Pedro goes to camp!
I am at this moment a part of the most dysfunctional youth retreat in the history of my life. Between busted lips and broken jawbones; we’ve had some good times. The kids in my cabin woke up at 4:00 am yesterday morning for no other reason than to start talking to each other. WHAT! Are you kids serious? Shut up and go back to sleep. Us gringos still cannot fathom the purpose of this odd phenomenon.
Honestly though, I think it’s going wonderfully despite being completely unprepared for our group. Everything was a little off from the moment that our group of 85 adults with about 15 or so teenagers magically transformed into 100 teenagers and about 20 adults. Our guest speaker who had prepared for an older crowd had to shift his content and delivery style in an all too impromptu instant of about 45 minutes between their arrival and his first talk. His series is broken up into about 6 different 80-90 minute talks and even through the gaps in my Spanish; it is obvious that he’s doing a masterful job. The crowd is his and their respect he has won. The real battle I think is in the hearts and minds of the pastors who have been here as chaperones. They asked to speak to Dave the other night and told him that all this grace business sounds like the liberalism of which they’ve been warned all of their lives. His responses to them are introspective, clever, and poignant but caring. These pastors have pretty much received one main line of teaching their whole lives. They’ve never been confronted with different ways of thinking within their “Christian World”. Catholicism is the closest thing but they keep a stark distance from that and the only other camp is the drunks, and/or sexually immoral smokers who talk dirty! That’s it! There’s not a lot of in between. It’s hard for many of us to understand their position as we’ve been exposed to so many different factions within our own faith. So many different lines of thinking that we’ve gotten to a point where we have in many cases efficiently defined what we call closed hand and open hand issues. All this talk of women wearing pants not being a sin is throwing everyone for a loop. The big issue of course is not who can wear pants so much as what it means to be “saved”. I almost hate the word b/c I feel like every time I use it I need to explain myself. Then I get worried b/c I’m not so sure that I can properly define what it means to be saved. I suppose by saved I just mean the moment in time when a person comes into a trusting relationship with God. By “trusting relationship” I mean that there must be some sort of understanding that God has it all together and we don’t. Jesus was somehow God in the flesh and by any attempt to follow him I am trusting in him to take care of all of my evil and allow me to live with him in his kingdom forever and ever…….something like that. There is so many different pieces to the story like “substitutional atonement” and such but I’m still not quite sure how to define the bare minimum of what goes on in a persons heart and mind before it’s all good. In fact; I don’t really even want to use the term bare minimum b/c I so value the knowledge of God and His world because I believe that good orthodoxy helps move us toward good orthopraxy, which is sort of a made-up word and I’m just going to shut up now. ANYWAY, the point of saying all this is that most of the church in Nicaragua believes that you lose your “saving relationship” with God every time you screw up to a certain degree. The problem with that is that there is no real basis for how much “messing up” or how large of a sin one must commit before they are ousted out of the kingdom. The church leadership at large has a pretty easy time of defining it in the moment, but “Where’s the list?” Seriously, where is God’s master list of offenses accompanied with their appropriate punishment. Seriously, this is a problem in itself but it is probably more evident of a deeper problem.
I won’t even start into this “deeper problem” but the beautiful thing is that all of their one-line ideologies are being attacked head on with “I don’t dare say truth” but at least what I would say is far closer to the truth than what they presently consider. Many of these pastors are shaken to the core I believe,and they are experiencing an inner conflict that I would hope will open up a continuing dialogue and a quest for knowledge. The biggest point that our speaker Dave Waters is driving home revolves around two questions.
1. Is there anything I can do to make God love me more?
2. Is there anything I can do to make God love me less?
Great questions for this group. I hope and pray that they will continue to seek and I hope they’ll be willing to challenge everything they’ve ever learned. If a people is not willing to do that; there can be no growth. They are not progressing but rather dying….....a sinking ship. My prayer is that they would not be. I’m excited today b/c I can see these people’s hearts being stirred and I see the goodness of what may come of these words being adopted. I know that the freedom and beauty of God’s grace has changed my life. May it be the same in your church here in Nicaragua Lord. Do what only You can do. Amen.
Honestly though, I think it’s going wonderfully despite being completely unprepared for our group. Everything was a little off from the moment that our group of 85 adults with about 15 or so teenagers magically transformed into 100 teenagers and about 20 adults. Our guest speaker who had prepared for an older crowd had to shift his content and delivery style in an all too impromptu instant of about 45 minutes between their arrival and his first talk. His series is broken up into about 6 different 80-90 minute talks and even through the gaps in my Spanish; it is obvious that he’s doing a masterful job. The crowd is his and their respect he has won. The real battle I think is in the hearts and minds of the pastors who have been here as chaperones. They asked to speak to Dave the other night and told him that all this grace business sounds like the liberalism of which they’ve been warned all of their lives. His responses to them are introspective, clever, and poignant but caring. These pastors have pretty much received one main line of teaching their whole lives. They’ve never been confronted with different ways of thinking within their “Christian World”. Catholicism is the closest thing but they keep a stark distance from that and the only other camp is the drunks, and/or sexually immoral smokers who talk dirty! That’s it! There’s not a lot of in between. It’s hard for many of us to understand their position as we’ve been exposed to so many different factions within our own faith. So many different lines of thinking that we’ve gotten to a point where we have in many cases efficiently defined what we call closed hand and open hand issues. All this talk of women wearing pants not being a sin is throwing everyone for a loop. The big issue of course is not who can wear pants so much as what it means to be “saved”. I almost hate the word b/c I feel like every time I use it I need to explain myself. Then I get worried b/c I’m not so sure that I can properly define what it means to be saved. I suppose by saved I just mean the moment in time when a person comes into a trusting relationship with God. By “trusting relationship” I mean that there must be some sort of understanding that God has it all together and we don’t. Jesus was somehow God in the flesh and by any attempt to follow him I am trusting in him to take care of all of my evil and allow me to live with him in his kingdom forever and ever…….something like that. There is so many different pieces to the story like “substitutional atonement” and such but I’m still not quite sure how to define the bare minimum of what goes on in a persons heart and mind before it’s all good. In fact; I don’t really even want to use the term bare minimum b/c I so value the knowledge of God and His world because I believe that good orthodoxy helps move us toward good orthopraxy, which is sort of a made-up word and I’m just going to shut up now. ANYWAY, the point of saying all this is that most of the church in Nicaragua believes that you lose your “saving relationship” with God every time you screw up to a certain degree. The problem with that is that there is no real basis for how much “messing up” or how large of a sin one must commit before they are ousted out of the kingdom. The church leadership at large has a pretty easy time of defining it in the moment, but “Where’s the list?” Seriously, where is God’s master list of offenses accompanied with their appropriate punishment. Seriously, this is a problem in itself but it is probably more evident of a deeper problem.
I won’t even start into this “deeper problem” but the beautiful thing is that all of their one-line ideologies are being attacked head on with “I don’t dare say truth” but at least what I would say is far closer to the truth than what they presently consider. Many of these pastors are shaken to the core I believe,and they are experiencing an inner conflict that I would hope will open up a continuing dialogue and a quest for knowledge. The biggest point that our speaker Dave Waters is driving home revolves around two questions.
1. Is there anything I can do to make God love me more?
2. Is there anything I can do to make God love me less?
Great questions for this group. I hope and pray that they will continue to seek and I hope they’ll be willing to challenge everything they’ve ever learned. If a people is not willing to do that; there can be no growth. They are not progressing but rather dying….....a sinking ship. My prayer is that they would not be. I’m excited today b/c I can see these people’s hearts being stirred and I see the goodness of what may come of these words being adopted. I know that the freedom and beauty of God’s grace has changed my life. May it be the same in your church here in Nicaragua Lord. Do what only You can do. Amen.
posted by Alan Wilser at 3:47 PM
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