Moses: The Cross Cultural Litrugical Church Planter: Surveying the Urban Landscape

Our story is a familiar story in some ways. We all have heard aspects of this story read from our lectionary readings or we have heard this story in our Sunday School or Children's Church classes in various ways. My mother was in charge of Children's Church in the ole Pentecostal church I grew up in. She used the flannel board and flannel graph to tell the story. Now days, kids see the story through the eyes of vegetables or other various cartoons.

How can we forget Charleston Heston comin' off the mountain with gray hair and two tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments written with the fiery finger of God? Even Disney and Dreamworks brought the Story of Moses to life through their epic animated feature: The Prince of Egypt. We have been saturated with the Life of Moses, so saturated that the stark reality of the story gets lost in our romantized renditions. I believe as we journey with Moses and step into the story and the let the text narrate our lives; we can see with new eyes where God is workin' in our cities among the poor and the oppressed and how we can join Him in his mission.

Our story begins in Exodus 1-2:1-10. The Hebrew people are in a different state than when we left them at the end Genesis. In the closin' chapters of Genesis, a Hebrew named Joseph saves the Empire and his own family is favored in the midst of famine. Ah, but when we read the openin' verses of Exodus, a daunting phrase that introduces a change in their status: "There arose king who did not know Joseph."

About four hundred years had passed and this band of nomadic shepherds livin' in the ghetto of Gershom - Egyptians did not take too kindly to shepherds, they felt that they were unclean - had grown numerous in the fulfillment of the promise God gave to Abraham. These few folk that the previous Pharaoh had let in were now a threat to the Empire. Egypt had an Immigration Problem!

Joseph was a foreigner, an ex-con, a fugitive without a bond who had been favored by God to preserve the elect of the promise and as a by product saved the Empire. Now what would have happened to the Empire if Joseph hadn't showed up? What would have happened to our little band of nomads if Egypt did not give them refuge?

There are about 3-12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. There are those who say we have an Immigration Problem or that we need Immigration Reform, and there is spirited debate on both sides of the aisle in order to deal with this issue. However, we must ground our response to this issue in the Scriptures. We must ask a Two-Fold Question: How does the Church respond on a Macro-Level: How do we reform the system in a fair and just way? The Micro-Level Response: How do we respond to individuals in our urban communities who may be in our midst.

Pharaoh had a plan, his reform was twofold as well: Enslave the masses for the Empire and let them to build the glories of the Empire. (I wonder how much blood, sweat, and tears built the Egyptian pyramids that we love to go and see as tourist attractions. Just a thought!) Kill the individual male babies so that the masses cannot rise up and revolt. Doesn't it seem ironic that he is killin' his labor force in fear of revolt. I guess he understood the complexities of his problem!

With all tongue and cheek aside, we as the Church need to know not only the complexity of issues such as immigration but the ones I will discuss below as well. We need to know the complexity of responses that national, state, and local government give and how they affect and impact the communities you are serving. This brings me to three other major issues that Urban Church Planters will face: Poverty, Violence, and Broken Families.

Our Hebrew families in our story are expericin' slave labor to the fullest extent. They were caught in the trap of governmental and societal systems that oppressed them to the point of non-advancement. Today in America we have about 39 million folk who live in poverty where African Americans and Latinos around 25% living in poverty. The unemployment rate has hovered around 9.7% with the actual rate bein' higher if we factor the working poor. Sometimes White American and the predominantly White Evangelical Church look down on the poor and say, "Why can't they pull themselves up by the boot straps and help themselves?" Then we quote: "God helps those who help themselves" as the Gospel not realizing that this does not come from the Bible but from Benjamin Franklin. This saying reflects more of a Pelegian ethos than the Gospel of grace that empowers works to be carried forth. If the Church is the vehicle of the Gospel of Grace, then the community will be empowered to good works in all its fullness and complexity.

We must exegete our culture and see the systems that prevent jobs, and allow the Holy Ghost to inspire us and empower with apostolic ideas to create jobs and raise up leaders.

Violence is another issue that our text talks about. Pharaoh systematically slaughtered all the boy babies so to wipe out any threat to his Empire. We in the Evangelical Church love to preach on texts like this because we relate it to abortion in our day and age. We love to diatribe about being Pro-Life which means we protect unborn children. Yet, let's talk about what it really means to be Pro-Life.

Being Pro-Life means we fight against any destructive forces that that threaten the Gift of Life that Abundant Life that overflows from the Triune God and that Jesus promised and gave to us through the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection! The same destructive forces that drive abortion are embodied in murders, gang violence, drugs, prostitution, etc. We must be willin' to engage the powers and the systems that paralyzed our communities and families and drives these destructive forces in the community. We must be Pro-Life from the womb to the tomb. As you can see, this is more than being Anti-Abortion, it is fightin' for the unborn and the born whose lives are being snatched away by the forces of death and destruction at ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, or ninety years of age!

The final problem that our urban church planters will face is broken families. Notice in out text the courageous role of the women! The midwives refuse to give the male children over to Pharaoh's army. Moses Mom and Miriam keep him safe and then strategically place him in a basket down the river towards the heart of Egypt, riskin' and yet savin' his life! About 12 million of American homes are headed up by single parents with 83% of African American homes headed up by a single parent. Most of these parents are single moms but numbers of single dads is on the rise as well. The women who run the homes in our urban communities do all they can to save their babies and yet at times they still see their babies slaughtered by the violence we have spoken of earlier. Yet there are those who are like Moses Mom and Miriam who sacrificially do all they can to save their babies so that they can have a better life.

I know a mom who is divorced and unemployed; her oldest son is mentally disabled due to the fact that he was born with only half of his brain. She is the primary care giver and has spent many days in the children's hospital with him. She also has a teenage daughter who has been blessed to receive scholarships to go to a private school because of the gifts God has given her. She also helps take care of her brother. The mom sent her daughter down the proverbial river so she can receive a better education and break the cycle of poverty. Yet I spoke with the mom in the local Starbucks in my community, and she told me how tired she was and how she is holdin' on to God in the midst of the adversity; yet she is blessed despite of her mess.

However, not all babies get out so those called to urban ministry need to be equipped to empower all to overcome by improvin' education and other systems that seem to hold down instead of help out.

We have touched the surface with all these issues and I will say that there are no easy answers or slick solutions. Not everyone agrees on the best way to resolve these issues. Church Planters who may come into these situations may have preconceive notions that may need to be adjusted and perceptions that may need to be changed. Folk who live within these communities do not agree on the right resolutions to these issues. Therefore we need to exegete -to draw out-to interpret the context like we interpret the Scriptures to draw out the meaning and application for our situation. We need to agents of reconciliation who come to the table with folk not with answers but listening hearts.

Here are some suggestions for exegeting your community.

1. Build relationships and hear stories. This will give you the history of your community with personal reflection from those who live there.
2. Find the assets in the community. Look at what the community already offers and has in places, resources, gifts, and folk.
3. Get to know the other pastors in the community to see where God is already working and where you can plug in if there is something lacking.
4. Be Present in your Community. Live in your community, shop in your community, hang out in places where everybody likes to gather.
5. Look at demographics to see the breakdown of your community race, ethnicity, class, crime, etc. This will give you the macro view, which stories you hear from your community will give you the micro view.


Resources to look at: http://www.ccda.org/ for more information about exegeting your community. www.census.gov to look at current statistics on poverty, unemployment, etc.


What is the community that God has called you to? What are their assets? What are the resources and gifts they have? What are the problems and issues? Who can you build relationships with? Let's talk about it.