Author Archives: Grayson Pope

A Mom to Prisoners: 72-Year-Old Makes a Difference in Texas Prisons

At 72 years old, Dorothy Henry has become a mother to hundreds. She travels to prisons around Texas as a Prison Fellowship® volunteer, sharing the Gospel through her testimony. Her nurturing heart and simple faith remind many of their mother or grandmother.

Dorothy has never been incarcerated, but she’s been in plenty of prisons. Her son, John, was incarcerated three times on drug-related offenses.

“John was a good kid,” she says. “He didn’t get mixed up with the wrong crowd—he just chose it himself.”

John spent 11 years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. His second sentence started in 1996, and for the next 10 years, Dorothy spent many days and nights on her knees in prayer.

Read the rest of my article at Prison Fellowship’s blog

The Essence of a Gospel-Soaked, Faithful Teacher

How did we get to a place where Christians turn against Christians in the name of political power?

How did we get to a place where we demonize one another by oversimplifying our beliefs and convictions?

How did we get here? By quarreling over words and secondary matters to the neglect of what matters most; by not faithfully teaching and demonstrating those things which matter most. Without faithful teachers, God’s people have few, if any, guardrails against worldly pursuits and thinking.

But what does it look like to be a faithful teacher of God’s Word? In 2 Timothy 2, Paul paints three compelling pictures of a faithful teacher for his young protégé, Timothy: the unashamed worker, the clean vessel, and the Lord’s servant. Taken together, these three pictures convey the essence of a gospel-soaked, faithful teacher.

Read the rest of my article at Gospel-Centered Discipleship

She Wanted a Better Life for Her Children, But Was Stealing Worth the Separation?

Pregnant, 15, and the oldest of six kids in a crowded Detroit home, Charnell Scott could feel the weight of the world pressing down on her shoulders. When her baby girl became the seventh child in the household, a sense of duty and pride kept Charnell going—but it also kept her from asking for assistance. When things got tight, she started stealing clothes and food to help her family survive.

It wasn’t long before she got caught. Charnell was 18 the first time she went to jail.

Read the rest of my article at Prison Fellowship’s blog.

Racism and Our Need for Repentance

At the T4G Conference this month, David Platt preached a sermon based on Amos 5:18-27 titled, “Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters: Racism and our Need for Repentance.” Be sure to read the verses in Amos before moving on.

Though he would prefer to talk about ethnicity instead of race, Platt spoke specifically about the white and black divide in America. According to one conference attendee, reactions were mixed. Mine was not. Platt simply called himself, his church, and evangelicals to live lives worthy of the gospel we have received (Philippians 1:27).

He asked long-overdue questions like, “Why is my church so white? Why is the missions organization I lead so white? … Why is this conference so white?”

Platt’s exposition (or interpretation of the text), indictments against and exhortations for the church are worth examining.

3 Indictments Against God’s People in the Face of Injustice

Amos, a shepherd-turned-prophet, indicted Israel, God’s people, on three primary offenses, according to Platt:

  1. They were eagerly anticipating future salvation while conveniently denying present sin.
    • It is possible to anticipate salvation tomorrow while turning a blind eye to sin in your life today.
  2. They were indulging in worship while they were ignoring injustice.
    • People who truly worship God above them will sacrificially work for justice around them.
  3. They were carrying on their religion while they were refusing to repent.
    • God is not honored by mouths that are quick to sing and hands that are quick to rise in worship when those same hands and those same mouths are slow to work against injustice.

These indictments led Platt to ask if we have been slow to work for racial injustice around us. His answer is “yes.” (Note: Platt was speaking directly to pastors.)

The Church Has Been Slow to Work for Racial Injustice

On a whole, Platt said, pastors and churches in America have widened and are currently widening, instead of bridging, the racial divide in our country. Here’s why he says that:

  1. It matters whether you’re black or white in America today.
    • “Why is it that I would say that Arthur Price is an African American pastor in Birmingham, instead of just saying that he is a pastor in Birmingham? I have never introduced John MacArthur as a caucasian pastor.”
    • Black Americans are much more likely to be unemployed than white Americans; income inequality today is 50% wider (worse) than it was 40 years ago; African American babies die at over twice the rate of white babies; African American mothers are 4 times more likely to die giving birth than are white mothers; young African American males are 6 times more likely to be murdered than young white American males.
  2. Over 95% of white Americans attend predominantly white churches; over 90% of African Americans attend predominantly African American churches.”
    • Could it be that as much as we like to think about the church as a force for countering racism, right now the church is actually a force for continuing it?
    • “We cannot be comfortable as the people of God with a clear white/black divide in our country, and we can’t be content with deepening that divide in the church. It is not just, and it is not right. And we will not be found to be worshiping God if we ignore injustice, or far worse, increase it.”

6 Exhortations for Repenting of Racism in the Church

Based on his understanding of Amos 5 and the cultural analysis above, Platt offered six exhortations for the church.

  1. Let’s look at the reality of racism.
    • (The section above is what Platt covered here.)
  2. Let’s live in true multi-ethnic community.”
    • I look at my life and ministry and in so many ways my world has been so white. … Why have the churches I’ve been a part of and led in been so white? Why is the missions organization I lead so predominantly white? How can I, with supposed zeal for the nations, be so blind to such injustice among peoples in my own nation? These are questions that I have, for far too long, ignored.” (Really appreciated his transparency here.)
    • “We all hate slavery. We all hate Jim Crow laws. Certainly, we cannot be content, then, with churches, seminaries, missions organizations, and conferences that look like time capsules preserving the divisive effects of the past.”
  3. Let’s listen to and learn from one another (in the context of true multi-ethnic community).
    • Most white and black people in the church disagree on what they think the causes of racism are, and Christians are farther apart in their understanding than non-Christians.
  4. Let’s love and lay aside our preferences for one another.
    • We want the kind of churches that cause people to say, “How are those people together?”
    • We can’t prioritize church growth over ethnic diversity.
    • Most multi-ethnic churches in the U.S. are still dominated by white cultural norms.
    • “We will not be found faithful before our God if fear of man and fear of losing the crowd keeps us from proclaiming the totality of God’s Word.”
  5. Let’s leverage our influence for justice in the present.
    • On a whole, white churches have been complacent during every stage of racism (slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, etc.).
  6. Let’s long for the day when justice will be perfect.

Reflections on Racism and the Church

Here are, in no particular order, some of my thoughts on Platt’s sermon and the concerns it raises. (Note: I’m a white male, so I’ll be speaking from that perspective, and for that reason, will only touch on what white Christians can do to repent of racism in the church.)

I think Platt was spot-on in his indictment of evangelical churches. For too long, our churches have furthered the divide between white and black brothers and sisters. White ignorance of the black experience has fueled the chasm between cultures.

Building a church culture that prizes diversity requires radical grace without losing the truth. I have been blessed to be at a church that’s far more diverse than many of the others in my area. The diversity stems from a culture saturated in the knowledge and practice of grace that accepts everyone who walks through the doors. Crafting a culture like that takes a relentless focus on grace, but in a way that doesn’t lose the truth in the process. An overemphasis on grace at the expense of the truth (or the commandments of Scripture) leads to what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace: “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”

White evangelicals must be shepherded through engaging their black brothers and sisters by servant leaders who will show them how. To Platt’s credit, he said that the final verdict on what white Christians in America do with the knowledge that we live in a culture of systemic injustice against people of color is not how loudly we clap or how many “amens” we shout, but how we sacrificially work for injustice around us.

But here’s the thing: most people have no idea what that means or what it looks like to work against injustice. They think that’s something for a professional or legal organization to do. What is needed are servant leaders who will display what it looks like to work against injustice by living it out in everyday life. We need white pastors who are willing to plant churches in non-white areas or to partner with black pastors and leaders to plan and fund their church plants. We need white families to open their homes and live out radically ordinary hospitality that gathers people of all sorts of backgrounds and colors around the table and the Word of God. We need young white men to seek out older, wiser African American mentors, and older white men to seek out young, African American men to mentor.

I have been working to address my white-washed experience for the last two years. The Lord has blessed my family the last couple of years as we’ve sought to diversify our life and relationships. For over a year, I walked through the truths of Scripture and a bible study curriculum with an African American brother who I count among my dearest friends. I learned how he fears for his son to be pulled over or questioned by police, a fear I have never felt. My wife and I attended an anniversary party with his wife, family, and friends where I was maybe for the first time in my life the unquestionable minority. It was an unequivocally good experience that left me with a deeper understanding of my brother and his background. I’ve been to his home, prayed for his kids, and texted him with running questions.

Around the same time, I sensed the need for a spiritual mentor in my life, and the Lord was good to send me to an older, wiser African American man who turned out to be my middle school guidance counselor. We’ve been connecting every other month or so for about a year. He walked with me through a career change, which was one of the most stressful periods of my life.

In our neighborhood, we’ve befriended an Indian family and shared meals in each other’s homes, and have learned how similar we are despite our differences. We’ve had a mother from Puerto Rico and her three children live in our home for a few weeks, which opened our eyes to the discouraging, bewildering worlds of public and social services.

I’m not holding myself or my family up as an example. I only share this to encourage others to pursue diversity in their own lives, because it’s a pursuit God will bless. Pray specifically for opportunities to diversify your life and for God to open your eyes to the opportunities that already exist.

Like Platt, I long for the day when justice is no longer a trickle but a torrent rushing through our lives and nation. Even more than that, I long for the day when people from every nation, tongue, and tribe gather around the throne of the Lamb as one race—the human race—worshiping our Creator in perfect peace.

Justice Will Roll Down

Sandra McCracken wrote a beautiful song from the same verses in Amos 5 called “Justice Will Roll Down.” I’ll leave you with the lyrics:

Oh my love, you have grown so cold
To the world outside, to the house next door
She who has been loved much, has so much to give
Mercy is the fragrance, of the broken

Justice will roll down, oh justice will roll down
From high upon those mountains with a mighty river sound
It will roll down
It will roll down

Oh my child, I will be your light
In your secret pain, in the dark of night
No enemy, no conqueror, will steal your life from me
I am your salvation, and your victory

Justice will roll down, oh justice will roll down
From high upon those mountains with a mighty river sound
It will roll down
It will roll down

Soon oh soon, when the trumpet sounds
Every knee shall bend, every heart will pound
I have made a new world, where the servant is the King
Oppression will be over, and the slave set free

Justice will roll down, oh justice will roll down
From high upon those mountains with a mighty river sound
It will roll down
It will roll down

 

Prayer as Formation

A Christian who doesn’t pray isn’t really a Christian. A church that doesn’t pray isn’t really a church. To be a Christian is to be a pray-er.

Prayer has always been central to God’s people, especially in his church. Prayer was of the utmost importance in Jesus’ life. Time and again, he would disappear into the wilderness or some quiet space to be alone with his Father.

It was obvious to Jesus’ followers that his time in prayer fed his insatiable love for God and man, so much so that they finally broke down and begged, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). We, too, should beg Jesus to show us how to pray. That’s the aim of Gordon T. Smith’s small new book, Teach Us to Pray.

This book, like so many others on prayer, is built off of the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:2-4). But it differs in its treatment of the subject matter. Instead of working through that prayer line by line, Smith opts to examine three key features of Jesus’ prayer: thanksgiving, confession, and discernment.

Prayer as Formation

But before he begins that treatment, he points out that our lives usually inform our prayers. But, he asks, what if it was the other way around? What if instead of our life circumstances driving us to pray, we saw prayer as a way of participating in the kingdom of heaven and as a way of actually shaping the realities of our everyday lives? Smith says,

“Prayer has a formative impact on our lives—the manner or form of our prayers actually shapes the contours and character of our lives” (p. 9).

Smith is wisely pointing out that the form of our prayers ends up forming us. So when we pray, we should not pray as if God is passive and we are trying to get him to act, Smith says. Instead, we should approach prayer with the knowledge that God is always working, and through our prayers, we begin to see how and where he is at work in the world around us.

Since the form of prayer shapes us, he says, “We can even speak of a liturgy [of prayer], meaning that our prayers have a regular pattern to them so that over time our hearts and minds and lives are increasingly conformed to the very thing for which we are praying.” For thousands of years, God’s people have found it helpful to pray God’s words back to him, whether in the form of the Lord’s Prayer, the Psalms, Paul’s Ephesian prayer, and so on. These prayers are so beneficial for the individual and the church because they continually shape our hearts and minds to look more like God’s heart and mind.

Three Movements of Prayer

With that in mind, Smith explains that (based on Jesus’ example) there ought to be movements of thanksgiving, confession, and discernment in our prayers. We must start with thanksgiving because we will not receive more of we are ungrateful for. “We cannot pray ‘thy kingdom come’ if we are not grateful for how the kingdom has come and is coming” (p. 12). Thanksgiving is the Christian’s original response to the Redeemer’s work, and it should be our initial response to God in prayer.

The next movement is confession—the typical response for any who finds themselves in the presence of the King of Kings or in the midst of his kingdom. Smith calls confession, “the essential realignment of those who long to live under the reign of Christ” (p. 13). Confession and repentance (“an act of intentional alignment . . . with the coming of the reign of Christ”) are essential in developing “kingdom eyes”:

“We cannot pray ‘your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’ unless and until we see the ways our lives are not lived in consistency with the will of God” (p. 13).

Third, we practice discernment in our prayers, by which Smith means, “considering where and how God is calling us to speak and act as participants in the kingdom of God” (p. 13).

Three Movements, Three Temptations

At each movement, though, we are tempted away from praying. We’re tempted away from thanksgiving by focusing on what God is not doing rather than seeing what he is doing. I’m easily tempted to wish for moves of God I read about in other countries, churches, or states, so I was particularly busted by these words:

“Rather than looking to other societies where we are impressed that God is at work in seemingly miraculous ways and bemoaning that this is not happening in our situation, should we not see that perhaps in a secularized society God may be working in a far more subtle way?” (p.15).

When it comes to confession, we’re tempted away from praying by looking at “how others fall short, how others are not living up to the kingdom” (p. 15). If we think it’s always someone else who needs to change, we can be sure that we’re not confessing our own sin and repenting from that which is keeping us from living under Christ’s authority.

Once we’ve been thankful for the ways God is working around us and we’ve confessed and repented of our sin, we can now do  the work of discernment in our prayers—unless we give in to the dual temptations of thinking there’s nothing we can possibly do about the situation, or thinking we are the only ones who can do it all, and so we must. The first leads to cynicism, the second to burnout.

Worth Your Time and Money

From there, Smith dives deeper into each of the three movements—thanksgiving, confession, and discernment. Each chapter of my copy is filled with underlines and dog-eared pages. I love books this size (about 10,000 words) because each word counts and the author has usually boiled their thoughts down to the absolute essentials.

Teach Us to Pray is absolutely worth reading. Smith is a Canadian, so his phrasing, examples, and lexicon are refreshing for American readers. He often writes with beautiful simplicity and clarity—both of which the church can never have enough of.

My Favorite Quotes

  • “We are invited not only to pray the prayer but also, in praying, to enter into the kingom—to seek it and to live in this new dimension of reality.” (p. 5)
  • “In our praying not only are we asking God to change things, but we are being changed.” (p. 7)
  • “Yes, we do need to be agents of positive change, but could it be that we can only discern God’s particular call on us now if we’re able to see how God is already at work?” (p. 15)
  • “Praying in the Spirit means that in our prayers we listen twice as much as we speak.” (p. 25)
  • “If we think God is good to others and not to us, we do not really believe that God is truly good.” (p. 39)
  • “Confession is not a matter of getting God to love us. Indeed, we make confession precisely because we know we are loved.” (p. 58)
  • “And this requires persistent prayers—ideally daily—for the very simple reason that the impact of our prayers is their cumulative effect.” (p. 93)