Thank you for that honest response. I really appreciate what you share here and think it is a crucial message that many (myself included) need to hear. Again, thanks.

If strategies work and organizations are successful and Christian communities bring about dramatic change in a neighborhood, so much the better. But that often doesn’t happen, even over years. In one sense, changing a poor urban community significantly takes changes in many factors, many of which are actually outside of that community and out of the ‘control’ of a group of Christians trying to be faithful in that context.

So I guess my experience is that while tangible changes to a neighborhood are certainly a part of God’s resurrection work, they’re secondary to the stripping away of illusions we have about the change we can make or the effect our strategies will have–or more basically–about our own real commitment to the people around us (crucifixion?)and a miraculous building up a new kind of faith less attached to what may be vain hopes about what ‘cutting edge’ missional people can do with our strategies and approaches and energy and commitments.

Like a lot of folks who do that kind of mission, I struggled with a crisis of faith and a dark night of the soul in the midst of it including depression and questioning what it meant to believe. Something about justice /service of the poor missional work has particular power to begin stripping away the illusions I mentioned and also challenging false and easy conceptions about God.

Looking back on that time in the inner city, and also on many years of starting and helping build ‘urban poor missions,’ I’m not sure we accomplished a whole lot of dramatic change in entire poor communities. And I’m again struggling to make sense of all that–was the effort worth it? Were we just not faithful enough? Was it the wrong people, the wrong strategies?

As a result of that reflection on those years of urban poor work, I feel like God is going even deeper now than He did once before in stripping me of my ‘missional’ and personal illusions. Honestly, right now it’s getting so stripped down I’m beginning to wonder what’s left :^) And I’m feeling about a dozen different emotions. But I think that’s all part of the process. I’m sure at least some of you understand what I’m talking about.

In any case, I’m believing and hoping that ‘the resurrection,’ at least in my case, will have more to do with a new kind of faith that may be more skeptical about things I once put more faith in than I should have but more confident that God is working, even if not in the ways I’d hoped or through the channels I thought.

Peace,
Jamie