Gearing up for James

Hi everyone. Today's post comes from Kurt Hoover, a member of our church currently studying at Cornerstone University in Michigan. It's a reflection on a passage from James 1, mixed with what God is doing in his life. Thanks for writing, Kurt!

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” James 1:27

I find this passage from the letter from James to be particularly important for Christians to not only read but to ponder and put into action. It seems like today many people are questioning what the church should teach, how they should teach, what we should believe, and how we should go about doing things. Some, myself included, have even questioned the purpose of the church; whether or not it should continue to exist or whether or not we should continue to support it as we know it.

I have just completed the first semester of my freshmen year of college. I attend a Christian university in Grand Rapids Michigan as most of you know and my experience at this school has driven my thinking in a direction that I would never have expected it to be driven before I left home. God is showing me many things regarding the existence of the church through my relationships with people at school, through classes, and through my own study of the scriptures.
I had an experience (I believe a divine experience) early on in the semester that acted as a catalyst of sorts for a whole universe of thinking that was brand new to me. This experience started with my work at a Christian non-profit organization in Grand Rapids called Sabaoth. This organization ministers to poor, urban children who are for the most part Hispanic. I have been volunteering there since the beginning of September and I have heard and seen some things from the children and from the volunteers at this place that had a great impact on me. I would hear stories of how some kids would go home at night to abusive homes, I heard stories of how some kids had cousins or brothers who were in gangs and some even had died from being in them. I heard one story about one of the kids who went home one day to see all of their brothers and sisters on the front porch. When this child asked what was going on the others told him that immigration came for their mother and after that their father packed his bags and left without making sure the kids would be taken care of.

These stories had and still have an immense impact on my heart. At some point a thought occurred to me, “How can the church allow this to happen?” and “Where is the church when this happens?” These questions stuck with me for a while. They have a way of eating at you, especially if you feel you can’t escape the situation. I started to get very frustrated at the Christian church. It seemed and still seems to me that there is immense pain and suffering in this country and yet we remain silent as a whole, we are content to live our lives apart from those who suffer, apart from those who have real need.

This thought sparked some more thinking on my part. I started thinking about how to solve this problem and I tried to pinpoint problems and solutions. At an evening worship event on a Sunday night at school I felt God tug at my heart and tell me something. He told me that I should try and start my own church. The idea as it was in my own head was that it wasn’t really a church at all like we are used to today in this country. After words, I was walking back to my dorm with some good friends and I mentioned this idea and two other guys said they felt the same thing. This only confirmed it for me that this is what I was supposed to do.
We started to come up with ideas on what it should be about, what we should do, how it should look. I started to realize that anything we did was not going to be a real big jump from what we do in church anyway. I struggled with this thought because I wanted to make something different, something to solve a problem that I saw. The problem being poverty and suffering and hurt and I thought the modern church had failed at addressing these issues. My friends wanted the same so we toiled to make it work, to force it to work which is obviously never a good idea. We had our first service sometime in October. It was just me, my friends who helped on the project, and some other good friends of ours who showed up. The day turned out to be a real letdown for me.

With the help of a good friend from home, I started to think about why I was disappointed with what had happened. I had expected God to move in a huge way and that everything would change from that point on. I had expected God to do one thing, but he did something totally different. He moved in a huge way but not how I or my friends had expected Him to. I foolishly thought He would change the world through this angst-fueled, hair-brained scheme when all He wanted to do is show me why things are the way they are. He has used these experiences to show me the real solution to poverty, to godlessness, to pain, to suffering. It’s not going to be an unusual church group, it won’t be a brand new building, it won’t be a massive organization, and it most certainly won’t happen next year. It’s going to be choices that I make everyday starting today. It’s going to be how I decide to spend my money, how I spend my time, my energy today.
To bring it all back, how then should the church act? What should we teach? What should we do? How should we live? I think the answer is very clear in James. A religion that is faultless before the One who we worship would be the religion that takes care of those who have none to care for them. The religion that takes care of those who cannot even take care of themselves; the religion that keeps itself pure from the ways of this world such as greed, social advancement, and a pick yourself up by your own bootstraps mentality.