A New Vision - Part 3

Part One

Part Two

Not a Work of Human Hands

On the last night of our Guatemala trip, we had a debriefing dinner led by Shaun and Patricia. They gave us a heads up about how difficult re-entry could be. I had been in developing countries before and didn't think it would be that intense for me. I remember two things Shaun said. One, don't try to go home and live in the middle. And two, don't make any big decisions for 30 days.

Coming home was incredibly hard. I was humbled. I felt very alone and uncomfortable with my life - like I didn't fit in it any longer. Frankly, I no longer cared to fit in it. And my new friends who I'd shared this experience with were plane rides away. My sister had been to India with Compassion and she was able to relate to me when we spoke on the phone. But it was a funky time.

On day 29 I tried to convince Curtis that we should move to India for a couple of years. Or maybe to Guatemala. He was not feeling that call, which is saying something. Curtis has typically been ready at any moment to pack up and move to a new place. At this point he felt that unless God made it unmistakably clear that we were to leave, our immediate future was here in Houston. (I may write a Part Four and address the Houston part.)

We had decided (A) to plant a church and (B) to plant it in Houston. But now the question was where in Houston and what kind of church?

Very soon after Guatemala I read Radical by David Platt, which is about taking your faith back from the American dream. I wrote about it here. Right after that, my friend Missy randomly put a book in my hands called Interrupted by Jen Hatmaker. I never wrote about the book. I only mentioned it briefly on my blog because it messed me up so much. But ask my friends and they'll tell you I couldn't stop talking about it. I would write some quotes from it right now but I lent it out to my sister. God used my time in Guatemala and these two books to chisel away at my heart.

Curtis kept saying that he wanted to have a city church. I really gave him a hard time about this because, hello, we live in the burbs! The beautiful, spacious, cheap, good-schools-burbs! The area we live in is growing like crazy and there's got to be room for another church out here, right? Surely we could meet right in our neighborhood's community center and invite all the people who live around us. This is our people group! We look like them, act like them, speak like them. We know these people. We would be friends with them anyway, so why not start a church for them?

Well. Interrupted got all up in my business. God showed me some real ugly stuff in my heart. I wanted us to have a church that was filled with people exactly like me and who made me feel good about myself, and that was cutting edge and polished. In my heart, I felt like we would have arrived when we were a part of a church like that. Especially if it was a church that people all across the country talked about because it was cool. Just now I tried to think of a word other than cool that would not make me feel so lame for saying it, but I think it's what I really wanted.

Ugly.

Jen and Brandon Hatmaker planted a church in Austin a few years ago. Prior to that, they had been pouring out their lives to bless people who were already so very blessed, but God began a new work in them. He interrupted their happy, neat, busy church lives and gave them a holy passion to serve the least of these - especially the homeless.

The story of how God brought them through this process is incredibly inspiring and faith-building. Jen talked about the concept of ascending and descending in her book and it broke me. I'm in luck because I just remembered that a friend posted an excerpt on Facebook about it:

I’m learning what it means to descend, which is so revolutionary it often leaves me gasping. I have been trying to ascend my entire life. Up, up, next level, a notch higher, the top is better, top of the food chain, all for God’s work and glory, of course. The pursuit of ascension is crippling and has stunted my faith more than any other evil I’ve battled. It has saddled me with so much to defend, and it doesn’t deliver. I need more and more of what doesn’t work. I’m insatiable, and ironically, the more I accumulate, the less I enjoy any of it. Instead of satisfaction, it produces toxic fear in me; I’m always one slip away from losing it all.

Consequently, my love for others is tainted because they unwittingly become articles for consumption. How is this person making me feel better? How is she making me stronger? How is he contributing to my agenda? What can this group do for me? I am an addict, addicted to the ascent and thus positioning myself above people who can propel my upward momentum and below those who are also longing for a higher rank and might pull me up with them. It feels desperate and frantic, and I’m so done being enslaved to the elusive top rung.

When Jesus told us to “take the lowest place” (Luke 14:10), it was more than a strategy for social justice. It was even more than wooing us to the bottom for communion, since that is where He is always found. The path of descent becomes our own liberation. We are freed from the exhausting stance of defense. We are no longer compelled to be right and are thus relieved from the burden of maintaining some reputation. We are released from the idols of greed, control, and status. The pressure to protect the house of cards is alleviated when we take the lowest place.

The ascent is so ingrained in my thought patterns that it has been physically painful to experience reformation at the bottom. The compulsion to defend myself against misrepresentation nearly put me in the grave last year. I was tormented by chaotic inner dialogues, and there were days I was so plagued with protecting my rung that I couldn’t get out of bed. With every step lower, the stripping-away process was more excruciating. I had no idea how tightly I clung to reputation and approval or how selfishly I behaved to maintain it. Getting to the top requires someone else to be on the bottom; being right means someone else needs to be wrong. It is the nature of the beast.

(Jen Hatmaker, Interrupted, pgs. 64-65)

We had been trying to ascend for God knows how long. This was so incredibly freeing to realize. We were ready to break those chains and descend.

God used this book to turn my heart upside down and dump everything out of it. Then He flipped it right side up and put in it a desire for a completely different type of church than I'd been hoping for. I finally got on board with Curtis in his desire to serve inside the city. I could see great purpose in the specific area he had vision for, which had seemed like a completely random choice to me before. There was now the possibility of something more beautiful than I could have imagined. It was so new and so unlike my former thinking that I was afraid it would fly away and I'd lose it. I would beg God - and still do - to seal it in there. I don't want it to escape.

What we are praying is to be a church that will reach the lost and hurting in this city with the Gospel in one hand and relief in the other. We want to live as missionaries in our hometown and see the people around us meet Jesus Christ. We hope to be a simple church that can use a lot of our time and resources to serve outside our walls, which is funny to say since we don't yet have any walls. We would dearly love to be an economically and ethnically diverse church that reflects the population of Houston.

When I think about all of this, it seems impossible. I keep saying, "God, this is a really tall order. Are we hearing you right? Can this actually happen?" God has repeatedly reminded me that this is not a work of human hands. It is by His Spirit. He is putting every bit of this together by His might. I believe we will see Him do it.