Good News for the Poor, the Captive, the Blind and the Oppressed

I recently accompanied my mother to the radical little Episcopal church outside of town. They were sharing testimonies about their trip to Nicaragua, and one woman began with: "I don't want to sound evangelical, but..." I smiled to myself. How many sentences have I prefaced the same way? For years, I have gone out of my way to assure everyone around me that I had no intention to push my beliefs on them. My reluctance to do anything that might look like evangelism is understandable if you consider that Evangelical Christianity in this country is popularly associated with pushy proselytizing, hidden right-wing agendas, sexism, bigotry, and a shallow, self-righteous spirituality. 

When I arrived in Bolivia in 2010 I started to see evangelism differently. In a country where Protestantism is in the minority, evangelism is humbler, more earnest, and more generous. My Methodist friends see evangelism a gift they freely offer that people can choose to take or leave. They want to share the transcendent hope, the intentional lifestyle and the close-knit community they have found in the midst of a society torn asunder by poverty, corruption, individualism and the disorienting process of incorporation into global capitalism. Evangelism is, by definition, the proclamation of good news. If God has placed good news for their fellow humans in their hearts, why would they not proclaim it?

But of course, Christian evangelism is not just any good news. It is the Good News that Jesus Christ is God incarnate, and he lived, died and was resurrected to redeem the sins of the world and establish a new world in its place. Amen? My "amen" has often been hesitant after such a proclamation. Don't get me wrong. I love Jesus. I love his stories about mustard seeds, widows, and last-minute wedding guests. I love his austere spirituality, his solidarity with the marginalized, his fierce sense of justice, and his tender compassion. And I cannot deny that there is something transcendent and universal about the person of Jesus. I have felt his presence in my life, in my spirit, in my very body. But I struggle with the doctrine that Jesus was the unique son of God, and that he died for the universal redemption of humankind. My own fierce sense of justice cannot comprehend why God's grace would only be available through one culturally particular construct of the spiritual life. I am also suspicious of the idea that incarnation of God can be limited to only one historical male person, as if the divine were not inextricably imbedded in all of us and all of creation. To be honest, I'm just not sure what I believe about Jesus in a cosmic sense. When I talk about God, I often leave Jesus in the background.

Nonetheless, lately everything has conspired to bring me face-to-face with the good news of Jesus Christ and even to channel it through me. All summer, I was preparing to take a trip to Peru for a World Methodist Evangelism Institute seminar. The leaders commended the delegates to prepare ourselves spiritually with journaling, prayer and reflection. I wasn't sure what this preparation would look like for me, with all my uncertainty and skepticism about evangelism, but I remained open to however God might enlighten and transform me as the seminar approached.

God responded by sending me on a last-minute trip to Bolivia. 

It all started because I agreed to help fundraise for the National Methodist Youth Encounter in Bolivia, an event that I was deeply involved in the last time it happened two years ago. My mind started spinning with ways to make the encounter a more transformative experience for the youth, and I wished I could be there to implement my ideas. I started hearing from a string of Bolivian friends who had gotten their hopes up that I might be coming. I was struck by how important my presence was to them. Was it just the novelty of having the pollera-wearing gringa around, or was there really some special inspiration or spirit that I was able to share with them? I wasn’t sure, but my heart started fluttering in my ribcage with the sensation that I was on the wrong continent to carry out God’s mission for me. It seemed irresponsible to pay the exorbitant cost of a last-minute plane ticket. Nonetheless, I prayed that if I was meant to be there, God would confirm it for me. Two weeks before the encounter began, I went to bed knowing that the next day I had to buy a ticket if I was ever going to buy one. Before I fell asleep, I read the Upper Room Devotional for the day, and it just so happened to be based on this passage from 2 Corinthians 9:

You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God. This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of the Lord’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God. Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, others will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else. 

If God has placed some good news in my heart, how could I not proclaim it? I bought my ticket the next day, and eleven days later, I was boarding the plane. 

The XVII National Methodist Youth Encounter brought together an upwards of 1,000 youth from all around the geographical and climactic rollercoaster that is Bolivia, representing a dizzying array of indigenous (and not-so-indigenous) cultures. They gathered from Thursday through Sunday to worship God, to participate in workshops on leadership, Christian formation, evangelism, social issues and the environment, to bond over sports tournaments, and to represent their cultures through music, dance and theatre with a Christian message. 

The encounter was, from one perspective, an organizational disaster. The coordinators confronted one problem after another: a shortage of mattresses for people to sleep on the first day, participants of questionable motivation wandering around uncertain of where and when their workshops were on Friday, and a discombobulated evangelism outing on Sunday. However, none of this prevented the Spirit from working in surprising ways. The event was still able to transform individual hearts, to create bonds of love between participants, and to expose young people to new forms of serving their communities. And all of this was possible because of the mysterious love of Christ that has both freed us and bound us together in a way that many of these youth—myself included—are just beginning to understand.

From another perspective, then, the encounter was a perfect demonstration of how the Kingdom of Heaven manifests in this world—in glimmers and glimpses, always incomplete but somehow breaking into the ordinary even in the midst of all our human failings. Certainly, the event was no dazzling success of molding the up and coming generation of Bolivian Christians into model disciples. But if it had been experienced as such, it probably wouldn't have been honest. Rather, the hope we have in Christ is precisely that God's grace will continue work through our humble, bumbling selves even though we never reach perfection. That, indeed, is good news.

So I will not try to summarize the effect of the encounter in sweeping strokes. I will not count its crowning success as the altar call at the end, or the 160-some residents of Cochabamba who gave the youth their contact information during the door-to-door evangelism activity on Sunday. I will simply offer a few examples of how I personally witnessed glimmers of the Kingdom of Heaven in the experiences we shared together.

  

My principle task at the encounter—the one I had planned, at least—was to give workshops on Wesleyan Groups. The original Wesleyan movement encouraged converts to form small, close-knit groups that met regularly in order to encourage and challenge each other in their spiritual development. I had never even participated in a Wesleyan Group when I decided to lead the workshop. I had heard that we would be doing them at the seminar in Peru, and I immediately knew that I had to bring this idea to the Bolivian youth.  I thought these intimate groups could be an invaluable tool to help them deepen their walk with God and their sense of mission. In many church contexts, the voices of women, youth and other marginal identities are devalued, and these individuals have little chance to reflect their spiritual experiences to the community. Without such sharing, not only does the individual's self-reflective capacity suffer, but the community is all the poorer without the unique wisdom that God has placed in each member.

For me, the Wesleyan Groups were all about nurturing a Christian practice that would manifest the Kingdom of Heaven in a just, peaceful and loving community. However, I enlisted the help of a young Bolivian friend who challenged me to focus first and foremost on the step that comes before building the Kingdom: salvation. The step that requires evangelism. The step that I’ve never really wanted to deal with. My friend Lucio, a sharp-minded young man with a charismatic approach, told me that many people in Bolivia—even among Evangelical Methodists—haven’t truly experienced or understood salvation. Being the hemming-and-hawing progressive North American that I am, I don’t even know what we Christians are being saved from. I’m not so sure about hell or original sin. But I do agree with Lucio that we do need to be saved from some source of evil, and that the renewal of our bodies soul, and spirit is possible through Jesus Christ. This notion of total transformation in Christ is exactly what makes it so powerful to sit around in small groups and answer Wesley's traditional question, “How is it with your soul?” This transformation exactly what gives people the strength and the tenderness to look at their own souls and the souls of others with God’s eyes. Otherwise, as the progressive Western world has shown us, the passion dissolves and people just resort to doing service projects and trying not to sound evangelical—if they keep believing in God at all. 

To my own surprise, I found myself taking Lucio’s advice to heart, and I presented the central purpose of the Wesleyan groups as discussing the "state of our salvation," thereby deepening our understanding of God's redemptive love for each one of us. But unlike Lucio, I do not believe that fully actualizing our salvation is a simple step-by-step process. Even as an individual struggles to understand God's what redemptive love means for her personally, she can begin participating in the radically new way of life that the Reign of God brings to society.  Sometimes, this experience itself is what leads her to a personal relationship with God. Sometimes, people who are already believers are the ones who most need evangelizing to realize the true nature of the new reign that they have been invited to enter. Mortimer Arias, former bishop of the Bolivian Methodist church, writes: "On the way to discipleship, conversion is not merely a point but a permanent process. And, strangely enough, it is the conversion of believers, not nonbelievers, that is the focal point. Evangelization also occurs inside the community of the kingdom!" (Announcing the Reign of God, 53). If the fruits of our salvation are not apparent in a reign of love, justice and peace among us, then further proclamation of the good news is still required.

I realized that part of my evangelism was showing women in the Wesleyan workshops the value of their own voice. Some of the church sisters from rural areas struggled to find the courage to speak even in our small groups. I affirmed that in Christ we all could claim the freedom and the power to share the wisdom that God had placed within each one of us. In one group, a young woman from an Aymara village said that she was studying to be a pastor, and she was slowly learning how to have a voice in public. I told her that she could pray for strength when she was afraid, and God would not only give her the courage to speak, but would give her invaluable things to speak about. Her growing confidence was one of those glimpses of the Kingdom of God that I witnessed in the encounter. On the other hand, some of the young girls in that same group almost refused to say a single word, so great was their fear or their sense of worthlessness. Yet I had to trust that the communion of the group was one way that God was at work in their hearts, and at work in whatever oppressive situations surrounded them, to gradually invite them into the full freedom Christ's good news offers. 

I also experienced in the encounter my own conversion to the power of thinking evangelically. I discovered courage, capabilities and wisdom that I did not know I possessed when I was surrounded by people who believe that the Holy Spirit will empower us in any way we need to share the Gospel. On the Saturday of the encounter, through a strange chain of events, I ended up standing in front of 1,000 people and improvising the narration of a theater piece that told the story of a young woman's dramatic conversion. It reminded me of the times I had to preach a sermon with only a couple minutes' notice in the dorm where I lived in La Paz—except this time multiplying the audience about 100-fold, and without knowing most of them personally.

It all came about because of Carlos Machado—or, if you prefer, Karl Mac, his Americanized name which will serve him well when he embarks on his calling to evangelize the spiritually chilly United States and remind them of the burning love of Christ. Karl came all the way from São Paulo, Brazil to teach theater evangelism techniques to the Bolivian youth.  His ability to get the youth on their feet, moving, laughing, and shouting out interpretations of the freeze-frame "paintings" that they made with their own bodies, was another shimmering manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven. The youth were discovering that creativity inside of themselves that reflects God's own creative power. 

Karl immediately took a liking to me when we met, and enlisted me to help him in his activities. He told me that he could see the Holy Spirit working in me powerfully. He said it with such conviction that I believed him, despite how unholy I feel most of the time. I had been planning to give more sessions of my Wesleyan Group workshop on Saturday, but they re-organized and consolidated the workshops at the last minute to eliminate the chaos that had run rampant on Friday. So Karl invited me to translate from Portuguese to Spanish in his workshop. Afterwards, he took a few of his most inspired students and organized a theater piece to perform that night in front of the entire assembly. He needed me to narrate, because I spoke Spanish and, apparently, the Holy Spirit was working strongly in me. I was to tell the story of a young a woman's life while pairs of actors pantomimed different moments, freezing one by one as I walked among them to construct a timeline of living "statues." Karl only gave me the bare bones of a plot to embellish, and I wasn't even sure if I agreed with the theology implicit in it. But when the moment of the performance arrived, I did feel that the Spirit filled me with fluid, authoritative speech. It went something like this:

This is the story of a young woman who was "in the world," and all that mattered to her was the momentary joys of drinking, going to parties, and hanging out with her friends.

At one of these parties, she met a man and they hit it off. They went 
around together for awhile and lived it up.

But before long, she found herself pregnant, and her boyfriend disappeared.

When her little girl was born, she had no support from her family. Her daughter 

was in frail health, and she could not even afford the medicine.

One day, as she was walking down the street, in low spirits as usual, another young woman, who happened to be a Christian, noticed her. The Christian woman's heart went out to her. She began to talk to the young woman about the grace of Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit opened up that single mother's heart to receive the message. She got on her knees and accepted Christ into her heart at that very hour.

She started attending a church, and she found the strength in Christ, 

in his teachings, and in her spiritual family, to rebuild her life. 

She began to taste true joy—not like the passing joy she had in the parties and 

with her boyfriend, but an eternal joy that can only be found in God. She felt 

complete in her relationship with God, and that she did not even need a partner. 

But then a man arrived in her life, a fellow Christian, and they 

fell in love. He accepted her daughter as his own, and they formed a family 

who walked together in the path of Christ.

To wrap it up, the actors made a half-moon around me and we sang "Renew Me Lord Christ" with my ukulele backing us up. I wasn't sure what we had just done, but it was something that put a sparkle in the eyes of all the young actors. I hoped at the very least that it had taught us something about expressing the unique story that God has placed in all of us to share with the world, whether it fits the mold of the theater piece's rather simplistic conversion story or not. And maybe the people watching also caught a sparkle in their eyes, and experienced some revelation of what it means to be authentically transformed in Christ.

By the end of the encounter, I was still unsure of what exactly the "good news" means to me.  The beliefs that God has placed in my own heart still seem to differ from accepted tradition  on many points. I believe in the importance of forming supportive community bonds and holding each other accountable for our spiritual growth as the Wesleyan small groups make possible, but do I believe in the "fleeing from the wrath to come" that was at the root of all this for Wesley? I believe in the power of religious conversion to give us peace and purpose in our lives, but do I really believe that all that matters for solving a single mother's problems is for her to accept Christ as her savior, as our theater piece suggested? 

But I also have to remember that evangelism is not just these theological caricatures. Evangelism isn't just proclaiming the good news, but embodying it. In this sense, evangelism is breaking bread together and remembering that everything we have is a gift from God. Evangelism is strategizing with my comadre (the mother of my goddaughter) about ways to help her out of the shackles of her poverty. Evangelism is offering healing insights to a friend who had injured his hand in a chain saw accident, and above all giving him the courage to continue with his music when I sang one of his songs with him and his folkloric Christian band, at a time when he was afraid he would never be able to play guitar again. 

These forms of evangelism are not so different from Jesus' own evangelism. When Jesus began his ministry, Luke describes him getting up in the temple and reading a scroll from Isaiah that went: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." It's all there. My comadre, the Aymara women who are afraid to speak, my musician friend in need of healing, the youth who acted in the drama. This is not to say they do not also need eternal salvation, beyond their present needs and desires. But perhaps it is not so easy to distinguish between the good news for this realm—the challenging, teacherly Christ who promotes social justice and practical spiritual cultivation—and the good news for the next realm—the cosmic, unfathomable hope of a Christ who conquered death and is creating a place for all humanity to dwell in eternity with God. At the very least, one without the other is meaningless.