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My latest column at Christian Week:

The church I pastor is trying to become more outwardly focused. Sometimes it helps to learn from examples, so a group of us traveled a short distance to one of the most outwardly focused churches we know: Sanctuary Ministries in downtown Toronto.

Sanctuary is more than a church. It's a ministry "that seeks to establish and develop holistic, inclusive and healthy community." They live in a neighborhood that's a little different from ours, one "plagued with homelessness, drugs, prostitution, unemployment and AIDS." Though it's not only a church, Sanctuary has the gospel at its core. "This Sanctuary is a gospel community at its heart, devoted to living out the good news that Jesus is God and Saviour," their website says. "There really isn't anything radical or new about it. It's just simple, orthodox Christianity at work."

From Reformation 21:

Dr. Keller made the following provocative comment: 'The social gospel has poisoned the church twice.' The first time, of course, was when the social gospel was first introduced as a (theologically) liberal agenda that minimized the preaching of the gospel. But the social gospel is poisoning us again, Keller argued, because today evangelicals are so concerned about falling into the error of the old social gospel that we do not put nearly the emphasis that the Bible places on caring for the poor.

An article I wrote for Compassion Today Magazine:

I guess it's a little late to admit you don't want to visit a Compassion project when you're already there.

In a way, I wanted to see the project. I'd seen how visiting a project had changed my friend Tim. In a Milestones Restaurant in Toronto, he told me that seeing Compassion's work had transformed his life, and it showed.

But now I was scared, way out of my comfort zone. As we walked up a dusty road in Tegucigalpa, I played devil's advocate. "What would you say to someone who says that this is all a band-aid, that we're not really helping?"

It's a legitimate question. It's just hard to ask when, within minutes, you're standing in a shack. The family had cleaned up for us. We snuck a look in the fridge, and it was empty. I pulled back a curtain and saw where the five members of the family slept. We talked and prayed and left some food, and left quieter than we came.

"Thanks for wrecking my life," I said to Tim.

It's frustrating to see poverty firsthand. The issues are complex, and there are no easy answers. Honduras is one of the ten poorest countries in the Western hemisphere. Half live below the poverty line; one in four are unemployed. I want to fix this, but that's part of the problem. Sometimes we want to fix things that are beyond our ability to fix.

Maybe we're called to do less than fix. Sometimes the most profound thing that we can do is love a person, even if we can't fix everything. When Jesus spoke of the poor, he spoke in terms I understand: offering water to the thirsty, feeding the poor, clothing the naked. He didn't use fixing terms. I can do more than love and care, but I can do no less.

Jesus focused on a subgroup of the poor, calling them "the least of these." They are the most vulnerable of the poor, a group that must include the one billion children who live in poverty. One billion. That's every second child. Jesus said that receiving children is the same as receiving him. If this is true of children in general, it is especially true of children who are poor, who are "the least of these." To love them is to love him.

We walked the streets of Tegucigalpa that day. We saw kids eating bowls of rice and beans at the Compassion project. We watched them play. We heard the project staff talk about their work, and we saw the love for these kids in their eyes.

We left later that afternoon knowing that we weren't able to fix much of anything. But in Jesus' upside-down kingdom, we knew we'd been with those who are last in this world but first in his kingdom. We can't always change the world, but we can care for those who matter to him most: children like the ones I met in the project. Loving Jesus means loving them.

A great post from Mark Petersen:

So often when we relate to marginalized communities, our Messiah-complex attitude is that we are helping these poor people out. We are the givers, they are the receivers. They need us to save them, to set things right. This is a particularly common attitude amongst philanthropists.

But could it be that they are saving us?

We are saved: from our egos, from our shallowness, from our comfortable bubbles, from our isolation, from our airtight theologies. Yes, we are saved from all of this, and more, when we move to the margins and enter into relationship with those who live on the edge of death each day.

I'm indebted to Greg Paul and Sanctuary Ministries. They let a group of us from Richview come last night and learn from them. I'll be writing about some of what we learned in coming weeks, but for now I'll say it was well worth the trip.

Tim Keller has said that being outwardly focused requires two skills that aren't often found together. One is to listen to the community, and to be taught by them the best way to serve them. The other is to announce the good news of Jesus. Churches that listen to the community are often good at serving the community but not very good at evangelism; churches that announce the good news are often good at evangelism but very poor at community service. It's rare to find the two skills together because they are so different. It's relatively easy to do one or the other but not both.

At Sanctuary you get the sense that they have learned to do both. They are with people and provide a safe place for them, and offer community. Yet last night when we worshipped, it was all about Jesus.

Greg Paul, the Executive Director, has written a book called God in the Alley: Being and Seeing Jesus in a Broken World, which I reviewed here. Last night he mentioned that he has a new book coming out in August called Twenty-Piece Shuffle: Why the Poor and Rich Need Each Other. Looking forward to it.

Pictures are now posted - more at Flickr

I visited three churches in Honduras last week.

The first church had a building with a second floor for kids that had been brought in off the street. We went into a room and saw a very young child sleeping in a crib. The pastor was out for a walk one day and saw a box moving in the rain. He went over and found a baby in the box. The church is now raising this child, along with other kids in the transition center and in the orphanage about an hour away.

The second church had a beautiful building relatively speaking. They had just bought a building across the road to accommodate even more children in the project. The church has 297 children attending the project and is going to expand to have another 30. The project director has had his life threatened by thugs in the community. As we walked through the community he stopped to talk to every person he met. He even peeked in a few windows to smile and to say hi.

The third church's building was literally a shack, but it was a much more beautiful shack than existed there a year ago. That church has plans to continue to expand its building to provide better facilities for the children who attend the program. It was started when the pastor began preaching under a tree in that area. This area is the most run down to look at it, but it seemed safer, and the people much friendlier.

This is one of the beauties of Compassion: it works through churches within a community. Their website says:

Every child development project is connected to a local church staffed by members of that community. Compassion's child ministry strengthens local churches through partnerships that provide resources to reach out to children and families. The church is the God-given institution meant to be salt and light in a hurting world. Enabling the church to minister holistically to children and their families is at the heart of Compassion's strategy.

After seeing hundreds of kids in churches that have almost nothing, I can't help but think, "What is my church doing?" Not picking on my own church in particular, but it did strike me that we have some pretty severe needs within our local community. It is humbling to see churches do so much with so little, when we have so much and do relatively little in comparison. It certainly raised the bar for me.

Besides becoming a big fan of Compassion, I've also been challenged to practice the power of investing in a child's life even here in Canada. I've also been thinking a lot about how a church in Canada can move toward serving the local community a fraction as much as what I saw last week.

Last Saturday night we sat by the pool in a nice hotel in an impoverished country. Compassion Canada had paid our costs to be there. We had just been on a plane full of other Christians visiting Honduras. I tried to capture some of the reservations and concerns we felt as we wrestled with being there and how we got there:

Is this just Christian tourism? Is this a sales pitch, like a glorified timeshare presentation? Are we coming here with all of the answers? We got knowing nods from some who've been here before. They've heard the objections; they felt the same the first time they came. They didn't say much, except to wait and observe.

I remember how one member of the group put it: are we being set up to drink the "Compassion Kool-Aid"?

It turns out that we Canadians are a cynical bunch, but these are all valid questions. It's impossible to go on a trip like this without wrestling with all the contradictions and realizing that a lot of things just shouldn't be the way that they are.

It will be something that we continue to wrestled through. I was thinking of this as I read some of Bene's questions about our trip this morning (in the comments of this post). I don't know if I have all of the answers but I will give it a try.

Time to go home. As I write this it's 18 degrees Celsius here and -10 degrees Celsius in Toronto. Time to get out the long sleeve shirt again.

Some random reflections from this past week:

• Despite the extreme poverty, we witnessed a lot of joy here. We saw huge smiles on kids despite their living conditions. In the middle of suffering I witnessed a joy and strength I wasn't expecting.
• Compassion will only ever reach about 2% of the massive need within this relatively small country. They're doing great work, but the need is huge. Last night one of the staff said that he goes to bed a lot of nights wishing he could do more.
• Years ago I read the book Bias to the Poor. The thesis of this book is that God is on the side of the poor and against them that oppress them. I never heard that before, but I believe it. This is about the only thing that gives me any hope about the 98% who aren't receiving the help they need.
• Solutions are complex. I witnessed the North American obsession with fixing things this week. The reality is that we can do some things, but we cannot fix what's wrong. That shouldn't stop us from advocacy and compassion, but it should keep us from glib answers.
• We were boggled by the extremes we saw this week. Decrepit shacks about to fall down one day; well-built stables for eighty-thousand dollar horses the next. Watching kids eat simple meals of rice and beans; stopping at a mall or eating at a restaurant later in the day. The most shocking example for me was as I was looking at pictures on my camera, sitting in a project, and came across a picture of our hotel room. It seemed very wrong.
• There are way too many American chain restaurants here. Tony Romas, Quiznos, TGI Friday, KFC, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and more.
• I wouldn't wish our North American lifestyle on the people we met. David Fitch touches on this in The Great Giveaway. Offering the poor a middle-class consumptive lifestyle is far from the solution to anything.
• I expected to have some criticisms of Compassion after I spent a week here. When you spend a week observing a ministry up close, you begin to see the real deal despite the ministry's efforts to present their best face. Compassion was very open and didn't try to give a sales job. We could talk to anybody and ask any question with Compassion staff gone, and we did. We met most of the staff in the national office, and it is the most capable group of people I have seen working anywhere. Every time we raised an issue, they had already thought through it and could tell you why they do things the way that they do. This is normal with the top leader, but every staff person could do this. I don't want to pretend that they are perfect, but I walk away with absolutely no reservations about Compassion's ministry. It's unbelievable. In fact, they've raised the bar for me.
• I think I now understand some of the differences between Compassion and World Vision. Both are amazing ministries. Compassion's focus is on child development; World Vision's is on community development. Both are needed; both have strengths; both have limitations. The one thing I really like about Compassion is that it is holistic and includes a strong spiritual emphasis. With Compassion you know that every child learns of Jesus' love for them.
• I walk away having to process a lot of things in my life. One middle-class family radically changed their lifestyle so that they could sponsor 30 children. They're not well-off; they've just decided it's what they have to do. The wife quit her job and spends time writing to each of the kids. We still have to process a lot, but it's hard to walk away from here without thinking that something has to change about the way that we spend our money.
• By the way, if you ever sponsor a child, choose one from a country that you think you might visit one day. If you have a sponsored child, please write. It means more to them than I could have imagined.

We're going home having to process a lot. The scary thing is that normal life resumes tomorrow and a lot of this will get quickly lost if we let it. We have a lot of thinking and praying to do.

I wish I could bring a ton of people down here. There's a lot of stuff you really have to see firsthand. If you ever get a chance to come, please grab it.

If you are sponsoring a child or thinking of it (you can sign up online at Compassion), you should know that it's a very good investment in the life of a child. The $35 a month is only a start. I've seen the finances, and the kids get over $40 of ministry every month for every $35 we donate in sponsorship, and every penny is spent wisely. And that's just the money. It really does make a difference.

Got to go to pack. We'll keep thinking.

I was thinking about what's surprised me on this trip. A lot hasn't surprised me: seeing poverty; witnessing the joy among those who are very poor; seeing God very present among people who have very little. All of this is humbling and overwhelming, but not really surprising. I expected that.

What's surprised me most is the role that sponsors pay with these children. Initially I thought that the main role they played is money: providing $35 a month that allows a child to be part of a project. Turns out that's not it at all. The money is important, but from the perspective of the kids it is far from the most important thing about having a sponsor. It's knowing that somebody far away cares about them, writes to them, prays for them, and encourages them. They take this really seriously.

A couple of nights ago, the graduates of the sponsorship program spoke about their relationships with their sponsors. Almost all of them wished their sponsor had written more. It was tough when other kids got letters and they didn't. Ouch. But when the sponsors wrote or sent stickers, it was a huge deal.

One young man spoke of the barriers he faced in finishing high school, and how the encouragement from his sponsor played a huge role. They also talked about really hoping that their sponsor would come to visit them some day.

The boy we sponsor, Saúl, was dropped by his sponsor a few months ago. That happens sometimes. But it's clear that it's really hard for a child over here when that happens. They wonder if they did something wrong. The kids here know if they have a sponsor or not, and they really want a relationship with their sponsor if they do.

All of this makes sense, but I think I've been surprised by how strongly the kids here feel about it, and how they have latched on to some of the sponsors who are here on this trip. The money is important, but just like all of us when we were kids, having an adult who really takes an interest in us and encourages us - that is what matters. And all of us can do this with one child.