This Week at Asbury Kentucky

Here are 99 photos from the day.
Our Leaders: Tim, (president) and Francis (World Cafe Leader)

John Adams (European American), Seeking MDiv

A couple of weeks before the earthquake, I was at the airport in Port-au-Prince, waiting on a connecting flight which would take me to the northern city of Cap-Haitien, where I grew up. My flight was running a couple of hours late (a common Haitian experience), so I was wandering around the small terminal with a Bible in my hand and nothing to do. A couple of taxi-stand dispatchers noticed the Bible in my hand and upon discovering that I was a seminary student, began to throw some tough questions about the Bible at me. I turned into a portable Bible school for an hour, and I was relishing every moment. During the course of the conversation, I was struck by the spiritual hunger evident in these people, who were “like sheep without a shepherd,” so hungry for the Word of God but untaught and undiscipled.

A few hours later, gazing out the window as the plane traveled north, my heart was saddened by the brown, arid landscape around Port-au-Prince. Haiti is 97% deforested, and many of the mountains bear deep scars from hurricane-related landslides, as well as mining and quarrying that have been carried out without regard for the natural environment. As the plane began to cross the mountains, I felt the Lord impress upon my spirit that the natural landscape matched what had happened to Haiti in the spiritual realm. Centuries of spiritual devastation have left their mark upon the people, and many had perished for lack of knowledge. When storms had come, many had been swept away because they have no spiritual roots.

As the plane crossed into the North, however, I saw rainclouds forming over the mountains, which eventually gave way to a lush, green rain valley. I felt another impression upon my spirit: that God was going to pour out his Spirit upon Haiti, and that it would begin from the North and radiate outwards. I shared this with my church the following Sunday as the conclusion to a sermon out of John 6, which says that Jesus did not come merely to give bread, but to be bread given for the life of the world. In that passage, Jesus says that unless we eat his flesh and drink his blood, we have no life in us. I challenged each individual member of our local church to take Jesus seriously, to eat His flesh and blood, to take the Word of God into themselves, and to be prepared to play a role in the harvest that the Lord was bringing to Haiti.

The rest of my time in Haiti was spent assisting two pastors’ conferences–one in the South in Grand-Goave and one in the North in Cap-Haitien. Both conferences were blessed with powerful praise and worship where the manifest presence of God was thick and tangible. During the latter conference, I saw a couple of my childhood friends receive prophetic words over their lives. It was incredibly moving for me to see these friends, who had previously been on the fringes of the church, get set into the church and begin to move into their calling and destiny. On my last Sunday there, as the rain poured down, my church ordained three new elders and rejoiced as one was sent out to plant a new church across town. On Tuesday, I flew back to the U.S., leaving Port-au-Prince at around 11:30 a.m.

At 4:53 later that same day, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake shook Port-au-Prince and changed Haiti’s history forever. In the days and weeks since the earthquake, awash in the flood of news coverage and the grief of seeing a country that one holds so dear suffer such tremendous tragedy, the promise of revival has continued to burn ardently within my heart. Reports of the Haitian church’s gutsiness–American journalists have marveled time and again that Haitian Christians are singing praises, often from atop the ruins of their own churches and homes–have reminded me that God’s promise to us will be fulfilled, even in the midst of such calamity.

A few years ago, a visiting minister from Canada prophesied to our church words from Hosea 2:17, that the Lord was going to open “a door of hope in the valley of trouble.” Though I could not imagine at the time how it would be fulfilled, I am now beginning to understand as that door swings wide to thousands upon thousands of refugees stream into Cap-Haitien, the nation’s second-largest city. My prayer last month was that the church would be ready for them. Already, I am seeing that prayer answered–in my church alone, we have seen people streaming to the altar after every service. Signs and wonders have been prevalent, too–my mom wrote me last week to say that a young man was raised from the dead after convulsing and being pronounced dead during a choir practice. Jesus is the door of hope and many in Haiti are finding him through his church.

Long ago, the prophet Haggai predicted a day when God would “shake all nations.” In that day, the prophet said, the desired of all nations will come (or perhaps, depending on the translation, the people will come to the Desire of All Nations), and the Lord will fill this latter house with a glory far surpassing the former Temple (Hag. 2:7, 9). Some would say that this passage is only about the Second Temple, built and destroyed centuries ago. The author of Hebrews, however, interprets it eschatologically (Heb. 12:28) and thus I believe that we can, too. In these last days, God is shaking the nations and pouring out His Spirit upon all flesh, even upon Haiti. He is bringing the rains of revival to a barren land, and I hope that you will join me in praying, watching, and laboring for and with our brothers and sisters there, because the glory of the latter house in Haiti is going to be an incredible sight to behold.

Ash Wednesday marks the first day of the forty day Lent season that is consummated on Easter Sunday. The symbol associated with Ash Wednesday is a cross, a symbol of death. The symbol associated with Easter is an egg, a symbol of new life. The Lent season begins with a death and ends with a birth. God’s ways are backwards.

Lent is a season of living God’s ways through fasting, reflection and repentance.

Fasting. The forty day fast is a gesture of withdrawing into the wilderness with Jesus, the time when the backwardness of God was embodied in the person of Jesus, as he turned down all that the world had to offer. In Matthew 4, just after Jesus was led by the Spirit into the Wilderness, the devil tempted him saying, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But Jesus answered, “It is written, ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Lent begins with a fast because through it we acknowledge a hunger that is deeper than what the body craves. The Lent fast is not about self-deprivation as much as it is about becoming a glutton for the Word of God. It is a fast that enables us to feast. So I hope that each of us will take the time this Lent season to give up one of life’s so-called necessities and indulge in the Word of God, acknowledging that our life on earth consists in more than what the material universe can provide.

Reflection. Socrates was right when he said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Indeed, we hear echoes of Socrates later in Paul’s command to the Corinthians: “Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith.” However, Paul’s examination was not an examination of life as an end in itself, but rather an examination of faith, which, for Paul, was the way to participate in God’s life. Though the controversy over this passage is great, the command and its basic implications were clear to the Corinthian church: they were to examine themselves for evidence of faith-life, and there was the possibility of failing that examination (2 Cor 13:5). I think a general assumption is present in Paul’s command. Frankly put: there are people who hold up the banner of faith who do not participate in the life of faith. It is clear that every student at a Christian seminary holds up this banner. But it is not necessarily clear whether we walk under it, that is, whether we hold it up and walk our own way or subject ourselves to it and walk God’s way, the backwards way. So regardless of your theology, whether you are secure in your salvation or secure in your perfection, let us take these forty days to examine ourselves, really examine ourselves honestly and thoroughly. Let us ask God to show us the areas in our lives that evince no faith-life, the paths we walk down in the company of the world rather than the company of God. And as such, we can respond by turning around, by repenting, and walking with God backwards, against the ways of the world.

Repentance. In the first century there was a sect of Judaism called the Essenes, who required repentance and conversion to enter their group and who practiced something similar to the rite of baptism that we encounter in the gospels. Some scholars actually think that John the Baptist, whose ministry was the baptism of repentance, was a part of this sect. However, the Essenes were largely a separatist group, for whom repentance from the ways of the world consisted to a large degree in dissociation with the people of the world. Jesus might have been identified as a member of this sect after going out to the wilderness of Judea (a place of separation from the world) to be baptized, except for the fact that he did not stay there; except for the fact that his baptism in Matthew 3 was followed in Matthew 4 with his gathering a crew of fishermen to fish for people, which was immediately followed by his contact with “ the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics…[as he traveled throughout] Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan” (Matt 4:24, 25). And this ministry of touching the untouchables, those whom a separatist group would most eagerly avoid, was coupled with a message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt 4:17). The season of Lent as a season of repentance is not meant to prepare us for Easter by separating us from the world of humanity, as though the resurrection is about escaping the world. It is precisely the opposite! Our wilderness of repentance prepares us for Easter because in it we acknowledge that God’s world has broken into the world of humanity—for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!—and we can then return to the world to parade down the streets, on the wrong side of the road, as it were, proclaiming the Easter message: “It is here! The kingdom of heaven is here! The King has come to rescue us from the dead! He is risen! He is risen, indeed!”

And indeed this message is backwards. It is significant that the ashes that are used to make the sign of the cross on the believers’ foreheads on Ash Wednesday are made from the palm branches used in the Palm Sunday celebration of the previous year. The branches that were used to celebrate Jesus’ royal procession into Jerusalem are burned to symbolize the death of our idolatrous definitions of power and glory and honor, all of which were projected onto Jesus when he came to Jerusalem to take his throne. Ash Wednesday calls for a redefinition of all our categories of sovereignty as we remember that our God took his throne on a cross. So let us humbly accept the backward ways of God. Let us allow death to be the beginning of life. For if God did things our way we would be celebrating an Easter without a Good Friday, a resurrection without a death, a favor from God but not his furious love. We would be celebrating a dispassionate Passion. For us, this would mean an empty cross and a filled tomb, your tomb and mine. So let us thank God for his backwards ways. And as we move backward toward the Easter celebration, I hope that each of us will have a meaningful Lent season: feasting on the Word of God, reflecting on the life of faith, and repenting from our worldly ways to prepare for our proclamation of Easter to the people of the world.

Student Council Member- Jeremy Spainhour