The Truth Shall Set You Free - Part II

For me, the greatest tool for change and for introducing Truth is honest and guileless questioning. By honest and guileless, I mean questions that do not presume the questioner has all the answers any more than the System which is being questioned. Such honest questions understand that God and God alone is God.

We who are of Faith and we who are of Science of all people should not fear questions. Questions are what birthed modern Science. And questions are what births Faith. Copernicus questioned what everyone knew to be true, that the earth is the center of the universe, and in so doing launched modern science, all in good faith with Faith. Nathaniel came to Jesus with questions and doubts and Jesus called him "a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false." Jesus loved questions, loved to ask them himself, and tore into question-haters with a vengeance.

Even the earliest accounts of dialog in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures begin with questions. The serpent challenges Paradise with a question: "Did God really say?" And when God comes to Adam and Eve after they have eaten the forbidden fruit (unquestioningly obeying the serpent, by the way), God starts His dialog with them with a question of His own: "Where are you?" In fact, He continues to ask a whole series of questions before He makes His first declarative statement, all these questions designed to poke holes in their unquestioned presuppositions.

The Story of the Fall looks like it is God pushing Adam and Eve away when in reality Adam and Eve have already pushed themselves away, only they don't realize it. Instead of questioning and querying God, they have ignored Him. And it will take several more chapters in Genesis before humankind finds a lasting way back to a God who has been pursuing them all along. "Where are you?" is, after all, a question filled with pursuit and desire.

The principle of this whole meta-story is that unless questions are raised to crack a System that does not allow questions, that way back will not be found – whether that System be post-Fall humanity, Phariseeism of Jesus' day, aging "Communist" Statism, the Religious/Political Right, the Religious/Political Left, or the modern god of Science. For all these human Systems resist what the true God never resists – honest and persistent questioning.

The problem with modern society today - be it Glenn Beck or Carl Sagan, Joe the Plummer or Susie the Seamstress (we are talking stereotypes here) - is that we don't ask enough honest questions. Oh, we raise questions alright, but those questions are more answers in disguise, and they are intended to replace one unquestionable System with another.

The surprising thing about Faith is that it comes in the most innocent and honest forms, birthed as babes in a basket of reeds or a shepherd's stable. Faith challenges the closed Systems of this world not with a sword, but with humility and doubt. Moses and Jesus both entered closed Systems in the least threatening way possible and their mere presence raised doubts that those Systems were all that unquestionable and impenetrable. It was babes, not equally imposing or threatening systems, that eventually overthrew the closed Systems of their day.

God never fears our honest questions, even questions that doubt His existence. For He created our minds to think and we damn ourselves to eternal darkness when we stop thinking and believe without question, as did Adam and Eve, that we have all the answers.

The Truth Shall Set You Free - Part I

The whole thing starts with a faulty premise, of which there are many in our world, including within the House of Faith. But the faulty premise I begin with today is not in theology. It has to do with science. The faulty premise is this: Probing questions destroy truth. No, probing questions liberate truth.

True theology and true science are alike in that they both start with questions, meaning that what brings me to them and what opens them to me are questions. Lots and lots of questions, each one leading to seven more with no end of the querying in sight.

Questions do not destroy truth. On the contrary, they open up truth so that we may experience and understand it in all its reality. When we shut down inquiry in the name of science (or faith or whatever), we betray science (or faith or whatever) in the process.

This is an age of sound bites and, to be frank, I refuse to bite, whether the issue be socialism or democracy or homosexuality or global warming or health care. God is too big to fit into most of our sound bites and all these issues (and more) involve God, which means God is not inclined to address these concerns in sound bite drivel, especially when sound bites are intended as a means of cutting off further questioning. We think God does not like questions, when it is fallen humanity that abhors them. God loves questions and He created the human mind with an unlimited capacity to doubt the previously understood, formulate inquiries and ask away.

People of faith are often heard to say "God said it and that settles it for me," assuming that such a sound bite is a sign of faith. But a true man or woman of faith is a hungry person, hungry with an insatiable desire to know more and more of God and His creation. Not just what He said or did, but all the whys and wherefores we can muster. So, too, if science is a part of God's Truth, then we should never respond with a "that settles it for me," when what we really mean is "Don't bring it up any more."

When we first went to China in the mid-90s, we found that our mere presence was a scientific and philosophical intrusion into a closed system - a system that allowed no doubt or questions when it came to politics, sociology, religion, or the natural sciences. But we, as outsiders (Westerners) and in some cases people of faith, did not fit into that closed system. And yet we had been invited in by the very core that sustained it - the State. Moreover, we were invited in as authorities by that State. Maybe we weren't welcomed as authorities on anything that might question the system itself - such as theology, sociology, politics or even, say, biology. Our venue was limited to English, foreign culture and international business after all. But we were invited in as teachers and scholars nonetheless.

The State had taught our students from birth that there was only one way to think and that to raise any questions about the State's System of Thought was both ludicrous and something not to be tolerated. But we, who apparently did ask questions, who did think outside of the acceptable System of Thought were not only tolerated, we were given a position of great authority in a society that had venerated teachers from Kongzi (Confucius) to Mao with the utmost of respect.

As their teachers, we did not have to pose any questions to our students or speak to them of our own "heretical" ideas. By our sheer presence, we became the crack in the heretofore unquestionable authority box of the State - and we had the unwitting sanction of that very State to do so. As we used to explain to our rookie teachers from the "Outside," the first step toward the Cross begins with a question. We didn't have to point people to the Cross as much as get them probing reality, because in God's universe, all honest questions eventually lead to the foot of the cross.

For the first time in their lives, these students realized that questions could be raised, and thus everything was open to inquiry, even the Box itself. If we had come in attacking that Box, we would have closed their minds for another generation. Instead we became a sanctioned part of the System's desire -- yes, the system itself -- to raise doubts about the status quo, in true Marxian dialectic methodology.

Marxism, real Marxism, is all but dead in China. What is left of the old ideology is a failing pseudo-Statism that is as dogmatic-and-dead as elements of Faith and Science can at times be in the West. Such dogmatism will not fade away through direct attack, especially by outsiders, but only through honest and guileless -- and persistent -- questioning. This pseudo-Marxism is as ripe for failing as Khrushchev prophetically said the West was, especially a West that denies its twin roots of doubt and faith.

Life Themes: Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade – Part II

After a few decades, life's rivers all flow together so that it is difficult to remember what came from where. Such is the case with a second key element I as a 13-year-old gleaned from David Wilkerson's The Cross and the Switchblade.

When the skinny young preacher arrived in the ghettoes of New York City in 1958, all passionate about helping the urban gangs, Wilkerson had no earthly idea what he was doing. He really didn't even have a heavenly one, except that he wanted to do something to help. After making a public relations mess at the courthouse during a murder trial, he was left to wander the Big City's grimy streets on his weekly escapes from his country parish in Pennsylvania. In those days, nobody had a clue, least of all him, what to do about the gangs, their violence and the new threat of drugs.

So in lieu of a plan or a program, Wilkerson just started walking the streets, seeing what he could see, until he wound up connecting with the gangs, in no small part due to his photo getting blasted in the media for crashing that trial. As he connected with the gangs, he actually involved their input as to how best to reach out to them. They became partners in planning their own rescue and, as they became followers of Jesus, they joined him in ministering to other gang members.

A little over a decade after I read The Cross and the Switchblade, David's son, Gary, and I plotted together on ministering to high school and university students. Our ministry ways eventually parted, though I continued to flesh out these ideas, particularly around the Apostle Paul's missionary methodology, something I've been field testing for years and I am finally putting into print with Night Shift to be released later this year.

What I saw in Wilkerson was an "on the street" approach that now seems almost ordinary. But back in the late 50s and early 60s it was revolutionary. These events, after all, took place before the spiritual and cultural convulsions of the 60s and 70s that would shake up every area of society, not least the church.

What especially stuck with me was his simple practice of walking the streets in his new environment. After I launched out in my own work, first in pioneering student ministry stateside and then in serving in Asia, I took to walking each new cityscape as my first item of business. No contacts, no connections, no problem. Just get out and observe the place up front and personal, and out of that start get a feel for how life moved. It was part of the exercise of prayer I talked about in my last post. But it also led to an understanding of how a particular neighborhood or campus or a certain city functioned and flowed. And through that walking engagement, I would invariably discover the human activity hubs where I could meet people in their own natural environments.

I am not a cold turkey kind of guy. I don't mind meeting a stranger, but I need some kind of natural connection to get past "hello." Like buying vegetables in Asia's open markets or picking up my mail at the nearby shopping center. I like to warm up to people and let them warm up to me. As one fruit-seller in China said to his friends about me one day, "He's just an old face." And the networking was on.

Wilkerson isn't a cold turkey guy either – he may be an evangelist and a prophet, but he is no gregarious salesman. He didn't just go up to these gangs and start talking to their members. They discovered him first – all because he'd made a fool of himself in the papers. He disarmed them with his innocence and a lack of ulterior motive other than to love them through Jesus, something sorely lacking in many Christian encounters with culture in our day and age.

Which is why I think he served as such a helpful model to me. I wasn't from the world, let alone the streets, and neither was Wilkerson. And, no offense to him, I felt that if he of all people could succeed "out there," well, I could too.

Life Themes: Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade

The past few weeks I've been polishing off my manuscript for Night Shift, preparing to send it to my editor so he can chew it up and spit it out! A couple of times in this book I reference David Wilkerson's The Cross and the Switchblade.

I was 13 when I first read it. The summer before I'd been to California with my family for a national church conference where he spoke. I remember waiting for him to sign my copy, something that never took place. In the long run, it didn't matter. All the value needed was in what he'd already written inside.

The book, a best seller early on, chronicles his venture as a country preacher going to New York City to reach the urban gangs and founding what is today a worldwide organization called Teen Challenge. I did meet him years later and helped on some of his World Challenge projects. He became a long-term supporter of our work. At some point, the book was made into a movie, though I never could connect him with Pat Boone, who plays him on the screen.

A few short scenes from his book have had lasting impact on my life, influencing me at more than one turn in the road. It starts when he is still at his rural Pennsylvania parish. Watching late night TV, he decides to get rid of the tube and turn the time spent watching into praying. One night in prayer he's drawn to a copy of Life magazine where he becomes obsessed by a photo of some gang members on trial for murdering this guy in a wheelchair. On impulse he heads to their trial in the big city to try to help them. He makes a mess of that, winds up being thrown out of the courtroom and gets his photo in the papers, totally humiliated before the whole nation.

He has no idea why, but he keeps being drawn back to the city on a weekly basis and all he knows to do is walk the streets. After sleeping in his car one night, he wakes up to find some young kids jacking it up to steal his tires. Through those kids he meets their older brothers, gang members all. Everyone recognizes him as the one thrown out of that trial, a hero to every last one for being abused by the cops, and soon he's connecting with all kinds of gangs.

What struck me most from that story was how he prayed. I'm sure he prayed Pentecostal style when he knelt down in his country home, but when he walked the streets of New York trying to figure out what to do, it was eyes wide open, prayers going straight from his heart to heaven. It's a scene I've played over and over. Walking those streets, looking to find what God was calling him to. Slowly coming to see the inner city neighborhoods the way only God could have shown him.

"Prayer walks" mean all kinds of things these days – mostly structure and programs. For some, there's a whole technique to it. For Wilkerson back then, it was just plain ignorance mixed with just plain obedient faith.

I started mimicking him whenever I found myself in a new setting and not sure what to do. Working Texas campuses large and small as a campus pastor in my early 20s. Circuit-riding the nation in Campus 80s, praying for ministries to be started from New England to California. Settling in the Ozarks to pastor a campus group at SMSU (Missouri State). Reaching out to university students in Taiwan. Working with all strata of society in Northwest China. And now…

I never have bothered too much with style. I mostly just walk or ride a bike or sit and look out an urban vista or study faces passing by. People "harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd." The passage from Matthew 9:35-38 comes back every time, especially the part that follows the helpless sheep, where Jesus tells his disciples to ask the Harvest Master to send out workers to meet the needs they see – and then he sends them out in fulfillment of that very prayer. It's a prayer that never fails.