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The 137th Psalm of David captures the essence of how God acts in the affairs of people and nations. The elect people of Israel found themselves exiles and strangers in a foreign land. It all happened in a moment’s time. At one moment the nation was vibrant and alive, a people of prosperity and hope. However, in the twinkling of an eye, a free people became a bondaged people. In a moment, their garments of gladness were replaced by the sackcloth of their shame. In a moment, their Mardi Gras feet of joy had become the sagging shoulders of sadness.
On the banks of the Babylon the oppressor said to them “Sing us one of Zion’s songs.” To which someone replied, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” For Israel, religion had been reduced to a recital of what used to be. Israel’s word was “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Every disciple of Christ I know was saddened by the plight of the residents of New Orleans and surrounding cities. Like the people of Israel, these residents could not sing the songs of jubilance and merriment that for so long epitomized New Orleans. For so long an inspiration to soulful writers and artists who sing the blues, now there was nothing romantic about Katrina’s gift of tragedy. Most of the poets had headed for higher ground. Left behind were the poor who couldn’t get out, a few defiant members of the local gentry and gangs of predators.
Day after day of images showed fatigued families and their crying children stepping around corpses. While they begged, where is the water? Where are the buses? They seemed helpless and powerless, at the mercy of forces far beyond their control. The lack of rapid response left concerned people in the United States, and all over the world, wondering how an American city could look like Mogadishu or Port-au-Prince, —a million people without homes, jobs, and schools.
Hurricane Katrina, packing the energy of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes, had done its damage to a people, without the hopeful apology of Mother Nature. The waters of Lake Pontchartrain rising, racing, and eating away at the dirt levee beneath the concrete floodwall built to protect New Orleans from disaster plundered the city.
The relevant question for us all is “can the residents of New Orleans have another chance to sing?” The immediate response is a resounding “YES!” Americans are a resilient people! The New Orleans citizens represent a pliant community of hope!
However, one nagging question must be addressed. How could we permit a city like New Orleans to be ravaged by pre-conditions of poverty, neglect, and hopelessness? Katrina only aggravated the festering sores of a neglected city.
Christians owe it to themselves and to the poor to place the utmost priority to ministry in the city. Residents can sing again when the rituals of worship and the hymns of rejoicing ring out from the narthexes of their sanctuaries. Residents of our cities can sing when enclaves of worship are transformed into communities of caring and compassion. The songs can be heard again when the community of faith recognizes that God cares for the city, and that ministry to the city is close to the heart of God.
Too often the people called Christians have considered the city alien to the activity of God. For people of faith, there must be a perceptible connection between the comfort we enjoy in Zion and the poverty-stricken conditions that plague our cities. With a sense of urgency, we must return to the city and establish beachheads from which the relevancy of the gospel message can be both proclaimed and demonstrated.
The task will not be easy. We can empower city residents to resume their song! Ministry in the city is difficult and saddled with the law of diminishing returns. Donald McGavran advised the church in 1970, “discipling urban populations is perhaps the most urgent task confronting the Church. Bright hope gleams that now is precisely the time to learn how it may be done and to surge forward actually doing it.”
Points To Ponder:
1. The need is not the call
Mother Theresa has become the ultimate typecast of incarnational ministry to the poor and destitute. In a TV interview several years before her death, when asked about her call to serve the poor, she responded, “My call is not to serve the poor. My call is to follow Jesus. I have followed him to the poor. However, if he called me to the rich, I would go to the rich.” When the need becomes the call, there is every possibility that frustration is being invited, for we cannot meet all the needs.
2. Get our prepositions right
Robert Linthicum relates three prepositional approaches to response to city needs. Ministry “in” the city is a cosmetic identity with the community rather than an embedded commonality with those who suffer. Ministry “to” the city lends itself to paternalism driven by perceived needs. It becomes the savior of the community. Ministry “with” the community is incarnational, as those who minister listen and learn in a genuine redemptive partnership.
3. Prepare workers for the city
Ministry with the community is a multi- and interdisciplinary missiological enterprise that requires specific cross-cultural orientation. Those who respond to the call must engage in specific exegesis of city life. To ignore the complexity of urban ministry is to miss the mark completely, robbing those who should be made to sing of the fundamental chords of harmony and empowerment.
4. City ministry must be Kingdom centered
Ministry in the city is never centered on any one individual or group with a messiah complex. The central theme of involvement with the community ought always to be that God is interested enough to be involved in ministry with the community. It is in the city that God seeks to be incarnated through the breaking of vicious cycles, opening prison doors, and liberating the voiceless to resume their song of the soul set free.
Whether it is in New Orleans, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, or San Antonio, God’s people can sing their song again. Embedded within every faith community is that capacity to respond to the admonition of sacred writings, “Seek the welfare of the city, where I have sent you into exile and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” – Jeremiah 19:7
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