A Simple, Clear Witness

Arloa Sutter’s book, The Invisible: What the Church Can Do to Find and Serve the Least of These, is one of the finest examples one can find today of two things:

What missional means.

What witness looks like.

Arloa has labored for three decades or so in Chicago’s cracks, finding the homeless, ministering to those in need, and this book is nothing but — and I’m grateful it is just that — a simple, clear witness of a life devoted to “the invisible,” those whom we ignore, those who go unnoticed, and those who are often within our vision — if we will but look. Those who know Arloa love her, and there is ample witness here too in her blurbs — Shane Claiborne, Ray Bakke, Don Cousins …

The book is laced together with her story — from Iowa to Chicago to a pastor’s wife in Iowa and back to Chicago. She was at First Free near North Park and is now at River City Community Church and heads up Breathrough Ministries. That word — breakthrough — forms the them for what we need (a breathrough) and of other themes: shalom, presence, Spirit led, stewardship, discipline, joining a movement, and racial understanding.

This is a good book. Full of stories. Straight witness. The power of one. Here’s what missional means.