Less than fifty miles west the unceasing tide rose, pushing inland without remorse. Nature has no remorse. It has no emotion. There were no “I’m sorrys” when Hurricane Katrina washed the world away on August 29th, 2005.

Entire blocks of the Mississippi Gulf Coast slipped into the unrelenting sea. Gone. Forever residing at the bottom of the Mississippi Sound for some future archaeologist to discover.

The levees broke. With them, my heart.

Searching for purpose in the wake of disaster – searching for myself – I volunteered to return immediately to help. I didn’t go. When the campus reopened nine months after the flood, I returned. June 1, 2006.

I made it two years – two years that changed the very core of who I am.

Six years ago today my life was uprooted. As were thousands of others, I became an American refugee. Six years ago I grew up. And in the two years after I returned, I learned what it meant to be a man.

Pain. Compassion. Hard work.

When I quit my job making coffee last year, I went to the Red Cross. I joined because I didn’t want people to suffer the way they had during Katrina. I wanted to help.

And I did. I’ve responded to fires and tornadoes. In the aftermath of the North and Central Alabama tornadoes, our chapter sent volunteers and staff to help. I did everything I could within the guidelines of the AmeriCorps VISTA program. And when a position opened up at the chapter in July, I applied.

Six years. Six years ago I would not have seen myself here. Not in this town. Not doing this.

But here I am. Today – six years to the day after my world was completely rocked – today is my first day as the District Volunteer Development Specialist with the American Red Cross.

I’m sure I’ve been making a difference for a while now, whether it was in Louisiana or Texas or Alabama. Whether it was as a popcorn boy at Target or as a coffee boy at the local bookstore or over the last year as a volunteer and VISTA.

It took a while. It felt like eternity. I’m pretty sure I sacrificed a few of my geriatric years getting here.

Pain. Compassion. Hard work.

It was worth it.

Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God we do not lose heart. But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. -[2 Corinthians 4:1-6, ESV]

Every year I read about half a dozen megachurches offering expensive Apple products or even cars as incentive for showing up or bringing people to church. I’ve been told that people will accept an invitation to church on Easter 85% more often than other Sundays. Easter and Christmas- people show up if you ask them. Good. Great! Ask people to your heart’s content.

But what exactly are we giving away? How you get people to show up is how you’ll keep them around. If you give them an iPad this year, you better offer something bigger next time, and the next time, and the next time. If you’re resorting to cheap gimmicks to get them to show up, they’ll probably keep coming for the handouts, regardless of the message. Their incentive to show up isn’t to worship God or learn more about Jesus; you’re all but paying them to show up, raffling off prizes in hope they’ll get a little Jesus in the bag with that sweet iPad 2. Moreover, the underlying thought is that maybe if they win that iPad, maybe they’ll feel obligated to keep coming. Even put a little money in the bucket.

And if you only d it once or twice a year- does that make any difference? Are these people sticking?  If the surpassing grace that comes through Jesus’ blood isn’t enough, then what is? Do you really think the chance to win a car somehow makes a person more attuned to the Gospel?

What are you giving away? The Gospel you preach produces the churches you get. You can promote a false gospel through gimmickry; sucking people in by promising material things as if that’s what Jesus did… as if the Gospel of Jesus himself isn’t enough…

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. … For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. -[2 Corinthians 5:14-15, 21, ESV]

If that isn’t enough… if the life, death, and resurrection of  Jesus isn’t enough…

then nothing ever will be.

*The following article is reproduced in its entirety with permission.

God is changing the Church, and that, in turn, will change the world. Millions of Christians around the world are aware of an imminent reformation of global proportions. They say, in effect: “Church as we know it is preventing Church as God wants it.” A growing number of them are surprisingly hearing God say the very same things. There is a collective new awareness of age-old revelations, a corporate spiritual echo. In the following “15 Theses” I will summarize a part of this, and I am convinced that it reflects a part of what the Spirit of God is saying to the Church today. For some, it might be the proverbial fist-sized cloud on Elijah’s sky. Others already feel the pouring rain.

Before they where called Christians, followers of Christ have been called “The Way”. One of the reasons was, that they have literally found “the way to live.” The nature of Church is not reflected in a constant series of religious meetings lead by professional clergy in holy rooms specially reserved to experience Jesus, but in the prophetic way followers of Christ live their everyday life in spiritually extended families as a vivid answer to the questions society faces, at the place where it counts most: in their homes.

In aligning itself to the religious patterns of the day, the historic Orthodox Church after Constantine in the 4th century AD adopted a religious system which was in essence Old Testament, complete with priests, altar, a Christian temple (cathedral), frankincense and a Jewish, synagogue-style worship pattern. The Roman Catholic Church went on to canonize the system. Luther did reform the content of the gospel, but left the outer forms of “church” remarkably untouched; the Free-Churches freed the system from the State, the Baptists then baptized it, the Quakers dry-cleaned it, the Salvation Army put it into a uniform, the Pentecostals anointed it and the Charismatics renewed it, but until today nobody has really changed the superstructure. It is about time to do just that.

In rediscovering the gospel of salvation by faith and grace alone, Luther started to reform the Church through a reformation of theology. In the 18th century through movements like the Moravians there was a recovery of a new intimacy with God, which led to a reformation of spirituality, the Second Reformation. Now God is touching the wineskins themselves, initiating a Third Reformation, a reformation of structure.

Since New Testament times, there is no such thing as “a house of God”. At the cost of his life, Stephen reminded unequivocally: God does not live in temples made by human hands. The Church is the people of God. The Church, therefore, was and is at home where people are at home: in ordinary houses. There, the people of God: -Share their lives in the power of the Holy Spirit, -Have “meatings,” that is, they eat when they meet, -They often do not even hesitate to sell private property and share material and spiritual blessings, -Teach each other in real-life situations how to obey God’s word, dialogue – and not professor-style, -Pray and prophesy with each other, baptize, `lose their face’ and their ego by confessing their sins, -Regaining a new corporate identity by experiencing love, acceptance and forgiveness.

Most churches of today are simply too big to provide real fellowship. They have too often become “fellowships without fellowship.” The New Testament Church was a mass of small groups, typically between 10 and 15 people. It grew not upward into big congregations between 20 and 300 people filling a cathedral and making real, mutual communication improbable. Instead, it multiplied “sidewards”, like organic cells, once these groups reached around 15-20 people. Then, if possible, it drew all the Christians together into citywide celebrations, as with Solomon’s Temple court in Jerusalem. The traditional congregational church as we know it is, statistically speaking, neither big nor beautiful, but rather a sad compromise, an overgrown house-church and an under-grown celebration, often missing the dynamics of both.

The local church is not led by a Pastor, but fathered by an Elder, a local person of wisdom and reality. The local house-churches are then networked into a movement by the combination of elders and members of the so-called five-fold ministries (Apostles, Prophets, Pastors, Evangelists and Teachers) circulating “from house to house,” whereby there is a special foundational role to play for the apostolic and prophetic ministries (Eph. 2:20, and 4:11.12). A Pastor (shepherd) is a very necessary part of the whole team, but he cannot fulfill more than a part of the whole task of “equipping the saints for the ministry,” and has to be complemented synergistically by the other four ministries in order to function properly.

In doing a puzzle, we need to have the right original for the pieces, otherwise the final product, the whole picture, turns out wrong, and the individual pieces do not make much sense. This has happened to large parts of the Christian world: we have all the right pieces, but have fitted them together wrong, because of fear, tradition, religious jealousy and a power-and-control mentality. As water is found in three forms, ice, water and steam, the five ministries mentioned in Eph. 4:11-12, the Apostles, Prophets, Pastors, Teachers and Evangelists are also found today, but not always in the right forms and in the right places: they are often frozen to ice in the rigid system of institutionalized Christianity; they sometimes exist as clear water; or they have vanished like steam into the thin air of free-flying ministries and “independent” churches, accountable to no-one. As it is best to water flowers with the fluid version of water, these five equipping ministries will have to be transformed back into new, and at the same time age-old, forms, so that the whole spiritual organism can flourish and the individual “ministers” can find their proper role and place in the whole. That is one more reason why we need to return back to the Maker’s original and blueprint for the Church.

No expression of a New Testament church is ever led by just one professional “holy man” doing the business of communicating with God and then feeding some relatively passive religious consumers Moses-style. Christianity has adopted this method from pagan religions, or at best from the Old Testament. The heavy professionalisation of the church since Constantine has now been a pervasive influence long enough, dividing the people of God artificially into laity and clergy. According to the New Testament (1 Tim. 2:5), “there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” God simply does not bless religious professionals to force themselves in-between people and God forever. The veil is torn, and God is allowing people to access Himself directly through Jesus Christ, the only Way. To enable the priesthood of all believers, the present system will have to change completely. Bureaucracy is the most dubious of all administrative systems, because it basically asks only two questions: yes or no. There is no room for spontaneity and humanity, no room for real life. This may be OK for politics and companies, but not the Church. God seems to be in the business of delivering His Church from a Babylonian captivity of religious bureaucrats and controlling spirits into the public domain, the hands of ordinary people made extraordinary by God, who, like in the old days, may still smell of fish, perfume and revolution.

The “Body of Christ” is a vivid description of an organic, not an organized, being. Church consists on its local level of a multitude of spiritual families, which are organically related to each other as a network, where the way the pieces are functioning together is an integral part of the message of the whole. What has become a maximum of organization with a minimum of organism, has to be changed into a minimum of organization to allow a maximum of organism. Too much organization has, like a straightjacket, often choked the organism for fear that something might go wrong. Fear is the opposite of faith, and not exactly a Christian virtue. Fear wants to control, faith can trust. Control, therefore, may be good, but trust is better. The Body of Christ is entrusted by God into the hands of steward-minded people with a supernatural charismatic gift to believe God that He is still in control, even if they are not. A development of trust-related regional and national networks, not a new arrangement of political ecumenism is necessary for organic forms of Christianity to reemerge.

The image of much of contemporary Christianity can be summarized, a bit euphemistically, as holy people coming regularly to a holy place at a holy day at a holy hour to participate in a holy ritual lead by a holy man dressed in holy clothes against a holy fee. Since this regular performance-oriented enterprise called “worship service” requires a lot of organizational talent and administrative bureaucracy to keep going, formalized and institutionalized patterns developed quickly into rigid traditions. Statistically, a traditional 1-2 hour “worship service” is very resource-hungry but actually produces very little fruit in terms of discipling people, that is, in changed lives. Economically speaking, it might be a “high input and low output” structure. Traditionally, the desire to “worship in the right way” has led to much denominationalism, confessionalism and nominalism. This not only ignores that Christians are called to “worship in truth and in spirit,” not in cathedrals holding songbooks, but also ignores that most of life is informal, and so is Christianity as “the Way of Life.” Do we need to change from being powerful actors to start “acting powerfully?”

The church is changing back from being a Come-structure to being again a Go-structure. As one result, the Church needs to stop trying to bring people “into the church,” and start bringing the Church to the people. The mission of the Church will never be accomplished just by adding to the existing structure; it will take nothing less than a mushrooming of the church through spontaneous multiplication of itself into areas of the population of the world, where Christ is not yet known.

Church tradition has managed to “celebrate the Lord’s Supper” in a homeopathic and deeply religious form, characteristically with a few drops of wine, a tasteless cookie and a sad face. However, the “Lord’s Supper” was actually more a substantial supper with a symbolic meaning, than a symbolic supper with a substantial meaning. God is restoring eating back into our meeting.

Jesus called a universal movement, and what came was a series of religious companies with global chains marketing their special brands of Christianity and competing with each other. Through this branding of Christianity most of Protestantism has, therefore, become politically insignificant and often more concerned with traditional specialties and religious infighting than with developing a collective testimony before the world. Jesus simply never asked people to organize themselves into denominations. In the early days of the Church, Christians had a dual identity: they were truly His church and vertically converted to God, and then organized themselves according to geography, that is, converting also horizontally to each other on earth. This means not only Christian neighbors organizing themselves into neighborhood- or house-churches, where they share their lives locally, but Christians coming together as a collective identity as much as they can for citywide or regional celebrations expressing the corporateness of the Church of the city or region. Authenticity in the neighborhoods connected with a regional or citywide corporate identity will make the Church not only politically significant and spiritually convincing, but will allow a return to the biblical model of the City-Church.

They crucified Jesus, the Boss of all the Christians. Today, his followers are often more into titles, medals and social respectability, or, worst of all, they remain silent and are not worth being noticed at all. “Blessed are you when you are persecuted”, says Jesus. Biblical Christianity is a healthy threat to pagan godlessness and sinfulness, a world overcome by greed, materialism, jealousy and any amount of demonic standards of ethics, sex, money and power. Contemporary Christianity in many countries is simply too harmless and polite to be worth persecuting. But as Christians again live out New Testament standards of life and, for example, call sin as sin, conversion or persecution has been, is and will be the natural reaction of the world. Instead of nesting comfortably in temporary zones of religious liberty, Christians will have to prepare to be again discovered as the main culprits against global humanism, the modern slavery of having to have fun and the outright worship of Self, the wrong centre of the universe. That is why Christians will and must feel the “repressive tolerance” of a world which has lost any absolutes and therefore refuses to recognize and obey its creator God with his absolute standards. Coupled with the growing ideologisation, privatization and spiritualisation of politics and economics, Christians will, sooner than most think, have their chance to stand happily accused in the company of Jesus. They need to prepare now for the future by developing a persecution-proof spirit and an even more persecution-proof structure.

Where is the easiest place, say, for a man to be spiritual? Maybe again, is it hiding behind a big pulpit, dressed up in holy robes, preaching holy words to a faceless crowd and then disappearing into an office? And what is the most difficult, and therefore most meaningful, place for a man to be spiritual? At home, in the presence of his wife and children, where everything he does and says is automatically put through a spiritual litmus test against reality, where hypocrisy can be effectively weeded out and authenticity can grow. Much of Christianity has fled the family, often as a place of its own spiritual defeat, and then has organized artificial performances in sacred buildings far from the atmosphere of real life. As God is in the business of recapturing the homes, the church turns back to its roots, back to where it came from. It literally comes home, completing the circle of Church history at the end of world history.

As Christians of all walks of life, from all denominations and backgrounds, feel a clear echo in their spirit to what God’s Spirit is saying to the Church, and start to hear globally in order to act locally, they begin to function again as one body. They organize themselves into neighborhood house-churches and meet in regional or city-celebrations. You are invited to become part of this movement and make your own contribution. Maybe your home, too, will become a house that changes the world.

She’s written several books, but the one highlighted in the news was her latest release, Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide?: (‘Cause I Need More Room for My Plasma TV). It’s all about people- some people who sniffed money and got addicted and some people who realized that loving others was more important than stuff. Karen’s got two things going for her (actually, she’s got more than two, but these are pretty important).

First, she’s a superstar storyteller. Every chapter in Double-Wide kept my attention, but her description of the jubilee in Mobile Bay is the best I’ve ever read. The book is worth a buy simply for that one little old chapter. Dead serious.

Second, she doesn’t hold back when she sees something wrong. She’s got bite, and in her latest book Karen eviscerates the prosperity gospel and boldly rebukes those who proclaim it in the name of wealth. For real, folks. She did it with humor that good old Southern charm, but there was no mistake in the end. There’s no place in God’s Kingdom for those health, wealth, and prosperity guys. It’s just not what Jesus was about.

So that brings us to this week. You might have read about “Bishop” Eddie Long in the news. Some guys claimed Long sexually assaulted them. Long denies it. It turns out “The Bishop” is one of those prosperity gospel preacher-types, complete with the custom suit, bling on his fingers and around his neck, and those expensive cars. Karen wrote a blog post about it:

Whatever the courts decide about the sex abuse charges, Long has a troubling history of abusing his position to coerce people into serving him. In a flagrant abuse of scriptures, Long has preached a false gospel – the Prosperity Gospel. Tragically, it’s one that Americans have been groomed for since Oral Roberts arrived in shining white polyester promising that God loves Capitalists best.

It’s a message that allows pastors like Long to exact obscene amounts of monies from the manipulated masses in the name of the bloodied Christ.

Long’s abuses have been well-documented. According to an investigation conducted by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, between 1997 and 2000, Long received at least $3.07 million in salary, benefits and the use of property from the nonprofit tax-exempt, now defunct, Bishop Eddie Long Ministries, one of 20 charities Long established to reportedly help the needy.

Apparently that referred to Mr. Long.

Tax records revealed that the $3.07 million channeled to Long was as much as the charity gave to all other recipients during the same time period. Long’s compensation included a $1.4. million six-bedroom, nine-bath home on 20 acres in Lithonia, Georgia, use of a $350,000 Bentley and more than a million in salary. …

“I’m not going to apologize for anything,” Long told an Atlanta-Journal reporter. “We are not just a church, we’re an international corporation. We’re not just a bumbling bunch of preachers who can’t talk and all we’re doing is baptizing babies. I deal with the White House. I deal with Tony Blair. I deal with presidents around this world. I pastor a multi-million dollar congregation.”

You’d think that a pastor of a multi-million dollar congregation would have better things to do, but he doesn’t. That post got Karen in an awful lot of trouble with The Bishop, because he banned his church from reading Double-Wide this week. No kidding. Is this a big deal? Probably not. I sincerely doubt many of those 25,000 church members were ever going to pick up Karen’s book.

But you know what? You should pick it up. You should go to your bookstore of choice and grab a copy. Download it on your Kindle, or Nook, or whatever e-reader you use. Buy one for your friends. You could even mail a copy to The Bishop (c/o Bishop Eddie Long, 6400 Woodrow Road, Lithonia, GA 30038). God knows they might get a kick out of it (and if they don’t, I know of a pastor down in Florida who seems to get a kick out of burning books).

I don’t get a kickback from any of this. Karen’s local, so maybe we’ll bump into each other sometime when she’s not touring the country selling books. But that’s about it. I’m a fan, and I believe in her message. I think you should, too.

If there is one essential to Christianity, it is that at its core we have the Gospel- literally, the Good News. The Gospel we preach produces the churches we get. Over the last ten years I’ve spent a lot of time on determining what the Gospel is. What comprises the Gospel? What makes it good news? Why is it good news? In all my theological education, I don’t remember ever having one class session where we sat down and attempted to answer that question, and it’s disappointing.

Nearly four years ago I asked my readers “What is the Gospel?” and responses varied. One friend cut and pasted the entire book of Romans into my comments. While it demonstrated my point, it wasn’t particularly constructive to the discussion. If you asked fifty people, you’d probably get forty different answers. “What is the Gospel?” is a loaded question. It has a lot of answers. One might say, “good news.” Another might proclaim it’s the books of “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” Others delineate between different gospels, referring to the gospels of prosperity and salvation or the social gospel. What I want to know is simply, what is the Gospel of the Bible? What is the good news, and why is it good news?

But first, a couple ground rules:
1. Try to keep your comments as clear and concise as possible (don’t post an entire book of the Bible).
2. Remember that other people are watching (Hi Mom!). I shouldn’t have to say this for a post about the Gospel, but play nice.

Okay. Your turn.

NFC Division Champions: Dallas, Green Bay, New Orleans, and San Francisco
AFC Division Champions: Baltimore, Indianapolis, New England, San Diego

NFC Wildcards: Atlanta, Minnesota
AFC Wildcards: Houston, NY Jets

I didn’t save my final standings, but they’re no surprise. Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, and Tampa Bay will be picking early in the 2011 NFL Draft. The New Orleans Saints repeat as Super Bowl Champions in an overtime win against the Baltimore Ravens in Dallas.

If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? (James 2:15-16)

I prayed. Amy said, “come with me, let’s go get something to eat,” and took off with him across the street to Bubba Gump’s. Tiffany yelled after her, “don’t go, he’s trouble!” and I rushed after Amy so she wouldn’t be alone. Clint followed a few steps behind. We stood in line at Bubba Gump’s and then just as we sat down, they kicked us out because of Bobby. They said he had come around a lot and bothered everybody all day long. So Clint got food though, courtesy of the folks at Bubba Gump, as Amy and I stood outside and Bobby went back to his corner.

Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins. (James 4:17)

Clint brought half his meal out to Bobby, who didn’t eat it. But on that corner we met Ali from Ghana, his friend in a wheelchair. We learned that Bobby was from Liberia. Later we met Testimony, his East African friend. They all sat on that corner and talked to us for a few minutes. Close to two hours after we got there, we hadn’t traveled more than three blocks from the car, and had done zero interviews.

I was looking forward to the interviews, because I have this whole personal philosophy of “anyone, anywhere, anytime.” I stole it from Southern Miss’s football slogan, but it works. Or, it did. But as I stood there in front of Bubba Gump, watching the people as they walked by- the guy who had the walker and seemed to have cerebral palsy, looking sheepishly like he wanted to cross the road; or the Bobby on his corner; or any one of the other random people walking by- I thought about that slogan. I thought about how that’s all it was- some pumped up slogan about evangelism or whatever.

And it’s like this. I can talk to rational, everyday, normal people… all day long. Seriously- anyone, anywhere, anytime. But then there are those who I can’t hear well, can’t understand, who aren’t rational, who go on and on about some random political issue native only to Liberia or Ghana or something, who rant and rave and get real good at it. And I freeze up. And I pray for them and wish them well, and tell them God Bless, and walk off. Sometimes I even feel good about it. (Not usually though; I’m a naturally melancholy and reflective kind of person.)

So Clint reminds me tonight of what Dr. Ortiz told us in Encountering the Biblical World. After he reconciles the gospel accounts of the disciples and Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and the healing of the blind men, Ortiz explains: “That’s not even the point. The point is that we get so busy doing God’s work that we forget to DO God’s work. We completely miss the folks standing right there asking for our help.”

A refugee crosses the ocean to stay in the land of the free and begs for food. One night he meets a disciple of Christ, and says he is hungry. The disciple prays for the refugee and sends him on his way. “Be well fed and stay safe,” he says, but does nothing for him.

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:37-40)

In contrast, it is our responsibility as Christ-followers to be positive change agents- bent solely on the fulfillment of Jesus’ prayer to the Father: “YOUR KINGDOM COME, YOUR WILL BE DONE, ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.” We cannot do this alone, thus our desperate need for Christian community and cooperation. Thus, the Church.

Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. [2 Corinthians 4:1-6, ESV]

May I wake up tomorrow with the desire and ability to be a good servant of Jesus Christ to the world. To you.

I graduated from Mobile in 2004 and immediately went off to seminary in New Orleans. At the time I’d put nonprofit dreams on the back burner to be a college minister. We all go through phases- I’d just spent a year and a half working with youth and college students. So I went to seminary to become a college minister. It seemed like the thing to do at the time. Hurricane Katrina changed things pretty fast. Although I ended up studying urban missions and church planting throughout seminary, it was the city of New Orleans after Katrina that educated me about life. Namely, it taught me about the fragility of life. I graduated from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in 2008 a different person than when I’d started. A better person. A more thoughtful and well-rounded person. Wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t want to be a paid minister/pastor, either.

Much to the surprise of, I’m sure, at least a few people, the professional ministry just wasn’t on my radar anymore. There are plenty of reasons for that- most of which either don’t matter or are another story altogether. But charity- nonprofit work- doing something to help make a difference in the world- that was back on the radar. And it is. I don’t knock pastors. They do great work, and I’m blessed to have many pastor/missionary friends all over the country (and world). Something in me stirred after Katrina. I wanted to help people, and I didn’t want to do it through what we see as organized/traditional church avenues. Two week mission trips to Mexico or Brazil, building white chapels for the local congregations- that’s nice, but it’s not me. Medical missions. Again, not who I am.

So I started out 2009 looking for a job. I admit I was willing to accept a church staff job, but it had to be the perfect situation (there are no perfect situations). The job market was sparse. In June 2009 I found myself in a familiar situation. I was back in Mobile living in the same room eight years prior. After short stints with Target and the Census, I was making coffee at Books-A-Million again. Two degrees and nine years since I first worked in that cafe, there I was doing it all over again. I admit I was discouraged. I didn’t spend all that time for nothing.

Nine years ago I quit Books-A-Million to chase that dream of getting a degree (or two!) and making a difference in the world. Last Friday I left Books-A-Million again to continue dreamchasing.

I want to invest long term. I want to make a lasting difference. I’ve applied for more nonprofit jobs across the country than I can count over the last year. Few bothered to respond. In every case I’ve been rejected. Maybe it’s the economy, and maybe it’s for a lack of professional experience. Either way, I’ve got plans. Beginning two weeks ago I started looking for full-time volunteer positions in the Mobile area. Once I’ve found a place to pour myself into, I’ll try to find a part-time job around town.

Look, I know for some of you it doesn’t make sense. For most of the folks at Books-A-Million, it’s confusing. My manager keeps repeating, “You’re not a material guy, are you Joe?” Why leave a paying (granted, minimum-wage) gig to volunteer full-time? For me, it’s easy. It’s about experience. I could work a decade in retail and never get the experience necessary to work for a nonprofit, much less start one. I’m sacrificing the short-term money (seriously, not even that much) for long-term benefit. I couldn’t do it without the support of my family.

I encouraged my co-workers to pursue their dreams. To never give up on what they want to do in life. Some will spend years at Books-A-Million because it’s where they want to be, or because it’s there and will have them. Most will move on to something else. What I hope to hear one day is that many left, not to pursue a better paying job at Chili’s, but to chase the dreams they’ve had since they were kids. To become someone better than they are today. To make a difference in the world.

Anyway, I my final shift at Books-A-Million was last Friday. Over the last couple weeks I had several of my regulars tell me how they’ll miss me. I’ve received plenty of undeserved compliments, and I know one thing for sure. If I’ve made a small difference in the lives of the folks I meet at Books-A-Million, then maybe I’ll be able to make a difference at the next stop, too. Hopefully it will be more.