By John Hayes and Nate Bacon
Nairobi 2007
I followed my friend, Aila Tasse, carefully through the narrow passageways of one of Nairobi’s largest and most crowded slums. I kept a careful eye on Aila’s back and one on the ground, because alongside the narrow walkway was a channel of open sewage. In places the stagnant water was an unnatural green and I didn’t want to lose my footing. The ground below was beaten smooth with a slippery film of dust like powder. I began to imagine the hundreds of thousands of bare feet that had shaped the ground below.
It is amazing what comes to us when we are listening with our full attention. In moments of concentration, we can often find we are most fully alive. Aila and I were on our way to meet church leaders in the heart of the slum and I was thinking about the privilege of that. But I was also smiling back at the faces of children calling out to me. And at the same time, I was reflecting on the journeys of the people whose bare feet had touched the dust below.
And in considering those feet, and how Jesus would wash them, I was suddenly aware that God was guiding my thoughts. I could see the light touch in the dust leaving a unique footprint that might be there one moment but gone the next. And I thought of the story those feet told. I told myself, “I am walking into a community that in the world’s eyes, is leaving no permanent footprint. People here are living a story no one is recording. It is as if their histories go into unmarked graves.” Then I sensed God’s voice saying, “For the world, their stories don’t leave a trace. But as for me, I don’t miss a footprint.”
Whether we are Remainers, Returners, or Relocators, we have the privilege of ministering in the most vulnerable edges of society where unusual stories are being lived out, but few are being recorded. What makes the story of someone living in the margin any less valuable than one lived in the mainstream? Nothing! In fact, in the upside-down Kingdom where the Lord acts in justice to raise the poor to sit with princes, the untold stories the world neglects may be the ones God is most eager to hear.
However, this is not just an issue of justice. Stories are a powerful form of communication because they go beyond the mind and the heart to give eyes to the imagination. Because stories are visual, they help us remember important truths because we can picture a story happening. Jesus was a master storyteller and his parables of the Kingdom give us unforgettable images. But beyond Jesus’ stories in the gospels, the majority of the Bible is in story form. Both the Old and New Testaments are full of stories of real people, many of whom were not remarkable in the world’s eyes. Communicating truth in story form resonates well for people in the Majority World, because for many of the world’s poorest, personal story is all they have left. This is especially true of the one billion people living in the world’s slums. Too often they are squatting on borrowed ground and have been denied access to education, employment, adequate resources, and health care. In InnerCHANGE, we are invited to listen to these stories with “the ear of God” and affirm the dignity of each person made in his image.
Ivan Illich reminds us that if we want to change the world, we need to “tell an alternative story.” Jesus did that. He lived out, incarnationally, the ultimate story of redemption and made it accessible to all people at all times. We are called to imitate Christ in this way, to live among people the world has made last and experience his story in our lives and those of our neighbors. It is the gift of Christ’s story, not the world’s ‘stuff,’ that makes our stories worth living.
Three Stories Working Together
The formation material we are assembling in Horizons comes from years of listening to the Spirit of God, the people of our communities, and our teammates. In fact, the bedrock of our content rests on the interaction of three stories: Biblical story, community story, and our story as missionary change agents. We step out in faith together with the assurance that everyone’s story matters, and that everyone’s story is made whole in redemptive personal encounter with Christ.
Stories are to people’s lives what fingerprints are to the body; a unique expression of identity. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of valuing the stories of the community, both the story of the community as a whole and the stories of people in it. Believing in the value of local narratives, and more importantly, that God can use them as a foundation to write alternative stories, requires having “eyes to see” and “ears to hear” as Jesus instructed. Armed with only the world’s eyes and ears it is natural to see poor communities as only places of deficit—contexts where people have been pushed down and moved aside and left behind. Whether we’ve grown up in the margins, returned to them, or are relocating from outside we can quickly adopt a limiting perspective. Jesus confronted these same paralyzing attitudes of unbelief in his day when people typically looked at his hometown and said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46).
In the Exodus story, God also confronted Moses’s low self-worth and lack of faith in raising him to leadership at the age of eighty. Moses saw himself as too old, too insecure, and too burdened by past failure to consider the improbable task of going back to Egypt to be an instrument of God’s deliverance. He repeatedly tried to talk God out of using him. Instead, God gently challenged Moses’ reluctance by drawing his attention to the staff he was holding. “What is in your hand?” God asked (Exodus 4:2). Perhaps Moses had used the staff for years. In fact, he may have cut and shaped it himself. Either way, it was his staff and it had been essential for him in forty years of shepherding sheep. In the same way, as we allow God to use us to empower and disciple local leaders, we must begin with “what is in their hands.” We should not be in a rush to fill their hands with tools from the outside. For many from the margins, their most powerful tool will be their stories.
Finally, let’s remember that the Enemy knows God’s Word better than we do. He knows that God has chosen the poor to be potentially rich in faith. And he knows that even faith the size of a mustard seed, if sincere, can move mountains. Consequently, he will do everything he can to keep that seed of faith from ever forming. One of his most effective means is to attack self-image and annihilate trust that God can use us. However, when we take time to hear and value the stories of people in our communities, we help to create the environment for faith to happen and for people to notice God’s presence in their lives.
Speaking Truth to Power
Long-time InnerCHANGE leader, Nate Bacon, alertly points out that God loves to use the power of story to confront the world’s unceasing narration of “the story of power.” The story of how Jesus healed a woman who had suffered an unrelenting blood flow for twelve years is a good example of speaking truth to power.
This beautiful and highly emotional account of how Jesus healed both a beloved daughter of twelve years and a woman who had struggled twelve years with an incurable blood flow is rich in detail. For the purposes of this module, however, we will focus our efforts mainly on how this story addresses the issue of power.
On his way to attend to the daughter of a powerful leader, Jesus made an “unscheduled” stop to engage a woman in desperate need. The passage doesn’t reveal her economic status, but the ceaseless blood flow would have marginalized her socially and religiously far beyond the physical consequences of her medical condition. The ailment meant she was ceremonially unclean and barred from public worship of any kind. Additionally, the Law required that she could not even touch another person for fear of also contaminating them and exposing them to the same isolation (Leviticus 15:25-27).
We should note that the woman merely wanted to touch the fringe of Jesus’ garment and bring an end to her anguish. Years of hiding had accustomed her to avoid public exposure. But Jesus, in publicly affirming her faith and confirming that she had been healed, made it possible for her to stop isolating and return to a world of relationships. That Jesus called her, “daughter,” reinforces this point. Although it was not unusual for Jesus to use familial terms of endearment to address people he healed, the fact that he did so in this case with a woman so excluded from the most tangible forms of relational intimacy, is especially powerful. There was no dad, like Jairus, to step forward and drop to his knees on behalf of this woman. On his way to heal one beloved daughter, I wonder if it was in Jesus’ mind to gently act as family for someone else’s daughter who had suffered such private misery for so long.
On the other hand, imagine how difficult this delay would have been for Jairus as the life of his daughter ticked away! In stopping for, and prioritizing the woman with desperate need, Jesus made the last, first, and gently spoke truth to power. But Jesus did more than put the need of a completely excluded woman ahead of the need of a powerful man. Jairus was not simply a powerful man, he represented precisely the kind of commanding religious leader who would have felt obliged to ostracize the woman in order to uphold the letter of the law.
I love Nate’s insightful comments on this passage. He writes: “Jesus shows us the attentiveness and loving priority of God to the hand-brush of those the world deems unworthy and unclean, and to the stories of their lives. The ‘clean,’ the religious, the insiders, and the powerful can wait. They are not unloved by God, but those at the margins have been waiting too long. The ‘power of story,’ becomes the story of power turned upside down by the God who hears.”
Perspective: New Every Morning
There is a final point in this story from Luke that critically relates to power dynamics and deserves our attention. In a world systemically ordered along power lines defined by male dominance, women often find themselves involuntarily scrapping for leftovers. Don’t miss the reality here, that is still current today, that two women in desperate need were forced to contend for the attention of someone who could help in a way in which it appeared that only one could win, the other must lose. A girl of twelve, near death, was pitted unintentionally against another, a woman compelled by misfortune to endure a living death.
In the time-bound ‘real world,’ unfortunately, Jairus’ daughter and the woman with the haemorrhage could not both be healed. In this story, however, Jesus, for whom “all things are possible,” spoke truth to reality and its limits. He powerfully demonstrated that some outcomes the world considers mutually exclusive are possible in the Kingdom. Jesus could not be hurried that day, could not be driven by the world’s doctrine of scarcity.
We cannot stress enough, the importance of this passage for us as missionaries living in places of poverty. How might Jesus want to bend reality in our communities to the Kingdom such that some win/lose situations are found to be win/wins? In communities of poverty that lack critical resources and force hard decisions about who can survive, we must “hang on to the fringe of Jesus’ garment” and faithfully do what is possible, but we must also be faithful to allow Jesus to do what is impossible.
As InnerCHANGE missionaries, we begin with listening, learning and cultivating assets already present in the community. And we take care not to introduce assets from outside the community prematurely that could pre-empt and/or disempower local creativity and energy. But we serve a God for whom “blessings are new every morning,” a God of abundance, who desires that his children live life in its fullest, Kingdom sense. Consequently, we must also prepare for Christ to do the miraculous. Additionally, we must prepare for Jesus to draw resources toward people in need from outside the community, from the fullness of creation, since “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it” (Psalm 24:1). In future modules, we will explore more deeply how we can practically cultivate what is within the community while preparing the way to receive what is helpful from without.
José Aceves Peñate has been leading people since his youth, and leading InnerCHANGE members for more than two decades. I have often heard him remark on the necessity for leaders to have perspective—broad, accurate, and insightful perspective. This passage from Luke, and its authenticity in describing competing needs and how Jesus manages to fulfil both of them is a valuable and hopeful perspective. It is one we will need to shape our approach to ministry in places where some people see only deprivation.
Living full and meaningful lives in places of poverty will not always mean we succeed in our best efforts. We will not always see the outcome of our faith. But this important passage in Luke encourages us to persevere in faith, moment to moment, for what Jesus chooses to do. That fateful day that Luke records, Jesus made it possible for a girl to reclaim her life, a father to regain a daughter, and a woman to recover a life worth living. In this world of limits in which we hope to get what we need, what we deserve, or what we expect, Jesus shows us that in the Kingdom it is possible to get what we unexpect.
The Story of the Cover Art
The pencil drawing that begins this module is called La Lumenada. I have combined a view of the La Limonada slum in Guatemala City with an 18th century altarpiece from the Cathedral of Toledo, in Spain. Uniting the two images drew me into contemplation of what makes a place sacred. It also allowed me to meditate on the often tortured, historic relationship between Spain and the New World.
This slum in the center of Guatemala City, randomly or playfully named La Limonada (The Lemonade), is a community in which InnerCHANGE has many friends and a history of ‘courtship.’ There is nothing playful about living in La Limonada, however, and although the name is perhaps affectionate, I feel it potentially trivializes the experience of people living there. More than 60,000 people cram into a ravine that cuts through the heart of the capital city. It is the second largest slum in Central America and is one of the most violent.
The baroque altarpiece called, El Transparente, is a lavish collection of sculpted cherubs and angels. It was commissioned in the 1700s by the Archbishop of Toledo to cover an opening made in the ambulatory wall. That opening, together with a hole in the exterior back wall, allowed a shaft of sunlight to spotlight the altar.
I paired these two elements because when I was in Toledo in the summer of 2013, I sensed God suggesting that, as in the cathedral, when it comes to the sacred space of slums, we need a shaft of light cut through our typical perspectives such that we see them illumined in a new way. Thus, I was not drawing the sculptures as much as I was drawing the idea of the breakthrough opening.
For years I’ve maintained that there is unusual beauty in the margins—sometimes an urgent and fragile beauty. But I haven’t always been clear in expressing it. And I’ve grieved when people have stereotyped marginal communities or described them as “wastelands.” We have a cynical saying in the West, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” But in more than thirty years of living in the margins I have come to realize that often, “I see it because I believe it.” And so it is with seeing Kingdom beauty in poor communities. Belief acts as a window for the eyes. Where else in the world except in slums and barrios, are there houses built entirely by hand, usually by the residents themselves, with resourcefulness and ingenuity? In nearly every other community, people live in structures mass-produced by someone with investment capital from someone else only to be sold or rented to yet someone else—on and on in a chain of impersonality resulting in indifference.
“Lumenada” is not a word in any language, but is, instead, a blend of the barrio’s name with the words “iluminada” in Spanish, and “lumen” in English. El Transparente brought a costly and innovative illumination to the Cathedral of Toledo’s holiest of spaces. In the same way, I suggest we need a breakthrough perspective to awaken our eyesight in order to fully appreciate the holiness of places like La Limonada.
Exercise
Listen to Annie Aeschbacher’s story.
Questions for Reflection:
- What are some of the stories in the community you hope to minister in? Are there common themes? What makes each one unique?
- When you reflect on the story from Luke 8 and the needs of the two women, are there similar dynamics of desperation in the community where needs seem to be competing with one another? If so, does this lead to division?
- What are some of the dominant perspectives in the community? Are they hopeful or pessimistic? Do they reflect scarcity or abundance?
- Whether you are a Remainer, a Returner, or a Relocator, how might your personal story connect with people’s in the community?
