Last week I wrote an article about Aleppo, mentioning Bana Al-Abed, a young girl whose tweets have brought the entire watching world into her house in Aleppo. The ability of a young girl and her family to bring billions into their daily reality in real time is unprecedented in history. The Washington Post has called Bana the Anne Frank of our generation. But Anne Frank, as candid as her journal was, was not writing it live for everyone to see as things happened in the moment, reaching billions of outsiders almost instantly.
We are looking into the lives of people in such an intimate and immediate way thanks to the technology that exists, without the intervention of the news anchors or newspapers or magazines; people have become their own reporters. They get to choose how to frame the story they want to share, and we get the authentic version of what is occurring without edited footage by news media.
Last week also, in the same article already mentioned, I wrote about having patience and giving ourselves grace as we prepare to become better activists. What I meant by the term “activist” is a person with skills, compassion, resources (of various kinds, not just money), and reliable facts about what is happening in the world and as a result, rising up to the call for help. I wrote that sometimes we need to bide our time to become these kinds of activists—and biding our time means educating ourselves and cementing useful skills. It also means actively partnering with organizations to donate, and spreading awareness in our circles of influence.
But there is an urgency, in the here and the now, that we simply cannot get rid of. I feel the urgency in every single one of my cells as God awakens my heart more and more to the needs of the world. Whatever you believe about God and about yourself, I believe him when he says we were made in his image. As author and theologian Carolyn Custis James writes, “leadership is in our DNA.” I used to think wistfully that some people are born leaders and others aren’t. As an anxious introvert and a generally shy person, I thought the work of leadership was cut out for outspoken extroverts with nerves of steel, or at the very least people who worked hard to overcome their introversion as though it was a disadvantage.
Maybe some people have leadership skills that are more innate to them while others have to learn them painstakingly through experience. But I find myself no longer content with the idea that people like me—introverts, students, college kids learning to adult—cannot be influential people in leadership roles. There has got to be a magnitude inside of me that’s equal to the magnitude shaking my world—the reality of oppression and injustice that, up until now, had not been part of the justice I had been taught God was known for.
In her book HalftheChurch, Carolyn Custis James talks about the “millennial milestone.” The millennial milestone is a convergence of many factors, but one of these convergences is the gospel of social justice and the gospel of salvation. I grew up in churches that emphasized the gospel of salvation a lot. What I mean by this jargon is that following Jesus was a very individualized, metaphorical experience. It always came with some sort of prayer in which we “receive him in our hearts” (whatever that means). Basically, I learned how to read my Bible and pray, but my gospel vision was small because it was reduced to that, and as a result, my Jesus was small, easy to put inside a comfortable morality to-do list. This is why I remember the shock of hearing, upon enrolling at a Reformed Christian college known for its integration of the secular and the sacred, that sometimes God is just as pleased when people build hospitals in poor villages as he is when missionaries go share the gospel. To me, sharing the gospel was the most important thing, so when the person told me this ditty redolent of Christian Reformed theology, I thought they were blaspheming and I got offended. But in failing to understand the gospel of Jesus Christ, I failed to understand the complex, huge, and multi-faceted nature of the gospel. Now, having a “personal relationship” with Jesus and praying to “accept him into my heart” often makes me cringe, not because there’s anything wrong with that, but because it’s so incomplete. I understand a three-minute prayer isn’t enough to make people understand that what Jesus is really about is transforming the whole world from a place of injustice and pain to a place of justice and peace—starting with us. Starting with us, but also, necessarily, spreading to all the power structures that exist (because people make up those power structures!).
And people often want to separate God from talk of politics, feminism, poverty, racism, and culture because when you bring God into those domains, it gets really tricky. Gone are the simple formulas and Bible verses that kept our privileged world afloat on the back of the rest of the world’s oppression. God crashes into culture, into politics, into gender, with big questions that we don’t have answers to most of the time. He crashes into us and our paradigms and shows us that to be gospel people, to be Jesus followers, we’re going to need more than a softer version of the world’s racist, patriarchal, oppressive systems to become the people of God.
We’re going to need complete regeneration.
Which is why our generation is unprecedented. With the clash of social justice and getting the word out about Jesus’s love, we are living a reality unknown to many of our parents and our grandparents. Our ways of doing church and living out the gospel are going to be so different from even the ways we learned as children. I have been struggling with guilt and uncertainty because often times the way I follow Jesus now doesn’t look like the way I used to do faith when I was still at my parents’ house. But I know it’s not just me. All around me, my generation is turning into something that perhaps we don’t yet fully understand. We are being brought, by the proximity of social media, into a battleground where we are challenged to live for something bigger than ourselves. Gone are the days when we could be sheltered from the pain of others our whole lives. Even those in the echelons of privilege cannot escape.
We are being brought to a crucial point where we must assess what we’re living for. We’re at a crossroads where living for ourselves and for the 401k simply doesn’t cut it anymore. The worlds’ needs are shouting in our faces 24/7 and we feel compelled to answer.
The power structures of privilege and oppression, gone unquestioned for so long because of lack of knowledge, are being exposed. We are exposing them in ourselves and in our countries and governments and churches. In the words of Amy Carmichael, “I mean it with an intensity I know not how to express, that…such unutterable wrong…in the name of all that is just and all that is merciful should be swept out of the land without a day’s delay.”
God has been in the business, for thousands of years, of shattering oppressive power structures like the walls of Jericho Israel saw crashing to the ground. Many people who have been called to be image-bearers of God are being deceived by talk of wall-building. They are advocating the building of barriers and the prevalence of oppressive systems, forgetting God gavehislifeandhisdeathto bring down the walls:
For [Jesus]himselfisourpeace, whohasmadeusbothoneandhasbrokendowninhisfleshthedividingwallofhostility.
He has been working to break down the walls between genders, ethnicities, classes, and kingdoms.
However long it takes, we will see these walls and infrastructures crashing down. We will work towards that. We will not wait until “we are in heaven” to be the body of Christ, because that is a mission for the here and the now.
Sometimes we treat the body of Christ like it’s a make-believe game God gave his kids to keep them busy till he comes back from running errands.
But that’s not the case at all. He entrusted things to us. He entrusted us with skills. With his Spirit. With gifts, with money, with influence. With each other. It was a punch to the gut to realize Jesus isn’t playing games with us, because that means I GOT WORK TO DO. He has fully entrusted his mission to us and the consequences of not following through are going to be REAL and potentially destructive. We often brush off this urgency by saying that since God is in control he is going to make sure everything turns out according to what he wants.
But. HE wants us to be the body of Christ. He wants us to be his hands and his feet and his answer to a world that has not ceased, since ancient times, asking why a good God allows so much evil to happen. What if that is what he wants and we are avoiding that out of laziness, out of fear, because that’s not the answer we want?
Let’s be wise, let’s be patient. But if we feel this urgency, let us not quench it. Let us decide today that if our purpose is to reflect God’s image in this world, we’re going to live our lives working towards the justice and peace that begins now. Jesus came already. What are we waiting for?
