Get Out More

Get Out More April 28, 2017

Screen Shot 2016-10-15 at 9.10.12 AMBy John Frye

Get Out More

The problems of the Jewish church of Jerusalem with the various Gentile churches blossoming under Paul’s ministry tell me that the Jewish believers needed to get out more. Travel is a wonderful benefit to seeing the robust power of the gospel at work. Paul, once immeshed in Judaism, was liberated by the risen Christ and told to pack his bags. Get your tickets, Paul, for the major cities of your world. Unlike Peter who delicately stepped into Cornelius’s house, saying, “You know how illegal it is for me, a Jew, to be here,” Paul, at Jesus’s command, raced through customs as fast as he could to get about multi-ethnic church planting. The gospel was built to break down barriers, to widen the human perception of the love and power of God.

I can’t shake some counsel a seminary prof shared with his classes. Given the choice to buy books or travel, he exhorted travel. I know I’m stepping on toes sharing this with bibliophiles. (Isn’t one-T Scot always telling us about books we have to read!) My prof wasn’t against books. He said, “Buy tools.” That is, books you’ll use a lifetime. This was before the digital age. Don’t waste your money buying the popular fluff. Read those books at the local Christian college or seminary library. Save and invest in travel. “See the world” was his advice. I always wondered why he was so adamant until I had a chance to travel.

Jacques Ellul, a professor of the history of institutions among other disciplines, wrote somewhere (I can’t find the quote) that the church will always absorb the prevailing values of the dominant culture. This was glaringly obvious when I left the USA where the church chased after big business concepts and shopping mall techniques and I landed in Kiev, Ukraine. There I discovered that the church had absorbed the communistic, top-down, suspicion-driven view of leadership. The young leaders I was training lamented being viewed as subversive by the old church regime that survived (to its credit) under communism. I think it is very instructive to listen to leaders in other cultures describe USAmerican evangelicalism. Like my mom use to say, “It’ll knock you off your high horse.”

I get a chance to go to India very soon. I’ve been there one time. I was in Delhi with other pastors and Christian business men on October 31, 1984, the day Indira Gandhi was assassinated. We saw massive waves of people flooding the streets like an incarnate stormy ocean. Our guide told us we were in danger. There was rioting, fires, deaths all over Delhi. We were quarantined to our hotel. I missed seeing the Taj Mahal. I remember reflecting after a day of travel through a huge city about the literal millions of people I saw. That night I journaled that I had lost the concept of “the individual.” I wrestled with the Reformed concept of election: “us and no more.” I also journaled that if I did not believe in the gospel’s power to win nations, I’d likely become a gun runner for the sake of the desperate poor of India. I would have never thought these things in the comfort of my church office in Grand Rapids, MI.

I have had the good fortune in God’s providence to travel to Trinidad, Venezuela (oh, the mountain barrios), Paraguay (up river in a boat), Turkey, Israel, India, Ukraine, Japan (for a summer while in seminary), Austria, Venice Italy, Mozambique, Egypt, Ethiopia, Canada, and Texas. The country of Texas was where my wife was born. When you gather with the church in a Maputo garage or a clay building in Paraguay or a cobbled-together tin hut in a poor Indian village or an old theater in Vinnytsya or a bank lobby in Ada, OK, you begin to discern what really matters—the transformed lives permeated with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

You might push back, “Why travel? The Internet brings the world to us.” The Internet also brings “how to have sex” videos and that’s definitely not the same as loving relations with your spouse. So, really travel. Feel the change in weather. Taste the change in food. Hear the change in language. See the change in people’s faces and clothing customs. Wonder of wonders, meet the beautiful, making-the-many-into-one, Jesus, as he is resident in his stunningly diverse church. There is nothing as awesome as sensing the deep unity in Christ with people who are totally not like you.

Save some money. Get out more. I think Paul would like that. So would Jesus.


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