Our Generation

I've been reading a book called The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, CEO of World Vision. A co-worker of mine bought a copy of the book for me as a graduation gift and I'm so glad he did. It's a compelling read, one that has made me stop and evaluate some areas of my own life, as well as reconsider the role I play in my upcoming trip to Africa.

Sometimes I think it's easy to read books like Stearns', which focus on areas where we as the Church in America and where we as individual Christians often fail, and just get all down-and-out and feel like the social injustices happening in the world are just too overwhelming and too much to handle. It's easy to read the newspaper headlines every day and think the world is such a lost cause and that surely God has all together forgotten about the orphans and the widows, the poor and the impoverished, the diseased and the broken. But as we think on those things, more often than not, we still do nothing to take action, to make some kind of change. If we are to feel compassion, then that compassion has to do more than just make us feel sympathy - it must move us to action. Stearns thoughtfully finds the balance between calling us out as a body of believers and as individuals and holding us accountable, without making us feel like we are completely helpless and hopeless in the face of the crisis. He presents facts, anecdotes, statistics, and Scripture all to support the idea that there is indeed a hole in our gospel.

One of the quotes I really appreciated that he included was from Bono:

We can be the generation that no longer accepts that an accident of latitude determines whether a child lives or dies – but will we be that generation? Will we in the West realize our potential or will we sleep in the comfort of our affluence with apathy and indifference murmuring softly in our ears? Fifteen thousand people dying needlessly, every day from AIDS, TB, and malaria. Mothers, fathers, teachers, farmers, nurses, mechanics, children. This is Africa’s crisis. That it’s not on the nightly news, that we do not treat this as an emergency – that’s our crisis.

Future generations flipping through these pages will know whether we answered the key question. The evidence will be the world around them. History will be our judge, but what’s written is up to us. We can’t say our generation didn’t know how to do it. We can’t say our generation couldn’t afford it. And we can’t say our generation didn’t have reason to do it. It’s up to us.

As Stearns outlines, we are a generation of people who have the awareness, the accesibility, and ability to put our beliefs as Christians into action, to stop paying lip service to the idea of taking care of the widows and orphans of the world, but to actually make it happen. But will we?