pat loughery

“When prayer and piety are used as a dodge from responsible action, we must expose this twisted and deformed spirituality as an imposter. White-hot love for God is necessarily tied to a concern for the broken and bleeding of humanity. A genuine prayer life powerfully connects us with the suffering and pain and injustice of our fallen world.”
– Richard Foster, Streams of Living Water, p.54

I can remember, in one of our first home group meetings in which we were building a core leadership team, describing the type of church that we would become. I remember saying that we specifically wouldn’t be a church that focused on “that social justice stuff”, meaning one of the churches that I see whose main focus appears to be battling racism or urban decay or the corruption in the city council.

But then I began to see the Gospel for what it really was. It’s filled with calls to pursue justice, especially for the poor and broken and disadvantaged.

I even saw that I’d missed a huge prong in my life-verse, Micah 6:8:

He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God? – Micah 6:8, ESV

I’ve always focused on the “walking humbly” part, and every now and then the “love kindness / love mercy part”, but the first part? To “love justice/do justice”? Missed it. Totally and completely missed it.

Maybe it’s because, for whatever reason, I’ve been around more people who were concerned with truth than justice. I remember one couple, friends of ours, in a home group that we attended a few churches ago, who were deeply concerned that we all should come to an agreement as to whether we were pre-trib, post-trib, a-trib, mid-trib, Tacoma News-Trib, or something else. (All right, I may have made one of those parts up.)

But frankly, I still couldn’t answer that question. Actually, I could, but that’s not the point here.

I learned that when you work in a bigger church office, maybe 1/3 of the phone calls that come in from people seeking out a church include this question – specifically, “what does your church believe about the rapture?”. When your answer is, “We believe in the parousia – that Jesus wants to return for the church, his bride, and believe that that could happen today or in 2000 years”, you never see those people visiting your church. (Not that this is a bad thing).

When did doctrinal truth about a minor point become the God of our age?

Anyway, back to justice… I think the guy that convicted me in this area was David Ruis. He’s a worship leader, but that’s just his mechanism. He’s a prophet, a church planter/pastor, and an equipper. He tells fantastic stories about what it means to serve the poor, and why it has been his life focus. If I remember right, he’s on his 3rd church plant now, all in urban centers, all among the poor.

He tells the story – I think from the Winnipeg Centre Vineyard (tag line: “Let Worship and Justice Kiss”) – where his leaders were forming, they had found a meeting location downtown in an abandoned bank building behind a little ATM alcove that the homeless slept in. They had refurbished this room, painted the walls and put new carpet in. They ordered pizza and opened up the doors.

The first guy in was clearly high and clearly mentally unstable. He stood across the room from the leaders who were all nervously gathered together, and he simply stared at them. And then, they heard sounds. Odd sounds. And out from his pantlegs poured a steaming pile of human feces. All over the new carpet. The man turned and walked out.

And David, in his inimitable style, turned to his leaders and yelled, “All right! We’re having church now!”.

And yet, as David told this story, and his story, my heart was captured.

To read more in this area, check out this issue of Cutting Edge Magazine. I’m going back through it myself.