"If I was God, I can assure you things wouldn't be this messed up!" the well-dressed senior manager said to me. "In fact, it's what makes me absolutely certain there isn't a God."

 

     We'd been waiting in line together to be frisked by security before boarding a plane. Our conversation naturally settled into vocations and when he heard I was a chaplain, he really cut loose.

 

     This isn't an unusual experience for me. People are angry with the church; they're angry with the public face of Christianity; many are angry with God. (Many of your emails reflect this anger towards the church and Christianity's public face as well.) On this particular day, I represented all of those things to my wealthy and successful line-mate, and he was quite candid.

 

     Why are people angry?

 

     To be sure, some of it comes from the poor way the media expresses the nuance of our faith, choosing caricature over character. And the scandals that pop up around sexual abuse and sexual sin don't help. Neither do the health-wealth gurus who sell a gospel no serious thinker believes. But I suspect the reason for the anger is deeper than those shallow explanations. It comes, I think, from at least two other places: (1) We're not talking about the strong side of the Gospel, to ourselves or to others; and (2) We really are under-performing in the areas where people have a right to expect us to be different.

 

     What do I mean? On the first point: Far too often we engage in a "dip 'em and drop 'em" attitude towards evangelism. We teach people, in the storms of their life, just how broken they are, and how much they need God. This is well and proper, but it isn't the full Gospel. What about the other parts of their lives, when they aren't battered by life's stormy seas? Is God active in them then?

 

     The atonement of Christ makes us new creatures; empowered by the Holy Spirit not only to cease being slaves to sin (though not yet sinless); but also to do the work of God, as His ambassadors. It means we have the ability, in our union with Christ, to accomplish His will, to bring His Kingdom to earth, by choosing to serve in all the places where we find ourselves when He found us. We are no longer weak, no longer broken, no longer powerless in the face of sin's assault on the world. In short, we go from broken vessels to meaningful vassals.

 

     Years of conversations have taught me non-Christians sense this, often better than we do. They intuitively understand God gives His children the resources and the ability to make a difference in how the world operates, but He also gives His children the freedom to choose to serve or sit on the sidelines. At least part of the non-Christians' anger is directed at the way so many of us choose to be spectators, either because we're pre-occupied with a misguided belief we're still our old broken selves, or because we're pre-occupied with grabbing what we can get for ourselves from God. People witness the miracles, majesty and creativity of dwarf wheat or the $100 laptop program and wonder why we (Christians) didn't get there first.

 

     Which brings us to the second point: Service really is evangelism. By choosing to tackle the problems that trouble our souls, and the souls of others, we meet God where He's already at work, and the fruit we produce then is well beyond anything we might have imagined before. Just as Jesus chose to leave the declaration of His spiritual Kingdom to fishermen and tax collectors, so too has He left the shepherding of His physical Creation to us.

 

     So where do we start? By asking one question, repeatedly, in all our spiritual gathering places.

 

 

     That's the question Scripture poses to every believer. It's the question our culture poses to the body of Christ (the church at large). It's the question the "naked, thirsty, hungry" Jesus talks about in Matthew 25 pose to us as individuals.

 

     In fact, it's the one question, perhaps the only question, with the ability to turn a small group from a social gathering to a spiritual experience; to change a church from a consumer organization to a ministry; to change your vocation from a job to a mission. Posing that question can also transform an accountability group from a passive, spiritual self-defense exercise, into an active force for spiritual growth, generating the kind of fruit that pleases God even as it shapes the individuals in the group.

 

     If you're in the storms of life right now, then you do indeed need the comfort of the Psalms, the rest the weary are promised by Jesus, and the shelter that can be found in the bands of fellowship we Christians form with each other.

 

     But when the storm passes, when the stamp of eternity's certainty seals itself in your heart and you discover God wants not just you but your skills and labors and dollars and brains, that's when the joy of eternity on this side of death really grabs hold.

 

     It's also precisely what a waiting world longs to see in someone who says they know Jesus.

 

     What are you prepared to do?

 

 

Here are some other thoughts on this question:

 

What are you prepared to do? (Be willing.)

What are you prepared to do? (Be personally invested in action.)

What are you prepared to do? (Be equipped to be effective.)

What are you prepared to do? (Stop thinking/talking/planning. Get in the game.)