Several years ago I read the short book Worship: The Missing Jewel in the Evangelical Church by A. W. Tozer. As usual, Tozer’s analysis was spot on, and still, fifty years after it was written, a message that contemporary Christians should take to heart –

Worship is the missing jewel in modern Evangelicalism. We’re organized; we work; we have our agendas. We have almost everything, but there’s one thing that the churches, even the gospel churches, do not have: that is the ability to worship. We are not cultivating the art of worship. (p. 20)

I’ve often wondered what Tozer would have to say about current worship trends that put so much emphasis on the preferences of the worshiper, sometimes at the expense of the subject of worship, the Triune God.

If Tozer were still alive, I’m sure he would add other jewels to the list of those missing in the Church and I believe wisdom would have a prominent place on his revised inventory.

Most of the strategies being implemented by the Evangelical Church today – for worship, outreach, programming and other facets of church life, put a strong emphasis on being relevant, cutting edge and contemporary. It’s all about the buzz factor.

Many a church has been split by the so-called worship wars, while others have kept the peace by offering traditional and contemporary services at different times or attempting to blend the traditional and contemporary in one service. If a church was started after 1990, they’ve probably never owned hymnals and the idea of a preacher standing behind a pulpit would seem foreign.

But I believe that the biggest casualty in the quest for relevance hasn’t been the hymnal or the pulpit, it’s been the Spiritual gift of discernment, also known as wisdom. As my late friend Dwight Ozard used to say, “Too often, the market determines orthodoxy.” After all, who needs wisdom when you have market analysis and focus groups?

Maybe it’s a sign that I’m getting older, but I’m at a point in my life where I crave the wisdom and insight of people older and more experienced than myself. I’ve grown weary of hearing about the next big thing, the latest and greatest gimmicks and tricks, the flavor of the month fast track to spiritual or church growth.

I want to hear from someone who’s been there, done that – several times. I want to learn from someone who has failed more than once and understands that the seeds to future success were sown in those failures.

Bob Lupton is that sort of man. If you have any interest or even curiosity about urban ministry he is someone you must listen to. He has the true wisdom of an elder who is not afraid to look the American Church in the eye and tell us the truth.

In his latest book, Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life: Rethinking Ministry to the Poor, Dr. Lupton opens up the vault and shares 30+ years of experience that the Church must take heed to if we are going to make a difference in the inner city and urban areas of America.

Forty years ago, while serving a tour of duty in Vietnam, Dr. Lupton served alongside young men from America’s urban centers. It became obvious that the stable Midwestern minister’s home he had grown up in was a stark contrast to the poverty, violence, addiction and dysfunction rampant in the neighborhoods and households those young men came from. Through that experience, Lupton heard God calling him to spend his life working with urban youth.

Starting in Atlanta as a field worker with Youth for Christ, within a few years Lupton saw the need to develop a strategy to impact entire families, not just their adolescent members. Out of that insight Dr. Lupton started Family Consultation Services, but before long saw the need for a holistic approach that would work at transforming the environment urban families live in. That meant affordable housing, education, job training, living-wage jobs and other necessities, and so FCS Urban Ministries was born.

But FCS Urban Ministries isn’t a Christian social service agency. Bob isn’t focused on betterment, he’s all about development. There’s a huge difference between those two approaches and if we’re going to make a difference in urban America we must learn that difference.

In some ways, it’s as simple yet profound as the old Jewish proverb – Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he can feed himself for life. Lupton reminds us that we all know that, but very few of us are doing that. Maybe because giving away fish is a lot easier than taking the time to teach someone how to fish. Lupton says it like this –

A superbly run food pantry, complete with balanced menu, dependable supply sources and computer accountability, still does little to develop recipients’ capacities to become self-sufficient. On the contrary, free food distribution does more to create dependency than encourage healthy independency. The same is true of the clothes closets and community clean-ups. The best run betterment programs, though admirable examples of well-run systems, do little to strengthen the community’s capacity to address its own needs. They may even work at cross-purposes with community development. (p. 40)

Lupton doesn’t say that there isn’t a time and place for charity, but he laments the fact that charity – one way giving that fosters dependency among the recipients and cynicism among the givers – is the dominant model for the way ministries and churches minister to the poor. He reminds us that this type of one-way giving is considered the lowest of the four levels of charity found in Jewish Wisdom Literature:

The highest level is to provide a job for one in need without his knowledge that you provided it. The next, lower level is to provide work that the needy one knows you provided. The third level is to give an anonymous gift to meet an immediate need. The lowest level of charity, to be avoided if at all possible, is to give a poor person a gift with his full knowledge that you are the donor. (p. 26)

When I first read that I thought about all the food giveaways I’ve participated in and led over the years – how the churches sponsoring the food baskets at Thanksgiving and Christmas almost always made sure their names were on the gospel tracts or flyers included with the food – or how we sometimes sent out press releases to the local media to let everyone know that we were giving away food during the holidays.

We were doing good, but we weren’t doing good wisely.

It’s time for the Church of Jesus Christ to draw on the wisdom resources that God has given us through the Scriptures and traditions of our Judeo-Christian heritage. It’s time for us to listen to wise men like Bob Lupton who, for over 35 years has worked and lived in the inner city of Atlanta, who knows the poor and the marginalized not as merely clients or recipients, but as neighbors and coworkers in the Kingdom. Bob says it best –

Perhaps it is our time and place in history to re-implement the wisdom of the ages and to fashion contemporary models of thoughtful compassion. (p. 27)

With men like Bob Lupton to lead us, we can reclaim wisdom as one of the jewels of the Church and use that wisdom to connect, empower and transform our inner cities.

To order a copy of Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life: Rethinking Ministry to the Poor or to get information about Dr. Lupton’s other books and resources, click on this link.