Missionary Position

Hello All!

I'm back from a wonderful holiday season. It was a vacation that included everything from playing great games with my nieces (from Things to Wii--and yes, I did manage a couple of wins in Just Dance on the Wii, thank you very much!) to great wine and conversation with my sister and bro-in-law; plus, time with other family and friends made it difficult to return to the grind, but alas...


It is good to be back and settled into the New Year. I wanted to address some criticism (which I love btw, so keep it coming) to start 2010 on the right note. Yes, it's true, I have often been critical of organized religion for often turning Jesus' message of love and compassion into a revamped set of rules and requirements...for evolving with legalism that has fed the conventional thinking of man, while shuffling past the radical wisdom of the religion's cornerstone...and for creating "God monopoly" within some churches, as they claim to have concrete answers to quite abstract thought.

I certainly stand by those thoughts and will until we see legalism exchanged for compassion...when we experience Jesus' radical ideology and philosophy of agape replace the "measuring up standards" wrought through conventional wisdom...and, when all faiths are given respect with the old "we're in--you're out" mentality being swept away from religious practice. HOWEVER--with that being said, if one truly experiences a special connection, relationship or intimacy with the Sacred through a church--by all means...GO...camp out in the parking lot the night before, if needed, but have that experience.

One e-mail that I received recently asked me about the need for missionary work and the vitality of spreading "God's Word" through the church. The comment was prompted by a section in my book (Revolution). It was a story that I shared from my youth. As a 10-year old, I had told my Mom that if people who had not been exposed to the "Jesus message" would not be sent to hell, but those who had received that message and dismissed it would be, why then, would missionaries...rather than telling the Jesus story, shouldn't they instead tell their subjects to run screaming if anyone mentioned the name "Jesus"?

Of course, that did not go over well with my Mother or that particular reader. She pointed out the wonderful work and help that missionaries often provide in the giving spirit of Christianity. I agree.

I have a friend who often goes to Honduras to help the inhabitants there with housing, planting and general work. It's a wonderful effort with Compassion at the heart of the journey. I love that. What I don't connect with is the idea that a group from one culture is going into another culture with much self-righteous, ego-centrism to offer help in exchange for the opportunity to tell them what they need to believe spiritually--because it's what they have always believed.

My missionary position (yes, pun intended) is that: Yes, good work can be done through missionary work. However, the focus of such efforts should be to offer needed assistance while respectfully embracing each other's cultural ideas. That type of effort would truly embrace Jesus' ideas of love and compassion. That kind of work needs to be done the world over.