Author Archives: Kim Reisman

Christians around the world have been celebrating Easter, a glorious shout of triumph after the muted darkness of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. (This year, it happened that Orthodox Easter also fell on the same Sunday as Protestant and Catholics’ observation of Easter.)

As our Methodist friends in the southern hemisphere would remind us, Easter doesn’t coincide with spring for everyone on the globe – our colleagues in Australia usually enjoy summer strawberries at Christmas. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, we celebrate the Risen Christ while flowers are bursting into bloom, harsh winds are softening, and daylight hours increase. Nature seems to happily coincide with the news of new life.

Recently I traveled to central Asia, where it was a joy to see how God is working in the hearts and lives of people on the other side of the world. I was able to witness baptism while there – death to the old self, rising in new life, a child of God. Whatever troubles us when we tune into the news, there is undeniable new life springing forth in the Kingdom of God around the world.

Let’s continue to pray for the flourishing of new life wherever it is springing up. Let’s celebrate it and share stories of the goodness of God. Let’s come together to testify to each other about God’s faithfulness. Like the women running from the tomb long ago, we are called to tell the story of new life that cannot be controlled or contained.

Where have you seen new life springing up?

Reflections from my travel journal:

The other day I preached. The church was packed to overflowing – so many kids and young people! It was Communion Sunday, which is a time when they allow young adults to practice preaching. Three young women preached before I ever got up! One on persistence in prayer even when we don’t receive what we are asking for, one on the danger of sin, and one on the church as a temple for God. The woman who preached on prayer became a Christian a few years ago. She began praying for her husband to accept Christ but ultimately he told her to choose between him and “her God.” When she chose God, he left her and their two sons to fend for themselves.

Many people here are nominal Orthodox in the same way that many Christians in the US are nominal. It’s more of a cultural thing. This nation is also about 80% Muslim – there are over 2,000 mosques – and Saudi Arabia is funding the building of new mosques. Interestingly, there are a number of nominal Muslims – which may be why the Saudis are so keen. For Protestant Christians, local churches must register with the state. A group cannot be considered a registered church unless you have at least 200 members. If you are not registered, you cannot legally gather for worship. Evangelism by churches in the other category is prohibited: they are not allowed to invite people to church or have foreign visitors for religious purposes.

Today we baptized a young man who is 24 years old. He and two other young men (19 and 21 years old) came to the seminar with their pastor Igor (who is also pretty young!). The man who was baptized oversees the education section of the community center in his town.

Seminar participants are so committed to faith and evangelism. Inspiring! If you want to be Christian here you have to be incredibly committed.  Several of the young adults are attending the seminar with their pastor.

It’s a joy to work with Wesleyan Methodist leaders from around the world, partnering where the Holy Spirit leads and equipping members of our faith family. Kyrgyzstan – tucked between China and Kazakhstan, north of Pakistan and India – is the latest location to which World Methodist Evangelism has traveled.

Recently I taught at an evangelism seminar for pastors in Mexico. So much of evangelism is about building bridges and breaking down barriers in order to reach out to others on behalf of Jesus Christ. It was a good conference. Connections were made, language barriers were overcome, relationships of friendship and trust were created, and most importantly, the Holy Spirit moved and people were empowered to act.

I’m reminded of a little book of essays I received a few Christmases ago called, A Writer’s Paris: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul by Eric Maisel. One of my favorite of Maisel’s essays is one in which he talks about the footbridges of Paris. Bridges in Paris aren’t miles long and clogged with traffic, although there are some that are purely functional – all steel and cement. Most of them, however, are short and sweet, inviting a lingering stroll with a relaxed stop to watch the world go by. Many have been there for hundreds of years, evolving from footbridges, to heavily trafficked pathways and back to pedestrian walkways.

Bridges are fascinating things. I remember seeing the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco for the first time. What an awesome construction! And the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, with all its lights. The awesomeness of these bridges reminds me of the awesomeness of the task of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with others. The gulf we need to cross can seem so great – a huge gap between our experience of the love and acceptance we receive in Jesus Christ and the experience of suspicion and rejection we often experience in the world.

Maisel’s words about the bridges of Paris teach me something about scale. He writes about writers, saying, “You want to show a war, but you must show a battle instead. You want to prove the greatness of a great love, but you can’t do it through hyperbole – you can only do it by a careful noticing of the way your lovers hold hands.” He goes on to recount a time when he found himself on the Pont Saint Louis near a 30-year-old man and his 60-year-old mother. The son was pouring out his heart to his mother. After describing their conversation, Maisel says, “The setting has allowed him to speak. This conversation never could have occurred in their living room, at the supermarket, or at the Louvre. This bridge creates a place safe enough for a boy to speak to his mother.”

Maisel is right. It’s not about the awesomeness of the bridges. It’s about the intimacy. It’s about the way the footbridge subtly draws you to the middle to stop and absorb what’s going on around you, to see how the water flows, how the streets lead to and from, how the buildings grow up and out.

It may just be that we don’t make connections between our experience of being in relationship with Jesus Christ and the experience of the rest of the world through massive efforts and structures. It may just be that it’s about the intimacy of crossing a footbridge to meet another in the middle.

Maybe evangelism is not as much about creating grand strategies and programs as it is about making connections of love and trust in the individual relationships we encounter in our daily lives. Maybe it’s not about proving the great love God has shown in Jesus Christ through hyperbole, but by noticing the way Jesus comes to us as a lover – holding our hand, easing our fears, forgiving our faults and shortcomings – loving us anyway. Maybe it’s about creating places like the bridge where the son was able to talk with his mother, places that are safe enough for us to talk about our faith, the meaning that it has brought to our lives, the difference Jesus Christ has made in our experience of the world.

We live in a time when bridges are one of our greatest needs, but barriers seem bigger and more prevalent than ever. In that kind of environment, what bridges are we able to create in our lives? What next step do we need to take to create places that are safe enough for us to talk about the deep things of our heart? What person in your life is quietly awaiting an opportunity to meet you in the middle of a bridge, to make a connection, to deepen a relationship, to hear or speak a word of faith and hope and love?

This post originally appeared at www.gospel-life.net.

World Methodist Evangelism is proud that we began as an initiative of the World Methodist Council, which represents and serves 80 denominations around the globe – over 80 million people. Last August and September the World Methodist Conference was held in Houston, Texas, and a parade of flags representing Wesleyan Methodists from Brasil and Nepal, Ireland and Pakistan, Japan and Nigeria, and many, many more places gave colorful illustration both to the worldwide Body of Christ and to the reach of the Wesleys’ influence.

A line of translation booths edged one wall of the large event room where everyone gathered for corporate worship. Not all Wesleyan Methodists saw eye to eye on every topic: far from it. But there was worship together, and singing, and Holy Communion.

The church is free in ways that no government ever will be, because we belong to Christ, and Christ alone. We accept each other’s wisdom and leadership, we acknowledge the giftedness of the other, the peculiar cultural challenges each region or denomination faces, and the unique contribution our member churches make to the Methodist movement but even more to the Body of Christ. No tradition is perfect – even if we do have the goal of being made “perfect” – complete – in holy love.

But there is beauty in seeing each other as beloved parts of ourselves. South Korea and Peru need each other. Poland and New Zealand need each other. Mexico and Kenya need each other. The United States and Iraq need each other…

Politicians have interests from which Christians may be joyously free. Our faith family is not contained by state lines or party lines, by skin color or culture, by language or ethnicity.

We are free to love each other. And we are free to love others.

What a gift.

Today, we’re thankful for our sisters and brothers around the world. We are thankful that we can serve our global neighbors without fear, because Christ’s yoke is easy, his burden light. To be sure, there is a great deal of suffering in our world. There is pain and loss, terror and trauma.

But Jesus never flinched. He sobbed at human casualty and grief. He raged against oppressors using the Temple as their umbrella for their own corruption. He sweat blood with intensity and agony at the moment of surrender.

But Jesus never flinched.

There are well-known anecdotes of Mother Teresa’s willingness to touch people suffering from all kinds of skin disease and ailments, often dying. In one story readers are told of a time a young sister was tweezing maggots out of someone’s skins at arm’s length, trying to avoid the worst of the stench, repulsed by the process. Mother Teresa gently chastised her, putting her face close to the rotten flesh, telling the young woman, “the body before you is the body of Christ.” For this tiny lady, each person, no matter how filthy, wretched or diseased, represented Jesus. How would we treat Jesus if he were in front of us? This quality of never flinching is itself a characteristic of Jesus Christ.

We are not called to withdraw in horror from suffering. We are called to gently lean closer, tenderly handle the weeping man or woman in front of us.

Christians – and Wesleyan Methodist Christians – lean in toward the smoke-filled hair, the gangrene, the PTSD, the cemetery, the shellshock, the loss of livelihood, the addiction, the empty eyes, the screaming, the language barrier, and we embrace.

We embrace, without a flinch.

Migration, borders, citizenship. These are ongoing topics of emotion and debate. Yet, people live at the heart of most weighty issues: men, women, and children whose lives demand that conversations move beyond the hypothetical. That’s what I experienced while in Tijuana, Mexico, teaching at an evangelism seminar with our WME Institute.

**Take a deep breath, this is not a post about policy or politics. It’s a post about people. And the Holy Spirit.

While I was in Tijuana, I had the opportunity to visit the wall that separates Mexico from the United States. To the west is the Pacific Ocean – a beautiful sight from either side. Jutting inland from the Pacific is the border wall, brightly painted with wonderful, urban art. A garden runs beside the wall, edging a plaza with steps leading down to the ocean. A wonderfully cheerful atmosphere until you begin to gaze more deeply.

If you look closely, you’ll notice a locked gate. It leads into a “no man’s land” about 30 yards wide between the barriers that separate the two countries. Once a month, the Mexican government opens the gate and allows families to enter. They cross those 30 yards where others – family members or friends – wait beyond the US barrier.

There is no gate on the US side. But for a while, though separated by wire and watched by US border patrol officers, families can talk, clasping fingers through the small gaps, connecting across the barrier that divides them.

Every month, on the day the gate opens, the Methodist Church is present – on both sides of the wall. There is conversation. There is prayer.

And there is Holy Communion.

Together, the pastor in Mexico and the pastor in the US lead people in an act that transcends borders and walls, division and separation. Simultaneously, they all share in the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation.

I talk often about the importance of signs, all those visible tokens of unseen realities that are spiritually significant, all those things – sometimes miraculous, but often ordinary – that point to Christ and his healing, reconciling, redeeming love. I believe these Holy Spirit-infused moments, when the thin veil of reality billows ever so slightly and we gain a glimpse of something larger and deeper than ourselves, are the moments that form and strengthen and sustain us in faith and in life.

Jesus told us the poor would be with us for a long time. Because following Jesus is a long haul, full life project, it’s the same with the good work we do on his behalf. That is why signs are so important.

Though the issues encountered by a visit to the Mexico-US border in Tijuana are larger than any one person, as followers of Jesus we work for God’s justice in our world. And amid that work, we gather, month after month, open to power of the Holy Spirit to move aside the veil, as we embody through the bread and the cup our faith in the One who transcends all barriers and levels all walls.

What do you need Christ to do for you today? Where is there ache, or limitation, or suffering? Read these words from St. Symeon:

We awaken in Christ’s body,
As Christ awakens our bodies
There I look down and my poor hand is Christ,
He enters my foot and is infinitely me.
I move my hand and wonderfully
My hand becomes Christ,
Becomes all of Him.
I move my foot and at once
He appears in a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous to you?
—Then open your heart to him.
And let yourself receive the one
Who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
We wake up inside Christ’s body
Where all our body all over,
Every most hidden part of it,
Is realized in joy as Him,
And He makes us utterly real.
And everything that is hurt, everything
That seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
Maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged
Is in Him transformed.
And in Him, recognized as whole, as lovely,
And radiant in His light,
We awaken as the beloved
In every last part of our body.

Saint Symeon the New Theologian, Hymn 15, “We awaken in Christ’s body” from The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, ed. Stephen Mitchell (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 38f.