I was asked to facilitate a workshop at the recent TEAR conference in Perth, and share a few things that I’ve learnt as my understanding of the gospel has developed over the past decade.  I’ve by no means completed the learning process, but I thought it might perhaps be helpful and encouraging to some of you if I share those thoughts here.  At very least, they’ll be an interesting marker for me to look back on in the years ahead as my understanding and life choices develop further.  But here’s the first of four that I’ll share over the next few months.

I don’t know about you, but as my understanding of the gospel moved from a very narrow ‘Jesus is my ticket to heaven’ to ‘Jesus is the restorer of everything that is broken’, I began hearing fascinating stories of people doing full-on, adventurous stuff in the name of Jesus.  Things like inviting the homeless to live with them, community dinners for those on the fringes, turning empty buildings into flourishing communities, getting arrested or doing creative non-violent resistant protests.  And while those things are exciting, in many instances necessary and very often good and right, it helped to foster this idea in my mind that the more extreme your actions and the greater risks you took, the more you are following Jesus, the more you were doing justice and righting the wrongs in the world.

I experienced (and contributed to) the perpetuation of that very myth (that doing justice is fun or easy) at Churchfreo, a small church which Michelle and I remain deeply committed to.  Churchfreo initially had a Sunday evening gathering, and back then it would have ranked high on the ‘struggle for justice’ noticeboard.  We had couches for pews, we gathered in an old run-down building, we shared dinner with the homeless as part of the gathering, had drunk guys take over the microphone, handed out blankets and so on.  And it was good – at least initially.  But there soon developed a sort of distance between what I would tell people about Churchfreo, and what was really happening in my relationship with them.  It was fun to tell people I was involved in this kind of edgy Church that serves and knows the homeless community in Freo.  It did wonders for my ego, and I loved watching people’s reactions.  But in reality, my relationship was pretty thin with the folks who walked through the door, and we both put on a façade of sorts so that we’d both get what we wanted.  The homeless folk rightly wanted a warm meal on a Sunday night, and I wanted to be able to say that my Church was engaging the homeless.  And so we’d do this little dance together, though the two of us never got around to acknowledging it.

And I still perpetuate that myth today.  I was arrested a while ago as part of a refugee issue action, and at times it felt like I was more interested in getting arrested than in dialoguing with the politician we were targeting.  When I built our house a few years ago, I hired homeless guys as labourers, one of whom I had to fire twice – a great ‘justice’ yarn, right?  We built some units next door, and our first tenant was a guy who was fresh out of rehab, and another was a refugee who didn’t trust the Red Cross.  More juicy stories for the justice newspaper.

But what if we frame those examples differently and flip the table on who is helping who?

For example, my arrest made very little difference to the refugee cause, but it gave me a better understanding of the power dynamics and helpless feeling that people get when they go through the judicial system.  Tom, the guy who helped me build the house, was the only person (that I can remember) out of all my friends and family to question whether I really needed to build such a big house.  I hired a much-needed prophet and fired him twice.  Tom was right, and it took us a few years before we heeded his judgement and downsized.  How about framing our tenants in this light: our first tenant was a mate of mine who was new to the faith when I met him – and his love for Jesus was so infectious that I wanted him as my neighbour in hopes his faith would rub off on me.  Another became a friend of ours who had so very little but was so incredibly generous with it that I realised how shallow and guarded my own generosity is.

See how much difference the framing makes?

Think about the issue of ‘justice attractiveness’ a little further: you’d get full props and some social cred if you went down and dished up some dinner every Friday night at a soup kitchen.  You could add that to your resume and you’ll  receive acknowledgement and applause when folks hear about it.  Now what if you made a commitment to invite the guy next door over for dinner every Friday night because you know he’s not doing well and needs some company?  Or imagine if you know the old lady across the road struggles to pay her bills, and so you slip some money under her front door from time to time. These things don’t sit so well on a resume.  You can’t name drop them.  But they are just as much acts of justice and mercy as serving up dinner at a soup kitchen or hiring a homeless guy.  And perhaps given their hidden nature, and the un-importance we’d typically give them, they might very well be the most important tasks to be done in the kingdom of God.

Please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying.  I’m not suggesting that getting arrested or sharing dinner with the homeless are pointless or ungodly exercises – Jesus himself did both of these as part of his restorative work, and they’ve been regular works in the history of Christianity.  I believe that they are necessary works (among many others) that should be done when the time is right and the Spirit prompts.

But I also don’t want to give the impression that Christians have to be doing big, amazing things to be neck-deep in the kingdom of God.  It is equally important, and at times more difficult to do – as Mother Teresa said – ‘little things with great love.’