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  • November 30, 1999

Archives For November 30, 1999

Neighbor’s Lunch and Immigration

Charles Kiser —  August 13, 2008 — 2 Comments

We had a Neighbor’s Lunch this weekend at Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse in West End. I really love these experiences. About half of our group consisted of young adult/professionals; the other half consisted of poor neighbors.


I decided to walk around downtown for about a half-hour before lunch in the hopes that I might meet someone to invite to our lunch.

I just prayed as I walked that God would show me someone to serve, to befriend.

And yes, I had the nervous butterflies. I knew God would have to work in order to push me past my anxiety about cold-turkey invitations.

As I walked God brought a text to mind in Jesus’ teaching about inviting people to a party (Luke 14:12-14):

Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

At the very end of my walk I saw a man sitting on a bench with a Wal-Mart sack beside him. I walked by him, looked him in the eyes and said, “Hey, how’s it going?” He responded politely.

I kept walking.

Then I heard, “Excuse me sir. Do you mind if I ask you something?”

That was all I needed. Thank you, God.

He explained that he had just moved a few weeks ago from a large city in the north to find work in Dallas. He was on the streets, and he was trying to find a way to get to Wichita Falls because he knew someone who could give him work there. The bus fare cost $43. He showed me the $30 he had and asked if I could help.

I just happened to have $15 in my pocket.

I told him, “You know it’s funny that you ask because I’ve been walking around praying that God would show me someone to help.”

That resonated with him — he told me he was also a believer.

Paul ended up coming to lunch with us and eating all the ribs he could handle. After lunch, we sent him off with enough for bus fare to Wichita Falls. We hope to hear from him again when he’s back in Dallas.


I love divine appointments. It seems that God works out all the details when I merely make myself available to him.

At future lunches we’ll invite everyone to show up early and go out into the streets and alleys praying that God would lead us to new friends. In fact, why couldn’t we do that for all our events?

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On Sunday night, we talked about immigration and its relationship to spirituality and politics. Go figure that three of our poor friends from our Neighbor’s lunch came—one of whom regularly protested on behalf of two imprisoned border patrol agents, another of whom was married to an undocumented immigrant! What an interesting conversation it was.

It was also amazing to see conversation between the rich and poor, the educated and less educated. I think we discovered commonalities between the two we would have never expected.

Seriously, where else in the world can the rich and poor rub shoulders like this? That’s the beauty of the church.

In the words of one of our young adult friends at the gathering, “I could feel the presence of God with us. It was beautiful.”

We discovered in scripture God’s openhandedness and mercy toward the “stranger” or immigrant, as well as the ways certain responsibility was expected of the immigrant—particularly when the immigrant was living among God’s people.

If you’re interested in a good book on the subject, I’d encourage you to pick up Christians at the Border by M. Daniel Carroll R. It’s a short read and a good introduction on how the scriptures speak to the topic of immigration.

In Justice, Mission, Politics
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Non-Church Spaces

Charles Kiser —  June 16, 2008 — 12 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about connecting to people in our broader community for the sake of God’s mission.

In my reflections, one thing has hit home again and again: the importance of entering into and living within “non-church” spaces.

A common instinct for ministers and churches when seeking to connect to the community is to host some sort of community event and invite community people to it—a marriage seminar; a financial management class; a kids’ camp. Most of the time such events are hosted at church facilities. Sometimes they’re hosted at neutral locations in the community.

The location is less important than who is hosting the event—the church. The event becomes inherently “church space” because the church is hosting it.

What’s the problem with that? There’s no inherent problem with the church hosting events that connect to the community. But there is a potential problem given that more and more non-Christian people distrust, or are at least ambivalent toward, the institution of church such that they’d be more likely to participate in a marriage seminar or financial management class elsewhere.

All this resurfaces the importance of cultivating personal relationships with non-Christian people and building trust with them (so they can see we’re not wacko). And how do you go about doing that?

Enter into relationships with people in “non-church” spaces.

Non-church spaces are places where the church doesn’t set the agenda, plan the party or control the atmosphere. There’s no bible study. No prayer before the meal. No announcement about upcoming worship gatherings.

A significant reason Christianity has struggled in North America is because it has neglected to engage these kinds of non-church spaces. Churches have neglected non-church spaces for the same reason non-Christian people have avoided coming to church spaces: fear.

It’s a scary thing to venture off into territory where we have little control over things, where we’re different and might be the minority. So who should be required to take the initiative, churches or non-Christian people? It’s almost a rhetorical question.

If the church is to connect to its community it must first be part of that community. It must venture out into non-church spaces.

Here are a few non-church spaces in which the Storyline Community has either spent time intends to spend time (many of these are determined by our context and might be different somewhere else; some of these are based on our own passions):

  • Civic organization events
  • Community service organizations
  • Sports leagues (joining other people’s teams)
  • Concerts and plays
  • Fitness clubs
  • Workplaces
  • Apartment communities where we live
  • Restaurants, bars and coffee shops

Our major victories these days are simply 1) having the courage to enter such non-church spaces and 2) the relationships that emerge from them. The hope is that the shape the church takes will consist of and be informed by community relationships such that Storyline becomes a church that grows out of its surrounding culture.

We’re seeing this hope become reality in small ways already…more about that later.

In Community Connection, Mission
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Justice and the Mission of God

Charles Kiser —  May 12, 2008 — 17 Comments

One of the first appointments we made after arriving in Dallas was with Larry James at Central Dallas Ministries. We desired to get to know what was going on in the city in terms of community service and development, and CDM is making a significant impact in those areas. We asked Larry how we might come alongside CDM and partner with them in community development.

He said a couple things that got my attention. The first was that not many churches ask that question. Most are concerned with volunteer opportunities for their members and avenues for evangelism among the poor. The second thing: he encouraged us to build relationships with our poor neighbors. Personal relationship would benefit both us and our neighbors more than any token volunteer hours could.

—

We met Chad and Marjorie Matthews several weeks ago. Chad was a youth pastor in east Texas for a few years. He recently quit his job and, after receiving an unexpected monetary gift, relocated with his wife to downtown Dallas. What do they do now? They hang out with the homeless every day. They take them out to lunch. They have them over for dinner. They offer chauffer services when someone needs a car to get around. They call what they do “I Love Evelyn,” the name of the first homeless woman they met in Dallas. Chad says with a gleam in his eye, “We just want to see what love can do.”

Porche and I recently went to eat lunch with Chad, Marjorie and their friend Wesley. Wesley is intelligent. He is a man of values. He is a man of integrity. He is a man of gratitude and humility. He is 67 years old and looks 47.

When Wesley learned that I was a “preacher”, he cautioned me not to be like other preachers who were in it for money or renown. When I asked him what counsel he would give me as a preacher he said, “When you get behind that pulpit, you better not half-step it; you better bring it all. Tell the truth.”

Wesley, by the way, doesn’t have a home right now. He sells newspapers on a downtown corner so he can make ends meet and save up for a new place.

—

A couple weeks ago I volunteered with a non-profit organization in town called SoupMobile. It is directed by a man named David Timothy, affectionately referred to as the Soup Man. Every week day he prepares lunches for the homeless in downtown. Around 1 p.m. he loads it up in a van and drives to the Day Resource Center parking lot, where hundreds of people line up to receive a warm meal. His friends always know when he’s coming because he plays the Rocky theme song through speakers attached to the exterior of his van.

On the day I helped out, I gave away 600 hot dogs in 60 minutes.

—

Ryan and I came back from the National New Church Conference with some new resolve to listen for the needs of our local community by conducting some form of a community needs assessment. In short, it entails meeting with community leaders at every level—business owners, school counselors, social workers, non-profit organization directors, elected officials—and in one way or another, asking them what are the needs of the surrounding community.

The hope is that by doing so, we can develop relationships all across the city that will open doors for joint partnerships to do good things for the city and its inhabitants: to help the poor; to curb injustice; to be good neighbors to all our neighbors.

—

Why spend our time doing such things? Why not pour all our efforts in meeting people who are far from God and joining in their spiritual journeys? Why not hold off on “benevolence-oriented” ministry until the church gets off the ground?

Because to us, these things are expressions of one facet of God’s fully-orbed mission in the world: justice. Not justice in the American sense, but justice in the biblical sense. In the Scriptures, particularly in the OT prophets and teachings of Jesus, justice (or righteousness) means taking care of the needs of the poor, the downtrodden, the widows and orphans, the aliens.

We’re having justice conversations because justice is what God is already doing in the world and we want to join him. We want to begin to be the kind of church now that we want to be five years from now—and that means participating in some way in all the facets of God’s mission.

James puts it well: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (1:27).

In Justice, Mission
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Sports Talk

Charles Kiser —  April 7, 2008 — 8 Comments

1. I’m a Mavs fan. I watched a great comeback win yesterday over the Phoenix Suns. It looks like they’ll make the playoffs in a tough Western Conference. Julie and I got nosebleed tickets with the Chappotins to watch them dominate Golden State last week—oh so satisfying after getting kicked out of the playoffs by the Warriors in the first round last year.

I was skeptical about the Mavs’ ability to win big games after the Jason Kidd trade, but they’ve got my attention now. We’ll see how they finish the season and perform in the playoffs.

2. I ran in the Big D Texas Marathon 5K with a good friend this weekend. I was pleased to finish at (what I consider) a decent time after not running very consistently since we’ve been in Dallas. We were mainly there to support a new friend of mine who was running the half-marathon. It was quite an accomplishment. Less than a year ago he struggled even to run a mile, and now he’s just finished running 13.1 miles at less than a 10 minute/mile pace. Pretty impressive.

Friend Raj in red, James on far right

All of this has made me want to get back into running again. I’m planning on participating in a 6 mile Mud-run event in November, and maybe even the White Rock half-marathon in December. Sometime I’ll have to share the hilarity of my experience running/walking/crawling the original marathon event in Athens, Greece when I studied abroad there in 1999. I trained for a whopping 3 weeks. It took me more than 2 weeks to recover. Enough said.

3. The Porches and I are going to join a flag football league in Uptown. It’s co-ed 8 v. 8 on Thursday nights. Everyone plays a game and heads to a local bar afterwards to hang out. Should be a great way to have fun and meet people.

Every one of these everyday life activities—basketball, running, flag football— presents itself with opportunities to enjoy the good world God has made for us and to live out the way of Jesus in friendship with other people. Living missionally is sometimes not about doing new things as much as it is seeing the same old things with a different set of lenses.

In Mission, Running, Sports
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A Time to Invite and a Time to Be Invited

Charles Kiser —  March 17, 2008 — 1 Comment

I’ve asked Ryan Porche, my co-worker in our church starting efforts, to contribute to the blog this week. Enjoy. CK

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We are grateful, as always, for your prayers on our behalf. Next time, Charles will write about creating margin in ministry. For this week, I (Ryan) want to write about what I’m learning about outreach.

Lately, my paradigms for outreach have been attacked (and this is a good thing). I used to see outreach as sending people out to invite more people back in. Granted, even in college, I began to see how the invitation “back in” was much better received when it occurred in the context of genuine relationship. But I was still approaching these relationships with the idea that I had everything to give. I know, I know…such humility! Actually, it’s embarrassing.

You see, as Claudia and I have begun making invitations to our Uptown neighbors, we’ve been surprised at how many—in the same instance of introducing themselves—have invited us into their homes for drinks and conversation. But I’m even more surprised at my own resistance to these invitations! After all, this is not what I had in mind! You’re supposed to come to our apartment so we can get to know you. And the words of a friend begin to echo in my head: what if we need to belong to them before we ever ask them to belong to us?

Ah. Now that’s a question. A one-sided relationship is not much of a relationship. I have realized how important it is for me to see the new people I meet as those who have something to offer me, rather than the other way around. So I embark with a new perspective this week: I’m looking for opportunities to learn and to belong. Rather than starting a new group of guys to play hoops at the park, I will join those already gathered. Rather than schedule as many people over for dinner as possible, we will leave margin to accept the invitations from others.

And as I write, my mind floods with stories of Jesus accepting the hospitality of others. May those who show hospitality to the Kisers and the Porches encounter Christ in us.

RPorche

In Hospitality, Mission
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