This past Sunday, King and I spoke at our church. We talked about loving Muslms and God's calling on our lives to share the love of Jesus with them in SE Asia. Who would have thought a few years ago that we would giving the sermon in front of our church, teach and challenging others about loving our Cousins?
So lately, people have been introducing us as missionaries. It's a little weird being labeled a "missionary". In this season of our lives we are learning to really think about our labels...what calling ourselves a "Christian" means and the perception of that word with those who aren't "Christian". The truth is that the connotations behind the word Christian are often negative and associated with extreme religious right, who many see as judgmental hypocrites who will try to get you to pray the "sinner's prayer" because you're going to hell if you don't convert to Christianity.
Please don't get me wrong. We share some of the same values and beliefs as the the religious right and are imperfect people who are also hypocrites. We won't deny that. We are learning how to critically think about what we believe in. We see that we put too many rules attached to being a Christian that we can get the whole thing wrong and thoroughly mess things up for those who might be actually wanting to know Jesus. In short, this is called legalism. We often try to do right and wrong with the best intentions, not knowing any differently. It's what we've been taught to do and think.
So anyway, after careful consideration, King and I have decided to call ourselves followers of Jesus.
I haven't really thought about what we're going to do about the label missionary. I think this term brings up other loaded words and ideas: convert, changing the person's cultural identity, etc. Some of these things we can't get away from. People think we're pretty weird and even out of our minds that we would leave the Orange County life and "downgrade". People won't (and don't) understand. Anyway, that's something for us to think about and post a blog about on another day.
Alright, I'll stop with all the asides. Back to this past Sunday!
Some things that were really cool:
- It wasn't hard at all to prepare for the message. I told the Lord that He would have to be the one to tell us what to say because both King and I didn't want to do anything out of our own wisdom. It was actually quite fun to put together the powerpoint.
- The people that the Lord wanted to be there were there. There were many friends and even a few people who came that we didn't even know.
- We bought a wireless clicker for the powerpoint presentation we put together. I messed up a few times but it was pretty cool...plus, it has the red laser pointer thingy.
- We went way over the usual time allotted to speak, but I think that we said what we wanted to say.
- People learned about loving Muslims, seeing them as equals, and hopefully helping to break stereotypes of Muslims being evil trrorists.
- People told us afterward that they were really blessed and learned a lot.
- We worked well as a team (I, Faye, tended to talk a lot...so I need to work on sometimes being quiet...hehehhe).
