Reading Exodus in Advent

By Jonathan Kindberg

Advent is the season of the Church in which we remember Christ’s first coming and look ahead to Christ’s return as King and the coming of his kingdom. During this Advent at Iglesia de la Resurrección we have been reading the book of Exodus in our adult Sunday school class. I didn’t prepare a complex syllabus nor reading plan. Each week we simply gather together, read a chapter and talk about it. Reading Exodus in this way alongside immigrant brothers and sisters and seeing the text through their eyes and lived experience has been a unique privilege. It has allowed me to see Exodus with fresh eyes and gain new insights into the nature of culture, injustice, liberation, pilgrimage and home.

First, we realized that Moses was a pocho. A pocho is a derogatory term used by native-born Mexicans to describe Mexicans born in the United States who have forgotten their culture and heritage and who are usually better off financially than those still in Mexico. When Pochos goes for a visit to Mexico, they often stick out like a sore thumb and find themselves somewhat out of place. They have become Mexican-Americans.

Similarly Moses, though ethnically Hebrew, lived a life of privilege in the palace of the Egpytian princess, was wealthy and likely was culturally very removed from his Israelite relatives who were slaves. Then he spent 40 years additional years in self-imposed exile in a culturally foreign land before being sent by God to return to Egypt by the Lord. No wonder he feared that the Israelites wouldn’t listen to them. He was an outsider. And yet, Pharoah would. He was the perfect man for the job of mediating between the people of Israel and the Egyptian pharaoh. He was a 2nd generation Hebrew leader, an insider-outsider, to both the Israelites and the Egyptians and thus exactly the kind of person to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.

Mexicans born here in the United States, the so called 2nd generation, are often marginalized both within the Mexican cultural world and the white American world. They don’t fit in perfectly with either. They exist in the world of the hyphen, neither fully this nor that. Within the immigrant church led by 1st generation Mexicans they can be marginalized as well. However, they are perfectly suited to mediate both between generations and between immigrants and the American host culture.  They are the leaders of the Hispanic church of the future, and it is key that they be given voice and leadership if the church is to survive past the 1st generation.

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Life as an Immigrant Pastor

By Jonathan Kindberg

My Swedish last name, Kindberg, is about as difficult for Spanish speakers to pronounce as “ferrocarril” is for English speakers. The approximations I’ve heard are many: Kinder, Kimberly and Kindergarten, to name a few. I’m 6’1” and as pasty white as they come. I’m also an Anglican pastor of a primarily undocumented-Mexican congregation in the western suburbs of Chicago.

In many ways, I am an unlikely immigrant church pastor, until you learn that I spent most of my growing up years in Latin America as a child of missionaries. My being an insider-outsider, with one foot in both the Anglo and the immigrant worlds, while belonging fully to neither, gives me a certain vantage point from which to describe each to the other. Facilitating Mosaic, a network that seeks to bring immigrant and non-immigrant pastors together in my county, has given me the opportunity to build relationships with immigrant pastors from all over the world within my own community.

What is it like, then, being an immigrant church pastor, and one in which a significant percentage of your congregants are undocumented? It’s like being invisible. Many less established immigrant churches don’t own their own building, don’t have a large flashing sign along a major road and don’t have a church website. Thus, they are virtually unknown and invisible to the surrounding community. This invisibility also stems from awareness gaps within the Church at large. “So what do you do?” Joe asked me. We were at a neighborhood block party put on by several local churches and had just met. “I pastor a Hispanic congregation just down the road from here,” I responded. What followed was highly unusual and sadly rare: he asked me the name of my church. I’ve had this conversation over and over with people and as soon as I reply with “immigrant church pastor” their eyes haze over and they change the subject as if it hadn’t been brought up. Perhaps they simply have no categories for this and don’t know how to relate.

In my own county there are an estimated 150 immigrant congregations, but most, even by name, are unknown to the broader Christian community. I’ve seen this over and over around the country both within my own denomination and others. Our immigrant brothers and sisters are invisible to us. As an immigrant pastor, myself, I can say from experience that this hurts. Being an Anglo, however, I know that these experiences of invisibility are nothing like those faced by my Hispanic congregants on a daily basis within their lives and work places, especially those who are undocumented.

Beyond feelings of invisibility, being an immigrant church pastor is to be a jack of all trades. One moment you are helping fill out college applications for one of your youth who is the first from his family ever to apply to college and the next you are driving a parent to a PTA meeting to translate for them. You are giving advice on immigration status issues (while fending off sketchy lawyers and notarios) and advice on disciplining kids and keeping them out of gangs. You are getting that middle of the night phone from one of your parishioners whose husband was just pulled over for having a headlight out and is now in jail facing possible deportation. (This is a phone call you start getting used to.) Then you are visiting him in jail.

You are doing home blessings for families whose homes have been hexed by a vengeful coworker and praying with families after the death of a loved one. As an immigrant pastor, you are a jack of all trades, but master of none. You are the primary advocate and voice for your people many of whom have little voice and power due to lack of language and legal status among other factors and you are stretched in a million directions. I, as a bi-vocational single person often feel overwhelmed. I don’t know how many bi-vocational immigrant pastors with families do it.

So, what can we, as non-immigrants, do to help and support those immigrant congregations and pastors in our community? First, build relationships. Change starts here. Seek out the immigrant pastors and congregation in your city or region. I assure you they are there, though they may have been hidden from you until now. Visit one of their services. Be a learner of other cultures. Ask good questions! If you are a church network leader, finds ways of highlighting the immigrant congregations already in your network or find ways of including those who aren’t.

If you are a non-immigrant pastor, invite an immigrant pastor to speak at your congregation.  Find tangible ways of upholding and supporting immigrant pastors’ heavy ministry load by asking them how you or your church can come alongside them. You will be surprised at the richness of blessings you will receive from these relationships.

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A Movement from the Margins, Part 2

By Jonathan Kindberg

To do great things for God we often assume that we need great resources: power, influence, renown, intelligence and have written best-selling books. But these kinds things are usually hindrances rather than aides to God’s work. God delights, rather, in using those who are unequipped and unresourced in the eyes of the world. Those who are powerless and weak; those on the margins ignored by the rest of the world and by the Church herself. These kinds of people he uses to fulfill his mission and do great things. Why? Because these are the kinds of people who recognize that they don’t have what it takes and that they must depend fully on God. Through this God shows himself to be great. This is the story, for example, of Patrick of Ireland. An uneducated, slave boy who encountered God in a powerful way, launched the Celtic missionary movement, and despite fierce opposition from the Roman church impacted all of Europe.

Many of the folks I minister are potential Patricks. As immigrants they are often ignored, invisible and powerless in a society that benefits from their labor and yet forgets the laborer. Many do not have legal status and live in fear of deportation and of the night. Often they come from humble origins in Mexico and have little resources or education. They did not go to Sunday school growing up (much less seminary) and are just learning the books of the Bible. They are often ignored and invisible to the Church at large. And yet many have a desperate faith in God and nothing left to lose. They are exactly the kinds of people God always uses to do great and amazing things: A potential movement from the margins.

Steve Addison in his book, Movements that Changed the World, describes the key elements of movements this way: “God takes the initiative and chooses unlikely people, far from the center of ecclesiastical power. He works to remake them from the inside out. He inspires innovative insights regarding his mission and how it is to be carried out. Biblical truths and practices are rediscovered. A growing band of ordinary people emerges who have a heartfelt faith and missionary zeal that knows no bounds. Despite opposition from powerful forces within society and the existing church, the gospel spreads into unreached fields. The existing church is renewed, and society is transformed.”

If this is the case then I have the responsibility to steward and encourage a potential world and Church changing force. There are present here the elements for a movement from the margins in the making. And there’s no doubt about it in this place, day and time: we need renewal and we need a movement.

May it be so. Come Holy Spirit.

God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs. - Matthew 5:3 (NLT)

Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. - 1 Corinthians 1:27 (NLT)

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A Movement from the Margins, Part 1

By Jonathan Kindberg

One of the most satisfying and exciting aspects of my ministry has been discipling some new believers who I’ve tasked with going out on mission from the earliest days of their new walk with Christ. In each case God has met them in profound ways as they are sent out. In this I’ve sought to follow the pattern in Luke 9 and 10 of Jesus sending out his disciples.

Many might ask: Why did Jesus send out his disciples so quickly after they had begun to follow him? You can almost hear the complaints that immediately arose from the disciples:  “We are doing what? But, Jesus, we aren’t ready yet!”  or “Jesus we haven’t had enough training. What if we don’t know what to say?” And in reality they didn’t have enough resources and training… and this was exactly the point.

Jesus purposefully sent them without the resources they “needed:” “Take nothing for your journey,” he instructed them. “Don’t take a walking stick, a traveler’s bag, food, money, or even a change of clothes” (Luke 9:3). They had no resources and very little training. They hadn’t even been with Jesus for 5 chapters! But this he gave them: his own power and authority (9:1).

When we go out on mission something quite mysterious happens. We immediately recognize that we don’t have what people need. People bring their problems and pain and we don’t have the right answers or things to say. Immediately we recognize that we are empty people trying to fill others’ vacuous souls and we have come up dry. At that point, though, of recognizing our emptiness, a miraculous exchange occurs. God fills us, meets us at our point of need, so that we are able to meet the needs of others. We come to the end of ourselves and begin to depend on his authority and power to work in our own lives and in the lives of others.

Discipleship or spiritual formation without mission, even from the earliest stages of growth in Christ is incomplete to say the least. It is, as a friend of mine pointed out, a rediscovery of what it means to be truly human as God intended, a “being for the sake of others.”

Evangelical discipleship often emphasizes being “filled” which most often translates into a passive receiving of unidirectional teaching/preaching and a host of small groups, books and Sunday school classes. No wonder so many leave our churches looking for greener pastures and complaining of not having been “fed.” The problem often is that they have actually been “overfed” but haven’t been feeding others. Their hearts have become a stagnant pond of water without an exit strategy.

So what happens when these un-resourced, untrained disciples go out? By chapter 10, the 12 have suddenly become 72. A movement from the margins has begun.

In the next post we’ll talk about how movements usually begin in this way and are carried by the poor and outcasts of society, by those on the margins, and what one could look like here in Chicago started by Hispanic immigrants.

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Jericho Road Improvement Association

By Jonathan Kindberg

Almost every week this past summer someone from my congregation or someone I knew within the larger Hispanic immigrant community in DuPage County was arrested and faced possible deportation. Each time a flurry of phone calls, jails visits, attorney finding, money gathering, praying and waiting ensued.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said:”On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

In other words it’s good to help people laying on the side of the road, but after doing this over and over you start realizing that it’s time to actually do some work on the road itself. So each week at Iglesia, during the prayers of the people we pray for: Comprehensive Immigration Reform. 
Below is the beginning of a post from undocumented.tv which shares the story of someone at my congregation who was arrested this summer.

I wrote here about 6 weeks ago about the frustration and heartbreak of watching a family in my neighborhood suffer after the father of the household was stopped for a questionable traffic violation and then was turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on suspicion that he lacked legal status.  He was detained for a week in a county jail, which rents space (in exchange for a substantial economic benefit to the county government) to ICE.  Then, because apparently there was more bed space available elsewhere, my friend was flown from Illinois to Colorado, where he spent three more weeks in a detention cell operated by a private corporation, at the taxpayer’s expense…for the full article see: http://undocumented.tv/2011/blog/frustration-anger-hope-gratitude/