Right now I am with the teens in Fort Worth, TX working with Fortress Ministries. Fortress is an inner city work that seeks to “ignite powerful change in the lives of urban youth.” They do this through praise and worship or “Jam sessions,” through after school reading programs, VBS, community renovation, providing meals for kids, serving the community, and summer camps for kids. This year I have got to see a lot more of the ministry that Fortress is regularly providing to kids here and its been a powerful thing. If you want to check out more about Fortress, check it out at www.fortressydc.org. By the way, our teens are awesome and have been doing a great job. We are doing a VBS for most of the week and using skits, reading, crafts, chants and songs to teach kids about Jesus. It’s a good time, to say the least.
That being said, I haven’t had a chance to write since Bill’s sermon Sunday. He and I were spending some time together last week and he was sharing more of his conversion story with me and I encouraged him to share it with the church. There is something powerful about anybody’s personal testimony and I really appreciated his sermon Sunday. However, there was one part that continues to gnaw at me and has since I went to Greece with Bill several years ago. While we were there, I got to see Corinth, Athens, and other places that I had read about in Scripture and I was completely awestruck to stand where Paul preached and Christians first walked. But when we attended church at the Church of Christ in Athens, I quickly noticed that something felt wrong. The service was well underway before I realized that I was the youngest adult in the room. There were very few children and almost no young adults. Some were probably approaching 40 and the rest were older. Just miles from Mars Hill, where Paul gave his amazing sermon found in Acts 17, I was sitting in a dying church. Bill mentioned Sunday that since then, the church in Thessoloniki, one of the first Christian churches had closed its doors because the church had died.
Certainly we have missionaries in the Church who go to South and Central America, Africa and Asia, where the Harvest is often plentiful and the seed finds more fertile ground (and the dollar still has enough value for missionaries to live comfortably). But have we given up on Europe and America? Are we willing to label them “post-Christian” and move on? Or is it simply that, as Bill said Sunday, that nobody is willing to give up the comfort of American living to go and do the work there? I often feel that God will call me to a difficult mission field someday where rocks and thorns are all around the path I am very excited and afraid to think about that day. Until then, God has called me to share the calling and equip those who will listen for the call to seek and save the lost.
So for now, I will do all I can to train missionaries in Fort Worth, Guyana, and Oklahoma City to hear God’s call and be ready to go, to love, to serve and to save those who have ears to hear. But do we have the hands to serve, the heart to love, the mouths to proclaim and the feet to go? If not, then I guess it doesn’t matter if the world has ears to hear…
