Proximity not Project

When I was in high school, I was invited by my youth group at my church to participate in a week-long camp and street mission. This camp brought in a couple thousand students from all over the country to a college campus near a large city. During the morning each day, we were trained in lecture room on campus. The purpose of this training was so that we could go into the city and walk up to complete strangers and try to talk to them about Jesus. In the evening, we all reconvened back on the college campus and sang worship songs and told stories of our experience in the city. Only the coolest stories made it to the stage. Talking to complete strangers--mostly adults twice our age--definitely brought many of us Christian kids out of our comfort zones and developed a sense of boldness. 

I did this for two summers as a junior and senior in high school and it was rather formative for me--some good, some not-so-good. The more I reflect on those experiences, the images that are most vivid to me are the faces of the adults who were simply spending time with their families or taking a walk in the park or on their way to their next meeting. They were faces that looked mostly annoyed, but were graceful enough to let me get through my very rehearsed, though timid spiel. They kindly said, "Thanks, but I'm not interested in a conversation right now."

I had worked up the courage to approach them, to interrupt them, to talk at them and to hopefully pray for them. I had hoped that I could convince them that what I had to say was important so that in the evening, I could get up on stage and tell everyone an incredible story about how I persuaded someone toward the faith. 

The biggest problem: It was all about me. 

At no point, did I even consider the comings and goings of those strangers. At no point, did I even care about what they had to say; I simply wanted to get my speech over with so they would respond with, "How can I know this Jesus you just talked about!?!" I truly just wanted a notch on my belt.

See, this is what happens when we treat the Gospel like a project--a task that has to get done. When we live and breath a culture that exalts Western pragmatism, that starts to feed into how we share Good News without even considering the hearer. People end up being treated like projects. They are a means to an end. It is purely transactional. At that point, it's not really Good News anymore, it's just news. Even more crudely, it's a monologue.

But proximity...that's something else. That's something different. Proximity is the very essence of relationship. It may even be the very opposite of pragmatism, because it removes the project status from the person. Proximity doesn't have clear objectives and measurables. It's mostly messy as much as it is beautiful. It doesn't fall neatly into a 9-5 time block . It doesn't usually involve a 2-minute rehearsed spiel spoken in some kind of clunky and cumbersome way. It involves breaking bread, laughing, crying, feeling one another's pain, waiting, and a whole lot of listening.

Proximity is especially important when considering the "other-ness" of the person. When it's someone who doesn't look like you, think like you, believe like you, or even vote like you, the stakes are higher and the mess may even be greater. You know what this sounds like?

Proximity sounds and looks a lot like Jesus.

A powerful and seemingly distant God gets proximite with the "other" through Jesus. It gets real messy real fast. There's certainly all those things: the breaking of bread, the laughing and crying, and for sure, the pain. It would be hard to argue that Jesus treated any of us like projects just by observing how He behaved in the first century. If it was about pragmatism, God might have just spoke forgiveness and resurrection into existence and sent us a memo. God might have just talked at us and hoped for the best. But then, as Paul says to the Philippians, he gives up His divine privileges. In other words, if I reflect that attitude and behavior, I find that it's not about me.

How might you get proximite with the "other?" 

Who is the "other" in your life right now?

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