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4 The Church’s Prophetic Vocation in the World During college, several friends and I began to minister in an impoverished, inner-city neighborhood of Minneapolis. The area attracted many who had nowhere else to go, forming a complex community of recent Somali and Southeast Asian immigrants, street kids, gutter punks, artists, left-wing political radicals, transplanted students, homeless veterans, and mentally ill residents. Unfortunately, the area was also highly contested terrain in the local drug trade where gangs violently struggled for dominance. As one of the leaders of our ministry, I moved into a slum overrun by cockroaches and crack dealers. As I lived in this neighborhood, my life became intertwined with the lives of the people around me. Their hopes, struggles, and tragedies became my own. Every Tuesday night we held a Bible study in a nearby theater featuring our punk band, in which I played the guitar. After the music, one of us would talk about what it means to follow Jesus. On Saturday nights, we set up our “Jesus Kitchen” on the street and served hot meals to anyone who was hungry. We spent many hours in the café behind my slum, the neighborhood’s unofficial community center, befriending all whom we met and trying to minister to those in need as much as we were able. One summer, the café put a wooden sign on the street to advertise its menu: “Hot Coffee, Cigarettes, Frozen Treats, Hardcore Christians.” One Saturday evening, before setting up the Jesus Kitchen, our leadership team gathered in my building to read Scripture and pray together. Suddenly, four rapid gunshots shattered the calm. We emerged slowly from our room to discover that a crack dealer had shot blindly into the door of the apartment next to us, hitting a woman in the leg. Part of our team stayed with her while I and another leader went down to the street. From there I watched helplessly as squad cars surrounded my building and police with drawn guns rushed in. Silently I prayed for our team members still in the hallways, knowing that the police in my neighborhood were often as dangerous and unpredictable as the 141 crack dealers. In my heart, a nagging question surfaced, and not for the first time. What difference were we making, what change could we possibly make, in a place so steeped in violence and despair? I cannot tell this story without also telling another, which for me was a moment of redemptive grace, a glimpse of the blessing hidden within discipleship’s cost. One Friday night, I was standing in the hallway outside my apartment talking to my neighbor Jensen about work, music, and God. A man with big dreams, Jensen longed to share his music with the world but was stuck working a temporary job in a nearby warehouse. Although hardened by more than twenty years of living in public housing projects, including Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green, Jensen and his wife Cathy would soon move out of my building because of its pervasive violence. As our conversation grew to a close, he suddenly turned to me and, struggling to find the right words, said, “You know somethin’? . . . You . . . are a breath of fresh air . . . in a world of chaos.” As we live with the people to whom God calls us, we quickly learn that we are not the savior of the world but a fellow sufferer also in need of grace, salvation, and liberation. We discover that, as the world’s affliction tears our own hearts and lives, we encounter our crucified Lord who does not abandon us to despair, but who leads us through darkness, slowly, toward hope. In chapters one and two, I argued that humanity in Jesus Christ is the object of God’s compassion; to be human is to be one toward whom God turns in mercy. This fact determines not only human identity but also the normative social practice of the human community. As the object of divine mercy, each of us is to extend mercy to those around us who are impoverished in a way that we are prosperous, who are vulnerable in a way that we are secure, or who are troubled in a way that we are at peace. The relief of human distress in this way becomes integral to our human identity as those toward whom God turns in mercy. In chapter three, we considered God’s merciful turning toward humanity in Christ’s reconciling...

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