Page 1431 – Christianity Today (2024)

There was something downright traditional about Rob Bell's remarks on marriage this March:

One of the things you're seeing right now, is you are seeing God pulling us all forward into a greater realization that we need more love. We need more fidelity. We need more monogamy. We need more people who are committed to each other. It's not good for us to be alone.

At first glance, it seemed that the former Mars Hill pastor is as gung-ho about marriage as we are. From couples' retreats to ministries focused on the family to some 25,000 titles under "Christian marriage" at Amazon.com, we Christians place a high premium on love, fidelity, monogamy, and commitment. And our numbers bear it out: Across the board, such Christians show higher rates of marriage and lower rates of divorce, even accounting for variations of age, education, race, and region. "Conservative Protestants, especially churchgoing conservative Protestants, [are] particularly attached to the married state," reports sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox.

Heck, this magazine made a "Case for Early Marriage" on our cover in 2009. Four years later, it remains one of the most popular articles on our website.

But Bell was actually coming out in support of same-sex marriage, echoing over half of all Americans in the most recent surveys. And he did so in a rhetorically brilliant way, drawing on the Genesis account (2:18) to show how crucial loving relationship is for human flourishing. When asked whether he was for same-sex marriage, he simply replied, "I am for marriage."

And how can we Christians not be as well? Much of churches' and individual Christians' tacit acceptance and explicit support of same-sex marriage stems from this: We would hate to prevent anyone from receiving the gift of mutual, monogamous sexual companionship. And we know that it is an incredible gift. For why else would we devote so many sermons, books, and ministries trying to preserve and perpetuate it? As Steve Chalke, a U.K. pastor and remaining member of the Evangelical Alliance, declared this winter, "It's one thing to be critical of a promiscuous lifestyle. But shouldn't the church consider nurturing positive models for permanent and monogamous hom*osexual relationships?"

Marriage Mania

Except perhaps we have made too much of marriage. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, perhaps local churches have acted as if monogamous sexual unions are the closest icon of heaven in this life. That no matter how much self-giving ministry or cultural creativity we undertake in our lifetimes, they are second-best without a spouse and children in tow.

In more detail than this space allows, other writers and theologians (I think especially of Rodney Clapp and Joseph Hellerman) have deftly tackled American Christians' overemphasis on marriage. What I might offer to the conversation is the perspective of a single Christian. As I watch many fellow young Christians come out in support of gay marriage, lest they bar friends or family from finding the gift of sexual companionship, they are making it harder for me to make sense of chastity.

If my gay and lesbian peers have the right to sexual union and companionship, why don't I? If the scriptural passages forbidding hom*osexual behavior apply only to a particular context, then surely the passages about fornication (sexual behavior outside marriage) and Paul's praise for singleness are also culturally bound. And so long as marriage ascends into the echelons of existential imperative—you must have this in order to be a complete human being—then my singleness becomes a problem. It is no longer a unique witness to the kingdom, where people "will neither marry nor are given in marriage." It no longer reveals that the water of baptism is thicker than blood—that an entire generation of Christians could be single, and still God would renew his church. Instead, it becomes a second-class existence.

Some readers will counter that I am comparing sexual apples to oranges. That at least I, a heterosexual woman, retain the hope of marriage, one celebrated by the church and approved by the state. Not so with the many gay and lesbian couples who understandably seek the same legal benefits as heterosexual couples. I do not want to downplay the extraordinary burden of living chastely as a gay person. Wesley Hill, a theologian and a friend, helps me avoid doing so. He pinpoints just how different are the respective challenges he and I face. In his profound book Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and hom*osexuality, he writes, "Heterosexuals are at least given the option of marriage and thus the possibility of having their sexual urges satisfied. For hom*osexual Christians, there is no such possibility. . . . To say no over and over again to some of my deepest, strongest, most recurring longings often seems, by turns, impossible and completely undesirable."

By contrast, at the end of the day, I may still get to choose marriage. And while I say no to longings now, I don't have to imagine saying no to them forever.

The One Guarantee

Except that sometimes I do, just for practice. Because marriage—and with it, sexual fulfillment and companionship and the possibility of children—is not a guarantee in this life, far less a fundamental right. Rather, it is a gift and a vocation, given to many but not all, it seems. And with all the dust in the air about prolonged adolescence and man-boys and women outpacing men in school and the workforce, marriage is no longer the shoo-in it was for most Christian women of my parents' and grandparents' generation. That includes me.

When it comes to our deepest sexual longings, none of us—married or single, gay or straight—gets what we want. But we who follow the risen Lord, an unmarried man while on this earth, get one guarantee: the promise of a new family, constituted by everyone who calls God Abba. We get to learn how to love one another as brothers and sisters now, since we'll be spending a lot of time together in the future.

I hope and pray that church communities will take up the duty and delight of stitching single brothers and sisters, gay and straight, into its shared life. This is especially true for churches that are tempted to make marriage the pinnacle of human existence. "The church is right to tell me the good news and call me to a life of discipleship as a single man if and only if it is willing to live as my family," noted Matt Jenson, a systematic theologian (and a 35-year-old single, straight man) in a recent Biola University talk. Likewise, if the church is going to call gay and lesbian men and women to deny their sexual desires for life, then it must be willing to embrace them as brothers and sisters and walk alongside them on the long road of chastity.

Humans, it turns out, can live without sex. But they will die without love. May churches be places where single Christians hear not the death knell of loneliness but the ecstatic greeting of family members: "Welcome home, sister."

When Confederate soldiers bore down on Gettysburg, Pa., in 1863, a quiet seminary building atop a ridge was transformed—first into a Union lookout, then a field hospital for 600 wounded soldiers.

Now the structure that stood at the center of the Civil War's bloodiest and most pivotal battle is being transformed once again.

Today, the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, Schmucker Hall, located on the campus of Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, reopens as a museum reflecting on the epic battle, the costly war and the complex role of faith.

Seminary Ridge Museum will take visitors into the minds of those who fought and explore their conflicting ideas of freedom.

Some 750,000 soldiers died during the Civil War and many of them carried and quoted from the Bible. But they read it in divergent ways that still reverberate in a polarized America.

"People have found it comfortable to find a way to think about the Civil War in terms of valor and heroism," said Barbara Franco, executive director of the museum. "We want to really look at these other parts of it—causes, consequences—and leave people thinking there's more to this than just the simple answers."

Visitors begin with a big view of the battlefields. They gaze out from the cupola where Union General John Buford viewed advancing Confederate brigades. They walk the creaking floors where wounded soldiers built back strength over a course of months. They ponder how soldiers suffered and how they made sense of it.

"Here were these young men, caught up in these events, and trying to be as faithful as they could be as good Christians," said Maria Erling, professor of church history at the seminary. "They were consoled by those faith commitments."

In interactive exhibits, visitors grapple with mid-19th century moral dilemmas: Would you harbor a fugitive slave if it meant you could go to prison? What motivated nurses, such as the Catholic Daughters of Charity, to tend to the injured on both sides?

Exhibits also showcase religious belongings of soldiers who fought at Gettysburg. Example: a 3-inch-by-2-inch Bible carried by Jefferson Coates. A member of Wisconsin's 7th Regiment and recipient of the Medal of Honor, he was blinded on the Gettysburg battlefield but survived.

"The fact that he carried this Bible with him tells me a lot about him and his purpose," said Coates' great-granddaughter, Jean Smith of Kansas City, who donated the Bible to the seminary. "If there hadn't been some sort of a religious context for him, he wouldn't have carried it."

The museum, which cost $15 million to develop, popularizes new insights from recent scholarship, including how clergy on both sides were physically attacked for taking unpopular stands on slavery.

"It's really a war of words that precedes the war of sabers and guns," Franco said. "The slavery debate is very influenced by biblical passages to support one side or the other."

As it turned out, both sides came to interpret Scripture in ways that would support their views on slavery, with literal interpretations hardening in the South and figurative ones gaining favor in the North.

Those interpretive principles still hold sway, Erling added, as the regions differ on social issues from women's ordination to hom*osexuality.

"The North had its own agenda, its own reasons for reading the Bible the way it did," Erling said. "And the South had its own reasons for reading the Bible the way it did. … That's how we have a Bible Belt."

After the birth of the Royal Baby, our months of speculation over its sex—A boy? A girl?—will end. But depending William and Kate's use of family heirlooms, the baby might wear pink either way. Historically, before pink became considered a feminine color, it had masculine connotations, too.

Despite today's gender-reveal parties and hyper-girly and boyish baby clothes, it wasn't that long ago that parents dressed infants differently. Some friends recently mentioned that the family christening gown passed down over a few generations — and worn by more than one baby boy — featured pink ribbons. Their son had recently worn it for his baptism. Not only did many of our ancestors once deem pink acceptable for both sexes and even a "strong" color, blue was often seen as appropriate for girls and women, partly due to its association with the Virgin Mary.

As Jo Paoletti recounts in her fascinating history of children's clothing, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, the word "pink" didn't even initially connote a hue and only joined the color vernacular in the mid-19th century. Until the early 20th century, most American babies wore long, white gowns favored for both their practicality (easy to bleach and starch) and lack of gender specificity. When pastels did decorate babies' clothing or nurseries, "pink and blue were suggested as interchangeable, gender-neutral 'nursery colors.'" If a parent did favor one or the other shade, it might depend on the child's coloring.

Though pink and blue began to acquire "gender coding" in the latter half of the 19th century, Paoletti reports that it took almost 100 years for people to uniformly interpret the colors the way we do today. During those days, adults were more concerned with distinguishing adults from children than they were little boys from little girls. Not until age four or five might boys begin to wear clothes that aped their fathers' fashions; before then they often wore dresses largely indistinguishable from those worn by their sisters.

But however much Americans gradually came to perceive pink and blue in such a fashion, this did not make our gender coding globally ubiquitous. "Baby clothes in other countries were still following a variety of rules," Paoletti writes, "meaning that imported items or gifts from overseas continued to observe their own traditional patterns…. Blue was still a 'girl' color in Switzerland, and pink was an acceptable color for baby boys in Korea in the 1980s." (Nor are cultural color differences limited to our baby pastels. The rainbows I see frequently in San Francisco have a very different meaning in Peru, where I saw similar flags in Cusco as a nod to the city's Inca heritage.)

As a knitter of many baby clothes, I tend to follow recent convention in choosing yarn colors, depending on what I know of the child who'll wear my gift. I was a child of the late 70s, and most of my peers are having babies these days. However, Paoletti suggests it's no accident the mothers of my generation are so obsessed with pink and blue baby clothes. Not only can we find out the baby's sex much earlier than our own mothers could, but most of us were raised during the brief unisex clothing fad that followed the sexual revolution.

Paoletti argues that some clothing trends need to be understood in relationship to how the parents buying those clothes experienced childhood themselves. Thus, the current obsession with gender coded children's attire may partly entail a reaction against the clothes we children of baby boomers were forced to wear. Whether or not she's right, Paoletti's book reminded me that the world of color — and gender — is more complex than I sometimes acknowledge.

We often see our habitual ways of doing things as not just preferred, but right. As Christians, it's easy to conflate what seems right to us with what's biblical, particularly when it comes to matters of gender. Much depends on what we think it means to be male or female and what God's intention was when he created the two sexes. But whose views haven't evolved a bit over time? And what's to say we won't undergo further changes in the future?

As a follower of Jesus, I certainly believe in truth, but the human tendency to change should spur humility about our beliefs. The fact that truth exists does not guarantee that we, its human discoverers, are equally infallible in our perception or understanding of the truth. History strongly suggests otherwise.

That's one reason cross-cultural contact — even that as trivial as following the Royal Baby's gender and attire — can be so beneficial. Years ago, I heard Tim Keller give a sermon about the early church in which he remarked that both the Jews and the Greeks had distorted understandings of food. However, their places of confusion were different. Whereas the Jews needed to reckon with what the gospel meant for keeping kosher, the Greeks struggled over meat sacrificed to idols. Perhaps only in hearing Paul's instructions to each other were their own, cultural issues illuminated.

And as Keller pointed out in other sermons, especially on Isaiah, cultural differences also highlight the breadth, depth and complexity of the God whose image we all bear. In the vision of Israel's glorious future, Isaiah sees the nations coming to Israel not with the same gifts, but those particular to their lands and cultures.

We were made by an incredibly big God. If he needed so many different people to fully image himself on earth, perhaps we could all stand to embrace more of the color spectrum as we each go about our image-bearing roles. We used to.

Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV, 3.1: The Doctrine of ReconciliationKarl Barth (T&T Clark)

Barth's work has helped me become more attentive to gospel bridges beyond the church's walls: Jesus—the light of life—penetrates all domains. Moreover, the dissolution of Christendom (e.g., Christian America) makes possible a genuine gospel encounter with those who don't know Christ.

Letters and Papers from PrisonDietrich Bonhoeffer (Touchstone)

Bonhoeffer's reflections from prison opened my eyes to see more clearly that the gospel is not chained, even when we face severe obstacles. God's power will be displayed in the vulnerable witness of Christ and his community, even in an increasingly secular age.

Mere ChristianityC. S. Lewis (Macmillan)

Lewis's well-reasoned, no-nonsense, accessible account of the essential Christian faith helps readers come to terms with the fact that the gospel is not about sweet, pietistic niceties. It is about a divine subject who addresses us as the ultimate life-changing reality.

Let Justice Roll DownJohn Perkins (Regal)

Perkins's autobiography provides a compelling account of the gospel's power to change people's hearts, lives, and communities. His holistic expression of the gospel is an incredible aid in offering the Good News to a broken, fragmented world.

Out of the Salt Shaker & into the WorldRebecca Manley Pippert (InterVarsity Press)

Pippert's book is a very practical and useful guide on how to be an effective witness. She assists readers in becoming more natural in their evangelism, more confident in the gospel, and more dependent on God.

Paul Louis Metzger is the author of Connecting Christ: How to Discuss Jesus in a World of Diverse Paths (Thomas Nelson).

Crayons, lights, and the boyhood of poet Pablo Neruda.

I offer this piece with a disclaimer: I don't think everything I wrote is entirely true.

Well at least, the part where I say I know no identity but that of a preacher. I am first and foremost God's beloved son, and that identity is infinitely deeper than anything related to my calling. But that is not always what I feel.

I offer this in tribute to all the brave men and women of God who bear up under the weight of our call. I hope it articulates some of the ambiguity, beauty and tension wrapped up in saying "yes" when God summons you to the pulpit.

Through the foolishness of preaching, God has chosen to demonstrate the power of the gospel. From Peter on the day of Pentecost to Martin Luther King preaching in Memphis, TN preaching is still changing the world. Never forget that, and by all means-keep preaching. Preach with boldness, preach with vulnerability. Preach high risk, bloody messages; preach because it matters.

-Jonathan

—

I am a preacher.

I say this as a confession, hoping that you will offer me the sacrament of reconciliation. For I might pretend to be many other things, but honesty demands that I come clean on this if we are going to be friends. And besides, the only person you should be more suspicious of than a preacher is a preacher who pretends to be something other than a preacher.

As preachers we put on different roles and "make believe." We dream. This comes off not with the whimsy of a child's imagination but the peculiar madness of grown men and women playing with paper dolls. We play at being CEO's or rock stars or life coaches or intellectuals or civic leaders or politicians. Preachers in drag, preachers at a freak show, step right up and see the bearded lady. It might be funny at first, like cards or gift calendars where animals are dressed up like people. Except you stare long enough until you wonder … do they really dress up their dog like a professor every day for real? We pretend sometimes, eager to be seen as something other than a preacher.

It's understandable why we would pretend to be something different than what we are, because (to put it mildly), preachers have limitations. We are compared to poets, but we generally lack their precision with language, using words with clumsy brute force as often as not. We are sometimes called prophets, but we are not generally so courageous, especially since our livelihood usually depends on the people we prophesy to. We are not precisely artists, since we lack the artist's originality. The preacher's job is not to paint new things but to repeat old things. If we were artists none of us would be Rembrandt; we'd be drawing caricatures in a booth at a mall for $10 a picture.

We re-shuffle a deck of words already given to us, only hoping to play the right card at the right time. We are of no real use to society, certainly not in the ways that engineers and doctors and teachers are useful to society.

I am a preacher. That means I didn't decide to do what I'm doing. I love God, and can say that without hesitation these days, but I don't preach because I love God more than anyone else. Certainly not because I can claim any extraordinary holiness. Preachers are people who have had holiness lay a claim on them, branded with iron. People talk about a calling, an inner voice, a quiet whisper, a special peace—"calling" that settles on you like morning dew. What gets left out most of the time is that calling seizes you like an octopus—you are Captain Nemo in the grip of a sea creature 20,000 leagues below. (Not all preachers experience calling in this way, mind you, where you are as much manacled by something as you are liberated by something. Only the interesting ones.)

I am other things besides being a preacher. But while I don't think any of us can see all the way to the bottom of ourselves, as best as I can tell, I am a preacher all the way down. I would like to say I know I am God's beloved son first, and preach to others that being known as God's beloved should be the first and truest thing about their identity, the foundation everything else about who they are should be built on. But I'll chalk this up to yet another place where my life can't live up to my preaching, because the truth of being a preacher seems as much at the core of me as anything else. There is love and there is being known by God, and I try to live from that. But is it really possible to be a preacher, all the talk of love and grace as true and powerful as it is, and not be a product of terror as well? Not only captivated by the love of God, but struck with slack-jaw horror at the sight of a burning bush somewhere? Deep down flatly more afraid to not speak for God than to speak for God?

Everybody talks about boundaries and margins and a sense of identity that goes deeper than what you do for God in ministry, and all that is good and well. But for the preacher, as least for me, there is always this lurking suspicion that some of that is psychobabble seminary bull. Of this one thing I am sure: I experience many things in life—friends and hobbies and interests and songs and stories that go far beyond the act of preaching. But God knows I experience them all as a preacher would. I laugh as a preacher, I cry as a preacher, I am moved as a preacher. I do all these things as a preacher would do, not because that is what I aspire to be but what I really am.

I am a preacher, a preacher who hates the sound of his own voice—except for those days of course where I am in love with the sound of my own voice, and neither is particularly good. I live under the weight of words. I carry words in my pockets, words in my satchel, words in my heart. Words, always the words. Words as pitiable weapons in a world when there are guns for sale at Wal-Mart, words as medicine in a world where prescription meds are all we seem to need. Carrying my words to places where they are impractical and word to places where they are inept. Delivering words that make some people look at me with the superstitious fear of a witch doctor, a shaman, the village medicine man who has all the answers—words that make people look like the village idiot, a man out of time, a man that won't move on with the world.

And I know that words cannot always be the answer …. but that sometimes they can, and that words can create galaxies and words can burn cities down. All this damnation and hope at my disposal, all this absurd power—living under the weight of the words. I wish that I could live up to the greatness of the words, to have a soul big enough and a life noble enough to be worthy of them. But don't you see by now—I'm a preacher? There is nothing greater than the words, they are the stars that light up the night. Isn't Jesus Himself called the Word of God? Only He could bear up under the weight of so many words, only he could exceed the expectation that words create and surpass the reality of what words signify.

I don't live up to the words, create the words, own the words. I gaze at them, I gibber with them. I consume them, I choke on them, I vomit them. I am a preacher.

Words are all I've got, words will have to be enough.

Jonathan Martin is the lead pastor of Renovatus: A Church for People Under Renovation in Charlotte, NC. He is the author of Prototype (Tyndale House, 2013).

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

No one escapes pain, and loss is inevitable.

I first discovered this personally when I watched my baby brother die from a genetic defect that was "incompatible with life." Though whole on the outside, his inner workings were irreparably different from what people need to survive. I was 8 years old, wide-eyed, and confused. I hope that his 3-day-old suffering was small. But I know that our family's was great. The helplessness, resignation, and wrongness of that loss hurt.

Afterwards, I saw from my second-grade perspective the various responses of our church to my family's difficult time. We were new to the faith. I watched my parents mourn and receive comfort from people that we worshipped with on Sundays. Some of them were wonderful, silent. They suffered with us. Others had no clue what to do, other than share awkward platitudes or even trying to change the subject to something other than the little bundle lying just out of sight.

Since then, I've been around plenty of premature funerals, at plenty of hospital beds where the morphine wasn't cutting it, or was cutting it too well. Across plenty of coffee tables from close friends one Americano away from breaking down. I've seen and heard the myriad Christian responses for when life hurts. Many were wonderful. But many others were totally inadequate to plumb the depths with people in the valleys of shadow.

Lost language

Sometimes I wonder if our Christian subculture has lost the ability to reckon with suffering. You'd be hard pressed to find any indication in most Christian media that we suffer at all. The few resources dedicated to the topic of suffering or anger towards God are either for a crowd that already knows the word "theodicy," or else so sugar-coated with sweet nuggets of how to get over your grief and on with your life that the pain and richness of suffering all but disappears. Where is the anger? The deep grief? The sense of having gazed into the abyss without any indication that God even cared about what was bumping around down there? We seem to want to excuse God even at the moments when our every instinct is to blame him.

It's polite, but hollow.

The Christian story is unflinching in its treatment of suffering. It looks the full horrors of the human experience in the eye—and refuses to turn away. It finds life and joy in the middle of it all. Our doctrine is rich with holy contradictions of blood and bandages, deaths and resurrections, and a hundred inexplicable moments of hope right when all seems lost. We have holy, angry, righteous indignation against the world's systems of abuse and oppression. And, of course, our spiritual ancestors often railed against God.

So when did we forget our rich, raging heritage?

Raging and reverent

AM talk radio is a bit like Nazareth. Can anything good come out of it? Yes, if How to Pray when You're Pissed at God (Random House, 2013) is any indication.

Ian Punnett isn't your stereotypical prayer guru. His day job is as a talk radio host/ rock station DJ, including on the (in)famous and bizarre Coast to Coast AM show, which I freely admit to listening to, anytime I have to drive creepy, isolated roads at night. When I saw his bio I expected a book that was short on prayer and long on pissed. I was wrong.

Punnett is an Episcopal deacon with a M.Div. and extensive experience as a hospital chaplain. That experience of dealing with the harsh questions of suffering comes through. How to Pray is an honest, sensitive, and surprisingly reverent book. It's big-hearted and gritty. It manages to capture a bit of the deep resignation and quiet closeness to God that I've felt in my own experiences of loss and anger. Punnett writes for those pulled to prayer even when the only words that seem to come are expletives, and he does it well.

He accompanies his own stories of suffering and tough pastoral ministry with a liturgy of (mostly) righteous anger. By turns, it's funny, biting, and profound. For all his surface irreverence,he manages to pull off a book that's deeply holy, genuinely pastoral, and ok with not having all the answers to the ancient question of what the hell was that, God? That's not an easy feat.

His written prayers range from the humorous ("An Angry Prayer for Those Who Are Cut Off in Traffic") to the quietly sensitive, ("An Angry Prayer for Someone Suffering From Depression During the Holidays"), to the furious and even heart-wrenching ("An Angry Prayer for the Abusers of Children"). Punnett uses Psalm-like language to cut deep to the heart of multiple agonies: the cold anger, the hot rage, the seething bitterness, the apathetic, unfeeling numbness of grief and hurt and wounding that we seem to receive from the hand of God.

Hope is here, too, but it is mostly the hope of the suffering Psalms, a hope tenuously tied to a God currently conspicuous only in his absence. Yet, in tying the specifics of modern suffering to their biblical counterparts, a sacred light is cast on familiar injustices and inconveniences in unexpected, refreshing ways.

This is a book on suffering, prayer, hope, despair, and the difficulties of lived Christianity. Punnett does what only a talk radio host and a liturgical deacon could—offer a litany of prayer that heals even as it presses on our bruises, with a witty, in-your-face aside and a sardonic, gracious smile.

And in doing so, he's given a rare gift to the church and to our culture.

Why do we struggle to express the dark feelings of lived faith? I really can't say. Books like Punnett's—honest and insightful, reverent, and raging at the same time—are rare. It would be hard to imagine this book (a Random House title) coming from the catalog of a mainstream Christian publishing house. Yet that's exactly where it should be.

Maybe we are so slow to rage at God because we fear that our faith cannot sustain anger towards its object. Maybe we're afraid that when the pinch comes, we won't be able to reconcile our mourning with Christianity's deep joy. Are we scared to utter the words "I think that God did this to me?" Are we scared to tell him that? To vent feelings of accusation? Maybe we've forgotten the dark mystery of Job, who, after suffering, angry and without divine explanation, receives no more than a "who are you?" in response.

Or worse, maybe we've remembered that story.

Hope and anger

It is true that we do not grieve like those who have no hope. Neither do we rage like those who have no justice, suffer like those who find no healing, or wander like those who have no path. But it's my opinion that we need to rediscover the holy disciplines of angry prayer during life's dark seasons. Our souls cry for it. Our anger is not the opposite of hope; it actually enables it.

Punnett's brief book prompts me to connect my prayer to how I feel, without losing sight of the true nature of the Christian story.

Every April, on my brother's death-day, I feel a little twist of the now familiar wrongness of death and suffering. Every time I read the news or sit with a friend experiencing the fallout of the Fall, I remember the phrase that theologian T.F. Torrance repeated from the early Fathers, "the unassumed is the unhealed." In taking on our entire humanity, from our deepest joys to our most heinous crimes, Christ redeemed it. He called it his own, and brought it into his kingdom. Redeemed it all—the sorrow, the hurt, and the pissed-ness. That is a beautiful mystery that I do not understand. But I sure believe it.

And I also believe that embracing that difficult doctrine inevitably means that we will echo Jesus—"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"—as we hang on the crosses we have taken up to follow him.

The Resurrection can redeem that. But it cannot make it easier.

Paul Pastor is the online editor for Leadership Journal.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

This is the third article in a three-part series. Be sure to read Part 1 and Part 2.

A few weeks ago I was in Colorado Springs for a benefit concert representing International Teams, the organization I lead. What made this event particularly enjoyable for me was that in addition to speaking about something that really matters to me—the lack of resources to fight economic, physical, and spiritual oppression—I got to be one of the guys in the band again. I had a blast. The musicians were excellent. It's amazing what playing with great people does to raise the level of your own performance.

Three bands performed that night. The band I played with was definitely the "old guys" band. We played some jazz pieces, some old worship songs with lots of blues chords added in, and we played the old Doobie Brothers tune "Takin' It To The Streets."

The next band was an incredible local church worship band. They played a lot of newer songs, several I had heard before. The final band was very young. They were good, but I didn't recognize anything they were playing. It was also hard to get past their "promptings" to continue playing far past their allotted time. By the time I got up to challenge people to care about oppressed people, the crowd we had started with was mostly gone—and I felt a "prompting" of a different kind. I was irritated at the missed opportunity.

Being vs. doing

In recent years it seems Christians have focused more on "being" and less on "doing." For the most part, I think this has been a good thing. I'm a doer through and through, and I needed help striking a healthier balance between being and doing. But honestly, sometimes I wonder if we've let the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction.

There's nothing wrong with spending long worship sessions marinating in God's presence. I love that. But there comes a time when we have to put down the guitars—and even our Bibles—and take to the streets. The danger with musicians (and, actually, human beings in general) is that it's easy to think we're the center of the universe. We get caught up with our own needs and experiences and forget about the enormous needs around the world. We need to be reminded that there is work to be done.

In my previous articles I used "Jazz" to describe a particular style of leadership. I have also talked about "Jazz Leadership" as a collaborative experience that can help teams find their leadership groove. Honing our leadership skills and experimenting with different styles is crucial. But at some point we need to make sure that our efforts are producing results.

What did Jesus do?

Consider the fruitfulness of the movement that Jesus initiated more than 2,000 years ago. It was grueling and physical. He was no ivory tower intellectual, dispensing wisdom from a safe distance. He dove into the muck and mire of humanity. He taught people, fed people, touched people, healed people. I consider it the highest honor to join the work that Jesus started. We worship Jesus as Lord and King, but we're also called to do what he did.

The ministry I lead recently set a formidable goal: We call it our "2020 Vision." By the end of 2020, we want be in 50 communities and ensure everyone there has access to food, freedom, and forgiveness. To "grow" toward this goal actually requires bringing the 200 places where we're currently present down to 50 communities. Some strange math, I know. But we are no longer interested in "coloring in maps." Instead, we're committed to going deep to see real transformation take place. Reinventing a 53 year old ministry has been a challenge. Rather than looking at what other organizations are doing, or what models are currently popular, we've turned to Jesus' example.

As we studied Jesus we discovered we'd deviated from his example without realizing it. Our only metric was "how many people did we send?" I've also come to realize that it's arrogant and outdated to think the world's massive and manifold problems can be solved simply by sending American workers. Why not find out what the actual needs (and existing assets) are in a given community and then put a strategy together that empowers the community to respond with Jesus and others to those needs?

What did Jesus see?

The Bible app on my iPhone lists 136 references to things that Jesus either "looked at" or "saw." I was curious to search out these references because I wanted to discover what was most important to him. So I grouped them into four simple headings in an attempt to distill what Jesus "saw?"

1. The ways of the Father. Jesus was focused on the future, his Father's priorities, the Kingdom of God, and the work of the Holy Spirit.
2. The hearts of people. Jesus was concerned with people's faith (or lack thereof), their actions (deeds), their potential, or what people lacked. Jesus could look deep into the heart of a person and know just what to do and say.
3. The presence of evil. Jesus could always spot the work of the evil one; Satan's tactics and his work through demonic forces.
4. The needs of people. Examining what Jesus did to meet the needs of people was by far the biggest category and the most convicting to me. The list includes things like teaching and preaching (individuals mattered as much as crowds), confronting, affirming, recruiting, building relationships, mentoring people. It didn't matter if they were rich, poor, sick, healthy, or even demon possessed, he helped them.

As we started to see others through the eyes of Jesus, it had a profound impact on how our organization operated. We were inspired to reinvent ourselves and do ministry "with" Jesus. Rediscovering this ancient path is helping us find our way forward with the "being" and "doing" dilemma. "Being" and "doing" are not enemies, but they need to be balanced. As a natural "doer," I confess that finding this balance is an ongoing challenge for me. But I'm not too worried. In fact, if I'm going to err, I would prefer to land on the side of "doing." With so much work to be done, I don't think that's such a bad thing. After all, I don't want to get to the end of another concert to find that all the worshippers have gone home, and there's no one left to help take it to the streets.

Scott Olson is President and CEO of International Teams (www.iteams.us), a nonprofit that's passionate about working "with Jesus" to deliver an authentic Gospel that fully integrates mission and compassion and results in Integrated Community Transformation. He's also a professional saxophonist who brings a sense of jazz and creativity to life and leadership.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.