for Vietnam. I shook his hand on this very spot and I heard a little voice, like a whisper in my ear: ‘He’s not coming back.’”
There I stood, shaking the hand of an elderly usher at an old church in Los Angeles, California. In my trauma, the story of my dad’s death flashed through my mind and shook me. I’m due to return here on furlough next year. Does this mean I will die in Venezuela before then? I wondered to myself. Was this a word from God? From Satan? A product of my fears? I felt confused and troubled.
Depressed and defeated, I pulled my suitcase and troubled spirit to Fifth and Olive Street to await a city bus. This was back when downtown Los Angeles became a desolate place on a Sunday afternoon. Buildings and streets lay abandoned, the quietness out of character. A haunting wind whipped up the paper trash, giving it the eeriness of a ghost town. City buses passed every sixty minutes, if that. I took my place at the bus stop with some folks that looked worse off than me.
When I got to Pasadena, I pulled my suitcase to the campus of Fuller Theological Seminary, where I studied missiology nearly two decades earlier. I had an hour before my friend was to pick me up. I sat down, pulled out my journal, and found company with my heart. So much was going on inside. As I put my emotional churning on paper, tears flowed. I didn’t want to die. I thought of my children.
My journal entry from that day:
I feel closer to death. It’s weird and kind of morbid. Part of me resists putting words to these thoughts, yet I can’t deny the feelings that are so close to the surface that they pop out in conversations that inevitably touch on my life in Venezuela and my fulfillment of a dream there. Satisfaction and death . . . they go together—like Simeon, I feel a depth of satisfaction in Venezuela that enables me to say for the first time: I’m ready to go. I’ve seen my dream. I’ve touched it.
A strange thing happened. Even though I see in retrospect that my emotions played games with me and that my perception of reality became twisted, God used this drama to do a new work in me. I came to terms with what I was feeling about the price we’re paying to live in Venezuela with all its risks. Was I ready to die? Was I willing to die in Venezuela? There, in the commons area of the campus, sitting alone with God and my turbulent heart, I found a place of rest. Somewhere in my tears I came to a moment of release, when I could joyfully and tearfully declare from deep within my being, “Yes, Lord. I can go.” In that moment, the sun broke through the clouds that covered my soul.
My friend arrived. I was ready—to die, yes. But also to live.
I am a mission worker with InnerCHANGE, a Christian mission community whose vocation is to live and work with the poor as a sign of God’s kingdom. My wife, Birgit, is from Germany. We met in Southern California and together started the InnerCHANGE team in downtown Los Angeles where our three children were born: Johanna (1990), Marna (1993), and John Mark (1995).
As mission practitioners in poor communities around the world, we place a high premium on context. We rarely, if ever, open a new work with a pre-made plan. We let the place and its people speak and inform us. We take time to grow in the host culture, listening and learning our way into a slum community. For these reasons, this book is very contextual, with reflections that have tangibly risen out of the streets we walk, the worldview of the people we love, and the history of the place where our children call home.
This could sound rather romantic. It’s not. To live and work in a violent slum is to look evil in the face in ways I was never prepared for by my comfortable upbringing in middle-class America. This challenge gets exasperated by the generally pessimistic outlook we inherit regarding the world-at-large. Irreversible climate change, insurmountable conflicts in the Middle East, recurring famine in Africa, and the hypocrisy and arrogance of politics that exploits and dominates in the name of “freedom” and “democracy” are but a few of the woes that besiege us with hopelessness. In my childhood these remained largely abstract. Moving into a slum community put flesh and blood on many of these destructive powers. Without a solid grounding in Christian hope, I couldn’t survive, much less thrive, over the long run.
To thrive long term we must also be more than workers. My use of the term “partners” in the section titles is not inconsequential. Because InnerCHANGE mission workers cultivate a three-pronged identity of missionary, prophet, and contemplative, the partnering with Jesus that I envision (“at the cliff’s edge,” “with Cornelius,” “outside the gate”) reflects a prophetic stance and a spiritual union. We don’t simply do the radical thing. We do justice with Jesus. Or, to use Pauline terms, in Christ and “in step with the Spirit.” This is something I explore in the coming pages.
One of InnerCHANGE’s most pronounced values is what we refer to as “the upside-down kingdom.” For us this means that God’s ways are radically different from ours and that much of what the world—and the Church—esteems stands in polar opposition to what God esteems. In our literature, we state it this way:
We will minister low to high, that is, from the bottom rungs of a society upward, remembering that significant aspects of God’s kingdom are often lodged in the humblest crevices.
We will not despise faithfulness to small things in favor of the big picture, believing that the kingdom of God is upside down with regard to many of the world’s values.
In many ways my reflections develop this motif from fresh angles. I do this by employing a narrative theology model that holds together three intertwining threads: (1) urban slum realities, (2) the biblical text, and (3) the practical expressions of the church in mission. This method uses a contextual story as the launching point for missional reflection.1
Several theological influences merit special attention because they provide the paradigms that shape my reflections: Kenneth Bailey, Tom Wright, Vernard Eller, and Justo González. Though not represented by an author per se, the ministry of the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship and the revival associated with it represents yet another paradigm within which my reflections take place. In the final chapters, authors Vishal Mangalwadi, José Míguez Bonino, and Jacques Ellul provide invaluable insights that bring the loose ends together. Only later in the writing process did I realize the influence of Lesslie Newbigin and the concept he calls “the logic of election.”2
One comment about the prodigal parable is in order since it figures prominently in the book, and I lean heavily on the insights of New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey. In the context of Luke 15, Jesus tells three parables in response to the murmuring of the Pharisees and teachers of the law over his fraternizing with “sinners.” His intent with the stories is to explain his mission. Throughout Nail Scarred Hands I freely associate the younger son of the parable with sinners and gentiles. Kenneth Bailey does not do this. I do so because I believe it’s consistent with Jesus’ ministry and message to which the parable testifies. (As a case in point, in Luke 4:25–30, the “younger son” of Jesus’ message to the synagogue was Namaan the Syrian and the widow in Zarephath, both gentiles.)
Finally, though I am a lifelong member of InnerCHANGE and ooze so much of what we collectively hold dearly, I don’t write in the name of our community. Nor do I intend to represent the views of my colleagues. I do hope that what I have written will inspire those embarking on InnerCHANGE-like work in urban slums of the world.
1. Van Engen and Tiersma, God So Loves the City, 241–64.
2. Newbigin, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 80–88.
Part 1
