Adorning Testimonies

A few times in my seminary experience, I have found myself in the midst of people sharing testimonies. This is always a bit uncomfortable for me, not because I discount the validity of others’ experiences of God, but rather I think we have the tendency to embellish our testimonies to make them sound better. We decorate our testimonies by making our original situation (the state before being “saved”) sound much worse than it actually was. Then, we put God into the picture and because our situation was so terrible before, God comes out looking like a superman/woman. The reality of it though is that for most of us attending seminary, our backgrounds have been, well, easy. Many of us grew up in the church, had loving parents, good support systems, food, clothing, houses, beds, air conditioning, heating, schools . . . we essentially had everything that we needed to not only survive, but thrive. But we still tend to stretch the circumstances of our testimonies to portray God as more powerful when the only thing that has changed is the state of our heart. Many of the testimonies I am referring to involve a spiritual salvation, not a physical one. I concede that salvation in the world to come is much richer than the salvation we experience here on earth. However, I am not a proponent of making our situations sound worse than they are in order to portray God as more majestic. Once again, I realize that testimonies are subjective experiences, in which it is difficult to enter into the being of another to feel what they felt. But I do know that we arrange and tell testimonies to persuade and because of that, we make the product sound good. Really good. I remember sharing my testimony on several occasions in high school; I was guilty of the very things I now find repelling. I painted my situation as hell when in comparison to many people, it was anything but hell.

This is all to say that I wish testimonies were a bit more honest. That we would reflect on our situations in light of those who are oppressed, in light of those who did not grow up as privileged as us. Maybe life wasn’t so bad. God did save us, but not from the things we thought God did.

Bait and Switch

The famous bait and switch outreach trick. Lure in the non-Christian with something cool like Kool-Aid or dodgeball or picnics, then shove the good news down their throat. Or maybe it’s feeding homeless and slipping a tract in between slices of bread. 

There is a beautiful section from the book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed that relates to this:

Help must never be given for the sake of propaganda; help must be given only for the benefit of the people being helped, not for the benefit of some church or other organization that was doing the helping. The life and the integrity of the person helped were more precious than any organization.

When push comes to shove, we do not and should not help and love people just for the chance to share the gospel with them. As soon as we do that, we are no longer in an I-Thou relationship, but an I-It relationship, in which the humanity of the other person has been ignored by us for the sake of our church or our organization. Can’t we just help people and love people as an end rather than as a means?

Short-term Missions and the Economic Recession

Today is the last day of class before spring break. Over the break, my school will send over 200 students, faculty, and staff around the world on short-term mission trips. I have participated in these trips the last two years and found them to be very formative. But are short-term mission trips a good idea in the midst of our current economic situation? Would that money be better spent elsewhere? Or would it be more wisely spent just giving the ministries we are going to serve the money instead of using it to send students to help? All I know is that I have more questions than answers on this topic.

This sort of discussion reminded me of a blog post from Andrew Jones last summer regarding this very topic. In his post, there is a link to a Washington Post article that is also worth taking a gander at.