the irony

I temporarily have a DVD copy of the 2011 Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit, and I've been watching and  listening to two sessions over and over this past week:  Tough Callings with Bill Hybels, Wess Stafford, and Mama Maggie and The Wise, Foolish, and Evil by Henry Cloud.

When Wess Stafford (president of Compassion International) spoke, he shared a story of an Ethiopian pastor named Tedessa.  During Communist rule, the Christian Church was forced underground in Ethiopia, and Pastor Tedessa, who continued to preach the Gospel and speak at funerals, was imprisoned and ultimately sentenced to execution by electrocution.  Through Wess's story, the listener learns that God protects Tedessa's life through two electrocution attempts.  Officials not only failed to kill Tedessa, but they also released him and commanded him to go away, and Wess caught up with Tedessa just hours after these execution attempts as Tedessa went off to preach the Gospel at a funeral.  In their conversation, Wess relayed to Tedessa that Christians in America were praying for the Ethiopian people, and Tedessa responded by telling Wess that they were praying for the people of the West.  


Wess asked, "Really?  What do you pray when you pray for people in the West?"  


Tedessa went on to tell Wess that though the Ethiopian Church's suffering was severe, it was not near the suffering that we in the West are experiencing. Tedessa shared that due to the pressure, the Ethiopian Church prays all day long....Tedessa heard that it was possible that Christians in the West might not pray all day long, maybe not even once a day.  Tedessa shared how the Ethiopian Church risked their lives to gather together because they need each other so much...he heard that in America there might be several churches in the same area with people free to come and go as they please, but that on a nice day, Christians might choose to go on a picnic instead of to church.  And finally, Tedessa shared that his congregation had one Bible to share, so he ripped it up and gave it out to the congregation to memorize the part handed to them....he heard that Bibles are plentiful in America but that it was possible for Christians to go all day without engaging in the Word of God.  

After seventeen years of oppression and persecution, Communism fell and the Church was allowed to gather freely again.  In the time of persecution, the Church had grown five-fold in Ethiopia.  People came 2-3 hours early to get a seat inside the church, as church spilled out onto the hillside.

Mind you, while I was listening to this session for the 3rd time this week, I was in our basement cleaning my bulging bookshelves and organizing tote boxes in our crawl space.  The content found in the tote boxes and on the bookshelves?  8 Bibles, 400+ Christian living/growth books, 6 crates of files on various Christian topics and events, and over 25 binders of Christian curriculum and class materials.  In the midst of Stafford's story, I found myself opening one of the binders from a Spiritual Growth Task Force I sat on in 2004, and recognized that the content, questions, stuck points are the same for today's conversations at my church..8 years later.

Sitting there, I was struck to the core of my being with a sudden overwhelming sense of irony, upside-downness, inside-outness.  "Our suffering is severe, but it's nowhere near your suffering...."  I was thoughtful about our casual, unhurried conversations in the American Church regarding the slow transformational journey of faith contrasted with this Ethiopian's sense of urgency, fire, courage, and radical "all-in" devotion.

These are the kinds of collisions God likes to put in my life to help me reflect and challenge me with the deep nature of things.  I pray that people like Tedessa will spur me on to greater surrender and fire in Christ!