Love Revolution, The Read online

  Jamie gave her life to Jesus and she wouldn’t miss church now. She is married, has two children, and her entire family is part of the inner-city outreach, which ministers to people living on the street. Jamie likes doing that because she realizes she could easily have been among them!

  Wouldn’t it have been tragic if Jamie had ended her life as she thought of doing on that day she had such a sad church experience? I hate it when people try church thinking they have tried God, and then give up on Him because the church they tried did not represent Him properly. Let’s make sure we include all kinds of people in our circle. Don’t ever exclude anyone because they are not like you. We all have people we consider our closest friends and that is not wrong, even Jesus had three of the twelve disciples with whom He spent more time with than He spent with others. But He never slighted anyone or made them feel anything less than totally valuable.

  LOVE REVOLUTIONARY

  Pastor Paul Scanlon

  The local church is the best idea God ever had! We are God’s “pay it forward” community, we are His overflow, His expression, His smile, and His address in town. Sadly, many churches don’t realize this, and as a result, millions within reach of God’s house die in the sorrow of their own houses, never recognizing Jesus through the disguise of religion and irrelevancy many churches wear.

  Crossing Over

  Ten years ago, our church went through an extreme makeover and the pain was excruciating. We call it our “crossing over,” and the story of that process has now become a book by the same name, which journals our story in detail. The average church size in the United Kingdom, where we are located, is twenty people, and 98 percent of the population not only does not attend church but is actually “anti-church.” So by British standards we were a fairly large church of more than 450 people at that time, based in a building that was almost paid for. We were close, happy, and prosperous. We enjoyed great preaching and were a very gifted church musically and creatively. Yet despite all of this, something huge was missing. Something deeply fundamental was absent, but nobody seemed to notice.

  We were trapped in what seemed like an endless cycle of looking after what could only be described as “high-maintenance, overfed, and under-exercised Christians.” High-maintenance Christians are one of the devil’s best-kept secrets in his plan to neutralize the church. These are some of the nicest people you will ever meet, and therein lies the problem! None of these people were unhappy or had “bad hearts” or poor attitudes. Looking back, I would have preferred that because it would have made the need for our reinvention easier to sell.

  Pastors all over the world are at a loss to describe what’s missing in their churches and ministries, and they don’t want to appear restless or negative by saying so, like the boy in the story The Emperor’s New Clothes who pointed out what was so obvious to everyone around the emperor: he didn’t have any clothes on.

  When everyone is so happy, loving, friendly, and blessed, who wants to announce that we are dying? But in late 1998 I became that boy, and for the first time in twenty years, I had to point at our church and say, “We are naked, comfortable, intense, safe, and irrelevant”—and that included me. It was not easy for us to see this because, like many churches, we had a theology and language about reaching the lost but were not actually reaching anyone. We prayed for the lost, preached and sang about the lost, we even wept over the lost, but no lost were being rescued. We had become an inward-looking religious club, and in our comfort and blessing had lost sight of God’s heart for others who were still missing and hurting.

  In January 1999, I preached a message entitled, “We Are Leaving the 99 in ’99,” referring to Jesus, who described Himself as a shepherd who leaves the majority—the 99—for the one still lost. I explained this meant those already in the church could no longer be our first priority, but that our priority must become others. This was when I discovered that hell hath no fury like a neglected Christian! I was stunned by the reaction of good, Spirit-filled people who, when push came to shove, could not stomach the idea of our beautiful church being trashed by an influx of dirty sinners.

  In my continued efforts to get our comfortable and exclusive members club back into the life-saving business, I launched a bus ministry in 1999. How God told me to do this is a story in itself. But suffice to say it was unusual enough to convince me that it was a “God idea,” because the last thing I needed was just a good idea.

  Well, within weeks we were busing in hundreds of those dirty sinners. These unchurched, often rough, rude, and unpredictable people ruined our beautiful club. They were referred to as the “bus people” by our respectable members, who viewed them as a threat to our safety and stability. Every day I received unpleasant, often nasty and threatening letters and phone calls from people I loved, and who I’m sure loved me, but who just didn’t get it. The kids who came on the buses were accused of ruining our Sunday school, and their parents were accused of ruining the main service, usually by smoking, swearing, and worst of all, wait for it, actually daring to sit where our long-standing members usually sat.

  Wave after wave of leaders came to see me, urging and persuading me to stop, but it was too late. God’s heart for the lost had found my heart and I was becoming completely unreasonable. For almost two years I endured the greatest loneliness, isolation, and personal attack I had ever experienced. And what made it all the more difficult to endure was that it was all friendly fire from people who had clearly forgotten that they too had once been drowning at sea and yet someone had come looking for them.

  When all of this failed to dissuade me, the “prophecy crowd” arrived. These were the so-called prophetic types among us. They started to make appointments to see me, often coming in groups, to share what God had told them to tell me. Their message amounted to this: “If you don’t stop this, our church will split, you and your family will suffer, leaders will leave, finances will drop, and our testimony in the country will be damaged.” But to me, just because the price was going to be high did not mean that God was saying, “Don’t do it.” If He was sending messages He was simply saying that if I did do it, here was a heads-up about the cost. My reply could only be that I agreed, because most of that was already happening. Many were leaving, and without their giving we were dropping tens of thousands of dollars a month. We were slowly growing back those who were leaving but with poor people—and the poor not only have no money but are expensive to reach and expensive to sustain.

  Getting the local church to reach their communities is still for me the greatest battle we face across the church in the world today. And if that’s true, the biggest shaking for the church is still to come. Maybe as pastors we will have to be willing to lose hundreds to gain thousands and even thousands to gain millions.

  I love the local church. I’ve been in the same one for more than thirty years, twenty-six of those in full-time ministry there. But as much as I love the church, I refuse to die in the comfort of soft Christianity. I have determined to live full and die empty. I cannot do that within the four walls of the local church, and neither can you.

  In the early days of Jesus’ ministry, He went to a town called Capernaum. The people loved Him; they were amazed by His teaching and His power over demons and sickness. They loved Him so much that on the day He was about to leave town, Luke tells us that the people came to Him and tried to keep Him from leaving (see Luke 4:42).

  His response to their no-doubt persuasive attempts to keep Him is both stunning and profound. Stunning in its simplicity, and profound because of the insight it gives into His priorities and driving force. Jesus looked into the eyes of all those blessed people and simply said, “I can’t stay here with you any longer because I was sent to reach other people in other places and I must go and preach the good news to them also. Did you get that? I was sent to reach others, others, others!” (see Luke 4:43). It’s all about others.

  If you could cut God, He would bleed others. But if we could cut the church, sadly, we would
bleed ourselves. We bleed our blessing, our comfort, and our happiness. Of course, there are exceptions to this, but the exceptions are far too rare to believe we are tipping the balance in favor of others. For generations, the church, like the people of Capernaum, has been trying to keep Jesus to itself, and for generations Jesus has been trying to leave comfortable Christianity to continue reaching others. This fundamental misunderstanding about what matters most to God is at the heart of the church’s failure to impact a hurting world.

  We are blessed to be a blessing; we are saved to seek and save others. We are healed to heal, forgiven to forgive, and we are loved to join God’s great Love Revolution. It is not about me, us, ours, me, or mine. It has always been about others.

  The apostle Paul said that even the comfort we receive from God does not belong to us alone: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows” to others (2 Cor. 1:3–5 NIV).

  Even our troubles don’t belong to us exclusively; within them is the seed of another person’s comfort, hope, and inspiration. My blessing is not my blessing; my mercy is not my mercy; my grace not my grace; and ultimately, my life not my life. It all belongs to others, and those others were once you and me.

  Watching good people you love and with whom you’ve “done life” for twenty years leave the church is extremely painful. The pain of sometimes having to separate from those we thought we would grow old with is also a birth pain. Of course, at the time it is difficult to see anything good in something so bad, but whatever we can’t leave is where we stop, and if we stop we will never know what could have been. God never makes reluctant people move on; we have to decide to move on. In every sorrow there’s a seed, and mine was the seed of the new church that we were becoming, a life-saving church.

  In late 1998, I had led the church into the biggest building project we, and maybe any church in our country in recent history, had ever attempted, a two-thousand-seat auditorium. I did this out of my growing conviction that if I built it, the lost would come. I only wish they had come sooner, because by the time we held our first service in the new building our church had shrunk down to about 300 people. I have to tell you that no matter how creative you may be with chairs, there’s only so much space you can put between them without people feeling that they’re not in the same room! Three hundred in a two-thousand-seater looked a mess, especially when we had our existing six-hundred-seat facility just across the parking lot.

  This was January 2000, and on that day God gave me a word from the story of Isaac re-digging his father’s wells (see Gen. 26). Isaac moved on from the first two wells he dug because the Philistines filled them in. He named them Esek and Sitnah, meaning “contention” and “resistance.” He moved on and dug a third well, but this time no one quarreled or filled it in. He named this third well Rehoboth, meaning “room,” saying, “Now God has made room for me.” On that first Sunday morning service in our two-thousand-seat auditorium, I looked at three hundred worn-out, pretty beat-up people and preached a message called, “Well Number Three Is Gonna Be a Gusher.” After almost two years of contention and resistance, I believed the time for our Rehoboth had come. Now, years later, with a church of thousands, our Rehoboth has truly come.

  During the final hours of Jesus’ life, standing in Pilate’s court, He was given the chance of freedom by being offered to the crowd along with a man named Barabbas. It was customary at the feast to release a prisoner whom the people requested. Barabbas was a convicted murderer and a rebel leader. Jesus hadn’t been convicted of anything, and all He had ever done was help people. Yet, amazingly, the crowd shouted for Barabbas to be released and for Jesus to be crucified. The truth is the world would always prefer a rebel over a revolutionary. The dictionary defines a rebel as “someone who is resistant or defiant against a government or a ruler.” But a revolutionary is “someone who overthrows a government or social order in favor of a new system.”

  This book is about a Love Revolution, not a love rebellion. We are not rebelling against the world; we are seeking to revolutionize it. God so loved the world that He sent us an alternative, not an ultimatum. Our leader, Jesus Christ, is a revolutionary, not a rebel; He overcomes by replacing, not condemning. This becomes our challenge. If the church is to love the world, we must find new ways of loving the unlovely and including the excluded without being judgmental. We must live “behind enemy lines,” not as a resistance movement, but as a replacement movement. We are God’s alternative society.

  While traveling through an airport in the United States recently, I noticed an older lady with a cane, struggling to place her belongings on the security screening belt. The security agent was stern with her and although seeing her stressed and struggling, did nothing to help her. I instinctively started grabbing her stuff and loading it onto the conveyer belt. On the other side, I waited with her to help retrieve everything from the belt. I will never forget how she looked at me and with a smile of relief said, “Thank you so much; your kindness compensated for that man’s unkindness.” That lady put into words my deepest conviction about the church: the church is God’s compensation factor for a hurting world.

  To compensate is “to give back, to reduce or balance out the bad effect of loss, suffering or injury by exerting an opposite force or effect.” We are God’s opposite effect; we balance out the pain and suffering in our communities. As ambassadors and merchants of love and hope, we bring a smile to the face of a stressed and struggling world. Compensation doesn’t change what happened, but it can reduce the effect of what happened. A Love Revolution is part of God’s great compensation plan for a world that has forgotten how to smile.

  Our native environment is not the church; it’s the world—not the comfortable club but the dangerous ocean. We were born to thrive in the adversity and hostility of a broken world. Like fish, which do better in water, we do better among a lost world because, like fish, we were designed to always stay in that native environment. Remove a fish from the water and it dies. Remove a flower from the soil and it dies. Remove the church from the world and we die. Fish don’t ever feel wet because water is their home, and yet many Christians have a huge allergic reaction to their native environment. We are like fish toweling ourselves dry on the beach! A ridiculous image, I know, but a graphic and appropriate one nonetheless.

  The Bible often portrays the church in a hostile environment. We are described as salt in a rotten world, light in darkness, sheep amongst wolves, foreigners and aliens away from our country. We were designed to thrive in hostility. We are the church, the only part of heaven built to prosper in a world poisoned by hell. We are God’s revolutionary army sent to start a Love Revolution—and that revolution has to start in you and me today!

  CHAPTER

  9

  Make People Feel Valuable

  So let us then definitely aim for and eagerly pursue what makes for harmony and for mutual upbuilding (edification and development) of one another.

  Romans 14:19

  One of the easiest ways to help fuel a Love Revolution is to decide to make others feel valuable. Mother Teresa said, “Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat,” and I have discovered that most people we meet or come into contact with in our everyday lives do not have a sense of their infinite value as children of God. I think the devil works very hard to make people feel devalued and worthless, but we can neutralize the effect of his lies and insinuations by building people up, encouraging, and edifying them. One way to do this is with a sincere compliment, which is one of the most valuable gifts in this world.

  One of the easiest ways to help fuel a Love Revolution is to decide to
make others feel valuable.

  Most people are quick to compare themselves with others, and in doing so, they often fail to see their own abilities and worth. Making another person feel valuable isn’t expensive and doesn’t have to be time consuming. All we need to do is get ourselves off of our minds long enough to think about someone else and then find something encouraging to say. Making people feel valuable won’t cost any money, but it gives them something worth more than anything money can buy. Offering a sincere compliment may seem like a small thing, but it gives tremendous strength.

  I believe in having goals, and as I was working with God to develop good habits in the area of encouraging others I challenged myself to compliment at least three people each day. I recommend that you do something similar to help you become an aggressive encourager.

  Don’t Forget the Forgotten

  People often feel lonely and forgotten. They may feel they work very hard but that nobody notices or cares. I remember a woman who told me she had felt invisible for most of her life. I remember the pain on her face as she recalled the way her parents basically ignored her. She felt isolated and terribly alone, which made her feel unwanted. Her parents were young when she was born; they were not ready to have a child and they were very selfish and self-centered. They gave her no affection or emotional support at all. She said she spent most of her childhood and teenage years alone in her room, reading.