A Message from Steve

Dear Friends,

I think Jonathan Edwards—back in 1732—expressed with perfect clarity a concept that the Church struggles with today:

"Where have we any command in the Bible laid down in stronger terms, and in a more peremptory urgent manner, than the command of giving to the poor?"

Recently, I listened to Tim Keller's sermon "Blessed are the Poor." You can listen to it here, and I would encourage you to make time for this message. In the sermon, Keller reflects on Jonathan Edwards' words on the poor (read here), as well as many of the hundreds of biblical references to the poor. In short, Keller agrees with Edwards, saying that one of the clearest things in all of scripture is the mandate to know the poor, become the poor, and love the poor. Keller goes as far as to say that we cannot remain "middle class in spirit," but must embrace poverty of spirit, something that happens in relationships of reconciliation with real people living in poverty over a long period of time.

"We may also observe how peremptorily this duty [giving to the poor] is here enjoined,
and how much it is insisted on." Jonathan Edwards

So it's clear that scripture says loving the poor is imperative--but do we really see it as imperative? Do we see it as an essential part of our personal identity as Christ followers? Or do we see it as an option? Do we see it as a personal mandate? Or do we see it as something that can be "outsourced" to a church committee or a para-church ministry like Advance? The truth is that none of the important kingdom activities that the church should do, whether soup kitchens, shelters, job training, tutoring, widow-support health care, justice ministries--or any other effort--can be effective without ongoing relational reconciliation between rich and poor. And as Keller argues, these relationships WILL INEVITABLY challenge and change our lives as well.

I was convicted of this recently when we interviewed a group of Advance Memphis graduates about the role of Advance in the community. We were gathering information to inform our strategic planning process, and we asked students, "What does the community need more of?" I was humbled to hear the answer from "Mary," a recent grad, aged 24: "Not more money or food. We need more people to spend time with us. Teach us. Teach us about God." Friends, Mary is a single mother of 5. Throughout Mary's childhood, her mother was addicted to crack and she had no relationship with her father until the very end of his life. Right now, Mary is living with a family member in Foote Homes. Her extended family is eating her food and leaving her kids hungry. She is working part time, studying for her GED, and raising 5 children. I asked myself, "DID THIS WOMAN REALLY SAY THAT THE GREATEST NEED WAS RELATIONSHIPS? She DID!" And I remembered again how we so often consider poverty solely in material terms, forgetting the importance of relationships of reconciliation for RICH and POOR alike!

How wide is the gap between you and your neighbor? Join me in praying
that God would close the gap a little more each day for all of us.

I often meet people who ask what we need at Advance—how they can help. My prayer is that I'll be bold enough to share our biggest need: the presence of Christians, loving, serving, and building relationships in the neighborhood. We need these relationships because social support is key to life change. We need these relationships because the gospel calls us to reconciliation between communities divided by race and economic class. And we need these relationships because theoretical solutions to poverty designed in board rooms rarely work, and neither do blank checks without accountability or understanding. We've got to stop DOING THINGS FOR poor neighborhoods and start DOING THINGS WITH our poor neighbors. Bob Lupton argues in his book Toxic Charity that anonymous aid, given without the wisdom and consent that comes from relationships with the targeted community, can do far more harm than good. As an example, Lupton describes the effect of aid on Haiti, as witnessed by Tim Schwartz, an anthropologist and long-time resident of the country.

What does it look like to DO WITH the poor instead of FOR? That's a big question, but if we're really working relationally with the poor, we'll not only be seeing financial generosity, justice in business and legal relationships, and education for poor neighbors...we'll be seeing Luke 14 parties!

Do you have the relationships in place for God's design for a Luke 14 party?

So is my friend Mary crazy to say there's more to economic healing than money? No! Toxic Charity powerfully reminds us that disconnected aid is not enough, while we see first hand the powerful life change in EVERYONE'S life when the gospel calls individuals and communities "to the other side of the tracks"—the Kingdom community.

What I didn't tell you is that my friend Mary has gone from zero income to $2,000 a month. She hasn't achieved this through a hand out, but rather through a whole host of educational initiatives, supportive relationships, and employment opportunities made possible by business partnerships. I wish you could see her pride and joy as she experiences some level of economic self-sufficiency. She remains grateful for her diminishing public assistance while being filled with the dignity God designed for us through work. She wants to keep growing and fulfill all her God given potential. And what does she say when she asks what would help her and her neighborhood? MORE relationships and MORE time with Christ-followers.

So I want to invite the Body of Christ to respond to God's imperative to engage with those who are unlike us. We cannot help the poor if we do not know them, and God tells us that through relationships with the poor we ourselves will be changed. Our lifestyles, economic classes, recreational activities, neighborhoods, workplaces, and yes, even our churches often segregate us from our poor neighbors. Please take a minute right now to look around wherever you are. I'm sure you see the segregation of the rich from the poor. Now consider: how can we respond to God's imperative and help shape a world that looks different?

Responding to God's imperative means we've got work to do. We need to ask why in the poorest city in the nation there are no poor people in our Sunday school class or on our block, and then DO SOMETHING about it. And we need to find places to engage in relationships of reconciliation with the poor neighborhoods right now, today. If you need help with that, we'd love to introduce you to some of our neighbors through a Champion small group, a GED tutoring session, or as an assistant in a computer class. We'll take everything we can get! What might happen if every Christian in our city was actively pursuing healing in their own lives and in the lives of their poor neighbors through personal relationships? We don't know. But we'd love to find out. Pray with us! Struggle with us! Learn with us!

Thanks for all your time reading this note. It's longer than usual, but I'm grateful for your time, and grateful for the staff, friends, and volunteers who helped me take this from a first draft to a finished letter...the body of Christ at work!

Steve Nash

P.S. As you consider all these things, join me in challenging yourself to make God's Kingdom our target; not a human kingdom with some room for God, but—truly—God's Kingdom.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

At the end of his long chapter on Christ’s resurrection and second coming in I Corinthians 15, Paul declares: “therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your work in the Lord is not in vain.” For most of us, though, the resurrection seems like little more than the epilogue to the story of the cross. What’s the connection between Christ’s resurrection and our work? How does the resurrection affect “our work?” What does it mean for us today to declare, as churches around the world will on Easter Sunday, “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”?

Christ Has Died

At the cross, God-the-Son “made himself nothing,” became a “servant,” and obeyed the Father all the way to dying an excruciating death on the cross (Phi 2:6-8). The cross means that we are no longer estranged from God, but have been reconciled to the Father “by Christ’s physical body through death” so that we, though our sins condemn us, might appear before God as “holy in his sight” (Col 1:22). The cross means that sin itself has been crucified so that we no longer are slaves to sin (Rom 6:6). Jesus became our sin (2 Cor 5:21), bearing “our sins in his body on the cross” (1 Pet 2:24).

But the meaning of the cross goes even out beyond our individual reconciliation with God. Through the cross, God has reconciled himself to the whole world, and given us the mission of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:18-19). All of the evil powers and principalities and every system of injustice has been “disarmed!” Jesus “made a public spectacle of [the powers and authorities], triumphing over them by the cross” (Col 2:15). The cross of Christ “destroys the Devil’s work” (1 Jn 3:8).

Though the Bible makes clear that Adam’s sin brought all of creation into sin and decay, releasing the power of the Devil into every corner of the cosmos, at the Cross Jesus has shattered the Enemy, has paid the price for our treason, has unmasked the injustice and oppression of a world which would crucify its own Creator, and reconciled the Triune God to the whole world.

Christ Is Risen

On the third day, the Father took the mangled, tortured, broken body of His Son and raised it up to new life. The point of the story isn’t that Jesus’ soul went to be with God, but rather that the broken body of Jesus was remade into something glorious and altogether new. Not only does Jesus pay for our sins at the cross, but he empowers us for new, resurrection life at Easter. As Paul writes, if Christ has not been raised, then we are still dead in our sins. But He has been raised! And that makes all the difference.

Scholars point out that in John, the Risen Jesus meets Mary in a garden on the first day of a new week; after dealing with all of the sin that had corrupted the old creation, at the resurrection Jesus becomes the “new Adam” on the first day of a new creation week. And so we know that we too, along with the whole creation, will be resurrected one day with Him. As Paul writes, “Christ has indeed been raised, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.” Moreover, Romans 8 tells us that the entire creation is waiting for the sons of God to be revealed at the resurrection so that the creation might share in the glory of God’s children! What happens to Jesus will happen to us . . . and to the entire created world.

Christ Will Come Again

In Acts, the disciples watched as Jesus ascended into heaven. Suddenly, two angels appear and ask them: “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” And so, along with the resurrection, the ascension reminds us that Jesus Christ is the Risen King who promises to return to us again in glory. Sin has been beaten, and a new day has dawned at Easter, and we wait faithfully for our King to come and complete the work in fullness.

What It Means For Us

Everything has changed! At the cross, Jesus unmasked, disarmed, and destroyed all the sin and death that hides in our hearts and that breaks out in violence, poverty, disease, and injustice. At the resurrection, Jesus has started a “new creation” project that begins in human hearts and pours out and overflows into a New Heaven and a New Earth. And just as our resurrected, vindicated Lord returned to the Father He will one day come again to reign as King over all Creation.

The reason Paul wraps up his teaching on the resurrection by declaring that our works are not in vain is that the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are the Father’s grand YES to the world, His gracious promise that we will be resurrected like Christ, and His invitation to participate in the resurrection of the whole world. Without this YES, this promise to redeem all things along with the “first-fruits” of Christ’s own resurrection, jobs make no difference. Neighborhoods make no difference. Rocks, trees, birds, cities, careers, and homes make no difference. But Jesus Christ has become one of us, has suffered our death, and permanently secured our resurrection life in His resurrected world. Our lives in this world matter. The work we do anticipates the sure redemption of all things, and it is not in vain. Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again! And we’re called to live lives in the kingdom, for the King, by the power of the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, and who will raise us and the entire cosmos into new life when Jesus comes again in glory.

Michael Rhodes

michael@advancememphis.org

Jenny Gets a Promotion

Last month, the Women's Foundation for a Greater Memphis asked us for a success story about one of the women that they've generously helped to fund in Jobs for Life. We chose to tell the story of Jennifer Williams - this is that story:

Jenny entered Jobs for Life at Advance Memphis in March, 2010. By her own admission, her attitude was poor. After the six week program, Jenny had begun to trust her classmates and teachers, and to smile. She was hired and trained to embroider using a 6 head industrial embroidery machine at One Stop Marketing. When One Stop placed a machine in Advance’s Outsourcing Program, Jenny became the operator. Since then, she has worked consistently and participated in additional programs at Advance Memphis, deepening her leadership and problem solving skills, and earning forklift certification.

Today, Jenny has embroidered to the high standards of Autozone and Office Depot. She has co-workers for large jobs—one is her sister, who she inspired to enroll in Jobs for Life and is training on the machine. Jenny’s 12 year old daughter also joins her on holidays, helping to fold and sort shirts. Jenny has worked hard, and is becoming a leader in the community.

Jenny at her Jobs for Life graduation with her Champion (mentor) Marla Inman.

But that's only part of the story! This week, Jenny received a promotion. She is now our Outsourcing Team Lead, supervising all piece work that takes place in the Outsourcing Program of Advance. Our staff gathered this week to honor Jenny and congratulate her. We all shared how Jenny has blessed us by being at Advance, and then Jenny shared some of her story with us. Because the video is hard to hear, we've transcribed it here:

When I first came here, I was angry at myself, because of the trouble I had got into. I was kind of angry because I had left my kids behind [when she was incarcerated] because I love my kids SO much. And just being away from them a couple weeks made me want to call and check on them all the time -- so being away from them 6 months...that kind of hurt me and had me so much built up anger within myself. But being up here...yall taught me how to forgive myself, and that's the reason why I started smiling again. Cause I forgave myself and stopped beating myself up all the time from going to jail and leaving my kids behind.

Jenny accepts her Outsourcing Team Lead shirt from Employment Services Director, Juanita Johnson.

Jenny has truly earned this promotion over the last year. Please join us in praying that God will continue to bless Jenny and her children.

The Christian Community and the Causes, Consequences, and Solutions to Poverty

Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart has launched a firestorm of debate about the nature and causes of societal breakdown, poverty, and the increasingly stratified economic classes in America. In an op-ed for WSJ, he argues that the solution is two-fold: for the wealthier classes to a) recognize that their isolated, suburban life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and therefore to b) “preach what they practice” in terms of work, marriage, family, and civic responsibility to communities where these values are deteriorating.

Not everybody agrees. David Brooks observes that the left has responded to Murray with the argument that all of society’s dissolution traces its roots to “economic determinism;” the jobs left,

the family died. For Brooks, this view reduces “the rich texture of how disadvantage is actually lived to a crude materialism that has little to do with reality.” Nevertheless, he also argues that Murray ignores 25 years of research suggesting three significant features of real poverty:

1. Societal breakdown “snowballs,” getting worse and worse all on its own.

2. The problem with poor people is often not that they value such different things than the rest of the population, but rather that they “lack the social capital to enact those values.”

3. Social context heavily influences individual behavior. “If any of us grew up in a neighborhood where a third of the men dropped out of school, we’d be much worse off, too.”

What are Christians to make of all of this?

The firestorm around Murray has brought into mainstream conversation several key features of American poverty that the church needs to hear because it reflects what we know from the story of God and His world in the Bible. Yet in every case the church’s story goes farther, penetrating deeper into the heart of why things are broken and how they can be healed.

1. Poverty is the Result of Both Individual and Societal Sin

Poverty is caused and perpetuated by a complicated set of factors that includes deep personal sin and incredibly broken social systems. Election candidates will ignore one or the other; the Biblical story does not! Furthermore, systemic sins (e.g., racism, economic injustice, or broken education systems) encourage personal sin, and personal sin (e.g., greed, sexual immorality, or pride) encourage systemic sins.

And yet this is exactly the point where the church can offer something that secular society cannot; a description of sin as such, and an explanation of how to be healed from it. Both Brooks and Murray expect some sort of sense of “civic duty” to propel change forward, and neither can give much of an adequate account beyond self-interest. The right may emphasize individual and immediate self-interest, while the left may emphasize long-term societal self-interest; only the church of God condemns self-interest, names the source of it as individual and societal sin, and proclaims the remedy as the community shaped by the crucified, sacrificing Jesus Christ.

2. Economic Isolation Hurts Everybody

Whether it’s the prayer in Proverbs to be neither rich nor poor, Isaiah’s condemnation that the rich add house to house until they have no neighbors, or the New Testament vision of a church that involves rich and poor as equal participants, the Biblical story clearly envisions a God-shaped community whose sharing brings together and softens the divide between rich and poor. Brooks, Murray, and others rightly point to the divide, the keeping up with the Joneses, as a barrier to societal healing.

Meanwhile, neither Brooks nor Murray lifts up the biblical vision of a reconciling community which heals the brokenness of both rich and poor together in a community of true healing. Murray lifts up the so-called civic virtue of the upper class, and calls on it to tell the poor how to get married and go to work. But the wealthy neighborhoods where I grew up--in contrast to the neighborhood where I now live in South Memphis--knew relatively little about true hospitality, about giving the bed in the living room to a homeless stranger on a cold night, about sharing your last dollar, about staying in a place long enough to make it a neighborhood. A community formed around Christ is uniquely positioned to remind the rich of the blessedness of the poor; the “upper class” in the church comes ready to learn from the poor neighbors in the pew, as well as to share their own insights.

We should welcome the research, efforts, and insights of our secular neighbors, and we should joyfully work alongside them where appropriate. But if the church embraces her charter story, we are uniquely equipped to answer the questions of poverty and social disorder in our neighborhoods simply by being the church. We answer those questions as the body of Christ gathers together in neighborhoods among neighbors who do not let race, class, or culture keep them apart. We answer those questions in businesses that serve their employees and add value to the community. We answer those questions in families that take the raising of their children as a responsibility connected to their responsibility to the family of God around them. If the church lived as the church, right here in Memphis, maybe Murray, Brooks, and the rest would find an example, a living biblical text, to help them understand why the world is broken, and what Jesus is doing to fix it.

Michael Rhodes

michael@advancememphis.org

Sources:

Brooks- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/opinion/brooks-the-materialist-fallacy.html?_r=2&hp

Murray- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.html

Upcoming Advance Memphis Workshop

Advance wants to contribute to the body of Christ's ongoing conversation about the relationship between the gospel and the poor, especially as it relates to work here in Memphis. We want to be a part of the movement of God in calling His church to the city.

To that end, we've created the Advance Memphis Workshop Series, and the first workshop of 2012 will take place next Monday, February 27th, here at the building, from 5:15-6:30.

This workshop will be lead by Michael Rhodes, Director of Education, with a focus on equipping volunteers to understand and apply the 4 Relationships paradigm to kingdom work with poor neighbors in the city (concepts explored in When Helping Hurts will be applied.

To reserve a spot in this equipping workshop, please contact Julie@advancememphis.org.

Today's Strife VS Tomorrow's Banquet

Education Coordinator Michael Rhodes recently sent the following email to the Advance Memphis staff members. Take a minute to read Michael's words, as well as those he's included from GED student Melvin Johnson (pictured above at his Jobs for Life graduation).

Dear Team:

I asked Melvin Johnson to write an essay about his neighborhood to get ready for the GED. He’s staying down off S Parkway. This is what he wrote, in its entirety:

"My neighborhood is not safe. There are a lot of crimes being committed. My neighborhood is full of gangs and drugs. Add there are a lot of burned down homes all over. With crimes, gangs, and burned down homes my neighborhood is not safe.

In my neighborhood crimes are committed daily. The stores are broken into at night. In the day time cars are broken into. And also sometime people become victims of robbery at gun point. By stores and cars being broken into, and robberies being committed the crime rate is very high in my neighborhood.

The neighborhood I live in is full of gangs and drug. Gangs in my neighborhood are called vice-lords, GD, and cribs. There are drug homes on every street. The gangs fights with one another all the time. With the different type of gangs, drugs, and fights my neighborhood is a gangs heaven.

There are burned down houses everywhere you look in my neighborhood. Some of the houses are burned down by homeless people trying to stay warm at night. Some are burned down to cover up a crime. And some are burned down by kids playing in empty houses. By homeless people, gangs and kids burning down the houses my neighborhood the area feels unsafe to live.

My neighborhood is very dangerous. The gangs have taken over my neighborhood. The burned down homes have made the property values go down. And the crimes that are committed makes the neighborhood scary to live in. The robberies, gangs and drugs and burned down houses my neighborhood will never be safe."

This morning I happened to read Isaiah 25 during my devotion, and came across a passage that was read at our wedding. What a contrast! It reminds me that we must claim God’s coming rule as our own, must declare that the future security of the kingdom of God will undo all the death experienced in our neighborhoods in the here and now. One day, those who know Jesus will declare, this is that which we hoped for. Let’s keep prayerfully exhorting our neighbors and ourselves, in the face of so much death, to claim the One who will swallow up death forever.

The Lord who commands armies will hold a banquet for all the nations on this mountain.

At this banquet there will be plenty of meat and aged wine –

tender meat and choicest wine.

On this mountain he will swallow up

the shroud that is over all the peoples,

the woven covering that is over all the nations;

he will swallow up death permanently.

The sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from every face,

and remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth.

Indeed, the Lord has announced it!

At that time they will say,

“Look, here is our God!

We waited for him and he delivered us.

Here is the Lord! We waited for him.

Let’s rejoice and celebrate his deliverance!”

For the Lord’s power will make this mountain secure.

Isaiah 25:6-10

Counting Blessings

COUNTING OUR BLESSINGS
Our cup overflows this week and we want to share the blessings with you and glorify God for encouraging us. Take a minute to read some of the great things that are going on in the Kingdom.

• One Jobs for Life alum just donated $100 to Advance.
• Another alum is volunteering regular shifts at the front desk so that Cindy can complete focused tasks away from the busy-ness of the lobby.
• Our Champions (mentors) had their first meetings with students this week; they'll be with these students for 6-12 weeks. Several Champions told us how God blessed the time and how they look forward to learning and growing during the meetings--as much or more than their students! Students were excited, too. Gwendolyn commented on her connection with her Champion, "Our stories are the same. We're both mothers of daughters. We're the same." We praise God for connections like this.
• Ced Harris was promoted to machine operator at KTG, where he is a permanent employee.
• GED Instructor Mike Shaw's grandparents came and served at Advance this week. Mr. Shaw spent the entire day correcting printer networking issues while Mrs. Shaw used her considerable talents to teach the GED class. We were all blessed to have them with us, and praise God for the gift of family.
• One current student is loving classmates by bringing apples in the morning to share. Many of our class members arrive hungry, so this small thoughtfulness is a big deal.
• A teacher from neighborhood high school BTW attended our Overcoming through Christ (addiction recovery) program this week. She has 22 years sobriety and was a tremendous encouragement to our students and alumni. We thank God for this gift of community.