just courage 11

In the final chapter of Gary Haugen’s Just Courage, we come to the moment of challenge, the “altar call” to convert to seeking justice as vital to a faithful witness to Christ and the Gospel. 

Chapter 10 is titled, “Would You Rather Be Safe or Brave?” Haugen begins by relating his experience of peewee football. As a boy, he was thrilled with the issuing of pads and jersey. He imagines football to be about “running fast, dodging cones and catching passes” (p. 112). But with the first day of contact practice, a “magic epiphany” happens—football is about contact! Haugen remembers a conversation with his mom after this realization. He recalls having had enough of football and was ready to throw in the towel. His mother proceeded to tell him that that was alright, so “I suppose you can turn in your uniform and equipment to the coach tomorrow.” In linking those two things–wearing the uniform and making contact, she succeeded in disallowing Haugen the option of wearing the clothes but not living the part. From this experience he concludes, “Good parents, I think, help their kids clarify the reality of life’s choices” (p. 113).  

God the Father clarifies our choices too. We, the Church, also face a choice: whether to be safe or brave. Haugen represents in his own self-reflection the conflict within us: “I’d like to be brave, but I’d also like to be safe. My heavenly Father, however, loves me deeply enough to tell be the truth. He says I can’t be both brave and safe. He wants me to be clear that I have to decide—and he wants me to choose to be brave, which means choosing to not be safe.” (p. 114) 

Isn’t this choosing a path of suffering? Yes. Haugen says: “Clearly, some suffering is part of God’s will. It isn’t necessarily the suffering itself that is God’s will, but rather following the will of God in a fallen world will generate suffering in our lives.” (p. 115) And he follows that with the two things that are consistently both God’s will and dangerous in this fallen world: “telling the truth and loving needy people.” 

Haugen continues with illustrations of persons with IJM who have embodied the proclamation of Jesus, “If you lose your life for my sake, you’ll find it.” This includes his own story of leaving a career at the Department of Justice to start International Justice Mission. I’ll let the reader of this blog read these stories for him/herself. 

The calling is for us to step out of our suburban cul-de-sac of false protection across the boundary of fear that keeps us there and into the adventure that is the gospel expedition with Jesus. 

I recommend this book. It is short and simple to read, but very powerful both in its insight into modern American Christian spirituality and in its witness on behalf of God’s ministry of justice. And I’ll close with the verse of Scripture that continues to arise as the theme of the book and IJM as well: 

“Seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1:17 NRSV)

just courage 10

“Deep within all of us there is a yearning to be brave. And like all of our deepest, truest and best yearnings, it comes from how we were made.” (p. 103) 

Thus begins chapter 9 of Just Courage, by IJM CEO Gary Haugen. 

We were made for courage but find ourselves behaving far short of that. What is the path back to the courage we’re made for? Haugen shares three practices that he and IJM try to live out to help with this. 

1. “Do less, reflect and pray more.” Freeing people from injustice sounds like the sort of job you can’t really take a break from–talk about urgency! But Haugen reports, “we begin every morning by spending thirty minutes doing absolutely ‘nothing.’For thirty minutes every day we just sit quietly, reflecting, praying, and preparing spiritually for the day. Then at 11 a.m. we gather again to pray–every day.” (p. 105) He notes that as consumed as they can be with the work of rescuing others, they must pause daily “to truly receive our rescue from Christ.” (p. 106) This is a good word for anyone. Here’s an applicable practice for anyone, especially if/when we’re trying to discern some fresh leading of God in our lives: “Reflect about the life you are living, about the anxieties you are carrying and about the life you sense God is calling you to live.” (p. 105) 
2. “Search the promises of Scripture and take a risk.” Haugen recommends questions to ourselves like these: “Am I being brave, or am I being safe?” and “In my Christian life, do I see myself playing offense or defense?” He reminds the reader that “all the things we value were never meant to be safeguarded. They were meant to be put at risk and spent” for the sake of the gospel (p. 107). 
3. “Embark on the lifelong journey of spiritual formation and renovation.” Haugen says, “It’s not by sheer will that we become brave. It takes reformation of the heart. God doesn’t call us to try to be brave but to train to be brave.” (p. 108) Then he recommends three books: The Divine Conspiracy and Renovation of the Heart, both by Dallas Willard, and The Life You’ve Always Wanted, by John Ortberg. 

just courage 9

Chapter 8 of Just Courage, by Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission (IJM), is titled, “The Witness of One.” In it, Haugen shares the stories of three families who simply needed help getting justice for themselves and their children. I hope by now I’ve gotten some of you interested enough to purchase the book and read it for yourself—it’s an engaging and quick, and spiritually potent, read. 

For this post, I’d like to simply share the set-up that Haugen provides to place his sharing of those three stories in context. He admits that his work with IJM has brought him into contact with very poor people whose lives are so different from his own that it proves difficult to sustain conversation for very long. He asks, “At what point of human experience could we actually connect?” (p. 91) 

Haugen says…

I have found a nearly universal point of contact: the experience of being a parent. Parenting seems to be the great leveling experience among human beings, especially in the unique sense of vulnerability that mysteriously accompanies parents of all places. Parents all over the world love their kids, and yet none of us (rich or poor) can control what happens to them.” (p. 92)

One of the realities of injustice in the world, and particularly of the type that IJM addresses in its work, is this universal feeling of vulnerability that Haugen has discovered on the faces and in the eyes of the people with whom IJM has worked. Some of these parents feel incredibly vulnerable because of the injustice of seeing their kids taken captive and their own lack of resources to do something about it. All parents have felt that sort of desperation and vulnerability at some level. 

That’s a big part of the connection between many of us and people who suffer injustice and brutality. Each of us, in Haugen’s words, can say, “my heart is walking around in someone else’s body.” (p. 101) Part of answering God’s call to justice is helping parents who love their kids care for them again even though at present they need some help caring for them.

just courage 8

Chapter 7 of Gary Haugen’s Just Courage: God’s Great Expedition for the Restless Christian tells stories of “charging the darkness.”

The chapter begins with a bed-time ritual with Haugen and his children. At a certain age, they became afraid to enter their rooms because the “room [was] scary.” Probing further, the reason was simply because it was dark. (My older daughter–two years old yesterday–has a fascination at present with darkness and light–loves turning the light switch on and off to see what it looks like.) The way he discovered to get them to enter their dark rooms and go to bed was to “charge the darkness,” running in himself so they could see someone come out alive after having entered that scary place. 

Haugen observes (rightly, I must confess to believe) that we are the children, staring at the places of injustice and oppression but failing to charge the darkness. Perhaps this is why we busy ourselves and are thus never “able” to do much of consequence to help? Perhaps we need to see someone else charge in first. So, to that end, Haugen offers three persons whose stories can embolden us in our journey to courage. 

William Sheppard was an African-American Presbyterian missionary who went to Africa (he was also the son of freed slaves) during the latter part of the 19th century and worked against injustice perpetrated on the Congolese by Belgian rulers. 

Donaldina Cameron was a contemporary of Sheppard who, beginning as a Presbyterian missionary intern, found herself working on behalf of Chinese girls trapped and brutalized by the sex trade in San Francisco throughout her life, conducting many nighttime raids to free the young slave girls. 

Irena Sendlarona was a young Polish Catholic who used her social welfare post to smuggle Jewish children to safety from the local Nazi camps during the 1940s. 

Each of these endured suffering for the sake of the cause they took up. The darkness they charged was indeed scary, and exacted its toll. But they lived to see their efforts rewarded and outlived their enemies. 

Haugen’s shares that he has seen inspiring testimonies along this exact theme in his work with his co-workers at IJM in the ten years since its founding. Scary, to be sure. But more than a little invigorating, isn’t it? That such evil and injustice is being confronted, unmasked, and nullified in the lives of many? What darkness might we be called to charge?

just courage 7

“And who is my neighbor?” One of my favorite aspects of this story in Luke’s Gospel (10:25-37) is that Jesus doesn’t answer the question as asked. Instead he answers the question that should have been asked: “How might I act neighborly?” One of our saddest and most consuming quests as humans involves our efforts to declassify someone or some group of people as neighbors. 

Chapter 6 of Just Courage, by Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission, deals with Loving God and Our Neighbor. Haugen points out that the question that mattered to the lawyer in the story was, “Who is my neighbor?” while the question that mattered to Jesus was, “Are you loving your neighbor?”

“For those who take the teachings of the Bible seriously, there can be no doubt that the call to seek justice is fundamental to our devotional life as Christians.” (p. 75)

Haugen puts it to us straight: “while our arguments against the impracticality of doing justice are understandable, they are ultimately not very interesting to Jesus.” (p. 79)

In the face of the hopeless picture painted by media coverage of global social ills and injustices, it is not surprising that motivation can be quite difficult. But we are called to remain steadfast in Christian hope, for “hope is not simply wishful thinking; it is a fruit of the Spirit born of the spiritual discipline of remembering.” (p. 80)

just courage 6

“Just Worship” is the title of chapter 5 in Just Courage: God’s Great Expedition for the Restless Christian, by IJM founder, president, and CEO Gary Haugen. 

Haugen points out that a slight alteration in our directional focus may not be noticeable at first, but will have huge consequences down the road. For example, consider an airplane that is a degree or so off in its directional setting when it takes off. Not much of a difference at first, but before long the plane is very much off course. The same may be said of our Christian witness. It’s helpful to think about this for both ourselves and our churches—are we heading in the right direction? Read the Old Testament, survey Church history. You’ll find this is unfortunately common among the people of God. How are you and I and we doing? 

Our worship says so much about what we believe about God. My friend JD has said that worship involves two basic things: faith expression and faith formation. The second of those–faith formation–is important here. There’s no question of if we are being formed in our faith. The question is: how? Perhaps, also: how well? 

In the prophetic literature of the OT, the word of the Lord comes to the people, rejecting their faith expression in worship because to accept it would be to affirm the apparently awful faith formation that has taken place so far, a faith formation that has allowed them to be comfortable with offering animal sacrifices as worship to YHWH but not the sacrifices that accompany just living—help for the poor, stewardship of creation, freedom for the oppressed. 

Haugen points out, “God is displeased with worship that does not include the ministry of justice.” (p. 69)

How is our worship? What is the directional setting of our worship this Advent season? 

PS: JD Walt is posting a series on Worship and Mission. Check out the latest here.

just courage 5

Chapter 4 of Gary Haugen’s Just Courage deals with the “The God of Justice.”

Beginning with his approach to teaching children math skills–give them disproportionate amounts of candy, Haugen points to a basic “hard-wiring” in humanity–fairness and justice: “As any parent of small children will tell you, children have an amazingly acute sense of justice.” (p. 62) This virtually universal innate sense of fairness comes from our basic resonance with the divine seed of justice that lives within humanity, if only as a signpost pointing us to the reality of an origin for that sense of Justice.

Haugen, as he does well throughout the book, offers a simple definition for injustice: “the abuse of power by taking from others what God has given to them.” (p. 63) And, he points to the clarity concerning God’s response to injustice in the Bible. “God’s position is straightforward. God hates [injustice] and wants it to stop.” (p. 63) Clarifying further God’s character as it relates to justice and injustice, Haugen offers a three-part answer to the question, “What does it mean to say that God is a God of justice?” (p. 63)

1. God is a God of compassion (Psalm 116:5), which derives from Latin, meaning “to suffer with.”
2. God is a God of wrath. God’s wrath is something of a controversial subject for some. No doubt part of the reason is the uneasiness many have with working out the amount of violence in parts of the Old Testament on the one hand with the teaching and witness of Jesus in the New Testament. Regarding injustice, Haugen keeps it straight-forward: God responds with righteous anger in the face of injustice, cruelty, and evil. When people endure torture and abuse, when a woman or girl is raped, when persons are enslaved, God gets angry. But God’s anger “is not the same as human anger–anger that is often disproportionate or of mixed motives.” Any anger on God’s part is righteous and warranted. This reminds me of a John Ortberg sermon I once heard that touched on justice in which he shared this thinking (which I think Ortberg attributed to CS Lewis): “Anger is what love bleeds when it is cut.” This is the way to understand God’s righteous anger at injustice.
3. God is a God of rescue. God doesn’t sit passively by with all of his compassion and wrath building up inside. He acts. He is a God of rescue (Psalm 35:10). The obvious and difficult question, however, is “What’s God’s plan for rescue?” Haugen’s answer in Just Courage is one of my favorite lines from his Leadership Summit talk: “The answer to this question is clear in God’s Word, and yet the answer is also surprising. It turns out that we are the plan” (p. 65, emphasis original). Then, in his Leadership Summit talk, he added, “…and there is no back-up plan!” This is indeed staggering because we can all think of times we failed to hear and/or act on God’s call for us to be his agents of rescue in the world. But we can hear and act on that call in the present.

“seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1:17, NRSV)

just courage 4b

In the previous post, I began a look at chapter 3 in Gary Haugen’s Just Courage: God’s Great Expedition for the Restless Christian. In the first part of the chapter, Haugen challenges us to take up the call of God to “seek justice” (Isaiah 1:17) for those in greatest need. He asserts that this is the “surprising path to courage” for a church that is, well, bored and uncourageous…but restless, aware there is something more.

This path to courage via seeking God’s justice leads us into a confrontation with violence: “Rather than run from such ugliness, Christians have to actually go looking for it” (p. 51). Haugen describes why violence is different from the other large-scale problems in the world today, even though they are “worthy of our urgent attention” (p. 50): “Violence is intentional. Violence is scary. And violence causes deep scars.” In the pages following, he presses each point further. Violence is intentional. Women and children trapped in a brothel are there because violent people intentionally trapped them and intentionally victimize them. Violence is scary because it fights back when opposed. Hunger, for example, does not attack those who seek to eradicate it. But violence does. Finally, the deep scars of violence are so multi-dimensional. When the physical scars heal, the psychological ones remain.

The secrets of violence that Haugen and his colleagues at IJM have learned over the past few years touch on how to address the issues discussed above. First, “those who prey on the poor are not brave” (p. 54). Second, “most fundamentally the predators are afraid of the truth” (p. 55), and third, “the oppressors of the poor are afraid of going to jail” (p. 57).

The Christian response to this sort of violence is compelling. Reflecting on Jesus’words, “perfect love casts out fear,” Haugen tells of an IJM colleague who, in response to enduring violence himself while working to free modern-day slaves from their owners, had this to say: “When it happened to me, now I could feel it, I could feel the pain they must have every day. I want to help them even more. You can see their lives changed. When you see people changed, that is why I am not afraid to do what I do, even though I know the risks” (p. 58).

This is indeed “just courage.” This is conviction for us.

just courage 4a

Chapter 3 of Gary Haugen’s Just Courage introduces us to “The Surprising Path to Courage.” Though we sense the disconnect between our actual lives and the New Testament vision for the Christian life, we hesitate to cross the gap. Haugen proposes the solution thus: “God is calling his people to a pathway out of fear and triviality through the struggle for justice in his world” (p. 38, author’s emphasis).

Haugen points us to the emphasis on God’s justice in both the OT and the words of Jesus, saying that “in both instances, the first calling on the short list is justice” (p. 39, author’s emphasis).

• Micah 6:8: “to act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
• Matthew 23:23: Jesus rebukes religious leaders of his day for neglecting “the more important matters of the law–justice, mercy, and faithfulness.”

In a vivid and chilling metaphor from suburbia, Haugen describes how the cul-de-sac was intended for safety but turned out to be more dangerous than its predecessor. Instead of protecting children from through-traffic, which was thought to be the danger, the cul-de-sac ended up being more dangerous since children are more often injured by cars backing up (cul-de-sac) than by forward-moving cars (through-streets). Haugen asserts that Western Christianity in large part moved into a relational cul-de-sac in order to protect itself from the dangers of the world. But the effect has been “lethal to the soul”: “spiritual atrophy, mediocrity, and boredom” (p. 44). Jesus’call is to a “better way,” a grand adventure that is challenging to the core, but healthier for the soul because it is aligned with the mission and heart of God: “seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isa 1:17).

In seeking justice, the organization that Haugen leads, International Justice Mission, specifically targets abuses of violence against humanity. This is dealt with in the remainder of chapter 3, which will be the subject of the next post in this series.

just courage 3

In chapter 2 of Gary Haugen’s Just Courage, the author begins by asking a question:

Jim Rayburn, the founder of Young Life, a nationwide youth ministry, used to say, ‘It’s a sin to bore a kid with the gospel.’But what about adults? Is it okay to bore grown-ups with the gospel? (p. 25)

Haugen points out that, having been rescued from sin and brokenness and all the tears us away from God, and having had the adventurous gospel and abundant life described in Scripture promised to us, many of us feel as though something isn’t right: “at the end of the day we thought our Christian life would be more than this—somehow larger, more significant, more vivid, more glorious.” Every Christian must at some point ask and wrestle with the question, “Now what?” Haugen’s prescription for discovering the answer to that question is found in asking another one: “For what?” He writes, “For what purpose have we been rescued and redeemed? In order to know what is supposed to come next, we must have a clear understanding of the ultimate destination of our spiritual journey” (p. 28)

This reminds me of one of those “gospel presentation” verses in the Bible that is sometimes used to help us respond to God’s gift of salvation in its personal reconciliation dimension, Ephesians 2:8-9, which reads:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. (TNIV)

Unfortunately, verse 10 is usually absent. When we read it along with verses 8-9, we actually get a better picture of what “salvation” is actually all about (compare with James 2 re: faith and works) and we move toward the answer to the “for what?” question:

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (TNIV)

Haugen answers the question primarily by pointing to Jesus’words in the “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew’s Gospel, “You are the light of the world” (5:14). This is a grander vision that anything we could have dreamed up—”it’s not that we have too much ambition for ourselves; it’s that we don’t have nearly enough” (p. 31). If the gospel envisions us as part of a great rescue operation, why do we miss that calling?

Haugen offers three reasons. I’ll only list and describe them briefly because he’ll come back to each and address them in future chapters.

1. Ignorance. We may not be aware of the depth of need. We might have an inkling of it, but this is a challenge of suburban Christian life—most of us moved to the suburbs to avoid deep problems, not to be called to engage them. Therefore, we may have found ways of protecting our ignorance. We may not be doing this out of sinister plotting, just more or less by accident, not paying attention to what has happened.
2. Despair. Others of us know so much about the depth of human need both near and far from us that we get into a cycle of despair. Our problem is not ignorance but paralysis. We help where we are in some meaningful ways, but don’t get much into the greater struggle.
3. Fear. Some of us, though, are simply afraid to respond: “The world of disastrous human suffering is scary, and for very understandable reasons we are afraid” (p. 33).

We don’t like these qualities, but one or more of them may be true of us… This is the dilemma personally. This is the dilemma addressed throughout the remainder of the book: How do we go “from rescued to rescuer?”