So far, we’ve talked about lofty things: racial reconciliation, foreign and domestic missions, and the role that context plays in how we communicate the message of the Gospel. However, I want to do something a little selfish. My pastor charged us today with the task of writing out our testimony and telling it to someone who would appreciate the issues God has redeemed in our lives. I believe that this someone might include you, and, towards that end, I’d like to share my testimony with you, highlighting aspects of it that might address a few elephants in the room as it pertains to common responses to contextualization. Plus tomorrow’s my birthday (I’m not telling you which one), and I am grateful to God! I should have been shot by now…seriously. One guy shot at me near the house where I grew up. I could have been shot again during high school, but the man never took the gun out of his car. Another incident took place during my college years when a man held the gun to my head, but never shot it. Thank you, Jesus.
I grew up in Austin, Texas, the “nation’s capital” (as it has been called), and, like my hometown, I grew up a nice person, postmodern in my understanding of truth, comfortable in my socially-acceptable addictions, and thinking that I had actually tried the life that I heard Jesus wanted from me and found it wanting (hence the title, “postmodern”).
On a side note, do you know that “postmoderns” call themselves that because they actually think they’ve tried modernity? What about those who label themselves “post-Christians”? What if Christians lived in a way that “post-Christians” had to see they hadn’t tried, that their society hadn’t tried, ever?
Anyway, I was always conscious of culture because of my parents’ differences (my dad’s from Africa), and always conscious of race because…I’m from Austin, but I wasn’t conscious of my sin, or the role that sin played in the realities of race and culture, which were two aspects of life that I was always drawn to. I tried to live in my head because the world around me didn’t have much meaning to me, and when I got old enough to understand what I was feeling, all I felt was numb. It as almost like life was outside of me, so distant that I could be cynical about its very existence, while it was I who just existed, living the life that my niche had carved out for me. I can see that now in the eyes of many of the youth I teach. I had a nice family, and a nice shot at a nice life, but this passion that (I now know) God gave me wouldn’t let me be content with that. So it’s his fault. Call it “irresistible grace,” if you need a label.
It started getting serious during the transition from high school to college, when a friend in high school started talking to me about the Gospel. He was getting through, but he didn’t know it. He was so used to church culture, and I was so offended and hurt by what it represented to me (even though I only went to my grandparents’ church three times a year), that most of our conversations ended in me trying to drown him in philosophy to shut him up. I liked philosophy, but it was just like everything else in my life: nice.
Then I saw this college in the hood when my mom and I drove to Atlanta, and we decided to visit, and the college recruiter told me my whole life story without knowing me, and then preached the Gospel to me! (I never heard of this guy again, though I looked for him for the four years I was there). The first student I met, I ended up in his dorm room until four in the morning, talking about everything in life. And he went with me, into conversations about music and art and girls and philosophy and girls, and it was saturated with Christ! I couldn’t stand it! But I was convicted. The same life that I’d learned to disbelieve in, in order to live the only way I knew how, the same life the guy in high school had shown me existed (though the life he had was dressed up in choir robes and smelled like the “church” I knew and rejected)…and at this point I wish I could say that he was living this life to the fullest. But all I can say is that he had life. He was alive. And here’s the challenge:
Even now, as a Christian, the pragmatic Pharisee in my head still tempts me to exist. And he’s not alone. Everybody from the structure of my society to the voices of relatives is telling me in one way or another to exist in the way that I was already getting very good at. And I was dead. At the same time that I need to outgrow my twenties (I’ll be 29 tomorrow) and learn how to provide for my family, I better not learn how to be a socially-acceptable Christian, because that’s when I’ll start to look like most of the Christians I know right now, after ten years following Jesus. For a video that brings this point home, please watch Paul Washer’s Sermon, “We’re Losing It,” at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlaCzmYBpUQ. It was only a few minutes long, but I cried through it. I hope that you sense the urgency of this point. I hope your heart is pierced with the same passion that I have, because I don’t think this is a side issue.
When the context is you, it’s called worship. God communicates himself to us in ways that navigate around and even break through the barriers of offense that wall us into our private prisons. And one of the things that Christians around me consistently talk about is hearing the voice of God clearly as a young Christian, and when it stopped. I experienced that too, and I don’t hear him regularly now. It doesn’t bother me as long as I’m being faithful to what he told me already. But this next thing bothers me, and it should bother you: what if it’s actually common that Christians shy away from worship, from being real with God, so that he can’t tell them anything that interrupts their “existence”? if that’s us, then I pray that this growing persecution, whether it comes from Muslim intimidation or “post-religious” persecution, would awaken us from our self-imposed prisons.
When the context is others, it’s called missions. After becoming a Christian my first week, God used my college years as boot camp, as he led me to reorganize my life around his own redeemed passion of race and culture and people and a whole lot of other areas that I had twisted and abused understandings of and experiences with. I found that the life he gave me was communicated to me not just in my prayer closet, but also in the interactive background of life, and I started seeing his leading in all sorts of ministry opportunities. Ultimately, these opportunities led me to my wife and to Detroit, to the church that I now gladly call home. But now for the bad news: he also led me to suffer.
His life also led me to sacrifice in ways that I’m still struggling with. I don’t struggle with whether or not they were God’s will for me, I struggle because the consequences are hard to live with. It’s easier with his meaning, his purpose, and his Spirit helping me and guiding me through this, but it’s still hard. But the only way that I can continue to bear my cross and follow him is that there are areas in my life that died.
I want you to ask yourself this question: are there areas of your life that you actually died to your own will in, where only Christ is responsible for what becomes of it? That’s what happened to my love life. That’s what happened to my professional and employment life. That’s what happened to my family life. And I hope that those of you who know me can say “Amen” to that. Those are the only areas that Jesus can use to draw people to himself though you, areas where his resurrected life is lifted up (John 12:32). For those who don’t know me, here’s another side note:
Does it matter now if I tell you that the guy who led me to Christ raps? (You can get his CD at
www.cdbaby.com/cd/redbaronmusic/from/fearofthedrum) Would you like it more if he gave me a tract? Would my conversion be more acceptable if he preached a sermon to me? Hopefully you see where this is going. In the absence of persecution, we cut off our hands and say “I have no need of you” (1 Corinthians 12:21) rather than going through the struggles necessary to make a multi-racial/cultural/generational witness work. But that’s the only witness that Christ says works (John 17:21).
Peace,
Kwasi Agbottah
