Читать книгу Whatever Happened to the Rich Young Man? - Keith Foster - Страница 8

Ron was a well-presented, seasoned businessman. And a successful one, at that. As the managing director of a national tire distribution company, Ron had a reputation for being a ruthless, no-nonsense kind of guy. At the time, I worked for a national car fleet company as their operations manager. Part of my role was to negotiate the tire deals for our forty thousand vehicles located across the country. I enjoyed negotiating with clients within an industry renowned for generous hospitality. One such negotiation happened during a five-star weekend in Barcelona. Several multi-national decision makers came on the trip, including Ron. More about Ron and Barcelona later.

I had become a Christian at the age of sixteen. Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, I visited my uncle and his family in Newark, UK, and I had always noticed something different about them. I later found that “something” to be Jesus. One summer, my uncle shared the gospel with me. I instantly knew that I needed forgiveness—a new direction. In August 1979, I asked Christ not only to save my life for eternity but to help me follow him into whatever he had for me. That “whatever” would lead (a year later) to joining the military. By the age of twenty-one, I had encountered two combat situations. During this time, I met a local girl (Lesley) on leave in my home city (Hull, UK) and soon we were married. Lesley was God-fearing but had never heard the gospel of salvation and allegiance to a new master, King Jesus. During our time in military married quarters, we started to attend a local Baptist church where Lesley heard the gospel preached for the first time. My wife became a sister in Christ, too. From that point, we were always seeking God’s purposes for us. Having sensed a call to ministry very early in my “walk” with Christ, this would often become the topic of our conversations about the future. We were to learn that the Lord is never in a rush, with the path to His purposes often being “long and windy” as he shapes us through our faltering commitment, obedience, and circumstances. This included being led out of the military in 1989 to take up a junior role in a local shipbuilding company. The character of Joseph in the book of Genesis had long been a hero of mine. How had he remained consistent in his faith, despite the injustices and seeming “slow progress” of God’s purposes for him? I saw a parallel in my preparation for service, which included eight years working for the shipbuilding company, leading to a management role and college education in business and finance. After having had some eighteen years in the defense industry by then, I needed a change. It was then in 1997 that I secured a senior role with a large, national car fleet company.

All this time, I had faithfully been serving at that local Baptist church. The people were friendly and hospitable and the social life was good. However, there seemed to be a huge disconnect between this “sacred space” and the Monday-to-Friday “secular space” where I spent most of my time. At church, nobody spoke about our “secular spaces,” with the reverse being true in my workplace. Yet since I came to know Christ, I had a passion and desire to share and communicate my faith, whatever arena or “space” wherein I found myself. Yet all the time I felt isolated, like some sort of Christian vigilante that God had sent into the challenging corporate world. Perhaps Jesus was right when he said it was “impossible” for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Luke 18:18–27). Yet the story of the rich young man has often been misunderstood, with Jesus being misquoted as declaring it “impossible” for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God. I too had misread the whole Lukan narrative in chapter 18. Reading on, I read about Zacchaeus (the well-off tax collector) who encountered Christ and about whom Jesus could subsequently announce, “Salvation has come to this house today” (Luke 19:9). There was hope for Ron yet.

So, back to Barcelona. It had been a long day of negotiating and discussing. Everyone was tired and needed an early night for another full day of negotiations the next day. Ron had said he was going to go for a walk along the beautiful Barcelona harbor, laden with multi-million-pound yachts, boats, and private gin palaces. The backdrop could not have been more corporate and lavish as Ron and I strolled along the harbor front together. Exhausted from the day’s corporate conversation, we were both keen to simply chat about life, family, and world news. Ron had asked about my family situation, additionally asking what I did when I wasn’t thinking about work. I told him about my leadership role in my church and shared my faith story about how it all started. Ron was polite but gave no real signs of immediate interest. I asked Ron about his family and hobbies. Ron proceeded to tell me about the challenges of home. He and his wife had an only child who was disabled and needed constant care. That was my opportunity. Silently praying for wisdom and an understanding reception, I said to Ron, “I am going to pray for your daughter and family.” Ron burst into tears. This tough (on the outside) negotiator, who radiated self-sufficiency, had a spiritual vulnerability—one, I believe, that we all have, yet by and large the church ignores. Perhaps part of the reason is the cosmetic “myth” of self-sufficiency communicated by the New Marginalized.

So who are the New Marginalized?

The concept of the New Marginalized arose out of my doctoral studies and conversations with two scholars who were already writing about the church’s engagement within the local community. Professor Chris Baker (Goldsmiths University, London) and Professor Paul Cloke (Exeter University, UK) have done extensive work and research in two key areas: Baker in the area of the faith community’s contribution to social capital, and Cloke in his research around evangelizing the welfare demographic.1 I will cover these in more detail in chapter 2; however, a summary of each will suffice here.

For a long time, social scientists have spoken about “social capital,” a term used to define how people feel about the places and communities where they live. In my former (joint-authored) book with Andrew Hardy, I gave this a complete treatment.2 Suffice to say that Baker sees the church as having a valuable contribution to make to that local sense of community. Baker speaks of religious and spiritual capital as the “what” and “why” of the faith community’s local community involvement. Spiritual capital is the motivation or “why” behind what faith-based organizations (FBO) do; religious capital is the actual “what” that they do and the practical form that takes. I found Baker’s insights challenging as they encouraged community engagement in local groups and activities, but as an evangelical believing in the need for personal and community transformation, community engagement with a gospel-centered intentionality was also needed. Cloke (as an evangelical) addressed this with regard to community engagement with the vulnerable. His challenging work around evangelizing the vulnerable (including the ethic of such) provided another research marker for me. As a piece of doctoral research, my work would need to be unique in its contribution to both knowledge and practice, especially since my research doctorate was in practical theology.

Positioning my research between Baker and Cloke, I sought to develop a research project that not only contributed to the sense of local community, but did so with a conversionist, gospel-driven agenda. Additionally, while there was a significant amount of research being carried out amongst the measured marginalized, I could not find any amongst those with no obvious and presenting needs. Indeed, the more I read Cloke’s and Baker’s works, the clearer it became that there was a neglected demographic emerging—the non-welfare. I was reluctant to call this demographic “the rich,” as this would be subjective depending upon context. Instead, my focus would be on those who did not receive any financial or welfare assistance from the government. I called this group the New Marginalized. The first two years of my preliminary research confirmed my experiential suspicions from my time in the corporate world and currently in the church. There was a demographic of people who were “unmeasured” by national statistic agencies and subsequently ignored by churches and their missional strategies. Yet having had many experiences with people (like the one I had with Ron in Barcelona), I knew that these people had needs, too.

Why is it so tough?

Luke 18 tells us the account of the rich young man (Luke 18:18–30). In this account, Luke tells us about a ruler who came to Jesus inquiring as to what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. As well as grounding his answer in God’s Word [Torah], Jesus spoke into the personal cost that was necessary for any would-be follower:

Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then, come follow me. (Luke 18:22)

The challenge was too much for this rich young ruler, who, Luke tells us, “went away sad” (Luke 18:23).

Christ’s summary to the onlooking disciples was to declare “How hard [duskolos] it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:24). The original Greek translation of duskolos refers more to the English translation of difficult. Over time, as stories are told, meanings can be elaborated. Such is the case in this story, which is often misread to mean impossible as opposed to difficult. There is a huge difference between something that is difficult and something impossible. Even here in Luke 18, in anticipation of the misunderstanding of the disciples and the story’s ongoing transmission, Jesus can assure the disciples that; “What is impossible [adynata] with man, is possible [dynata] with God” (Luke 18:27). When God is at work in a situation, including someone’s heart, this changes duskolos or even seemingly adynata situations into dynata opportunities. As well as deconstructing the disciple’s worldview that imagined riches equal blessing and divine favor, Jesus was demonstrating one of the specific hurdles that the well-off demographic faces when it comes to submission to the King and his Kingdom: their possessions. Somehow, in the ongoing dialogue down the centuries, this has translated from “difficult but possible with God” to “impossible for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

One remedy for this would be for a simple sweep of the scriptures to see that many rich, well-off, or simply hard-working people were recruited amongst God’s people for his Kingdom purposes. The chapter divisions in our Bibles do not always help our understanding of the flow of authorial intent. Luke finishes this section by recording Jesus declaring the ultimate cost of establishing God’s Kingdom, his death (Luke 18:31–33), while at the same time highlighting the spiritual “blindness” of the disciples to understand what he was saying (Luke 18:34). What is then often the case in the Gospels, Luke then follows a section on spiritual blindness with an account of someone who was physically blind, receiving their sight (Luke 18:35–43). This is then all brought together in the next section when Luke gives the account of a well-off tax collector (Zacchaeus) “seeing” Jesus for who he is, embracing his new King, and welcoming him into his home (Luke 19:1–10).

One striking thing about this idea of reaching the non-welfare demographic (we may use other terms such as self-sufficient, well-off, even comparatively rich) is that this is the only demographic that Jesus said was difficult to reach. Yet for many people and organizations, the hard people and places to reach for the Kingdom are often seen as those living in the local, run-down housing estates or those engaging in substance or alcohol abuse. The next chapter will consider and challenge this overemphasis in more detail; it is sufficient to summarize here that if Jesus considered the well-off and materialistic demographic difficult to reach and spiritually blind, what are we as individuals, and more specifically as churches, doing to reach those in hard places? Responding solely to the measured material needs of the communities around our churches can only result in a narrow approach in our missional or outreach strategy. The well-off, although perhaps difficult to reach, have spiritual needs, too.

Everybody needs somebody

A famous quote from Augustine of Hippo states, “Thou madest us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless, until it rest in thee.”3 Famous songs have espoused the same sentiment and need. Lyrics that suggest everybody needs somebody, we all need somebody to lean on resonate across society indiscriminately. The writer of Ecclesiastes succinctly puts it when he writes, “God has set eternity in the human heart” (Ecc 3:11). Yet somehow, we have categorized people. Whole groups and generations are now classed under various sociological and theological terms: postmodern, post-secular, Millennial, Generation Z, etc. With these categories come characteristic definitions which we can summarize and assess, specifically regarding their potential receptiveness to our evangelism. Perhaps they are classified as being suspicious of the grand, corporate story: the meta-narrative that seeks to “explain.” While these insights are helpful in partnership with a missiological approach that seeks to contextualize the gospel to “all peoples,” underpinning all of this is the Bible’s timeless challenge to the church to partner with God in his global mission to reach all peoples from all nations. This great commission sees its culmination when the whole cosmos is brought under the single and sovereign rule of God within a “new heavens and earth,” with Christ at the head (Rev 21:1–4). In the meantime, we live in this fragmented world that may well desire but ultimately struggles to realize a world where there is “one humanity.” Achieving this aside from God’s reconciling project is an impossible task. The people of Babel in Genesis 11 desired to reach their “pinnacle,” yet they would only end up with a frustrated, unfinished project (Gen 11:1–9).

Equally, people often like to define themselves, perhaps by presenting themselves to the world as they would like to be seen. Before the global phenomenon known as the internet, the only methods people could use to achieve this were their possessions: the clothes they wore, the cars they drove, and the homes they lived in. These (of course) are still used by many to communicate a sense of success or self-sufficiency, but massively impacting this whole social “display” has been the rise of the internet and associated social media platforms. Social media filters can assist our false self-portrait. The reality of lonely and tragic lives is often hidden by filtered selfies and stories of indulgence. Behind all of this, the rich man is still sad. The church too can believe and be susceptible to this portrayed narrative of self-sufficiency and contentment. Augustine’s quote rings true underneath all of this. A life outside of God is restless until it finds it’s rest in him. The writer of Ecclesiastes has already told us why: as those with eternity created in our hearts, we have all been made to know God and to find our fulfillment in a life centered around his ultimate project to reconcile the whole cosmos to himself. As Christ-followers and as local churches, it is time to stop believing the projected narrative of self-sufficiency and to constantly keep in mind that everybody needs somebody—that somebody being Christ the Redeemer.

1. For example, Baker, Spiritual Capital and Progressive Localism; Cloke, Beaumont, and Williams, Working Faith, Faith-Based Organisations and Urban Social Justice.

2. Hardy and Foster, Body and Blood.

3. Augustine, Confessions, 5.