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.

When the Earth Gives Way

For our wedding, my bride chose a psalm to be read that has had much meaning to us as a couple over the years. Happens to be Psalm 46, which doesn't sound much like a text for a wedding, lamenting as it does about the world falling apart. There are, for sure, sweet verses in the psalm that sound very wedding-like, but surely not ones like these: "Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall, the earth melts."

Reminds me of a song sung at a Christian wedding in Taiwan: "Home, Home on the Range," the old cowboy ode about deer and antelope playing. For our local friends, it had sweet meaning as they crooned, "Where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day." But for us few foreigners present, all we could think of was sweaty ranch hands and cow dung.

Yet Number 46 is a surprisingly fitting scripture on which to start a life together. We all want to live "happily ever after." But life is more often filled with sorrow and pain, chaos and confusion, twists and turns we couldn't have anticipated in a thousand years. While there are those moments of unrestrained joy, there are also those times of agonizing heartache. It is in the midst of all this chaos, the sons of Korah write, that God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.

I think about this and the modern world in which we believers find ourselves. We long for peace and security without the panic and turmoil. But God has promised us peace and security in the midst of natural and social upheaval of the nth degree. It is the God of Jacob, a man who led a very complicated and frustrating life, who is "our fortress." Jacob grew up and fled from one very dysfunctional family to another and then started his own, which proved even more of a mess. There was no end to heartache in his life. And yet his God was his anchor, an anchor he found only while fleeing for his life from his own brother.

We want life to go one way and it goes another, so we adjust to that new way, only for it to take yet another turn and go in a third unplanned direction. We keep waiting for that "home on the range" which we think of as a ranch house in the 'burbs of Dallas only to discover that we are homeless in Seattle or helpless in Detroit. In all this chaos of life, slowly it dawns on us that our "home" is -- as I wrote for a school assignment at the age of 13 -- "the presence of God."

I have pondered these thoughts in #46 at various stages in my own life and I have often reflected on them concerning the Church, particularly in America. Unlike most of the rest of the world, we as the American Church are not used to upheavals. Even 9/11, as traumatic as that was, did not really destroy the American dream we have come to accept as our God-given birthright on this earth.

Do we fight for issues like pro-life (meaning anti-abortion) or pro-marriage (meaning anti-gay) because we want to fulfill our role of being salt and light in the world or because we are fighting hard for a certain type of status quo lifestyle, a '50s-style (white) dream world in which all is well with God and the universe? How much we forget that every period in history has been heaven for some, but hell for others and there is no ideal world, in this life at least, we can hold onto.

So what if America goes to hell in a hand basket? I am not saying to go out and tear down the nation ourselves. I am saying that if the world as we know it collapses, it may not necessarily be the much anticipated apocalypse. It may only be the next opportunity for God to prove that God alone is our refuge and strength.

Taste Testing God

A custom common to many folks is to use the changing of the calendar as a moment to take stock of life and set goals for the coming year. We often call these goals "resolutions" as in "I resolve to" lose weight or clean out the garage. The standard New Year's joke is that such "New Year's resolutions" last shorter than the proverbial New Year's Eve hangover.

Perhaps the short-lived nature of these goals is because they are given too minimal a gestation period, coming as so many of them do in the closing hours of the old year or even during the lingering hangover the next day. And perhaps goals so conceived are best left at the party anyway.

I've tended to avoid New Year's resolutions precisely because of their sordid reputation. But I have been known to set a lot of goals in my life. Some I've achieved, some I've exceeded, and many others I've failed miserably at, even leaving a few behind the moment I've written them down. I'm not setting goals or resolutions this New Year, but I am continuing a process begun many months ago -- that of sorting through and taking stock of the essentials in life.

I've experienced something the past three years I thought I was going to avoid -- a mid-life crisis. It had to be one, occurring as it did at midlife (I guess) and it was a crisis (without a doubt). I won't go into the gory details, other than to say that I walked through a period of deep depression in which all the realities of life as I'd perceived them were vigorously shaken to the extent that what has come after is hard to connect with what went before.

And yet, I come to the other side of that dark valley in life amazed at how intact some of the most closely held values remain and have deepened -- such as my devotion to God, my love for my wife and kids, and my commitment "to reconcile the alienated, free the oppressed and embrace the misfit" (as I've phrased it on my website). Oh, and my quirky humor (sorry, folks).

What I've also determined is that I'm not going to let presumptions stick just because they already exist. It is too easy in life to believe that something is true merely because you always thought of it that way and were too lazy or too afraid to examine it and see if it really is as true as it purports to be. No exceptions. Not even God.

It is that "not even God" that makes people nervous, especially religious types who depend on there being a god in order for them to remain religious. But if God really exists and He/She really is God, then my thinking is that He/She can stand up to all the scrutiny the world can muster. And, surprise, surprise, God is not intimidated by our scrutiny. In fact, the God I know actually welcomes it.

Where is that line that says "taste and see that the Lord is good"? Happens to be in a Psalm of David, Number 34. Interesting note at the head of the psalm. David wrote it when he was pretending "to be insane before Abimelech, who drove him away." Actually while the Psalm is as upbeat as they come, even when it talks about suffering saints and struggling sinners, it was a very low time in David's life, coming as it did when he was fleeing for his life from Saul and living as a man without a country -- and without a friend.

In the midst of that dark hour in David's life, he penned a song about checking God out to see if He is made of the real stuff or is just the sort of fake gods that Abimelech kept around his house.

I've eaten a lot of exotic foods in my time, being a guest to many a host ready to share his or her favorite concoction you've never heard of. They generally, being gracious hosts, only want you to try it and then smile and tell them how good it is before you tuck the rest of it under the cleaned-off chicken bones. It's what you tell your kids when you want them to eat that stuff out of the baby jar, the stuff you wouldn't eat in a million years. "Just taste it," you say.

And that is what David says. Taste God. Just check Him out and see if He really is all He's trumped up to be. If I get this psalm's context right, the time to do that taste testing is not when you're flying high in the good life. It is when you are either acting insane or doing it for real. Any old god can taste good when life is good, but only a true God will come through for you when you are caught between your arch enemies, Abimelech and Saul, who'd kill you first and then each other.

The nice thing about going through depression is that ever after you have an excuse for whatever it is you've ever wanted to do. "Poor thing, he's out of his head," they say. I've decided that, as with David, I'm going for broke. I'm taste testing God.

Beyond Right and Left - Part IV

This afternoon I met with a local pastor friend at his invitation to talk about the tensions between church and politics. We wound up talking mostly about evangelism and pondering how to help people develop relationships in order for communication of the Good News to occur. But before we parted, we got back to the original question as to how we keep the doors of the church open to people of all political orientations without making the Good News so public-forum-averse the Church has nothing to say at all about concerns like blessing the poor or rescuing the pre-born. It is much like the tension often found between a focus on evangelism and a focus on discipleship, a tension harder to balance than it first appears.

There is a tug of war going on inside American Evangelicalism between declaring the Good News and demonstrating the Good News. It is not a new skirmish. In fact, it has been a struggle for over a hundred years now -- ever since Finney's and Moody's 19th Century Evangelicalism splintered at the dawn of the 20th Century. Living the life of faith can sure be complicated at times. Which is exactly what Jesus said we would discover if we take this life of faith seriously.

Earlier today while attending a meeting of the Human Services Coalition of Oregon, a panel was reviewing the plight of society's most vulnerable in light of the economic downturn and subsequent funding cuts. At one point as they digressed, my mind wandered to this tension between demonstrating and declaring the Good News. We as Believers feel other tensions as well, such as how the Gospel is to be declared (relational evangelism vs. proclamation evangelism). And demonstrated (what part should the church play, if any, in individual or corporate acts of compassion and justice?). We may say our answers to concerns about demonstrating the Gospel should be kept separate from our mandate to declare the Gospel, but in reality the two are inseparable.

For example, during the 1950s, Evangelical and Pentecostal church leaders worked to stay out of the Civil Rights movement and at times even voiced opposition to the movement, while at the same time warning that the evangelism of African-Americans would impede the evangelism of White Americans. Such crass attempts at triage -- to say we cannot reach one group or we won't be able to reach another -- are, sad to say, not isolated lapses in the Church's commitment to follow Christ at all costs. And then there are churches who get so activized they forget the One whom they worship.

Sitting in that morning meeting I thought about how important it is that no one ever feel unwelcomed at church meetings because of political orientation. One friend, who once pastored in a Latin American country torn by civil war between the government and communists, shared with me how he had leaders of both sides of the conflict sitting in his congregation Sunday after Sunday. How much that contrasts with a church I recently visited in the States where snide remarks were made from the pulpit about our current American President. Never mind whether or not that was appropriate toward the President. How does that make visitors feel who think differently than the pastor? Either way, it made me less inclined to go back.

And yet, what happens if we go to great lengths to make the church inclusive as some have attempted to do in making the church politically neutral for the sake of avoiding divisions or alienating seekers, or out of concern for protecting their non-profit status? In so doing, are we creating a false dichotomy in the life of faith? Does such an avoidance of all things socio-political lead to a sense among Believers as well as outsiders that faith and justice have nothing to do with each other? Does such neutrality inadvertently legitimize a politically centrist approach as the most spiritually valid position? Does avoiding the causes and concerns of society and the world lead us as Believers to a purely internalized faith devoid of relevancy to life on earth? Do we conclude that we can declare without demonstrating God's love?

A friend sitting next to me in the morning meeting whispered at one point that perhaps as we have become less of a Christian nation, we have become more individualized, meaning we are less concerned about the communities around us and even less concerned about the poor. I'm still not sure what to think of his observation. But I do recall the Apostle Paul saying he could go along with the particular priorities of the Jerusalem church about worship and life styles as long as the Believers did not forget the poor.

If you are wondering where I am headed with all this, I am just asking questions, wrestling with thoughts I have had for most of my life and wondering if I will ever find conclusive answers. Maybe you are blessed with easy answers, but I'm not sure how satisfying or how true to the Gospel such easy answers can be.