There comes a day when we sit back and ask ourselves what we are going to do with our lives. In a sense, I’m still asking myself that question. But many years ago, while studying Spanish as a university student in Paraguay, I felt a nudge, a call if you will, to spend time in cross-cultural contexts advancing the gospel.

At the time, I had no idea what that entailed. The only role models I had to look to were the missionaries I had met and gotten to know in Paraguay. They were either medical doctors or preachers. As a business student, it seemed I would have to leave behind my business interests and develop a new set of skills.

Thankfully, I’ve always been good with language and have enjoyed speaking and teaching so over the years, that became the primary focus of my ministry. But a few years into my overseas ministry, I began to ask myself some new questions about why couldn’t one be a businessperson and a kingdom builder at the same time?

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There seems to be a serious conflict with our current lives and strongly held concepts about church and ministry.

So many churches that I know of, which are actually great churches, hold to a local church-centric view of ministry. This means that the goal of the staff is to get the lay people involved in ministry, which is defined as either volunteering at the physical church location or through church organized service projects in the community.

Undoubtedly both of those are valuable and needed avenues. However, this is really what I call "faith addition", living your faith means 'adding' certain activities to your already busy life.

The contrast to this is "faith integration', living your faith means integrating your faith into whatever you are doing.

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A while back I wrote a blog post on the often cited quote, “Preach the Gospel always, when necessary use words,” which is attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.

The blog addressed a difficult and challenging relationship of Christian proclamation aka word vs demonstration aka deed.

One inquisitive reader raised the following questions:

1) Jesus seems to prioritize his teaching ministry over his “deed” ministry at various points (e.g. Mark 1:35-39, 3:7-19, 4:1-2 and the parallels in the other synoptic gospels).

2) Jesus seems to describe the ‘self-sacrificial’ life of following him to ‘adhering to his words,’ and doing so is for his sake (which is equated to the gospel’s sake) in Mark 8:31-38.

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Over the weekend I tweeted and updated my facebook status with the simple statement: Muslims killing Christians in Nigeria followed by a simple question: Will we respond like Christ or like humans? It’s always interesting what captures people’s imaginations and provokes response.

After a year of conversations on facebook, I was still amazed at the response the simple status update received. Feel free to check it out here: http://bit.ly/auO0bH

Reflecting on responses, the following points are worth of mentioning:

1) There is no emotion like religious emotion.

Wars over the centuries have demonstrated that religions are frequently front and center in every war. Religious emotion is a product of two things as I see it. First, it is an indicator that people genuinely care. If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t get so upset.

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The Bible starts off with God creating the world, bringing Adam and Eve to life, giving them tasks and walking with them. However, in the biblical account this does not stay that way for very long. Eve deceived by the Serpent eats the fruit of the forbidden tree and Adam, knowing better, follows her lead. The result is what is historically called the Fall of humankind. There were several curses that came about due to the Fall. These curses demonstrate areas of brokenness in our world. The four areas of brokenness are:

1) Abundance: God called Adam and Eve to work the garden, through which they had abundant resources (Gen. 1:28) for their well-being. With the Fall, work has become difficult and these resources became scarce (Gen. 3:17).

2) Relationships: God created Eve as it was not good for people to live alone. We were created for fruitful relationships. With the Fall, these relationships became contentious (Gen. 3:16).

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When followers of Christ become socially conscious about global issues, one of the first things that becomes discussed is the role or necessity of a verbal proclamation of the gospel. There are typically two camps: One believes that the good deeds required to respond to social issues is more or less sufficient; the other emphasizes a verbal proclamation over any type of “physical” service.

These tensions have become highlighted with two recent publications. The first is an article by Mark Galli of Christianity Today entitled “Speak the Gospel Use deeds when necessary”.

The second is The Hole in Our Gospel a book by World Vision USA President Richard Stearns.

Galli is writing from a perspective that demonstrates concern that a verbal proclamation of the Gospel is undermined when deeds are emphasized. He points to the quote, “Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words” which is commonly attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.

Galli shows two important things:

1) There is a good chance that St. Francis never said this since it does not emerge until two centuries after his death. It is unlikely that his followers would not have cited such a pithy phrase.

2) St. Francis regularly preached or verbally proclaimed the gospel, thus demonstrating that he had a high view of such activity.

Before we return to Galli, let’s look at one of Stearns’ stories in his new book. Stearns tells the wonderful story of a collaborative project that World Vision did with Habitat for Humanity in rural India. During a ceremony dedicating the project to the community, a local World Vision worker overhears the local people speaking in their dialect asking each other questions about why Christians would come from so far away to help them. Stearns concludes, “We had not spoken a word in their local language, but the village elders had already ‘heard’ the gospel” (p. 23).

While one could not say that Stearns reflects an opposite viewpoint of Galli, he is emphasizing that the good deeds done either replace or are the functional equivalent of verbally speaking the gospel.

I have read Stearns and Galli on numerous occasions and they are both thought provoking, faithful followers of Christ and strong leaders. If I could be privileged enough to sit down with them, I think we would all come to very similar conclusions regarding the relationship of word and deeds to the Christian faith. However, both of their viewpoints in these recent publications fall short of articulating the fullness of word/deed ministry.

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On Monday, June 1, 2009 General Motors unveiled plans to close 14 plants and three warehouses in a move that could ultimately slash up to 20,000 workers from its payrolls, as the company undergoes an historic bankruptcy restructuring.

This is terrible news for just about everyone, most particularly the thousands of workers who have lost (or will lose) their job. As an economically engaged Christian, I do not think that God desires anyone to stay indefinitely involuntarily unemployed and I believe we should be praying for everyone affected.

Here are few points to consider

1) Difficult circumstances are a time to become stronger. A year or so ago, two friends of mine were facing personal finance challenges. Today, one of them is sinking into alcoholism, is divorced, and has little custody of his children. The other is working two jobs, sweating a lot, but has developed more character in the last year than in his previous 34.

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