Last week my family spent our vacation in the Pacific Northwestern part of the United States and we also visited Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. We spent our time at Nanoose Bay and made trips up and down the island as far south as Victoria. I was amazed at the spectacular beauty and the close proximity of snow-capped mountains to the deep blue sea and long beaches. It was fun to watch the tide go in and out each day. Our boys enjoyed the cement skateboard parks bountiful on the island. It was a relaxing time and great get-away from the pace of ministry we have seen in the last six months.
Having spent lots of time at skateboard parks in the area I became keenly aware of the lack of spiritual vitality of the youth we encountered. It did not take long to discover the spiritual emptiness around us.
On our way to Vancouver Island I visited with Ron Shepard, Executive Director of the Puget Sound Baptist Association, a fellowship of 175 congregations serving a population of 5 million, rendering a population to church ratio of 28,571 to 1. Add to that the growing demographic complexity marked by more than 180 languages spoken in the public schools in the Seattle-Tacoma area. The SEA-TAC area is home to the highest number of per capita millionaires in the nation. At one time in Seattle's history, about 24% of the Seattle tax base was provided by prostitutes. The area features the highest rate of known former criminals and the highest rate of former sex offenders.
Ron and I spent a good bit of time visiting about the potential for increasing the BCFS relationship in the SEA-TAC area through the Puget Sound Baptist Association (PSBA). We will be looking for a social worker there to provide much needed assistance through PSBA. I am hoping that this BCFS staff person will become a spiritual magnet that will attract Baptist congregations from Texas to assist through VBS and a host of other encouraging support for this area. I am sure Bro. Ron would be able to match your church group with another congregation in the area.
In fact, I have an idea for a mission project. Take your youth to help with a VBS during the week and have them bring their skateboards. Hang out at the local skateboard parks and provide a tangible example of the love of Christ and a verbal witness to teens who desperately need to know the grace of God. Host a skateboard contest and invest some funds in some new skateboards or a gift certificate at a local skateboard shop. Share bottles of water with skateboarders. Find ways to deliver acts of kindness in Jesus name and earn the right to tell of the hope in you. I am sure you get the idea. Prepare your youth to encounter drugs, alcohol, and foul language. It is part of the scene.
To arrange a mission trip to Seattle, contact Jeff Jones, Interim Director of BCFS Missions Support Department at 214-758-8191 jjones@buckner.org or call Dr. Ron Shephard at 252-838-6616 or email him at ronshepard@comcast.net or www.psba.net for a look at their website.
I am reminded of the Apostle Paul’s visit to Athens as recorded to Acts 17. He was supposed to be on vacation or at least resting as he waited for Silas and Timothy (Acts 17:15). Paul could not help but notice that the city was full of idols. So he spoke the Gospel in the Synagogue, the Marketplace, and the Areopagus. I like to say he went from the church house, to the check out counter, to the cheers, the place where everybody knows your name. He gained enough attention and earned the right to have an audience. He preached a sermon without ever using the name of Jesus, without referring to the Pentateuch, without referencing the Patriarchs or mentioning the Temple in Jerusalem. Why? He realized where he was. He was in Athens, not in the bible-belt city of Jerusalem. So his communication strategy was contextualized to make sense in that place. He did reference Greek religion (v.22); he mentioned Greek Worship (v.23), and he quoted Greek Literature (v.28). There were those who responded to the Gospel, those who became interested but were not ready to respond, and those who rejected what Paul had to say. It is no different today. See my article on this blog entitled “Cross Cultural Competency: Resources for Effectiveness in the Global Village.”
What is my point? Seattle is Athens. The Pacific Northwest is far from the Bible-belt. I encourage you to consider a mission trip to Seattle. Just don’t forget to bring your skateboard.
In one of mine mission trips with NAMB I ended up in Alaska working in a summer camp. We would work from 6am till 6pm everyday around the camp. After 6pm we would be free to do whatever we wanted to do. There was this guy from Mississippi named Brad, he had a love and passion for ministry. As you know, I have a burden to mission and evangelism myself, and we decided that we wanted to do some crazy ministry on our free time. Alaska is a very dark place, and I don’t mean light and dark, but evil dark. Somehow you can feel the thickness of evil around you. There was this hanging place at the Pizza Hut parking lot, and lots of kids would spend time over there. Most of them were skaters, and that caught my attention, because I have always been a skater myself.
We begun going there every night, but we would not leave the van; we would just pray for the people individually. We saw 13-year-old kids shooting heroin and morphine in their veins. Weed and alcohol were normal. During 2 months we only prayed for those kids. Our plan was to just buy some pizza and cheese stick, sit in the car and eat it. The catch was: these kids will get on the munches and at some point ask us for some food. So we would eat it very slow. The problem was that our money was little and at some point we couldn’t buy anything else anymore. We talked with the director of the camp and he decided to give us the money to buy the pizzas everyday.
At that moment the ministry changed. I would get out of the car and skate for a little bit while brad would get the pizzas. At some point we knew most of them, even though we would not mingle a lot, because that was not our plan. We had limited time in Alaska, so we were praying that a Christian would appear there at some point so we could share what we were doing and get someone to reap the fruits. We were pretty much prayer warriors over those people.
One interesting moment happened when the police arrived one night. One of the guys ran into our van and told us to drive away. He was shaking with fear. He was drugged and drunk; I could smell the alcohol coming out of his mouth. We drove away. He was not a minor, but he was providing alcohol and drugs to the minors, so there we had the drug dealer inside our car and the police outside it. We kept our cool, because sending him to jail would not help neither him nor the kids. We just drove away with him. He had a cross-tattooed to his left arm and I asked what that meant. He told me that he knew I was hooked up to that Jesus and I’d better not preach to him. I said: “you rather spend sometime with a Christian or with the cops?” He did not make any commitment prayer that night, but he heard the whole gospel in a very stylish and skateboarder way.
I was amazed with the fact that he knew that we were Christians, because we were dressed to skate, listening to some loud (not really and entirely Christian punk rock), but somehow he saw Christ in us.
On our last night in Alaska we were buying pizzas at the hang out place when Brad made a move to evangelize the waitress. She was the wife of a youth pastor that was trying to connect with the lost kids of the Pizza Hut parking lot. We went to his house and had a meeting with him, and he was pumped up about knowing some of the kids and what we were doing over there. We went back to the parking lot and begun talking to the kids, introducing the pastor to them (not as a pastor). It was mid night, and I was very happy because on the next day I would be flying back to a place where mid night means mid night, with a different kind of darkness.
Posted by: cesar gevert | July 12, 2007 at 08:17 PM