I never knew my dad – he’s been locked up my whole life! CPS took the kids!

There is no work hommie! I am going to slang (sell drugs) for a minute, I really don’t want to…it’s eating me up Kev. I’ll come back to the men’s group,   I miss you guys.

Our baby is dying, can you come baptize her? You’re the only that can come, I will let the detective guarding the door know.

West Side City shot up my nana’s house, my primo got shot in the chest, but he’s going to make it.

My little homie OD’d!

We took care of those fools Kev!”

These are the questions and the realities I encounter on a daily basis in my work with the Diocese of Phoenix’ Prison Ministry. These experiences and emotions build up, forming a beat in my head, a beat that doesn’t stop. Sometimes it stops at the break of dawn…but quickly starts again.

In the desert I am looking for the water to pool up, but it won’t; it just dries up into the crusted earth. Will Grace do the same? I feel the pain of these with whom I work. My tears fall with theirs. However, at the end of the day I get to go home to my little oasis.  My tears cease, theirs continue like rain.

Grace, where are you? Our people are dry lipped.
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We all know that many of the ministries that we live in are lopsided.  Lots of men are lumped together leading stuff and lots of women are lumped together supporting stuff. I believe passionately that it is time to learn how to be together, side by side in loving community, leading communities and ministries together, sharing in life together in deep and meaningful ways, restoring the image of God in each other and through each other.  We need mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and daughters and sons.

I hope that we as missional leaders and catalysts will deeply consider finding ways to build bridges, restore dignity, and model justice and equality across genders in really tangible and powerful ways. This is so necessary when we are talking about living out the reality of God in the now–of reflecting the kingdom values of equality, love, mercy, justice, healing and hope in a broken and segregated world.  It’s about men and women learning how to be in true community together as equals.

I think that the purpose of community – “the church”– is to have a place, whatever that looks like, to learn to love God and others and to be loved by God and others. Like so many things that matter, I do not think it magically drops out of the sky.  It comes through hard work invested in intimate relationship–whether that is our journey with God or our journey with people–and an openness to the movement of the spirit of God in us and through us.  And these relationships–God and people–are all tangled up together.   Jesus summed up the law–love God, love your neighbors, love yourselves.  That is the essence of the journey.  I also think they are wonderfully interdependent.  I always say “you can’t love God without loving your neighbors, you can’t love your neighbors without loving God, and it’s hard to love either one when we don’t love ourselves.”
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Robert Capon writes, “Shamelessness is the supreme virtue of the Incarnation.”  I think Capon is right.  To cave into the accusing voices of shame is to drain the Gospel of its power.  In a word, God is shameless.

Recently, a friend told me the story of when he used the “f-word” in a religious gathering. (I would spell out the word for clarity but, ironically, most internet search engines have a higher morality than I do and would block it).  He used the “f-word” to ease the shame of someone in the group who accidentally said, “damn,” and felt terrible for doing so.  Can you see the picture?  A guy of questionable moral fiber accidentally said, “damn” at a bible study and felt ashamed for doing so.  My friend, who has sworn maybe twice in his whole life, saw that the man was ashamed and immediately threw out an awkwardly placed, ill-timed, and altogether forced “f-bomb” in hopes of covering the shame of the shamed one.

Alexamenos worships his god.

One of the earliest known depictions of Jesus, is the Alexamanos Graffito, dating from c.200 AD or earlier.  It is an early parody of Christianity.  It was discovered in 1857 in Rome and is now in the Palatine Antiquarian Museum.  This wall carving is much like the graffiti we might find on a bathroom stall today.  It shows a man with an ass’s head being crucified and a youth raising his hand, as if in prayer.
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Last month CTM training associates, Scott Dewey and Jeff Johnsen (from Denver) spent a week in Nairobi. They were teaching a class for the masters program that Center for Transforming Mission offers in partnership with Bakke Graduate University. There are 23 students in the program. Here is a reflection from Scott…

Having just returned home to the USA from time with friends in Kenya, I want to offer just a few verbal and visual snapshots of the fruit of CTM and the Street Psalms Community. Namely, that grassroots leadership is flourishing in challenging contexts, in a dynamic process of theological reflection and social action.

The setting for this shutter-click is the Inspiration Center in Mathare. Mathare is an “informal settlement” in Nairobi, sometimes called Nairobi’s oldest slum community. It’s basically a ravine with a river at the bottom and a half-million people making a go at life together, crammed into shacks perched all the way from the top rim down to the chocolate-colored stream. One companion’s comment was that it looks like a big hole in the ground–a mudhole teeming with people. Of course there are layers and layers of description and meaning to any place, including this vibrant place of resourcefulness, exuberant beauty, and great struggle. Jeff Johnsen and I peeled back just a few layers in our time there with Kenyan friends, and it helped us listen together with them for what good news might look like in the very hard places of our world.
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The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp. And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. Hebrews 13:11-14

At the Center for Transforming Mission we use this text from Hebrews in conversations with grassroots leaders located within the street culture to ask meaningful questions about posture and place. The text reveals an invitation from the author that suggests a posture of humility and a place outside of what is known as the camp. We use this text in an attempt to explore parallels that grassroots leaders can identify with in their own stories and to place their endeavors in context. Once amplified, we begin to ask about the location of Jesus and about the camp. It does not take long for these leaders to see from within their context that they themselves, and Jesus, are located outside of the camp. They then quickly identify the camp as the church. This becomes the perfect place for grassroots leaders to hear good news about their posture and place either already present, or yearning to be present in life outside the gates of the camp. I am one of those leaders.

I learned a lot about faith growing up as the son of Mexican pastors who had committed their lives to serving predominately undocumented communities on the streets of Southern California. I learned even more about love when I began rejecting their religion, giving myself to a life of street culture at the early age of nine. Keep those two statements close as I invite you to peer through a small window of my journey back into the street culture of Denver, Colorado and why I am beginning to understand the choices made by many in the Hispanic Church.

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