I’ve been musing on our conversation quite a bit since then. It’s obviously great that he likes me but that wasn’t what struck me. I was struck by his observation that many leaders were claiming to be something they are not.

This struck me for two reasons:

1. Since when did it become OK for Christians to claim to be something they are not?

2. Why do so many people focus inward on the church instead of outward to their communities?

When I became a Christian it’d be fair to say my family weren’t overly thrilled. My mum thought all Christians were hypocrites. She told me in no uncertain terms that she didn’t mind me being a Christian but ‘don’t you dare be a hypocrite…’ I knew that if she ever caught me saying I was something I wasn’t – I’d be in big trouble.

Tozer once said: ‘the church began in power, moved in power and moved as long as she had power. When she no longer had power she dug in for safety and sought to conserve her gains!’ Unfortunately, I think Tozer is right – too many of us are simply digging in for safety and trying to maintain what we’ve got; rather than working hard to see the Kingdom come.

Last year I went to the 15^th Anniversary celebration for an organisation that does amazing work with marginalised young people in London. About 400 people attended this celebration. On the other side of London 3,250 people had gathered for a worship event to pray for revival.

I have to confess that I did wonder what would happen if those 3,250 people joined the organisation I was with as volunteers. I wondered if they’d see revival come if they actually got involved instead of – just – attending conferences and events.

I think that a vibrant faith includes risk taking, adventure, sacrifice and the willingness to be the answer to your own prayers. You’d expect to me to say that I think that attending events and conferences are great things to do. But if they ever become a replacement for getting involved in our communities or churches we’ve got a massive problem.

A church leader friend of mine told me recently that he wants to see revival come to his town. While he and his church are waiting and praying for that to happen they are working to ‘revive’ their town. They run a free festival every summer; school breakfast clubs every day and a whole host of other community activities. They are being the answer to their own prayers… and their town is noticing the difference.

So come on let’s be what we supposed to be – look outward, get involved, take a few risks and see what God does with us.

Stuff to think about…

Why do you think that some Christians find it easier to be inward focused rather than outward focused?

Have you ever fallen into this way of thinking?

Many of us aspire to live a life that has purpose and meaning. I’ve heard so many times the phrase ‘God wants to do BIG things with your life’ which sometimes and somehow gets translated into ‘I’m going to make Jesus famous’ or ‘I’m going to be a rich and famous for him.’ And, increasingly it actually seems that being famous for Jesus is a valid ambition…

I’ve never been sure about this kind of teaching. I’ve never actually felt like God wants to do BIG things with me. I’ve just ‘followed the road in front of me’ and tried to do the best I can.  Clearly, some times I do better at this than others.

I think the current interest in fame and celebrity in Christian circles is really unhelpful and should be questioned by all of us.  I grew up around really famous people – people who you’d know because they were very good at what they did.  Their names were in the paper every day and anyone who knew about their sport knew they were total legends (in the real sense of the word) who were going to be remembered for years to come.  Did any of this make them interesting people, great to be with and better people than anyone else?  No, of course, it didn’t.  Even as an 11 year old I could see through all the hype and work out that when it came down to it ‘being famous’ wasn’t a big deal at all.

God does want to do big things with you. But I’m sure he’s not at all interested in you becoming a celebrity. I do however know that he’s interested in you knowing what it is to be loved extravagantly, he wants you to know that you are never alone even when it feels like you are and for you to know that you matter because you belong to him.  Knowing you are loved, that you’re not alone and that you count all seem pretty big to me.

Mother Teresa once said: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”  I love this quote because it sums up how I want to live my life. Life isn’t lived on a big stage in a big tent or arena it’s lived in the sum of the small things we do and the love we show when we’re doing them. There are plenty of people whose names you’ll never know who are just ‘following the road in front of them’ and doing ‘great things’ which are really significant.

So if you ever you hear anyone say: ‘God wants to do BIG things with your life’ agree with them.  And then remind yourself that Wordsworth said: “the best portion of anyone’s life is seen in our little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.”  The Kingdom is all about making big things small and small things big.  And Jesus actually doesn’t need your help in being made famous – he’s done alright with that already without any help from you.

Stuff to think about…

Has anyone ever told you that ‘God’s going to do big things through you’?

If they have, what do you that ‘looks’ like?

What ‘small thing with great love’ can you do today to make a difference to someone else?

When people have set out to make Jesus famous has that actually has it actually achieved anything?

I’ve discovered that people who live in comfort sometimes say the dumbest things because their comfort robs them of their ability to care.

I absolutely hate the phrase ‘compassion fatigue’ and I always have. And today I hate it with more passion than I ever have. It seems to me that ‘compassion fatigue’ is a phrase which gets used by comfortable people who live in comfortable places with comfortable lives. Compassion fatigue is by definition a luxury.

Yesterday, I met a church leader who leads a church of 7,000 people. After talking to him for a while I about his amazing vision for his church I asked him: ‘what is your biggest personal challenge as a Christian in Haiti?’  His answer was: ‘my biggest challenge is that the need just keeps coming.  And the more need you meet the need the more it just keeps coming.’ Was he a candidate for compassion fatigue? Yes. Did he have compassion fatigue? Absolutely not, because he doesn’t have the luxury of that choice.

Today we’ve spent the day with the church we might be working with to fund a building so they can run a Child Survival Programme (CSP). We took Nellie the Compassion ‘big blue elephant’ to their school (we’ve discovered that most schools in Haiti are in churches). At the school we met 200 amazing, fun and happy children – we played with the elephant and some with balloons with them. The joy on their faces was priceless.

Later, we stopped to film some of the Bible readings we’ll be looking at Spring Harvest. Three young boys joined our team for an hour. Initially they were full of bravado as only teenagers can be. As they began to trust us they began to tell us their stories.

Each had lost their parents in the earthquake, each had nowhere to live, each of them had nobody who cared about them. So they stuck together – three boys with nothing and nobody so they look after each other because they know its the only way they’ll survive.

Someone once said that ‘your perspective  is shaped by what you see when you first open your curtains in the morning.’ I don’t know what you see when you open the curtains in the morning – I see a leafy street and the school opposite my house. I don’t see 600,000 people living in tents, I don’t see street children, I don’t see people scratching a living by selling stuff on the streets, I don’t see parents robbed of all their hopes and dreams, I don’t see children orphaned by an earthquake begging for food.  I don’t see any of that.

Compassion fatigue says that ‘the needs are so great, and the little I can do won’t make a difference so I won’t even try.’ It’s a lie, an excuse and a choice that only comfortable people can make. Nobody I’ve met in Haiti has that choice or even if they did would make that choice – not the Compassion team, not the church leaders and definitely not three young street boys with nobody and nothing who’ve chosen to help their friends.

So if these people can find a place in their hearts to reach out and help, why can’t we? Because choice is a luxury only the comfortable have.

Stuff to think about…

Do ever think ‘the needs are so great, and the little I can do won’t make a difference so I won’t even try’?

If you do, what can you do to shake it off?

What is the biggest personal challenge to you being a Christian and a leader?

Welcome to Haiti read the sign at the airport. Once through customs and immigration we joined a bustling mass of people. It’d be easy to think that they were normal travellers but after listening to their conversations it turned out that pretty much everyone on the plane was here to see how they could help the Haitian people rebuild their country.  Realising that there is such a desire to help was inspiring.

As most of you reading this know, every year at Spring Harvest we take up an offering and give this money away to charities doing amazing work. In 2012 we’ve called our offering ‘No Ceiling to Hope’ and we’ve come to Haiti to find out if there is a church we can partner with to help them ‘demonstrate the love of God to the most needy in their community.’ Given all I saw yesterday I’m totally confident that we’ll find loads of people we can partner with.

We’re really grateful to our friends at Compassion for enabling me, Abby Guinness, Krish Kandiah, Bekah Legg and Damian Wharton to come here on behalf of the Spring Harvest community.  We’ve brought a film crew with us from OH TV to document our experiences – the people we meet, the places we visit and the impact the church is having – also with us are our friends Ian Hamilton and Steve Bunn from Compassion UK.

We arrived in Haiti yesterday and spent the day travelling and orientating ourselves to the people and the places we’re going to visit. And I have to say it was totally overwhelming (a word I think I’ll be using a lot this week). To be lifted out of your regular life and dropped into a place so different from your own life creates a weird sense of alternative reality. Almost every experience is different to what I see at home – instead of empty leafy streets I saw masses of people because in Haiti 85% of adults are unemployed, instead of houses I saw tents, instead of people living in comfort I saw people making the best of life under terrible conditions.  It was overwhelming.

We went out for food to a Chinese restaurant. We had a great time talking about our hopes and dreams for the trip.  I’m really passionate that the people we meet know that we don’t come with any other agenda than to serve them and what God is doing through them. I’m not even sure whether I want to use the phrase ‘help them’ – which of course we do but the phrase doesn’t sit well with me…

When we came out of the restaurant we faced what we hadn’t seen when we drove up – we saw the tent village. The picture at the top of this blog post is the photo I took of it.  Between us and them was a road – 18 feet separated us.  18 feet between our side where we eat great food and can keep asking for more just because we can and their side where they eat nothing or our leftovers. 18 feet isn’t much – yesterday it felt like an ocean.

For me personally I guess this trip is about finding out how we navigate all the roads we discover that feel like an oceans.  In doing that, I’m sure we’ll find our place in the bigger story of what God is doing in the world.

Stuff to think about…

Have you ever been in a situation where the road between you and others felt like an ocean?

If you have, what did you do to navigate it?

[P.s.  Compassion are helping us identify a church we can work with to fund them building some infrastructure to host a Child Survival Programme.  There is a real problem in Haiti with infant mortality basically lots of children aren’t surviving their early years and churches don't have the buildings they need to run a programmes in. Of course we’ll be asking questions about how the money we give can be used most effectively, and, as always, we’ll do all the necessary checks on financial integrity.]

I’m sitting on the plane and musing about what the next few days might bring. I’m en-route to Haiti to find a church we can work as part of the Spring Harvest offering. Seems a simple enough thing to do but it’s only now I’m on the plane that I’ve started to think about what we’re going to see, experience and feel when we’re in Haiti.

I’ve been on trips like this before. I was in Bosnia and Croatia during the war – I met people so poor that they had resorted to eating grass, people who’d been tortured, others had seen horrific things happen to their family and friends – all of them people who’d lost everything both materially and emotionally because of the war. Somehow I think what I’m about to see will be different. Bosnia needed help because a war had ravaged the country. Haiti needs help because an earthquake ravaged the country.

We’ve called this offering ‘No Ceiling to Hope’ – we totally believe there isn’t a ceiling to hope whether you’re in a war zone or in a place of extreme poverty.  God’s love demonstrated through acts of kindness, grace and compassion can ‘break every chain’ – emotional, spiritual or physical – which seek to ensnare us.

As Spring Harvest, we also totally believe that ‘the Church is God’s hope for the world’. That wherever we are, whatever our context – God calls his people to reach out in love and grace to those around them whether they’re in the church or totally outside it. One of the things I’m most looking forward to about this trip is seeing the love of God made real through the corporate Church and through individual Christians in Haiti. I’m sure their lives will be incredibly challenging.

I’m excited and a bit scared about what I’m about to experience… I know we’ll see plenty of need – in fact I’m sure we’re going to see overwhelming need. I’m also sure that it’ll be a great reminder of what’s really important in life. I expect to get more from being here than I’ll ever be able to give back.

Stuff to think about…

How is your church being ‘the hope of the world’ in your community?

What part have you played in being bringing hope to others?