Yesterday for ministry, we gave a presentation at a university about our home towns and the diversity of American culture. We played an icebreaker that involved throwing a volleyball with different questions on it like, "What would you do if you won 8 million grievna?" and "What is your favorite sound and smell?" Afterward, we brought homemade tacos to eat for lunch in the cafeteria with some of the students and with Dasha, our Ukrainian kindred spirit, because they didn't know what tacos were.
This whole month we've been doing similar things. Living life in Ukraine, giving one or two presentations in English clubs around the city's universities, taking the metro, going to coffee/dessert with students and conversing with them to practice English, a language that can dramatically expand their career opportunities and chance at a higher quality of life.
Our ministry this month has been, in a phrase, normal life.
Apart from the grueling hiking trip at the beginning of the month that pushed us to our physical limit, this month's ministry has made me feel guilty. I suppose that's the reason I've been rather silent on the subject.
There have been no miraculous healings.
No touching stories of salvation received or families restored, no richness from poverty, no escape from bondage, no return of justice to anyone deserving it.
Nothing definitively miraculous at all, actually.
Team Arise&Go just lives in a city apartment, we go grocery shopping, we make meals like a family and we just so happen to be in Kiev, Ukraine.
I don't come from a particularly charismatic background, so many people in my life will be quick to tell me that this is okay, that living life with people wherever you go is what ministry is all about, that sharing the gospel is not about slapping folks with NIVs and getting them to regurgitate the sinner's prayer while you keep a headcount on who you saved that day.
I agree.
That's why it's odd that I've felt guilty about our ministry. This is how I'd prefer to do it. This is what I want to do with my life – for my life to be ministry, not to incorporate ministry into my life when it's convenient.
Maybe I feel guilty because many of you supported me financially to the staggering amount of $15,000 and I feel a certain pressure to feed you stories of how your money gave a blind man sight or made a lame man walk.
Maybe I feel guilty because these are the only 11 months I'll have in these places while I'm 23/24 years of age and I feel convicted that I'm not stepping out in more faith that the tangibly miraculous is possible, that I don't pray for every cripple I meet, that I don't give every homeless guy a hug.
Maybe I feel guilty because I feel like I'm doing something wrong when things aren't happening because I just don't have enough faith to risk them happening. What if I offend someone or God doesn't do anything when I pray and it jades them for the rest of their lives since God did nothing?
These are questions I've pondered, and it's true. I want to live a more radical faith. When I see homeless beggars in the subway on the way to do English clubs, I want to be the kind of person who looks them in the eye, says hello, and tells them that they aren't forgotten and that God loves them very much, and give them a big hug. I want to buy the gypsies that are selling flowers outside the subway every day flowers of their own, to give them one just to let them know how beautiful they are. And I want to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit whenever there's a man or woman walking near me with crippled legs, which happens often, and risk praying for them, risk looking like one of those weird Jesus people.
All of that takes a lot of faith I'm working on mustering. Lord willing, I'll get there, and that will be a super blog to write.
But what takes more faith, I think, is ministry like this month's.
CCX, the campus ministry we're working with, places value primarily on discipleship. Not on one-time prayers or dramatic altar calls, but on weekly movie nights, on hanging out in the park, on invitations to Bible discussion groups or simply on getting coffee with someone to hang out. I'm not sitting in Ukraine watching these university students "receive Jesus" through the English presentations we give that allow me to talk about Auburn football and my awesome family but leave a little to be desired spiritually because of university rules about proselytizing on campuses.
But I think it takes more faith to trust that those seemingly pointless presentations might be what entices a student to come to another CCX event and meet people like Dasha or Paul who will without a doubt pursue the student's friendship and become safe places of counsel and love.
It takes more radical faith to trust that the silly Saturday afternoons in the park playing on-the-spot relay games where we run around trees and spin around in circles will give a student the acceptance he has been seeking for so long, will give another the friendship connection she's felt so lonely without, and keep them coming back. Maybe they'll join a discipleship group. Maybe they'll stay in relationship with the staff and other students at CCX.
And maybe they'll become one of the seven students we saw proclaim their faith through the sacrament of baptism a couple weekends ago at a church picnic after being discipled from atheism and agnosticism into a deep, profound faith in Jesus Christ over a span of five years.
World Race teams have been coming to CCX for several years now (there's even a Racer from 2008 who lives here), and the efforts of their labor have not been lost.
In 1 Corinthians Paul says that each of us has his own responsibility – some for planting, some for harvesting, some for watering – but that it is God alone who can make planted seeds grow.
The faith I'm learning through this kind of ministry is the faith that believes in the Green Thumb God, the one who can use an English presentation about Alabama as the fertilizer to eventually produce a beautiful wildflower in his treasured garden of followers across the world.
That's a faith that's pretty radical.
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