Richard Sterns (CEO of World Vision, a Christian Humanitarian Organization) recently wrote a book called The Hole in Our Gospel, which charges mainstream Christianity with only acting out a portion of the Gospel – the part that talks about believing in Christ as Savior just so we can enter heaven – but neglecting the commandments to serve the poor and oppressed. He challenges the Church to examine the entire gospel to see God’s passion for justice and love…and then to act.
The entire book is awesome (I whole-heartedly recommend it!!), but this one part just totally struck me, I hope that God speaks to you through it also.
“We gathered together in a group of about sixty – me, my wife, and my daughter Hannah, along with a few World Vision Uganda staff and perhaps forty children of various ages. We were waiting for them to arrive, planning to greet them with songs and celebration. We had been told they would arrive that morning.
As the metal gates creaked open, our anticipation grew – they were here. The SUV slowly pulled in, inched its way toward us, and finally came to a stop. The doors opened, the two teenage boys tentatively stepped out to face the crowd. I could see both fear and confusion on their faces – they clearly weren’t expecting this kind of welcome, not for two mass murderers.
I don’t think I’ve ever been to a place as spiritually dark as Gulu, in northern Uganda. Gulu is the epicenter of more than twenty years of violent atrocities committed by the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army and its leader, Joseph Kony, as monster who has declared himself to be the son of God. If Satan is alive and manifesting himself in our world, he is surely present in this cultish and brutal group whose trademark is the kidnapping of children who are subsequently forced at gunpoint to commit murder, rape and even acts of cannibalism. During his reign of terror, it is believed that Kony has kidnapped more than thirty-eight thousand children, killing some and forcing the rest to become killers themselves by conscripting them into the the LRA as child soldiers. As a part of their brutal indoctrination, the children are often forced to hack their own brothers or sisters to death with a machete – because bullets are too precious to waste – and then drink the blood of those they have killed. The girls, often just twelve or thirteen, are gang-raped and forced to become sex slaves and “wives” to the rebel commanders. As a result of the LRA’s grisly raids over two decades, some 1.5 million people have been driven from their land and forced to live in camps for internally displaced persons in and around Gulu. It was in this unlikely backdrop that I witnessed the awesome power of the gospel that has become so tame to us in America.
For more than a decade, World Vision’s Children of War Center has worked to rehabilitate and restore the children who are rescued or manage to escape from the LRA rebels. These are children with unimaginable spiritual, psychological, and emotional wounds, kids who are typically feared as monsters and rejected by the very communities they once came from because of what they have been forced to do. Sometimes their own parents do not want them back; their childhoods have been stolen from them and their very souls desecrated by horror after horror. Intense spiritual and emotional counseling, forgiveness and reconciliation, and even job skills training have been provided to thousands of these damaged children. The two boys entering the compound that day had also been subjected to the depredations of their own captivity by the LRA. They, too, had been forced to kill and maim.
Their eyes were hallow and vacant – eyes that had seen unspeakable things. Their souls seemed dead. I could see no life in them. Jesus in his most distressing disguise [referencing Matthew 25:40]. They had been captured by the Ugandan army, and now they were being brought to World Vision for help, for redemption, for healing. They had names, Michael and Joseph. Michael’s left arm was withered, the result of a gunshot wound sustained before he was fully grown, in some past firefight. The LRA warned their child soldiers that they would be murdered by their own people if they ever tried to go home. They were even told that if they were taken to the Children of War Center run by World Vision, they would be poisoned – or worse. That is why these boys were terrified that day, stepping out of the car.
Even a small match lit in a place of total darkness gives off a blinding light. So great had Michael and Joseph’s darkness been that the light of the gospel, the whole gospel, was brilliant and blinding, shining with intensity, authority, and hope. Jesus, too, had been abducted. He, too, had been beaten and maimed. And He, like them, had faced unspeakable evil – and defeated it. Jesus had made forgiveness possible”
(The Whole in our Gospel, pages 61-63).
Over the past few weeks, through leaders like Rich Sterns (World Vision), Gary Haugen (International Justice Mission), Willow Creek’s leadership Summit, etc, I am becoming more alive to the fact that if we, the body of Christ, will not stand up for the poor, enslaved, oppressed, and hurting of this world, how can we expect people to believe that there is a God in Heaven who loves them? We have a responsibility to represent the entire gospel – of freedom in Heaven and on earth – by loving God and our neighbor.
Final quote from the book (for now, anyway!):
“Sometimes I would like to ask God why He allows poverty, suffering, and injustice when He could do something about it.”
“Well, why don’t you ask Him?”
“Because I’m afraid He would ask me the same question.”
~Anonymous
