A pastor came and spoke at our church on Wednesday night from Honduras. His name is Pastor Israel and he trains pastors in the mountains of Honduras. The Cove has sent quite a number of people from the church to work with him there and every one that comes back says the same thing. Pastor Israel is widely known for being the man. He has influence. He has pull. The kind of quiet and unspoken pull of a Don Corleone. But not in a menacing way. Either way, his nicknames are “El Heffe” and “The Godfather”. He speaks very little English and used a translator during the message that sounded like he was straight out of the mountains of North Carolina. But, even in Spanish there was power in what he was saying. His message was simple, but filled with the Spirit.
When speaking about turning the other cheek and how only a true worshipper of Christ could conceive of this, the translator asked Pastor Israel for a moment to speak to the congregation. He told of helping the Pastor and his family pack their bags and move from a place they had lived and ministered for quite some time. Everyone in the family wept over how they had been hurt by a member of the congregation. Pastor Israel had been severely wounded by this person. The next day when the Pastor was at the grocery store he saw this same person. He hugged the man and invited him to dinner without ever letting on that the man had done anything. The man never knew how much he had hurt Israel by how strongly he had been shown love in return.
Another man in this same vein is Pastor Jackson from Kenya that’s in partnership with Port City. When you hear these guys pray or speak there is always a richness of the Spirit in their words. It was the same thing with pastors and missionaries that spoke at both of the Urbana conventions I attended. It always leaves me with a sense that the power of God is tangible with them. You get a genuine sense that there’s very little disconnect between their words and their experience. Between what they are calling people to and what they are actually living.
It also leaves me with a sense that in the Western Church, something is missing. Something has gone awry. I wholly believe that there are massive saints of the faith in many of our churches. But, with many, many believers in our churches I find a disconnect in all of the spiritual information we fill our minds with and the fruit of our lives. If you’ve read much of my blog, you can see that is evident within my own life. Many words, few actions.
When I listen to these men speak their few words something in my chest screams out to be, do and live something genuinely and passionately like Jesus.
Relevance is a great tool, but I think it may take center stage too often in the churches most of us attend. It brings people in who would otherwise feel alienated by some of the old styles of worship, but it takes a lot of work to create that environment and easily becomes the end rather than the means! Once they are there, everything else must be Christ.
Once the Spirit does all of the work to get me to this point of reflection, everything else must be Christ from here on. It’s what He calls me to. Pastor Israel said, “What if your physical heart took a vacation? You would die. It is the same with our hearts following Christ. No vacations. Ever again. Every day. Every minute. Until meet Him.”
Pastor Jackson at Port City’s 10th birthday.
Pastor Israel at The Cove Wednesday night.
“This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.”
-C.S. Lewis
