Direct REflections is an irregular column
written by REinstitute Director Kurtis Smith.
© 2007 – All Rights Reserved.

Direct Reflections on, "Jesus Among the Debris"

In order to fully draft the text for the evangelistic task before us along the Gulf Coast, I submit that we must understand the context of our post-Katrina mission field. 

In the book of Acts, Chapter 17, St. Paul understood the context of his mission field when he spoke to the Athenians on the Areopagus.  He noted that the Athenians had an altar dedicated to an unknown god.  The Athenian left a place in their pantheon for a god they had not yet recognized.  Paul observed this cultural context and adjusted his evangelistic text to speak in the heart language of the people with whom he sought to share the Gospel.  Athenian culture had what has been called by missionaries, “a God-shaped vacuum”.  Paul filled the Athenian God-shaped vacuum by identifying our living God with the Athenian’s unknown God.  His words held deep meaning in the Athenian context. 

Today, as we seek to restore faith, homes and community to victims of Katrina, we—like Paul—must look at our context if we desire to help.  We are not door knockers that swoop into action and frighten people with visions of standing at the gates of heaven or hell.  We REady our teams before we RElate to victims, we RElate before we REspond to needs and REspond in a holistic manner that will REform lives.  This is our model at REinstitute when addressing the needs of people through “disaster evangelism.”  We bring holistic hope.   We exist to help people turn disastrous critical incidents into critical events for Jesus.  We’re here in Louisiana and Mississippi to ignite the Gulf Coast with Christ’s love.

In order to identify our context for the mission at hand we must remember what New Orleans and the greater Gulf Coast, and America was before Katrina.  What is the historical narrative?  What was our story?  Five years before Katrina, New Orleans—along with the rest of America—was settling into a post-modern, post-Christian Age. 

Our particular city, unlike many American cities was relatively poor with some old money set in a larger nation of generally great wealth.  New Orleans wasn’t generally recognized as an influential part of the American metanarrative (the larger story) unless it came time for a convention, a Superbowl or Mardi Gras.  We were often seen as simply the place to hold a national party.  “Come to New Orleans, live wild, and then go home.”  The people of New Orleans were often left to live among the debris of other’s enjoyment.  Every now and then the wealthy would travel our streets and we would call, “throw me something Mister!” and our city became a virtual capital for the welfare state.

While this was our local story, the postmodern elite of our nation were busy deconstructing everything from physics to the meaning of “is.”  Postmoderns taught a disdain for absolutes.   As French Philosopher Jean Paul Lyotard defined it, postmodernism was an “incredulity toward metanarratives.”  Meaning, postmoderns didn’t approve of stories that had claimed absolute values for all people.   Postmoderns celebrated diversity to the extent that nothing was wrong but intolerance.  Our world had placed global absolutes upon the heap of history.  We had divided into sub-cultural groups that didn’t have a common story of life together across racial and socioeconomic lines.  Friends and Seinfeld television shows led pop-culture by proclaiming, “Whatever” as the mantra of the day.  Americans believed that people were inherently good unless they sought to limit the freedom of others to be and do what they desired.  As long as your sub-culture didn’t judge my sub-culture, you were ok.

And we didn’t hear the biblical question, “What must I do to be saved?,” (ref. Scripture) but rather it became the question, “Why must I be saved?”  Our country was so wealthy and so immediate in our collective thought process that many didn’t see a reason for salvation.  Salvation from sin, death and eternal damnation wasn’t even on our mental or spiritual radars as we happily traversed not only personal but private sacred paths.

As Christians, myself included, we became more worried about offending our neighbors with our terminology than sharing the Good News.  Our mission lost its eternal urgency and became a service-oriented action that often helped us feel good about ourselves more than truly helping others.  Evangelism became outreach and outreach became doing nice things for people as if our churches were Rotary Clubs.  We moved far away from John the Baptist’s example of calling for repentance and instead seemed to take a sort of evangelistic Hippocratic oath to “Do No Harm” in witnessing.

One might say that as soda companies rapidly turned out diet sodas in the 1990s, so did Christians bring out diet church: “Jesus light” without all the offense…we embraced postmodernism and this meant that our witness would hardly ever entail the absolutely full metanarrative of the prophecies fulfilled in Jesus’ birth, life, baptism, suffering, death and resurrection for each and every individual in this room and in this world.  Who wanted to talk about such a bloody story anyway?  Who wanted to talk about justice, and people going to hell?  We would only share the full story of Jesus if people happened to ask and then it always felt awkward at that.  All that talk about one way, truth and life sounded pretty judgmental and intolerant.

At the turn of the millennium the context of our country and individual lifestyle of wealth and materialism had gone beyond Allan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” into a full-blown decadence that made it the bull’s-eye on the target of fundamentalist extremism.  

Suddenly in 2001, our common experience of 9-11 brought about an unusual propensity for absolutist statements of moral right and wrong.  We defined evil and it was our enemy. For a moment our metanarrative was clear.  Then again, how could it be that we post-modern multiculturalists would be so cold-hearted to believe that evil existed in others?  Surely we would be the same if we had grown up in their culture?  How could we be absolutely correct?  Besides, Oprah Winfrey could lead us to all get along in a New York stadium - why not in the world?

And so, our national fervor for discriminating absolutes faded quickly toward unity found in diversity and the virtue of tolerance climbed again to the top of our societal ethic.  This meant that anyone who was to passionately share his or her faith  in such a way that it was considered THE truth, that man or woman became the enemy. In our society, without objective absolutes, we have no need for objective justification - (i.e. Jesus death for the salvation of all humankind.)  So, there still didn’t seem to be much of a reason to be saved except from people who are attempting to spread a metanarrative.   Christians came to be categorized with the Taliban. 

[In fact, just these past couple of weeks you might have seen the CNN special report called, “God’s Warriors” - placing passionate Christians in the same category as Jewish and Muslim extremists.]

Now, don’t hear me wrong.  As Christians, we need to be all about love for our neighbors.  Some of our own have forgotten that God is love. However, we must not sacrifice our absolutely beautiful and inspired message of faith to the relative interests of this diverse world.

And so we arrived at August, 2005.  Our world was cruising along, trying to deal with the pest of global terror.  Struggling to define our enemies, many Americans believed there was a God but weren’t so sure about the existence of sin and evil.  As much as Americans looked in the mirror, we weren’t using the mirror of God’s law to see our own brokenness.  And while we weren’t so sure about how the war was going, we still felt morally and physically invincible in our individual American lives.

On August 29, 2005, and the following several days, the levees of American pride were broken.  Before the world’s eyes, the extent of our moral morass was revealed.  For those of us from Greater New Orleans, our local narrative became a global embarrassment. 

It also became the opportunity of a lifetime for American Christian outreach.  The people of the Gulf Coast realized they needed a Savior.  They couldn’t survive on their own.  They couldn’t depend upon their elected leaders.  They needed something bigger than themselves.  They needed a Big Story that gave them answers…a metanarrative.  They needed a Biblical answer for a disaster of Biblical proportions.  That was and is our context for mission.

So, what is our text?  As Francis Schaeffer asked, “How should we then live?”

The people of the Gulf Coast are ready for a Savior.  Should we run out, and as Christians and fix all the homes in the region?  That certainly would save the people from their physical challenges.  Those of us who have the gift of service might say, Yes!  Let’s get that drywall up! 

On the other hand…maybe we should run right out and tell everybody about Jesus?!  Those of us who have the gift of evangelism might say, Yes!  Let’s go out, tell people to repent and believe.

Chuck Colson wrote in his book, Being the Body, “Many Christian endeavors have traditionally divided into two camps:  social activists in one and soul winners in the other.  Those seeking to right injustices and meet human needs have been accused of abandoning the classic Christian call to evangelize the lost.  Meanwhile the social activists deride soul-winners for being concerned only with altar calls and notches in their Bible belts…How desperately the modern church needs to recapture the full biblical vision of justice!”

Let us follow Jesus’ example.  We need a balanced response.  Jesus healed both the body and the soul.  The early church itself realized the importance of a balanced response when it fought against the heresy of Gnostics who believed the physical world to be evil and the spiritual world good.  The church fathers argued that God created BOTH the heavens and the earth.  Jesus was God incarnate. 

Today, Jesus offers us living water in baptism, his real presence continues to be with us in his body and blood and his church is here to offer BOTH physical and spiritual help.  That is the full, mysterious, holistic story Christians offer to those broken through a disaster.As Francis Schaeffer asked, “How Should We Then Live”?

Suddenly we need salvation.  Suddenly we know what it means for someone to risk their own life for ours.  God sends his son out of heaven like a coast guard crew member hanging out of a helicopter, risking his own life for ours.  Jesus was the ultimate first responder.  He was the model volunteer.  He gave up his life of safety and came down into our dirty muck of a world.   In the process of gutting out our lives He received nail puncture wounds in his feet as he gutted out our lives and ultimately died of asphyxiation from the stench of our sin…

And thus we draft an evangelistic text for a context of disaster:  Jesus IS Among the Debris.