Author Archives: Kim Reisman

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.

Recently I traveled to Mexico for one of World Methodist Evangelism’s regional training seminars. Part of the mission of World Methodist Evangelism is to equip people to share their faith gracefully and authentically. Our WME Institute is a significant vehicle for this work and we hold seminars regularly all around the world. This time, it’s Mexico. In April it will be Kyrgyzstan, in August, New Zealand.

One of the most meaningful aspects of our work is the opportunity to bridge cultural boundaries. We follow a God who transcends all boundaries, therefore, we do too; and it’s always amazing to see what God does when we’re faithful in that.

Sadly, it’s not always easy, crossing boundaries. Our world is a fragmented, boundary-laden place where group after group, nation after nation, calls on God as a validation of its own agenda. It can be hard to find God in all that. Yet my experience confirms, time and again, the tremendous power of the Gospel to transcend boundaries and come alive in the lives of dramatically different kinds of people. So I keep crossing boundaries, counting on God to continue to show up in dramatic and transformative ways.

I’m reminded of Vincent Donovan’s experiences with the Masai people in Africa. He tells of his ministry with these people in Christianity Rediscovered and years ago, this book had a great impact on me as I was shaping my own understanding of evangelism. In relating the Gospel message to the Masai, Donovan begins by telling them about the God of the tribe of Abraham who “had become a God who was no longer free. He was trapped in that land, among that tribe. He had to be freed from that nation, that tribe, that land in order to become the High God.”

He tells them about God calling Abraham to leave his land, his people, his tribe; to travel to a land God would show him. He shares that God promised that all nations would be blessed through Abraham if he did this. Then he challenges the Masai, suggesting that they might need to leave their nation and tribe and land – at least in their thoughts – and go in search of the High God, the God of all tribes, the God of the world.

Donovan suggests, “Perhaps your God is not free. Do not try to hold him here or you will never know him. Free your God to become the High God. You have known this God and worshiped him, but he is greater than you have known. He is the God not only of the Masai, but also my God, and the God of the Kikuyu and Sonjo, and the God of every tribe and nation in the world…There is only the God who loves us no matter how good or how evil we are, the God you have worshiped without really knowing him, the truly unknown God – the High God.”

After listening attentively, someone asks a simple, but profound question, “This story of Abraham – does it speak only to the Masai? Or does it speak also to you? Has your tribe found the High God? Have you known him?”

As we stand at the dawn of a new year, that question seems as significant now as it was then. Do we know the High God? As an American, I live in a country with a history of being supremely confident that “almighty God” was and is on our side – regardless of what war we’re fighting. And currently in American culture, that confidence is even more narrowly focused within political and ideological groups. God is on “our side.”

But which god is that? Is the god we invoked to bless our troops in Vietnam as they “destroyed villages in order to save them,” the same god invoked by the pope to bless the troops of Mussolini just before they plundered Ethiopia? Is it the same god as the French God of glory – le bon Dieu – or the German Gott, der Allmächtiger – or the god who will “bless” America and make her great again?

None of these sounds like the High God to me, any more than Allah or Buddha appear to be the High God.

We need to rehear the message of Abraham – leave your land, your nation. Learn of the High God, the God of the world who desires to bless all nations.

Part of being a Christian is sharing our faith in God with others, building bridges to create relationships. That makes the Masai’s question extremely important – do we really know the High God? Donovan’s answer strikes me as the most honest answer:

No, we have not found the High God. My tribe has not known him. For us, too, he is the unknown God. But we are searching for him. I have come a long, long distance to invite you to search for him with us. Let us search for him together.

Maybe together we will find him.

What would it look like if the God of the world – the High God – actually was the God of all nations and tribes? What would it look like if we could truly grasp what Paul was trying to say in his letter to Titus: the grace of God has been revealed, bringing salvation to all people.

What would it look like if we could get a handle on the truth that the God of the world loves each tribe and nation equally? How would it change how we looked at other tribes and clans – how we acted and related to each other?

It’s easy to talk about the world being one, about all of us being children of God and of equal value and importance. But I don’t think we realize how absolutely radical that concept really is. We don’t realize how radical it is because we’ve inherited the idea from the Gospel – it’s an essential part of the good news of Jesus Christ, a message that turned the world upside down when Paul and the first faith sharers began to witness to it.

This message turned the world upside down because it was so foreign to humans. We could never have come up with an idea as radical as the thought that God loves all of us, regardless of tribe or nation. We couldn’t have come up with it because we’re too focused on tribe and nation; and that focus has torn God’s world apart. Whether it’s between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, or between blacks and whites in the United States, or between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East; whether it’s because of gender differences, economic differences, religious differences, class differences, the result is always the same – one group positioned against another, violence in body or in spirit always at the forefront. That’s the human idea.  That’s the force Peter and Paul fought against so desperately; that’s the elementary human evil the whole bible squares off against.

When WME brings the Methodist Wesleyan family together, we pray – each in our own language. We pray in our own languages because the God made real in Jesus Christ is the God of all languages, the One who invites us to speak in our heart language, the language our mothers taught us. That God would hear us as we pray in our heart language – whatever that might be – points to the whole creation nature of the good news. It points to the fact that the gospel, that secret hidden from the beginning of the world, is bigger than culture – it’s supracultural. It broke into our world from the outside, from beyond any of us, in order to be offered to all of us.

The good news is that salvation is the result of the love of God and God’s grace at work in each of our lives. God’s grace doesn’t exist exclusively in the United States or Africa or anywhere else. Every nation and tribe that would seem “foreign” to us is a nation or tribe already loved by God. Before we ever arrive, before we ever encounter, before we ever begin to build a bridge, God is there, loving and making signs of that love manifest in the lives of all the peoples of the earth. Before we ever make any connection, before we ever attempt to share our faith, God is there and God’s saving work has already begun.

If the God made real in Jesus Christ were not already in love with the entire world, he could not truly be the High God we know him to be. Instead, the wise old Masai man Ndangoya would be correct in saying, “This High God of whom you speak, he could not possibly love Christians more than pagans, could he? Or he would be more of a tribal god than ours.”

The question remains. Do we really know the High God? How would our lives change if we really understood the fact that the God made real in Jesus Christ – the God of the world – loves each tribe and nation equally? How would that understanding change how we looked at other tribes and clans – even in our own communities? How would we act and relate to others?

What next step do we need to take so that our lives reflect the gospel truth that the God made real in Jesus Christ – the High God – is the God of the whole world, of every heart language, of every nation and tribe?

Do you know the High God? Are you searching for him?

I invite you to search for him with me. Let’s search for him together. Maybe together we will find him.

Damien Spikereit is a preacher whose father died just two days before his high school graduation. He didn’t have very strong faith at that point, so he was struggling to hear God speak in his time of need. He really wanted to know what God had to say about his situation. How God was going to get him through this difficult time.

So he started praying and waited for God to speak.

The funeral came and the church was packed, but Damien doesn’t remember much about it. Afterwards, everyone greeted him, but he doesn’t remember much about that either. But he continued to wait for God to speak.

Then he saw a classmate from school, Kim O’Quinn. She was his age – they were in the same youth group. When she got to him, she didn’t say a word. She had tears in her eyes and she just hugged him and walked off.

Suddenly, Damien says, he heard God speak.

It dawned on him that just months before, he had attended another funeral – the funeral for Kim’s father. In that moment she knew exactly what it meant to be Damien.

The word became flesh and lived among us.

The good news of Christmas is that if you want to hear God’s voice in your life, you don’t have to look any further than the one who knows exactly what it’s like to be you.

Today I’m pleased to share a guest post from Matt Erickson, a contributor to the Advent devotional, “Where the Light Shines Brightest,” published by the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism at Wheaton College. Matt Erickson is Senior Pastor of Eastbrook Church.

As I sat in the hospital with the new parents and their baby girl, nurses walked in and out to check vital signs, telling the parents how cute their little girl was. Family members gathered in the room, and an older sister stared at this new being who was joining her daily life. Usually, new babies receive a lot of attention.

Yet at Jesus’ arrival, he received little attention by any earthly measure. Surprisingly, the King of all creation was born as a lowly, disregarded nobody-baby. In part, that was because Mary and Joseph were nobodies. Joseph was a craftsman from the small town of Nazareth in Galilee. Mary was a young woman with an apparently questionable character. Still, they were the nobodies God wanted to use, and that was a surprise.

No matter how charming they may look in many sentimental paintings, the shepherds were also cast-offs from society. According to the standards of their day, shepherding was a lower class, messy career, even though the shepherd’s role had kingly associations in scripture. These rough-around-the-edges nobodies were the very first to see God in the flesh after Mary and Joseph. This is certainly a surprise.

Even the magi were not what we might expect. Although apparently wealthy, they came from outside Israel and, as Gentiles, were some of the least expected to receive a message from God. Yet onward they came as part of God’s vital story. Nobodies in the spiritual sense, they traveled great distances in response to God’s surprising message sparked by a miraculous star. They worshiped this child king, this nobody Messiah. Gentiles around the Jewish King was a jarring surprise. Again and again, God does surprising things. His plans come in unexpected packages, and his ways touch unexpected lives.

God is the God of the nobodies.

That is my story, and that is your story. May we be the sort of people who reach out to other nobodies with the surprisingly good news of a nobody-baby who makes us somebody with God.

Lord, Thank You for pursuing nobodies. Thank You for pursuing me, even though I am nobody by the world’s eyes. Give me Your eyes to see other nobodies the way that You do. Help me to share Your unexpected message of hope and life with everyone I encounter today. Amen.

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” (1 Corinthians 1:25)

The cover photo for today’s post is a picture of children in Syria. This Advent, news is coming from the ancient city of Aleppo of mass executions of civilians, including women and children.

One of the few nonprofit organizations to stay in the region is Preemptive Love Coalition. Learn more and give to those for whom there is no room in the inn here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]