Redistribution

I had a feeling that Dr. John Perkins would use that word when he preached last Sunday at Northside.  When I preached the early service that day I tried to prepare people for it.  Sure enough he said that word and some other things that got a lot of comments this week.  Most of which did not come directly to me, they were just passed around until somebody thought I 'ought to know" what was being said, not by the person bringing it to me of course.  So I want to address what is being said and what Dr. Perkins was actually saying when he used that word.  What many people heard is not what he was saying.

Let me explain, Dr. Perkins and some other like minded Christians who worked with people in poverty felt it was time for the church to do something to lift people out of poverty.  They saw that government programs had not had the desired results.  So they began to work on what the church could do in poor neighborhoods through new types of ministry.  In the 1980's they came up with Christian Community Development which is now a nationwide association of over 6,000 members and over 600 ministries. 

There are three ways we can go about helping people:
1. Relief - giving emergency help that is immediate and temporary.  Food and shelter after a storm or natural disaster, for example.  It is help for the moment, temporary in its scope and it is what is needed when people cannot help themselves.
2. Rehabilitation - restoring people and communities to their pre-crisis conditions.  This is the longer term work of helping people and communities to function again.  It is the clean up, mud out, fix up process.  What is being done to restore things in West, Texas now after a devastating explosion is rehabilitation.  Rehabilitation works best when the people in the crisis work with people helping them.
3. Development - Working with people through a long-term process of on-going change in which both they and those helping, grow closer to being in right relationship with God and with each other.
Habitat for Humanity and Perpetual Help Home are two local examples.

Dr. Perkins and others saw the damage that continual relief work was doing in poor communities; dependence on relief was a real problem so they began to find ways to do development work with the poor.  As they saw what worked in the long run they called them the three R's of Christian Community Development:
- Relocation - If you are going to change a community you must live in the community  no differently than a missionary must live in the culture of people they are trying to reach.  Relocation also means to bring back into the community some of those who have made a way out of poverty.  They have powerful testimonies that people will hear.
- Reconciliation - Getting people right with God and teaching them how to get right with each other.  That should go without much explanation for Christians.  It is a vital work in any community but especially among the poor where violence and crime run rampant.  There is much reconciliation to be done.
- Redistribution - (you thought I would never get back to it didn't you).  In development work that does not mean taking from those who have and redistributing it to those who don't.  It does mean to go into the community and into people's individual lives and see what resources they already have and help them to see how to redistribute those things for betterment.  Development work, as Dr. Perkins teaches it, starts a discovery of assets not an inventory of needs.  (Read that statement again).

The example of this "redistribution" that I gave in my sermon Sunday was the story of Stella, a woman at Perpetual Help Home who one year ago was caught in the drug culture of her community.  After she came to Perpetual and came to Christ she found she could use the same skills she had used to buy, sell and deal with drugs to prepare and sell salsa.  She now runs her own micro-enterprise "Stella's Sassy Salsa" and markets her product to individuals and restaurants.  She learned how to redistribute her skills and her assets and run her own business.  That is the beauty of development, she started with what she had and found a way to make it work.

You can go to our website www.nbcvictoria.org and under the "Worship Tab" find the February 9th sermon that I preached on this and the sermon that Dr. Perkins preached at 10:45 am that day.  But hopefully you have a clearer picture of what was meant and not just what was "heard."  I know that the most common meaning of "redistribution" today is not what it means in development work.  Remember the three "R's" of development were coined in the 1980's long before the word redistribution became a political hot topic. 

I doubt that at 84, Dr. Perkins is going to change his usage of the word nor change the popular understanding of it.  Perhaps we can all just understand each other a little better.  Hopefully now you understand Christian community development work a little better.  I hope to write soon on another amazing example of it going on in our own city but this has been a long blog so I had better go for now.  Thank you for reading and do let me know if you have more questions.

for the journey...

Tim

 

Marks of a Hero

What are the marks of a hero?  Super Bowl champion?  Being strong and classy even in a Super Bowl loss?  Or perhaps someone who acted bravely in saving others lives?  A person who sacrificed much through bravery in war? 

How does the Bible mark a hero?  Someone who was very far away from God but came to a saving faith in Him through an encounter with Jesus Christ?  Someone who followed Christ even though it was a very costly thing for him to do?  Someone who grew strong spiritually very quickly and wrote to Christians words that moved and shaped a movement of God's people?  Someone who was arrested on trumped up charges but used his time in jail to share messages that strengthened others resolve to follow Christ?  Someone who was brutally beaten while in custody and nearly died? Someone who despite that and other injustices continued to preach that the love of God is the only answer to the hatred that men have in their hearts?

Yes, that would be a hero, even though the Bible never uses that term.  All those things describe the Apostle Paul.  If you are going to have a hero in the Bible, he would have to be at the top of list of choices.  All those things also describe Dr. John Perkins.  He is definitely a hero to me.

He overcame extreme poverty and the deepest most painful forms of discrimination.  Despite having just a third grade education he has written numerous books and served on the boards of major evangelical ministries and organizations.  He and some others founded the Christian Community Development Association as a way that the church could minister to the least of these.  This movement is nation wide and now is going world wide with a new work developing in China.

Dr. Perkins, though now in his eighties, still keeps a rigorous speaking schedule that takes him across the nation and all over the world.  Oh, and by the way, he will be preaching our 10:45 am service this Sunday.  Want to hear a hero?  Here's your chance.

for the journey...

Tim

Super Bowl Sunday

This weekend is Super Bowl Sunday - now a national sports holiday.  The ticket cost for the first Super Bowl?  Six dollars.  The cost for a ticket for this Super Bowl - priceless.  The official cost of a 30 second commercial is $4 million.  The players on the winning team will receive $92,000, on the losing team players receive a measly $46,000.

Everything about the Super Bowl is big.  There is good and bad in the bigness.  The bad is that this event is perhaps the cause of the largest sex trafficking effort in the country.  I'm not blaming New York, the Super host city is always that way.  FBI statistics tell us that the average age of a girl to get caught up in sex trafficking is 12-14 after she enters this world, her life expectancy is seven years.  There are 1.5 million victims of human trafficking in the U. S. generating for those who use and abuse them $87  million a day.

There is a dark side we need to pray about on Super Bowl Sunday but there is also an opportunity for light to shine in the center of all this attention.  It is a great platform for players and others to share their faith.  Some coaches and players of the Seattle Seahawks  have prepared a video to share their faith in Christ and what it means to them.  You can watch it by going to this link:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC1iD8yzndM
It is fifteen minutes long but worth the time or you can show up for the Youth Super Bowl party Sunday night at 5:30pm in the Student Center where it will be shown at half time.

There will (hopefully) be many feats of great athletes on Super Bowl Sunday but this Sunday morning I want to share with you the story of the greatest athletic effort I think that I have ever seen.  It did not happen at the Super Bowl, obviously I can't afford that, it happened at a Junior High track meet not far from Victoria and it came from the most unlikely person. I hope you will come Sunday.  I pray it will be super and I promise it will not cost you a dime.

for the journey...

Tim

The Deicer

A couple of years ago this month when my daughter Kelley and I flew to Denver to see our friend Caleb Jentsch after his skiing accident, I encountered a part of air travel I had never experienced before - the air plane deicer.  This is a picture of the one who did our plane before we came home.  I realized this was not a job I would ever want, being held up in the air in an open basket in sub-freezing temperatures spraying liquid onto an airplane as north winds howled around shaking the basket and blowing the wet spray back on you.  I watched this guy in admiration and prayed he did not get too cold to be careless and call our plane "good enough" when it might be packing a little too much ice weight.  Fortunately he took no shortcuts; he did his job well and we came home uneventfully.

These cold temperatures and ice that we have experienced reminded me of this man and his sacrifice.  I also thought about how to really help people get free from the baggage that accumulates in life that weighs us down and causes us to crash, it takes a sacrifice.  It is not easy work and there are never easy conditions for it.

When Jesus hung on the cross with the weight of our sin upon himself along with all the scorn and ridicule of those there blowing back in his face, it took a huge sacrifice.  He took no shortcuts.  He did a job that we could not do for ourselves and enabled us to get to our destination.  We are indebted to him.  The deicer did it for pay; Jesus did it out of love.  I now understand a little more about how much love based on how much the sacrifice was.

That is the core of what we believe and live by in Christ, he died to set us free.  May that always be our core.  We will talk more about this Sunday.

for the journey...

Tim

Defining Life

I have mentioned before how much I appreciate Dr. Jim Denison's Website and daily essay.  I can not think of anything more appropriate for this day.  I can also not think of any better way to say what he writes about in this essay.  It is well worth the time and well worth your consideration.

http://www.denisonforum.org/cultural-commentary/936-brain-dead-woman-kept-on-life-support-because-she-is-pregnant

for the journey...

Tim

Sun Days

Our sun is a moderate sized star 864,000 miles in diameter, that's 109 times bigger than earth.  That does not seem moderate but compared to other stars it is.  It's surface is around 25 million degrees F and it consumes 657 million tons of hydrogen every second.  Remind yourself of that the next time you pay your gas bill. 

We have nothing to worry about though because our sun will burn for another 4 or 5 billion years.  Take the sun burning out off your worry list for 2014.  But what does that leave on your worry list for this new year?

Perhaps thinking again about the sun can help, or better yet, the sun's creator.  If God is able to make something of that magnitude, strength and duration -as well as all the other suns in our universe - how big and how strong must He be?  How vast are His sources of strength if He equipped our sun with that kind of power?

Though we can see the sun, we cannot see His infinite strength where we will need it in our future but we can be sure that it will be there because He will be there.  This Sunday - no pun intended - we will look at the source of this verse, "The Lord watches over you...the sun will not harm you by day nor the moon by night."

Do you know where that verse is?  Join me Sunday and we will look at that along with all the other promises that orbit around it.

for the journey...

Tim

Switched at Birth

Sixty years ago in Tokyo a hospital made a terrible mistake.  They sent babies home with the wrong families.  One baby born to a poor family went home with a wealthy family.  Another baby born to a wealthy family went home to a life of poverty.  The mistake was only discovered because of some health problems in the wealthy family that lead to some DNA testing among the siblings.  When one brother showed no genetic kinship to the family they began searching for the reason.

The two men spent their lives in very different ways, the poor man was a truck driver and the rich man runs his own real estate business.  Last week the a court ordered the hospital to pay the poor man - who wishes to remain anonymous - a settlement worth over $370,000, substantially less than the $2.5 million he sought.  "I feel...regret and also anger," the impoverished man said after his settlement, "I want them to turn back the clock."

Contrast this to the birth of our Lord that we celebrate today.  He, as Paul put it in Philippians2:7-8, "... made himself nothing, taking on the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross!"

He chose the poverty after knowing the wealth of heaven.  C. S. Lewis likened the incarnational drop of going from heaven to earth as being like that of a human choosing to become "a crab or a slug."  He chose to come live in this world of poverty with us.  He chose to die for us to make us rich in ways we never could have dreamed.  It was God's plan that he chose for himself and for us.

Today celebrate where and to whom you were born but also celebrate that you can be born again because he was born among us.

Merry Christmas,

Tim