just courage 2

In chapter one of Gary Haugen’s Just Courage, the CEO of International Justice Mission (IJM) offers a personal experience as a paradigmatic illustration of the lives of so many Christians, particularly in the comfortable Western world.

He describes his reticence at going on an adventurous afternoon trek up Mount Rainier with his dad and brothers. “With… mounting anxieties beating in my little chest, I responded the only way a ten-year-old can to such a proposition and simply said: “No. That looks boring.” Instead of choosing the uncertainty of adventure, he spent the hours they were going up and back on the mountain in the visitor’s center. It was interesting, safe, and–after not too long–boring and dull:

“As the afternoon stretched on, however, the massive visitor’s center started to feel awfully small. The warm air felt stuffy, and the stuffed wild animals started to seem just–dead. The inspiring loop videos about extraordinary people who climbed the mountain weren’t as interesting the sixth and seventh times, and they made me wish I could be one of those actually climbing the mountain instead of reading about it. I felt bored, sleepy and small–and I missed my dad. I was totally stuck. Totally safe–but totally stuck.

Haugen likens this experience to the lives of many Western Christians, opting for safety over adventure, even though it ends up meaning time at the visitor center rather than out where the real action is going on. He writes, “it is my sense that many Christians are starting to suspect that they are stuck at the visitor’s center. They suspect that they are travelling with Jesus but missing the adventure.”

It is here that Haugen introduces a most practical insight. Our call to the adventure of following Jesus will demand that we enter into terrain that makes us vulnerable and calls us beyond places our natural abilities, skills, and giftedness could take us. Haugen takes care to point out that in the midst of following Jesus on this sort of adventure, we don’t lay our abilities, skills, and gifts aside. Rather, we employ them in the service of a “higher climb,” to remain with the mountain-trekking metaphor. Our abilities, skills, and gifts are given to us for a reason, and they tell us something about what God will likely do with us (though God certainly has room to surprise us!). But when they are enlisted in a higher climb than they, by themselves, would warrant, we begin to see God at work among and through us, doing what we couldn’t do on our strength alone. That is a vision for a truly exciting, though scary, place to be.

just courage 1

Alright, I’m finally ready to start some blogging of the book Just Courage: God’s Great Expedition for the Restless Christian, by Gary Haugen, founder, president, and CEO of International Justice Mission (IJM).

I picked up the book at this year’s Willow Creek Leadership Summit, a great event I blogged a little about here and here, after hearing Gary’s talk on leadership. His talk did have a leadership angle, for certain. But much of the message dovetailed clearly into the thrust of this book (many of the illustrations and points overlap). I didn’t mind a bit–it was nice to have them in written form.

A few words of introduction. Gary left the US Department of Justice in 1997 to found IJM as a response to his Christian conviction and sense of calling about God’s demand for justice for the least and for those who are victims of some of the worst evil in our world today: modern slaves, girls forced to work in brothels, and others who are victims of violence and abuse and need rescue.

I have found that his book, written with much insight yet remarkably accessible to any youth or adult reader, speaks to me as a “restless Christian,” the identifying term in the book’s subtitle. I truly want to live a life of significance for the kingdom of God and the gospel of Christ.

A couple of take-aways from the Summit talk and the book, taken together…

1. From the talk, I was so inspired by the work of IJM, I almost forgot the most pointedly worded challenge to us: “Leaders lead people in what matters most to God.” This point may certainly be extrapolated out to all activities of the Church and of individual Christians as a criteria for deciding what to put our energy and resources into: those things that matter most to God. Seeking justice for persons in the most desperate need must be at the top of that list. Also, forming people in the robust biblical understanding of the gospel and the kingdom, such that seeking justice in radical ways, like IJM does, isn’t perceived as rare or radical–this is just the sort of stuff Christians do!
2. We need to embrace the work of Christ to make us brave rather than the false security of supposing that Jesus came to make us safe. How this simple shift would revolutionize the way we follow Jesus.

Thoughts?