| | I have been blogging lately about the turmoil at our church and the affects it has on our English Ministry. In the "Throw the Rock" parable I got from Elizabeth Eliot, I am confronted with the question if the Parallel Model of doing English Ministry had become an idol for us, where all of our hope and dream got wrapped up in its implementation. And as many other typical idols, its success will bring us much comfort, but its collapse will also devastate us also. May it never be! May God's grace be the only true foundation for our ministry! "No one should die for a Ministry Model", MST told me this 2 years ago. But I don't think I got it (at least in the idea of "Vision sustaining Endurance" as I posted the story of Swimming to Catalina a few months a go). But now, as I buried the Parallel Model (at least for as long as it will keep the peace with the older church leader, following the mantra “in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity”), I begin to realize that truth. "No one die for a model", because there is a bigger vision worth dying for. This realization came about as I read about the prisoners often ordered to move rocks from one pit to another pit, just to keep them busy. Some of them go crazy because of the meaninglessness of it all. And then this story came (from the book "Youth Ministry 3.0", recommended by MST): We're now off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, touring Robben Island, the infamous prison that held antiapartheid activists such as former South African President and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Nelson Mandela during what South Africans modestly call "the Struggle." I'm privileged to speak with a former inmate who spent his late teens and twenties in this prison. According to my guide, most of the inmates were like him, young and black or "colored" (usually of mixed race or Indian descent). The guards - young, white soldiers also in their late teens or early twenties - were ordered to keep them busy in the lime quarry, great gravel pits where (you guessed it) they dug holes. My guide worked alongside Mandela during those years, moving gravel from one hole in the ground to another-and then back again. As it turns out, the gravel didn't need moving. No one needed it or used it. Moving gravel in the lime quarry was simply a way to keep the inmates occupied, day after day, year after year. Young black and "colored" prisoners moved gravel back and forth, while young white and free soldiers kept watch. Here's where it gets interesting. Mandela, 20 years older than most of the prisoners, was a product of a Christian school, where Methodist missionaries instilled in him a passion for liberation and a generous view of divine grace and forgiveness. So Mandela began to see the gravel pits as a school. While moving gravel from one side of the pit to another, Mandela and his colleagues taught each other everything they knew. Mandela taught his young fellow prisoners the contents of his missionary education: Shakespeare and the Bible, English poets and philosophy, the ancient Bantu wisdom umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu ("we are people through other people") and Jesus' and Gandhi's views on reconciliation. Mandela fervently believed in the power of education for social change, and at "Robben Island University," as it came to be called, Mandela arranged secret lectures and informal seminars about humanity's interdependence and taught that "the common ground is greater and more enduring than the differences that divide." Then my guide shared one more remarkable memory. Mandela often purposely taught within earshot of the young white guards. "They were boys as well," said my guide, "and their privilege came through no choice of their own. Mandela believed that they were victims of the same political system that we were. He wanted them to have this education, too." What do Robben Island have to do with Ministry? Well, let me ask you this: How often have you wondered if the work you're doing in youth ministry is making any difference? Has your church ever kept young people busy, moving gravel from one side of the sanctuary to the other, rearranging ecclesial landfills without substantively changing either young people or the church? Have you ever wondered if the mission trip really mattered - the one where the 10th graders spent all week moving massive rocks to build a wall for an Appalachian family, only to be told by the staff the next day that "they made a mistake," and the wall needed to come down? (That really happened on my church's youth mission trip two weeks ago.) How about your hard-earned training, your long hours at the church, your earnest efforts to help teenagers recognize Jesus Christ's presence? Is God getting through? Are you creating cracks for divine grace, or are you moving gravel, day after day, year after year, for no apparent reason? Incredibly, Nelson Mandela made a ministry - one that changed the world at the end of the 20th century - out of a lime quarry pit. And what allowed him to transform a futile situation with young people into a faith-inspired, world-changing opportunity for witness?
I would answer the question: that the faith and hope, anchored firmly in the unchanging grace of God, the gospel, is the core of Mandela's "ministry" admist unthinkable circumstances. Some of my friends have had enough with the church, and sick of "playing church". We simply folded. No more pursue of the "Parallel Model". And since "no one should die for a model ", we will no longer care about moving rocks from one pit to another. Those ministry activities were just simply a mean to contact with one another, a mean for us to show God's grace, to live in grace, to live the Gospel in real life. We will content to leave the administrivia to the formal institution, and we will focus on the core Gospel. Because we know only the Gospel will bring life. The Gospel changes everything! |
