Walking in the Way of Jesus in the Current Moment
Love Out Loud remains dedicated to serving as ambassadors of accurate information and amplifying critical community work.
Love Out Loud began years ago as a concrete way for people walking in the way of Jesus to live out His call for us to love God and neighbor. Working with both ministry and nonprofit partners working for the flourishing of our whole community, a network quickly formed of hundreds of partners engaging almost a thousand volunteers in their areas of passion, calling and giftedness. Our earliest framework “hung” 24 causes on Matthew 25:31-46:
Amazingly, it brought together a wide and diverse coalition: People who cared deeply about loving and serving their neighbors, sought to understand injustices and communities who have been marginalized, and worked to address root causes of these issues.
Recent federal priority and funding shifts are materially impacting local partners – nonprofits, schools, community organizations, and churches and faith communities. These changes have generated significant uncertainty and fear within our community.
Two scriptures frame our response even as we are all seeking to understand the changing landscape:
Philippians 2:1-4: Having the attitude of Christ:
Encourage one another
Love collectively
Work with unified purpose
Prioritize others' interests
The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-10): Highlighting God's blessing on those who:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, etc.
Seek justice
Show mercy
Pursue peace
Endure persecution for righteousness
For more, the whole of Matthew chapters 5-7 is such a concrete picture of the radical way of Jesus and how we are to be and move in the world.
Similar to our pandemic response, Love Out Loud remains committed to:
Answering "How can I help?"
Maintaining cross-sector connectivity
Sharing critical information
Grounding our hearts and efforts in God
As one of our team members reminded us this week: "This is not business as usual, but truly a deep moment of fear, anxiety, and lots of misinformation. The season that we have entered in deeply impacts our coalition work and partnerships" – and the people we all serve.
Love Out Loud remains dedicated to serving as ambassadors of accurate information and amplifying critical community work.
As is well-known, I am always up for a cup of coffee. Please feel the freedom to reach out directly to me process this moment and how we can step up and into who we are called to be as a community and, for many of us, as people walking in the way of Jesus.
In lament and yet with great hope,
Chuck Spong, Executive Director
The Necessity of Doing Justice
"The Necessity of Doing Justice"
- Bryan Stevenson
On Thursday, February 23, Wake Forest University's Face to Face Speaker Series hosted Bryan Stevenson, founder of Equal Justice Initiative and American justice lawyer who has dedicated his work to those who are most in need in our criminal justice system: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and those who face death row.
Through a generous donation as well as tickets purchased by partners, Love Out Loud brought together a group of 225 stakeholders from churches, community partners, and those already engaging or ready to engage in local conversations and service opportunities in areas of justice, equity, and race (pictured in the balcony last night).
It was an amazing, stirring and challenging night with a full house of folks who needed to hear Bryan's prophetic message and life's work...including myself.
Bryan urged us to create a community rooted in justice, compassion, and love, and to boldly embrace an identity that is courageous enough to remember. He encouraged us to “resist the narrative of fear and anger, to stay hopeful, to do the right thing even when it’s uncomfortable and to get proximate enough to affirm the humanity and dignity of each other."
He closed by naming the significant moment of our post-pandemic world – an opportunity in which “we must increase the justice quotient, decrease the anger and not be afraid to talk about the power of love and WHAT LOVE REQUIRES: to act when there is injustice and to lift up justice, compassion and love."
It was a powerful evening. Lord, have mercy, Christ, have mercy that we will let God's call and challenge to us through Bryan take root in our hearts that we might stay hopeful and do what love requires. Read on for ways that you can continue your justice journey.
Chuck Spong
Executive Director, Love Out Loud
Prayers and Readings for Monday, March 16, 2020
As the Love Out Loud team met today, we began with these prayers, Scriptures and readings. Perhaps they will strengthen your heart as well:
INVOCATION
Lord God, you who are the source of all truth, wisdom, justice and love, lead me through this time of worship and throughout this day of service to you. Help me constantly to rest my life upon the eternal foundations of your love and presence. Save me from haste and confusion, from wrongful desire, and the net of evil. Through the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, enlighten, instruct, and guide me all the day long. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
SCRIPTURE: PSALM 143
Hear my prayer, O Lord; give ear to my pleas for mercy! In your faithfulness answer me, in your righteousness! Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you. For the enemy has pursued my soul; he has crushed my life to the ground; he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead. Therefore my spirit faints within me; my heart within me is appalled. I remember the days of old; I meditate on all that you have done; I ponder the work of your hands. I stretch out my hands to you; my soul thirsts for you like a parched land. Selah Answer me quickly, O Lord! My spirit fails! Hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit. Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul. Deliver me from my enemies, O Lord! I have fled to you for refuge. Teach me to do your will, for you are my God! Let your good Spirit lead me on level ground! For your name's sake, O Lord, preserve my life! In your righteousness bring my soul out of trouble! And in your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies, and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul, for I am your servant.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
READINGS FOR REFLECTION: FROM “TIME ENOUGH TO MINISTER” BY HENRI NOUWEN
Often we’re not as pressed for time as much as we feel we’re pressed for time. I remember several years ago becoming so pressed by the demands of teaching at Yale that I tool a prayer sabbatical to the Trappist monastery at Genesco, New York. No teaching, lecturing, or counseling…just solitude and prayer.
The second day there, a group of students from Genesco College walked in and asked, “Henri, can you give us a retreat?”
Of course, at the monastery, that was not my decision, but I said to the abbot, “I came here from the university to get away from that type of thing. These students have asked for five meditations, an enormous amount of work and preparation. I don’t want to do it.”
The abbot said, “You’re going to do it.”
“What do you mean? Why should I spend my sabbatical time preparing all those things?”
“Prepare?” he replied. “You’ve been a Christian for forty years and a priest for twenty, and a few high school students want to have a retreat. Why do you have to prepare? What those boys and girls want is to be a part of your life in God for a few days. If you pray half an hour in the morning, sing in our choir for an hour, and do your spiritual reading, you will have so much to say you could give ten retreats.”
The question, you see, is not to prepare but to live in a state of ongoing preparedness so that when someone who is drowning in the world comes into your world, you are ready to reach out and help. It may be at four o’clock, six o’clock, or nine o’clock. One time you call it preaching, the next time teaching, then counseling, and later administration. But let them be part of your life in God—that’s ministering.
BENEDICTION
May the Lord make you strong to do the work of ministry. Amen
The Wounded Healer - Henri J. M. Nouwen
One of our greatest callings is to serve one another in Christ-like love. And one of the most beautiful expressions of that love is to truly "hold" one another in Christ, to walk alongside them, and to affirm the work and calling of Christ in them.
Such is the holy calling of the navigator. We are managing lots and lots of details and moving parts to develop, launch and curate the platform that is Pathways. But at the very heart of the process is the navigator-volunteer relationship. Having our ears attuned to the whispers of the Spirit, our hearts softened by the love of Jesus, and our minds guided by the gift of discernment are all essential to stewarding these holy moments well.
The author Henri Nouwen had just such a strong sense for the personal nature of ministry that he walked away from huge audiences and acclaim and chose to walk alongside people (in his case, those with disabilities) in consistent and personal ways.
The quote below captures just how deeply meaningful and impactful that work can be: showing "personal concern" for one another. This passage from his book The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society reminds us of the power of being fully present to one another.
The great illusion of leadership is to think that people can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there. Our lives are filled with examples which tell us that leadership asks for understanding and that understanding requires sharing. So long as we define leadership in terms of preventing or establishing precedents, or in terms of being responsible for some kind of abstract “general good,” we have forgotten that no God can save us except a suffering God, and that no man can lead his people except the man who is crushed by its sins. Personal concern means making Mr. Harrison [a 48-year old patient in the hospital who is about to have a life-threatening surgery and is afraid to die] the only one who counts, the one for whom I am willing to forget my many other obligations, my scheduled appointments and long-prepared meetings, not because they are not important but because they lose their urgency in the face of Mr. Harrison’s agony. Personal concern makes it possible to experience that going after the “lost sheep” is really a service to all those who are alone.
Many will put their trust in someone who went all the way out of concern for just one of them. The remark, “You really cared for us,” is often illustrated by stories demonstrating that forgetting the many for the sake of the one is a sign of true leadership.
It is not just curiosity which makes people listen to a preacher when he speaks directly to a man and a woman whose marriage he blesses or to the children of the man whom he buries in the ground. They listen in the deep-seated hope that a personal concern might give the preacher words that carry beyond the ears of those whose joy or suffering he shares. Few listen to a sermon which is intended to be applicable to everyone, but most pay careful attention to words born out of concern for only a few.
All this suggest that when one has the courage to enter where life is experienced as most unique and most private, one touches the soul of the community. The man who has spent many hours trying to understand, feel, and clarify the alienation and confusion of one of his fellow men might well be the best equipped to speak to the needs of the many, because all people are one at the well-spring of pain and joy.
This is what Carl Rogers pointed out when he wrote: “I have found that the very feeling which has seems to me most private, most personal and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets who have dared to express the unique in themselves.” It indeed seems that the Christian leader is first of all the artist who can bind together many people by his courage in giving expression to his most personal concern.
