So I was twittering and happened upon this blog post by Paul Mayers. The post puts forth the premise that many of the books out there on “being church” are pornographic:  They titalate, they excite, they tempt, they fulfill fantasies and they may even provide some release. But ultimately, when we put down the book, are we truly satisfied?

As Paul says:

“I guess I’m just tired of the flood of book, blogs, podcasts, commentators who with voyeur like pleasure lift up the skirts to show me how wrong church is.  How broken church is.  How institutional church is. How hypocritical church is.  How abusive, myopic, out of touch, conservative, liberal, self serving, fragmented, divisive church is.  How really it is not what Jesus ever intended to be and quite frankly why he if he showed up he wouldn’t be darkening the door of those kinda places.”

“Those kinda places.”

You mean those corner suburban churches with buildings and budgets and programs and paid clergy?

Well that’s what I thought when I read this post. How boring. How vanilla.

I then let my mind wander a bit. I even fantasized about a vanilla church. The church is filled with women in pressed skirts and blouses, bustling to prepare some coffee and sandwiches for a visit from Jesus. I see the men in their khaki shorts and Polo shirts, neatly trimming the hedges to make the church presentable for Jesus.  The pastors are wearing their best suits.

(Oh ho, hum!)

But then the fantasy “got away from me”. This is how it went:

Jesus comes to the church.

And he darkens their doorway.

He shakes the pastors’ hands.

He admires the shrubbery.

He gratefully accepts some coffee.

(Wait a minute, why isn’t he turning over tables? Why isn’t he spitting these folks out of his mouth?)

Instead he accepts their service, their hospitality. He is kind to the bustling group,  saying to a woman who is fretting that the coffee isn’t hot enough:  “You are worried about so many things, aren’t you?”, as he pats her on the shoulder.

He inquires after the senior pastor’s well-being, noting that the pastor is burdened with many things, but that the pastor should feel free to come to him with his burdens, and he (Jesus) will give that pastor rest.

(Then I snapped out of it.)

(Boy, that was weird.)

Does it make us angry to think of Jesus behaving this way? The idea that Jesus might desire intimacy and union with those who “just don’t get it”? Why doesn’t Jesus realize how vanilla these folks are? Maybe he just doesn’t know what he’s missing.

Maybe Jesus never read our porn.

(Please note: An addendum/clarification to this post is available here.)

About ten years ago, my mom was a youth group leader at her church. The church was located in a very affluent community, and the kids in the group were very privileged indeed. The youth leaders decided that the kids needed to learn about the “less fortunate” and asked them if they would like to cook and serve a meal at an inner-city soup kitchen.

The kids were less than delighted at the prospect.

Finally, after a fair amount of cajoling, nagging (and probably tears on my mother’s part), the group decided to play along. They were serving a meal at the soup kitchen when a fight broke out between two of the diners. Things escalated when one of the combatants ran into the kitchen to find a knife. (The youth group girls huddled in a corner, crying hysterically, while all this commotion was taking place.)

After the day’s disastrous events, my mom asked my understandably-traumatized sister (who was in the youth group, and is now a very socially-conscious and kind-hearted adult) if she had learned anything that day. My sister nodded and said:

“I learned that I don’t like poor people.”

This story came to mind when I read a recent post by Pastor Pat Spelling over at Shades of Gray. She posted on well-intended “short term missions”, including a provocative article from the Washington Post entitled “Churches Retool Mission Trips“. The points that both Pastor Spelling and the Post article are good ones:

1. Short-term mission trips are often poorly conceived and executed by those organizing the trips. Youth groups are sent to “help” a community with no real understanding of that community’s needs or culture: In some cases the “help” offered is simply redundant (such as multiple groups painting and repainting a church over the course of the summer), but in other cases it is actually harmful to the community (i.e. putting local laborers out of work).

2. These trips are not cost effective: Participants are usually required to “raise funds” from church members, family and to cover their expenses, which can easy run from $1000-$3000. Thus a ten person youth group (plus chaperones) could easily spend $12 ,000-$30,000 to build a house or a hospital that, in the economy of many third-world countries, might only cost $2000-$10,000 if local labor was employed.

3. Most disturbing of all, however, is the attitude among many that even if such trips aren’t particularly cost-effective (or even necessary to those being “served”) they are justified because, after all, middle -class teenagers need to “learn” about their privilege and about the “less fortunate”. (Apparently the “less fortunate” are to endure these assaults upon their communities and local economies so that privileged youths can get an education. In other words, the poor get to be used as object lessons so that the privileged can engage in a course of self-improvement.)

Um, I don’t think so.

When it comes to serious, systemic poverty (and not just in the third world), “short-term” anything is pointless. Poverty, true poverty, is extremely complex, and people don’t “get it” just by going out and building a house or serving a meal at a homeless shelter. At best, kids on these trips are going to come back with “an appreciation of what they have” (but no real understanding of why they have it or how they got it or why other folks don’t have it), at worst, with attitudes like my sister’s after her visit to the soup kitchen.

If young people truly want to address poverty and its ills, they need to understand that going on an expensive working vacation is not the answer. Ironically, they would do best to take advantage of their privilege and the benefits that it affords them: They could use their social networks to raise cash, not for mission trips, but to send directly to long-standing aid agencies in third world countries. They could go to university to become doctors and nurses and engineers and agriculturalists and then visit a third world country to teach, train, solve problems, and generally do the sorts of specialist work that is actually needed. They could also work to transform social and foreign policy in their own countries or house and befriend students from third-world countries who are trying to bring new knowledge and skills back home.

But none of the above strategies sound as good as “My Johnny just went on a mission trip to help those poor people in South America!”. I just wonder what the “less fortunate” being “missioned” have to say to their friends after each group leaves for home.

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