email me.

01 Movement

Somewhere between where I was and the mountains on the horizon, the buildings of Sao Paulo, Brazil faded into the smog that blanketed the city. Our group was standing on the roof of the tallest building in Sao Paulo. We were on one of many stops on our tour. We hit four cities all together in our two weeks of travel.

We walked back inside and took the long elevator ride down. On the way down we stopped on the eighteenth floor. The doors opened and a well-dressed businessman looked at the faces of twenty or so hyper American teens. He smiled politely and wisely chose to wait for another elevator. We reached the ground floor and made our way outside.

Our leader told us we had two hours to do some shopping before dinner. My friends Ben and Peter decided to take off together. They went looking for soccer stores where they could buy some shoes. They headed down a street, and as they rounded a corner were met with a rotten smell. One hundred feet in front of them was a massive pile of trash. Someone had obviously not paid their bill.

They crossed the street to avoid the pile of dirty diapers, empty bags of chips, rotting fruit and half eaten burgers. As they crossed the street Ben saw three kids on the trash heap. They weren’t playing; they were shopping. They walked on a little further and saw two more people. It was the mother of the children nursing their new sibling. Ben and Peter could not help but stare. They were two American, Midwest, suburbanites who did not know people lived like this. They asked the mother if they could buy the family dinner, and she agreed. Minutes later they were eating like royalty at McDonald’s.

They met up with the rest of our group two hours later, and we all went to dinner. We went to a Churrascheria. This is a Brazilian style place where they bring slabs of meat out on swords. The servers put slabs of animal carcass impaled by a sword on your plate, and at your bidding they slice off big chunks that land with a thud-slap on your plate. It was like something out of a vegetarian’s nightmare. Needless to say, we were well fed that night.

We returned to our hotel, and a few of us went to the hot tub on the hotel roof. Ben told us about what he and Peter saw that day on the garbage heap. All of us began to wonder out loud what in the world we were doing twenty floors up in a hot tub when kids were digging in garbage heaps below us.

Lest you think our time in Brazil was with a soccer team or rock band, you must know we were on a mission trip. We toured the country doing a large scale performance. People would come and cheer. It was a show filled with singing, dancing, stunts and martial arts. While we were there, my friends and I began to wonder if doing a few gigs a day was the best use of time and resources.

The trip seemed to be more about entertaining a group of American students than about serving people living in Brazil. To think that we went all that way to go to soccer games, tour soccer stadiums, stay in beautiful hotels, shop in the cities and eat exotic foods is in some way unbelievable. But this is what we spent most of our time doing.

I often think about that trip and wonder if it is a good example of what the church has become. There we were, a group of people in a strange land, who were supposed to be on a mission trip, but spent most of our time doing things that were simply for our own amusement. Os Guinness, a British Theologian, said “One of the most powerful schemes to undermine the Church is to make it privately engaging, but socially irrelevant.” If we wish to avoid the pitfall of this scheme, we must deepen our understanding of exactly what Jesus wanted us to do after he physically left this earth.