Life Themes: I Meet Mark Buntain

The year was apparently a pivotal one for me. As I wrote in an earlier posting, I was 13 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. That same year, I published my first article, a free verse I had written for school titled "My Favorite Place." It was also the time in my life that I read two books whose impact on me has lasted to this day: Sheldon's In His Steps and Wilkerson's The Cross and the Switchblade. And it was the year I met Mark Buntain.

Buntain was that other foreign saint in Calcutta (Kolkata), and a close friend of the more famous one, Mother Theresa. A native Canadian, he was itinerating as an evangelist at a church in Kelso, Washington, when he heard my missionary grandfather preach and went forward to dedicate his life to missions, or so the family story goes. He followed his call to India in 1954, where he lived out his life in devoted service to God, the lost and the poor.

He came to our church in South Jersey for a Sunday evening service when I was in the seventh grade. Our youth group, such as it was at the time, met for the hour before and he was our honored guest. There were just a handful of us - three teens (all seventh graders) as I recall, my dad (the pastor) and our guest missionary.

It could have been a crowd of thousands or an interview with royalty as far as Buntain was concerned, for he readily engaged us, answering our questions, telling us stories, and sweeping us up with his infectious spirit. I have no idea what he preached in the main service that night - all that lingers in my memory was our private conversation with him.

There was in Buntain a deep and abiding passion. While I know little of his life story, I do know that he cared for people, especially the kinds of people that few others cared about - those who had never heard the Gospel, those who were oppressed, and those who were misfits because they didn't fit on anyone's most desired list.

I am convinced that Buntain's passion for people flowed out of his devotion to Jesus. He was obviously in love with this Jesus he could not stop talking about and to -- he frequently interrupted his sermons to talk directly with his Lord.

Two decades later I heard him preach at a minister's convention in Missouri. He shared the pulpit that week with a well-known orator. I walked away thinking that when I heard that other man preach, I was impressed with the speaker, and when I heard Buntain speak, I was impressed with Jesus. Buntain may have lacked polish, but he knew Jesus and that shone through more than anything else.

Two of those three teens from that Sunday night long ago eventually served overseas, Linda in Korea and me in China. I know it wasn't Buntain's influence alone. But I do believe that Buntain's willingness to spend an hour with a handful of seventh graders on a Sunday evening made a lasting impression on each of us.

Later in college, a group of us organized a ping pong marathon to raise money for missions and we chose Buntain's hospital in Calcutta as the recipient of what we raised. What he had started as an evangelistic outreach and turned into a church came to include a complete educational system, a feeding program, a hospital and all sorts of other avenues for meeting the needs of the poor. Mark and his wife, Hulda, saw people and their needs as whole people in need of a full gospel.

And he understood how intertwined is the two-fold mission of declaring and demonstrating the Good News. In my adult life, I've come to formulate and articulate that dual mission as a theme in my own life. Somehow, some way, Buntain planted a seed that quiet Sunday night forty plus years ago.

Life Themes: In His Steps

I read In His Steps, one of the bestselling books of all time, when I was just 13. I reread it this past weekend for the first time in over forty years in an attempt to discern why it has had such great and lasting impact on me.

Recently, Charles M. Sheldon's famous subtitle, "What Would Jesus Do," has become highly marketable as "WWJD", but Sheldon himself received little in royalties from his book and gave those all away to charity. As a pastor in Topeka, Kansas, he lived the book's message, supporting missions, launching Bible study groups and outreaches, and championing reforms such as better housing for the poor, job training and placement, prison reform, improvement of schools, and pacifism. As a university freshman, he started a Sunday School for Chinese laundrymen, teaching them English by reading the Bible.

He also founded some of the first kindergartens in America, one in a destitute community of freed slaves and their children outside of Topeka. Among those kindergarteners, Elisha Scott grew up to be a respected attorney. His son, Charles Sheldon Scott, also a lawyer, argued the winning side of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case before the U.S. Supreme Court the year before I was born.

But all this about Sheldon's life I have learned only in recent days. While highly inspiring, it contributed nothing to making the message of In His Steps part of my life theme.

The fictional story, written in the style of its day, 1897, is wooden for modern readers, often pedantic, perhaps because he wrote it first as a sermon series. The story line follows a pastor and congregation who resolve to ask themselves whenever they have a decision to make, "What would Jesus do?"

Sheldon did not prescribe how everyone should live out this principle. "There could be no fixed Christian way of doing money," he wrote. "The rule that regulated use [of money] was unselfish utility." Each disciple of Christ was to find his or her own way in living out the pledge, but there was no doubt that such a commitment would affect every area of life including the economic. It is obvious that Sheldon anticipated that, as people adopted and lived out his pledge, it would result in "a perfect upheaval of Christianity, as we now know it."

He repeatedly attacked the exploitation of the poor in the promotion of prize fights and the sale of alcohol, arguing that such corporate greed be fought at every level including the economic, corporate and legal. For him, prohibition is a fight against the sin of corporate greed as much as of personal drunkenness. As one of his characters prays, "O Lord, how long shall Christian people continue to suffer by their silence and their ballots the greatest form of slavery known in America?"

His wealthy characters who took the pledge challenged their own "luxurious class" to repent of class elitism and the wanton use of money. It was not enough for the wealthy to devote their money to God. "Men would give money who would not think of giving themselves....They gave what was the easiest to give, what hurt them the least." At this Sheldon was only warming up. "The Christianity that attempts to suffer by proxy," he wrote, "is not the Christianity of Christ."

As his characters live out the pledge, they become devoted to developing better housing for the poor, good wages for employees, education for all children, industries more conducive to justice and compassion, food preparation training, and job training and development for the poor. Moreover the book sets as a goal the reform of journalism, the transformation of the political system itself so filled with greed and corruption, and the expression of the Christian mission in all walks of life.

Sheldon's emphasis on humanitarianism, compassion and justice are firmly grounded in his devotion to Christ. "I cannot interpret the probable action of Jesus until I know better what His Spirit is...We must know Jesus before we can imitate him." He believes that "the Christian of our time must represent a more literal imitation of Jesus, and especially the element of suffering."

That Christians must enter into the suffering of others as Jesus did is a dominant theme. "Christian America! Is it a reproach on the form of our discipleship that the exhibition of actual suffering for Jesus on the part of those who walk in His steps always provokes astonishment as at the sight of something very unusual?" The "Christian" America of his day was highly steeped in a cultural Christianity in which neither the faith nor the citizenship reflected the true Gospel.

Sheldon puts great emphasis on a spiritual baptism, that this effort to reach and reform is not something to be done purely by human effort. He petitions over and over again "for spiritual baptism within the church in America such as it had never known." As a student of history, I am intrigued, for it was but three years later that the modern Pentecostal movement was birthed in the very same city of Topeka. Sadly the American church was to splinter over the next decade into three strands, each taking an aspect of Sheldon's message with it. With Modernism would go his emphasis on social justice, with Fundamentalism would go his devotion to Christ, and with the Pentecostal movement would go his emphasis on the Holy Spirit. All three had been part of the galvanized wing of the latter 19th Century Evangelicalism, but his book heralded the end and not the beginning of such a unity.

So how did this book influence my life theme? Hard to say, except that I spent the next twenty years in research and writing, trying to discover how and why those three strands had splintered and could not even now be brought back together again.

Life Themes: MLK, racism and justice

I was barely 13 at the time. I can still picture my room, the radio by my bed turned on, listening to the news out of Memphis. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated. They played his old speeches, especially the one from the March on Washington. I'd been too young back in '63 to follow any of that or much of the rest of his life. But his death, sudden and violent as it was, left an indelible impression on me.

There were other tragedies in that year of violence - the war playing out in Vietnam, the urban ghettoes burning as white and black alike spurned King's message of peace and reconciliation, Bobby Kennedy's assassination, and the whole cultural convulsion sifting our nation. But of all those events, it is King's death with which I most connected.

Looking back I'm still not sure why. I wasn't black. I was poor, though not without resources of which to avail myself. But I had already developed a sense that while life isn't fair, it doesn't mean that we can't and shouldn't fight its unfairness.

My high school had its token race riot three or so years later, but other than an African-American family or two in my church, mine was a white world. Even so, as a student of history and culture, I was becoming increasingly sensitized to the huge shadow of racism which had for far too long lain across our land. And I was becoming increasingly agitated at the passivity with which that racism had been chronically, officially and popularly greeted by people who supposedly took literally the words of the Apostle Paul that there is to be "neither Jew nor Greek" in the body of Christ. I was coming to see that the Gospel was comprehensive and universal in its appeal, that no one should be left out of hearing or experiencing the Good News, and that this good news required both the declaration and the demonstration of God's love.

Somehow that youthful passion for justice, that all people everywhere deserve to be set free by God's grace and power, grew into a decade-long study of racism in my own Pentecostal heritage through both my master's thesis and my doctoral dissertation, and into a doctoral degree in Theological Ethics, ever pursuing what it means to live out what I believe. Evangelicals, among whom Pentecostals had finally come home to roost after an uneasy birth out of Fundamentalism, were good about knowing what they believed. They were far less certain about how that belief system was supposed to transform their "living out".

I moved to Waco, Texas, at the impressionable and idealistic age of 21, as that part of the South was still sorting out the Federally-imposed civil rights advances of the '50s and '60s. Waco at the time was as yet brutally ugly in its racism, and the church, my church, was no exception. Even as late as the '90s, one of "my" local congregations was changing its name out of fear that it would attract certain unnamed undesirables (the church having originally been named after the street on which it was located, a street that bore witness to Texas' Hispanic heritage).

Among the many diamonds I discovered in Waco was Toliver's Chapel Missionary Baptist Church and its pastor and my classmate, the Reverend Dr. Cleophus J. LaRue, now a professor of homiletics at Princeton Theological Seminary. Cleo and I became Sunday and classroom friends. While his traditional Black church world was a cross-cultural experience for me, it was no less so than Texas itself was.

I moved on, continually seeking ways in which the Gospel could speak prophetically and pastorally to a deeply fallen world. My path took me far from racism in America to the injustice of people groups around the world remaining out of reach of the Gospel and to the systemic poverty of Northwest China's rural and ethnic masses.

And now I find myself back in the USA, this time in a new hometown in America's Northwest, once again challenging society's injustices and calling the Church to proclaim God's justice to all peoples. Oppression, whether spiritual, physical, emotional, or social, is that which hinders people from worshipping their Maker. Which is why their Maker has always said that we who have been freed are to be about His business of setting His people free, so that, as with the Israelites liberated from Egyptian bondage, we all might freely worship Him.

Today Martin Luther King is referenced in all kinds of causes, from anti-abortion to anti-government, by people who a generation ago might well have linked King with forces destroying our so-called American way of life and who remain awkwardly uneasy with his long shadow. As human as the rest of us, yet more energized than most, King did and continues to embody in his legacy the fight for justice in the name of Jesus, a cause I firmly believe with all my heart is worth fighting for.

Life Themes

2010.01.06

We all have life themes - songs, if you will, that play over and over again in our passions and our priorities. These themes probably have their roots in our earliest days, though they tend to bloom in later years, more often than not in our twenties and thirties. Of course, some people seem to launch into a whole new direction very late in life. The American folk artist known as Grandma Moses comes to mind. As does the original Moses who led ancient Israel out of bondage at the age of 80 or so. But I think that the seeds of the vision of such late bloomers are planted in much earlier experiences. Certainly this was so with Moses who had long before begun to bristle at the injustices being perpetrated on his own people.

I have been thinking recently of literary and other influences in my life. Christians often refer to the whole Bible as having a significant impact, as if they are afraid they will show some kind of bias if they further delineate their answer. But I think for most people for whom the Bible has had marked impression, there are certain passages that resonate more than others.

For me, the Gospel of John had such meaning when I was a boy growing up. I don't know why other than that I saw in John someone who was very close to Jesus. Known as "the Beloved" because he and the Master were "tight", he was probably one of the younger of the disciples, perhaps had a receptive temperament, even though he was one of the "Sons of Thunder". But I think it was mostly because he found his identity in Jesus early on. I've always thought that the unnamed disciple in chapter 1 who with Andrew spent the day just hanging out with Jesus was this very John.

As I moved into my young adult years, Luke's writings - first Acts and then his Gospel - took on much greater significance for me, particularly as I've tried to understand the Master's strategy and methodology and how we are called to follow that same path. Certainly, I can point to many other passages in the New Testament that resonate in my spirit - and then there are various Old Testament references as well, such as some sections of the Prophets, certain Psalms and the stories of the Patriarchs.

Key sections of Scripture keep showing up over and over again in my life theme. One is where Jesus speaks from the prophet Isaiah concerning his own mission on this earth. Luke records it in chapter four of his Gospel. Another is over in another chapter 4, this time in Paul's letter to the Ephesians where Paul writes that the believers are to be equipped to do God's work. I Peter 2 has also had special significance where we are exhorted to do good works living as aliens in this world so that others will come to glorify God. In recent months, I have gone back to studying the Old Testament - everything from the laborious verses of Moses' instructions concerning the establishment of a new society under God to the soaring lines of the Prophets, proclaiming God's justice in the world.

Early this morning I was rereading Isaiah's words (3:15), "What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?" That will make you eat your breakfast with good posture and proper humility. I thrill to those lines in chapter 1, where Isaiah writes: "Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed (or, rebuke the oppressor). Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow."

As Henry Longfellow famously wrote in the heat of the American Civil War: "God is not dead: nor doth he sleep; the wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth good will toward men." ("I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day") Perhaps like Moses, I early on in life began to look for a Savior who would not long endure injustices perpetrated on those he came to set free. This is a God I can follow with all my heart.

Life for my wife and me has certainly changed dramatically in recent years. One of our preaching pastors, Morris Dirks, shared on a recent Sunday how he was finally pulling out of a five-year valley of depression and for the first time in a long time was sensing a fresh hope. I don't know if I am that far through my own such valley. Nor do I know in what direction my life will move on the other side.

But I do sense that whatever that path looks like, I will still be walking to the beat of the same life theme with which I have walked for many years. It is a strong theme that resonates down through the ages, that God has come to set His Creation free so that it may worship Him and enjoy all that He has provided in the manner he intended it to be enjoyed; and that this liberation of those still oppressed will come in part through those already set free. In other words, like John, we have the joy of working as closely with Jesus as our hearts desire. And my heart does so desire.