Tolerance? Decency vs Expression

Help me out here. Something happened last night that has me thinking about our culture, about the ever changing line of what constitutes decency.

I grew up in the era where a neighbor had the right to spank you or at least wash your mouth out with soap if you uttered a course word. That actually happened in my neighborhood. As kids, it influenced our behavior. I know its hard for some 20 and 30 somethings to believe this -- today you'd be sued -- but it was an era where we actually lived out the belief that it took the whole village to raise a child. There was general consensus about what behavior was appropriate in the community, and what wasn't.

So here's my question: Does our non-judgmental culture require that we just acquiesce to the coarsening of our society -- to it's rudeness, its increasing brazenness, it's shock strategies at getting attention? Do we speak up when personally offended? Or do we just accept this as the way it is, and tolerate it?

This isn't a hypothetical question.

Last night as I was grocery shopping I noticed a young woman who appeared to be about 17 years of age, holding an employment application in her hand talking to a store employee. Her black T-Shirt proclaimed in bright pink letters "I have the pussy, so I make the rules."

Several questions hit me at once, and their likely answers disturbed me to the bone: How could this young girl proclaim something so crude? (Answer: she thinks it's funny, and no one in her world would challenge that.) How could she request an employment application wearing such an offensive shirt? (Answer: because we have come to a point in our culture where she doesn't think it matters.) Have we come to the point where management would even hand an application to someone wearing such a shirt? (Answer: Unfortunately, yes. Apparently they don't think it matters either.)

And my final question, for which I ask your input: Should I have confronted her about how offensive the shirt is? For the sake of holding some line of decency in our culture should I have done the unthinkable -- that is, calmly express my displeasure at her form of expression, and tell management that if they hire someone who thinks that kind of thing is OK, that I won't shop there anymore? (Answer: you tell me)

The fact that we have come to a place in our culture where one can say and do anything with impunity because others will not dare overstep the expectation of "tolerance," means that we are on a slippery road that will take us to a place our parents and grandparents knew would be akin to hell.

I am haunted by the well-used aphorism, "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for enough good people to do nothing." Well, I did nothing. What would you have done?

Cape Town, South Africa - Lausanne 2010

Lausanne 2010. On the one hand I couldn’t help but be impressed: More than 4000 leaders from every region of the world, all converging on Cape Town, South Africa for only the third such “congress” in history. Informed, passionate speakers from those same regions gave their best take on where we are in the task of global evangelism, and where we as a global church need to go. A multitude of seminars and dialogue groups explored in great detail every conceivable aspect of mission in an age of globalization. Some of the conversation generated was profound, and some of us made important connections that may lead to very fruitful collaborations for the kingdom. My role was to help delegates build a sustainable spirituality for ministry in the city. That, and invite leaders to consider doing a doctorate in ministry with my school.

But I have many “on the other hands”. There were many gaps in the program – places where the western strings and power levers were revealed, showing that we have a long way before the whole church is valued and trusted enough to take their rightful place in what purports to be such a global event. Leadership of the event did not give full voice to indigenous Christians. The whole church was not invited to be full participants in the event., with Orthodox, Catholic and Chinese Registered Churches not invited. Not one Native American representative was invited; the few that came got there through a back door institution. There was little public dissent. The script was carefully dictated.

I do praise God for the hundreds of volunteers that made this happen, some investing months and even years to the effort. And I am quite sure that the Holy Spirit inhabited all the good intensions, all the prayers and praises, all the discussions both formal and informal. I trust that there will be both eternal and temporal fruit. But I can’t help but hear the frustration in the voices of my Latin American and Native American friends when they reflected on the opportunity missed, and the feeling of not being honored or trusted with full membership in the process.

The picture presented of a world beset by complex evils of child labor, sexual trafficking, ethnic cleansing, civil war, corporate exploitation, the poisening of the environment, and millions dying without knowledge of the one who died to set them free, is a world far too complex to reach without the whole church. The motto of Lausanne, since the first Lausanne Congress that resulted in the benchmark Lausanne Covenant in 1974, has been “Whole Church, Whole Gospel, Whole World.” John Stott, Rene Padilla and Samuel Escobar helped draft it as a result of true and honest conversation. It will not be fulfilled until Whole Church is truly present, as they envisioned.

As I sit in the Cape Town airport, I dread the more than 24 hours it will take to get home. And 12 days later I leave again to teach in Kingston. But I know it was a privilege to be here, and the Lord will carry me on.

They were there for "such a time as this..."

I felt my eyes fill with tears tonight for two men that you have probably never heard of, but who are heros to me. Rene Padilla and Samuel Escobar, both with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in Latin America for many years, and beyond that, giants in the Lausanne Movement shared their journey. Lausanne has been used by God for more than three decades to call the church to faithfulness to the whole gospel, for the whole church, in the whole world. Through their low-kuy, faithful, honest, constructive critique and prophetic words and deeds, their contribution to the transformation of the global church is incalculable.

But I doubt you have heard of them. Both are authors and theologians, activists and student ministers -- both have lived sacrificially and simply. Both have brilliant minds, but even here in Cape Town serve humbly with no flash or celebrity.

Knowing full well that you cannot understand how full my heart is toward them, or what it meant to me to see them together on stage tonight singing with a group of fellow Latin Americans -- to see Rene's daughter Ruth Padilla deBorst up there singing her heart out -- it was exactly what I needed. I realized that they lived and are living their lives for an audience of one -- their faithful savior. And they lived and are living their lives in a way that made a contribution to the shalom of others. There is no higher calling.

They were there for such a time as this ... over and over again -- the right men for the right times. I want to live my life like that.

Rene Padila and Samuel Escobar, my brothers and my heroes -- thank you.

Jade

"Please sir ... I won't ask you for money ... but if you could buy me some corn flakes I can eat for five days." She was visibly pregnant and on the street. Thrown out by her family. No prospects. It was a typical story, one that I have encountered in many cities around the world, my own included. Here in Cape Town I am getting accosted daily, by men and women and children. I learned from two significant Johns in my life -- John Stott and John Perkins years ago that giving money is seldom the loving thing to do, and my general policy is to rule it out in most cases. But I could not not respond, so I went to the market with her, bought her groceries and then violated my policy -- I let her keep the change. I told her that I would pray that if she sold the food I just bought her or used the change on drugs or alcohol that she would get really sick. I felt bad about that later. But there you have it. In the end he told me she would get a room with the money. Having heard every story in the book I am pretty sensitive to BS, and I didn't sense any from her. I prayed for her. She asked questions about her salvation, unsure that God would accept her as she was. I tried to tell her that when God looked at her he glowed with love and devotion to his daughter, that he thought the world of her. Her brown eyes got a bit wider but she said nothing. The conversation was as fertile as her three-month profile.

Her name was Jade. I wondered as I walked to my hotel whether she could ever come to believe that, like her namesake, she is precious. Can she ever feel treasured, like a precious stone? Could the Lord carve his image deeply into her frame -- smooth away the rough edges created by the street -- so so that everyone could recognize her infinite value?

Will we ever get to the point where she has somewhere to turn, besides a random white man who happened by in this part of town? I didn't care anymore whether she was lying to me. Tonight I pray a tired and pensive prayer for Jade.

The Table: Loving the Strange and Stranger

Ate a plate of Warthog, Antelope and Crocodile tonight at a restaurant here in Cape Town. Loved every strange bit of it. Worthog, worthog, worthog -- it just rolls off my tongue. Like I've been eating it forever. "I think I'll have the worthog tonight," as if I had ordered it a thousand times. I swear it wasn't just the novelty of it, although that's initially what appealed to me. But I'll remember it because the taste spoke to my senses in a way that made my normal diet feel as if I had been eating sand.

As I prepare to serve at the third ever Lausanne World Congress here in South Africa I am asking the Lord to give me new appetites and tastes. I join more than 4,000 delegates from around the world who gather at "the table" (a metaphor referencing the giant plateau known as Table Mountain in Cape Town) of the Lord as His sends the food of his word to his people for the transformation of the world.

But the new menu at this table is definitely strange. And I am convinced that it is not the strangeness that is attractive. There is an aspect of the interaction with a new food that involves risk, and its a little uncomfortable. But the taste is its own reward.

Last night on the street I was approached by a young woman asking for money. I asked her name, and she said "Donna." But after 30 seconds of conversation it began to dawn on me that Donna was a young man. After having spent a late night last year on the streets of San Jose Costa Rica ministering to transvestites, I began to realize Donna's identity and took a moment to pray for her. It was an unusual conversation -- stood out for it's strangeness. But there on the street corner praying with my hand on her/his shoulder, this felt like a new meal. Risk taken. The reward of the risk, a deep satisfaction.

I am not addicted to strangeness. In some sense I do choose it out of a sense that this is often where I find Jesus. I find myself writing about it often because its taste jolts my dulled senses so much. But more often than not, it seems like it is strangeness that chooses me. Perhaps it is a confrontation that I need.

Because the location of a meeting we attended after my dinner of warthog tonight it was not safe to walk alone, so another male delegate and I accompanied two young female delegates to their hotels for safety. It turns out that one of them was the daughter of a Christian leader in Mexico City that I have partnered with over the years. I have been in her home celebrating their amazing ministry among the urban poor of their city. The strange, miraculous circumstances I often find myself in seem to me to be orchestrated by a heavenly chef. And tonight was like desert.