Incarnational Ministry

A ministry of presence is a requirement for serving alongside the poor. We must come near to those we desire to serve. We must touch them, and they us. It is not until their problems become our problems that we will ever truly be able to minister. Not in the sense that we care about them so much that their problems burden us emotionally, but rather in the sense that the problems we face in our lives are the same ones they face in theirs. When we suffer the violence of living with corrupt or absent police officers, when our property values drop because of corrupt banking practices, when our schools are failing and our jobs are gone, then we will be trusted to minister.

Your Mission... should you choose to accept it.

In what ways has your religious conviction informed your writing? And would you comment on the presence (or lack ) of religious content, specifically Christian, in recent children's literature (say the last fifteen years or so)?

I think it was Lewis who said something like: "The book cannot be what the writer is not." What you are will shape your book whether you want it to or not. I am Christian, so that conviction will pervade the book even when I make no conscious effort to teach or preach. Grace and hope will inform everything I write.

You're asking me to comment on fifteen years of 5000 or so books a year. Whew! We live in a Post-Christian society. Therefore, not many of those writers will be Christians or adherents of any of the traditional faiths. Self-consciously Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) writing will be sectarian and tend to propaganda and therefore have very little to say to persons outside that particular faith community. The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.

This is a quote from the author of Bridge to Terebinthia that I found a blazingly illuminating insight into the Mission of God. She critiques much of "christian" writing as having the outward trappings of Jesus, yet missing the deeper reality of who He is, and bemoans the dearth of writing that truly captures the redemptive story of the gospel, transmitting it into our culture as many beacons of hope and life.

Jesus does not seek people to place His name on their bumper, but to live His life wherever they go (so much so that it could be said that we are acting by His Spirit). This is the essence of God's plan, that we would enter wholeheartedly into His desire to redeem the whole of creation, so that we would be His "hands and feet" throughout our various spheres of influence.

My friend Justin called us "nomad's, carrying on our backs the center of the universe with us wherever we go." It is this exact sentiment (portrayed through an eloquent voice) that is God's plan for effecting real change in this world. That those who know Him, would go into every nook and cranny of the creation, and discover Him there!