Lee Grady's message at Westpointe

I really hope churches read between the lines -- or catch the less subtle aspects -- of Lee Grady's message today at Westpointe (the audio should be posted soon). Using the image of the storms God sent over the ship that Jonah was riding on, trying to get away from his assignment to Nineveh, Lee says that the "storms" engulfing North America -- such as financial crises and deep, hate-filled political division and general finger-pointing -- have been caused by people of God (the churches) trying to run away from their assignments and lying, fast asleep, below decks.

Indeed, not only have the churches not been fulfilling their assignments, they've been doing things they weren't called to do in the first place.

I've been hearing for a few years, now -- and I'm sure I'm not the only one; it's good to get confirmation from someone like Lee. While the storms have been raging around us, churches (and I realize this is a generalization -- as one English prof used to say, "All generalizations are bad" -- because not all the churches have fallen into this) have been railing against sin and the bad things people are doing and forgetting what The Great Commission is all about. We're not supposed to be harping on what's wrong with the world: rather, we're supposed to be telling people what's right with Jesus. Jesus never told us to go forth and wipe out sin. He told us to be His witnesses. If we're doing that properly, sin and evil would be a non-starter. The Light, as John puts it in his Gospel, would shine and darkness would not be able to overpower it.

How many times do we have to hear it? "Resist not evil." "Be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with Good." "Feed My sheep." "Ye shall be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in Judaea, and in Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth."

From where I sit, ministering Christ in the Downtown East Side, that last point is subtle, but significant. The DTES is our Samaria in Metro Vancouver: land of the outcasts, that the "good" people of the rest of the region would like to pretend doesn't really exist, of which the denizens are to be avoided. Yet if I construe Jesus' directions (in Acts 1:8 -- His last words to us on earth, in fact) as presenting an "order of operations", churches should be leading the charge to bring Christ to the urban poor even before they try to tackle the Third World.

Is showing off God's goodness, Jesus' love, and ministering that to the smelly, weird-looking "Samaria" of the urban poor is our "Nineveh" -- an assignment from God that we try desperately to avoid? Or ministering love and grace to the people who have -- at least for the time-being -- rejected Christ in favour of another "belief system" or their own fleshly desires? Are we trying to avoid those "mission fields" because we're afraid we'll be rejected, laughed-at or scorned?

Yet the storms persist and people's lives are at stake; but if we look at the metaphor Lee uses from Jonah, we see that the antidote is right within our grasp.

Lee Grady (the editor of Charisma magazine, whose prophecy was one of the keys to the realization of The Lord's Rain) speaks again tonight at 6:30, and Monday and Tuesday nights at 7 at Westpointe Christian Centre, 12th & Stephens (near Macdonald) in Vancouver.