Change your link to this site

Since I am blogging now at The Least of These, I am considering deleting this blogsite. Please be sure you are not linked to this site but to The Least of These.

Thanks,
Scott

Shifting sites

Hey all:

Just a reminder that if you are following this blog or linking to it, you will need to shift to the new location, Least of These on Urbana.org.

You can get to the site using www.thenewfriars.com or

http://www.urbana.org/blogs/blog.main.leastofthese.cfm

New Blog Site

Hey all:

I am putting this blog in mothballs for a year as I blog weekly at an Urbana site. This is in advance of a set of Poverty Tracks I am helping to lead at Urbana 09.

If those of you following or linking to this blog don't mind ... please make the switch to this new site.

Thanks for tracking and interacting with me on stuff I think is close to God's heart.

Head to www.urbana.org/blogs/blog.main.leastofthese.cfm

Thank You Note to a Child Laborer

Dear Bopha:

These are tough financial times, and working for $2 per day to help provide for your family is also really helping us here in the west. I thought I should write a quick note of thanks.

First some good news: Gas prices are lower. For a while it was getting scary. I was afraid I would have to sell my SUV! That would have been hard on us (it would have taken days to clean all the stuff out the back). Now that oil prices have gone down, your mom should be able to buy the ½ cup of cooking oil you’ve been doing without for so long. This means she will be able to cook a meal every once in a while for your family. Cheap oil is a great blessing to us all, isn’t it? You can cook, and I can continue driving at 15 miles per gallon.

I know the amount you’ve been getting paid has been dropping like a stone lately. This stupid credit crunch is freezing everyone up from buying things right now. I guess part of the problem is debt. I should know. I have four credit cards maxed to the limit. Plasma TVs are really expensive here – it’s unbelievable how much they want for a 50” screen! Since I didn’t want to put more on my credit cards, I was forced to take out a second mortgage on my home so I could buy the boat. This was unavoidable. Although we can only use it only a few months out of the year here in Wisconsin it was something my family felt we really could not do without. As you look at the attached photo I think you will see why. Isn’t it beautiful?



So anywho, all this borrowing seems to played a role in freezing money up in a serious way. Therefore, it is all the more important that you keep working twelve hour days for so little. We are all doing what we can. I realize the cost of rice has risen above your ability to pay. But let me tell you, my family and I are standing in solidarity with you. You will be glad to know that I have started buying the cheaper coffee to cut down on our grocery bill. This is sort of funny in a way because I’ve had to stop buying fairly traded stuff. The bright side is that this should help your friends, as I know their employers do not believe in fair trade.

The really scary part is that the money I had invested in emerging markets like Darfur is now only worth half of what it was last year at this time. Believe you me … you are fortunate your family has no savings.

So, I thought I’d write this little note encouraging you to keep working so I can get some good stuff for Christmas this year.

Gratefully,
Your Friend in America

P.S. Sorry to hear about your sister being sold into the brothel, but it’s wonderful that your mom can now get the medicine she needs. Once she starts working again and your dad stops drinking, your situation could really start looking up.

Set Apart

Adjo is 11 years old and tries hard to look sexy in her black mini-skirt and skin-tight blue swimsuit top. She said over a drink in a bar filled with cigarette smoke and drug dealers lurking in the background that she likes foreign customers best. They pay better and treat her better than Togolese men.

"The Ghanaians, the Ibos from Nigeria, the Senegalese and the other foreigners pay 5,000 CFA (US$10) and sometimes with a bit of luck they'll pay 10,000 CFA (US$20) - and despite that they treat us well," Adjo said. "The Togolese maybe give us 1000 or 1500 CFA (US$2 or $3) and then want to rape us violently. They often hurt and insult us," the small girl said, visibly upset as she recalled such unpleasant memories. (from http://cozay.com/ONE-HEART.php)


Good statistics on kids forced into prostitution are difficult to come by. Conservative estimates say that there are a million children in prostitution in Asia alone. And the biggest source of fuel keeping the sex industry humming along is the same kind of fuel that keeps things like terrorism, child labor, gangs and a hundred other social tragedies running: Poverty. If you are a child and living on the streets, there is an unbelievable gravitational pull into the sex industry. It is so, so easy to get drawn into prostitution as a poor child and so, so difficult to get out.

I try to imagine my eleven year old daughter stuck in the place in which Adjo is trapped. Adjo was abandoned. She does not have a Dad who will become outraged for her plight and fight for her. She doesn't have a big brother or sister to advocate for her. She does have a woman she calls "mama," but she's the person bringing Adjo customers (beating her if she doesn't bring in enough money). This life is normal for Adjo, and to rescue her into some other kind of existence will take fighting off her customers, fighting off her "mama," fighting off the desperate poverty she lives in, probably engaging in intense spiritual warfare, and even fighting with Adjo herself who has learned not to trust adults. In a way you could say that Adjo is set apart - insulated from any real help. She is mired in circumstances that will rob her of childhood, enslave her to the passions of those more powerful than her, and destroy any healthy sense of God, self, or community.

What does it take reach into Adjo's set-apart nightmarish existence and bring her into a place of health and hope? It will take someone willing to be set apart themselves. Someone like Jesus willing to leave what is comfortable and become immersed in life with those who live in brothels. Imagine the cost for those of us who live in cocoons of comfort to relocate so that we might have day to day interaction with those trapped in the poverty of prostitution. It would take something like a vow. Such a person would have to endure a certain amount of poverty themselves just to be in that place with Adjo and others day in and day out. It might require an ability to learn languages, discern and engage the spiritual realities surrounding the industry, and build relationships of trust with those who have lost the ability to trust.

Where have we provided the structure and challenge for people to make the kind of vows necessary to enter such desperate realities? We need those who will live a set apart life. We are able to mobilize and train untold numbers of dedicated young people to set themselves apart and risk their lives for war. Can we not call and equip a few who would be willing to set themselves apart to fight for Adjo?

On Becoming a Dictator

(Pictured above L to R: Derek Engdahl, Servant Partners, me, Craig Greenfield, Servants to Asia's Urban Poor, Tim Lockie, InnerCHANGE, Chris Heuertz, Word Made Flesh.)

I gather yearly with the heads of four agencies that place men and women alongside the poor in order to bring solidarity, hope, and the love of Jesus. When I told them about the "Leadership Schmeadership" book I'm writing, Craig Greenfield responded in his awesome kiwi accent, “That’s funny. You’re writing about a leadership-crazed culture, and I can’t find anyone willing to step up to the plate to really lead.” The others nodded in agreement. Despite the cult of leadership in the western church, very few of the “friars” in their fellowships aspire to lead in places where leadership was really needed. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that their missions tend to attract those who are content just to walk alongside prostitutes, street kids and slum dwellers. Two of the four have the word “servant” in the name of their organizations, why should they expect type-A personalities to sign up?

But then I began to think about how little real, unabashed leadership I run into. With the barrage of leadership material in our bookstores and the subject of so many conferences, why am I in so many poorly led meetings? Why does there seem to be so little order in our communities and in our churches – so little significant progress benefiting all, especially the “least of these?” If God gave humans the gift of power in order to protect the weak and advance the common good, and if leaders are installed to wield that power, then why is more than a third of our planet trapped in desperate poverty? Why are 165 million children as young as five years-old forced to work[1]? Why are there ten year old prostitutes and thousands dying daily of stupid things like diarrhea, and untold tons of grain rotting in warehouses while people starve to death[2]? It is because the world lacks mature leadership undergirded by thoughtful submission.

If the solution to releasing unapologetic and strong leadership were a good book or a conference, then the problem would have been solved decades ago. But the thing I find implicit in at least the existence of tens of thousands of leadership books, and sometimes explicit in their content, is that we all ought to be leaders. I disagree. I believe that in our lust to bring out the leader in everybody we may have robbed leadership from the few who really should possess it and undermined the calling of all of us to follow well. The problem is not that we have too few people leading, it’s that we have too many leading who do not have the gift of leadership and not enough people offering to submit.

Why not identify the few who actually have the gift, call them into authority, invest them with real power, and follow them with all our hearts?

[1] International Labour Organization
[2] “India’s Lost Food Keeps Millions Hungry,” by Amitabha Bhattasali, One World South Asia

The Slave Mindset

Paul uses the word slave (doulos) or servant (diakonos) in every one of his letters. He calls himself Christ's slave a number of times and a "slave to all" once. Mostly he's tapping into the idea of being a bond servant - someone who is deeply beholden to someone else.

The cornerstone of Paul’s teaching on servanthood really comes in his letter to the church at Philippi, where he says that our mindset ought to be like the mindset that Jesus had when he set aside his God-ship and took on the essence of a slave, humbling himself to the sort of execution endured by Spartacus and the other slaves who revolted. (Phil. 2:6-8). This "slave" mentality is not so much about debasing ourselves as it is about exalting others. Paul tells the Philippians not to act out of selfish ambition but to, “regard others as better than yourselves,” not in a morally superior sense, but in the sense of seeking your neighbor’s well-being above your own. He admits that we are to look after our own interests … just not exclusively, nor primarily.

Without destroying our sense of self, or ignoring the need for healthy boundaries, we need to look at those around us as those in Asian society view their elders, or as a good host views a guest – with preferential esteem.

Education is the killer here for me. At some deep place within me – deeper than my conscious self – I don't regard people with little education as better than me. I know it sounds awful, but it's the dreaded truth. The funny thing is that I'm not that well educated. I graduated high school with a 2.6 GPA for goodness sake and failed my first college math course!

Of course I am kind and attentive to people who don't have much education, hanging out with and listening to them. I can even wax eloquent about the difference between wisdom and education, lifting up those who have no formal education but great life experience and plenty of wisdom to offer. But to take a friend with a learning disability to the store in the mindset of a servant caring for a revered benefactor, that is something I have not mastered. There is a lurking paternalism which prevents me from adopting the mind of Christ when I help people who, say, can’t read, or don’t know where China is on a map. Nothing at all like the "same attitude of Christ" as described in Phil. 2.

When I talk with the mentally ill or the developmentally disabled, offering to pray with them, it is often with a subtle feeling that I am praying for somebody who is needier and less complete than me. I have no problem "regarding as better" my family members, or the elders in my church, or my colleagues at work. But when I serve somebody who can't put a coherent sentence together, I unconsciously feel I've performed some noble act of condescension.

This blasted intellectual elitism is an insidious obstacle, getting in the way of becoming like Christ. I have been called to the carpet by mentally ill friends before. “Why is it that you offer to pray for me? Is it that you feel you're better than me?” they have asked. “Why don’t you seek me out to pray for you?” It’s as if they can hear in my offer to pray, a faint note of superiority.

I suppose there is a certain amount of esteem involved in giving someone my time, attention, prayer, or physical strength. But if I am honest - to really “regard others as better than yourself,” in my heart, mind and soul - this is an area of deep struggle and profound failure.