Closing Commitments

I've never seen such sober, powerful commitments from students.

What a summer we had!  Students became friends with ex-gang members.  They became family with undocumented immigrants.  They fell in love with inner city children.  And they are leaving wanting more of this joy in their lives.  Last Saturday, we wrapped up six weeks of shaping students with God's love for the poor, and they left as different people.  They spent two days reflecting on the lessons of the summer and the commitments they wanted to make to live differently.

Worshiping on our last night in front of the commitment cross

We ended our time by having students tear up the previously used posters that captured the web of brokenness in the city, and on those very posters, they wrote out the three to five commitments they were making to live differently before God.  As students wrote them out, we had them come to the front of the room and staple them to two beams of wood lying on the floor.  Once they finished, we lifted the beams up and set them into place...as a cross.

Jesus has risen.  Jesus has defeated the powers of sin and death and brokenness in our world.  But that resurrection power is offered to his people not just to save us from death, but so that we can live differently:  to be the presence of Jesus in our world.  As we worshiped God in front of this unique cross, the feeling wasn't one of emotionalism, but a sober sense of invitation from God that he would be with us if we would live as his people.

I wanted to make sure you could see a few of the hundreds of commitments that students made.  Ranging from sacrificial giving, to abstaining from consumerism, to intentionally relocating to the inner city for a period of time, the themes of LAUP are in the midst of
becoming lifestyle reality as I write.  Please make a point to keep praying for students as they now face the challenge of returning to their "normal" lives, but seeking to live differently.


Thank you for being a part of the LAUP family:  through reading this blog, through your giving, through volunteering, and through praying for us.  I feel honored to be a part of God moving in students so deeply, and look forward to seeing the fruit that comes from our investment this summer.

How to Pray

As I write this, Thursday afternoon, the LAUP students are reflecting on their summer, and will be over the next two days, until they leave Saturday afternoon.

Please pray for them over these next 48 hours:

-that God will clarify what he's been speaking to them about being good news to the poor
-that the Scripture and convictions they've received will go deep in the soil of their hearts
-that God's Spirit will lead them to creative application of the lessons of the summer
-that God will preserve and sustain what he's done in them, that it would bear fruit on their campuses, in our cities, and in their lives.

Thank you for being a part of this journey...I look forward to updating you once we've finished out with the students and taken our student and staff leaders on our three day retreat.

From Stone to Flesh

The Leighton Avenue team singing with neighborhood kids

I realized, this past Sunday as I met with the student leaders of the LAUP teams, that I have been seeing something I've never seen.

As expected, students have been giving themselves to the urban kids and families on their sites, they've been immersing themselves in their readings about God's heart for the poor, they've been embracing the challenge of living on a budget equivalent with their neighbors--they've been faithful to all of their responsibilities--but they haven't let it stop there.  They've elected to go above and beyond.

The Northwest Pasadena team has taken extra time to visit each of the families of the kids in their program and spend time with them.  The Dolores Mission team has decided to spend the night sleeping in the homeless shelter, get up at 4:30 am with the men, and shadow them on foot to experience a day of homelessness.  The Leighton Avenue team hosted a potluck party for the whole block, and had the kids they've been mentoring in the arts present their work in front of everyone.  The Homeboy Industries team has started a weekly "God investigation group" for the recovering gang members to interact over stories of Jesus from the Scripture.  The list goes on and on.

I have never heard of students taking this much initiative to give their whole hearts to the poor in the midst of what's already a rigorous schedule.  This pattern underscores one of the central themes of the summer, found in Ezekiel 36:26:

"A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh."

The transformation happening before me is nothing less than beautiful.  These students are different than they were one month ago.  Not only are they more full of love for the urban poor, but they are simultaneously becoming more joyful, more hopeful, and are experiencing personal healing.  They're not just surviving a summer in the inner city...for many it's been the most joyful season of their lives.

And yet is it any surprise that making space for the poor in our lives would transform us?  As the summer comes to a close, I am more aware than ever of the omnipresent gravitational pull of our culture to have us focus on ourselves:  for our hearts to harden, for our schedules to fill up, for the poor to drift from our awareness, for our love to shrivel.

The next two days, students will be reflecting on what God convicted them of this summer, and how they will commit to living differently.  As they consider how to use their time, their money, and their education to be good news to the poor, I feel moved to let God speak to me as well.

The LAUP student leaders praying for the end of the summer

The call to remember the poor is throughout the Bible from cover to cover.  As I witness the beauty of seeing hearts of stone become hearts of flesh, it is clear that this exhortation is meant not just to bless the poor, but is for our own spiritual health.

Please join me in praying that God will preserve the transformation that students have experienced, that they will be strengthened to stand by the commitments they make, and that they will be an inspiration to you and I, that we, ourselves, would be responsive to God call to us to live as good news to the poor.

The Beginning of Breakthrough

Students responding to God's call to give him their future

Just last Thursday we hit a transformational moment with the 85 LAUP participants.

As students spent the week studying Scripture and hearing teaching about money, something broke open inside their hearts.  As students approached the front of the room to symbolically offer their treasures to God, the concept of God’s love for the poor somehow went from a cerebral idea to a heartfelt challenge to which they needed to personally respond.  They began to seek the link between the poor families they are working each day and their own choices of career, lifestyle, and finances in the future.  Students gave God control of their dreams and plans in very specific ways.

I’ve never seen students this engaged with the challenge to live as good news to the poor this early in the summer...I can hardly wait to see how much God will do by the end!

Please pray with us that God will keep moving deeply in students' hearts:  that each and every student will wrestle with God's personal challenge to them to live as good news to the poor, and that they will sweetly, intimately, and specifically hear God's invitation closer to himself.

Poetry on Poverty

At the heart of LAUP is more than just helping students gain God's heart for the poor.  It also involves identifying the competing values already embedded within them through our culture.  We are helping students make choices out of a view of the world that's driven by the "survival of the fittest" to make space for a view of the world built on the principles of the Kingdom of God.

Sam Rickert working on poetry at the LAUP house

Last Thursday, at our first weekly LAUP gathering, one of the students from our artist team--Sam Rickert--shared a spoken-word poetry piece that captured the foundation that we've laid.  Reading it doesn't do it justice, but you'll still get the idea:

Americans fight hard for freedom, for individualism...let's look at where that's left us.

We love our individual independence, not realizing the isolation conseqence;

We hope to be a self-made man, which probably means a wealth-made man.

This business world lives on competition, so we push the weak down without condition;

We live with a sense of entitlement, though you won't find that in God's covenant.

Most Americans believe "God helps those who help themselves" is biblical, just shows our starvation of the scriptural.

See entitlement leads to love-malnutrition, with western churches dying as the fruition.

The American Dream promises opportunity, but often leads to egocentricity;

We are told "fake it till you make it", God says, "I'll take your mask and break it."

Basically this rhyme's about

not I but we,

about us not me; 

We must live in unity

if we will ever be a kingdom community,

and a generation with eyes to see

the sins of our culture.

Let renewal rain down

by our repentance give God his crown.

As you pray for us, please ask God to move powerfully in the short time we have with the LAUP students.  As our directors team has sought God, we have felt moved by God to recognize the urgency of what's happening in them:  though they have the rest of their lives to live, what happens in their hearts over this next month has a dramatic effect upon the trajectory of the rest of their lives.

LAUP's first week

The LAUP 2012 interns, discussing Luke

What a first week of LAUP we’ve had!

 
Starting with Jesus’ inaugural address in Luke 4—the Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor—we immersed students in God’s heart for the poor and the city, and challenged them to recognize the brokenness in our world.

The first day, after looking at economic and racial demographic information on the city of Los Angeles, all ninety of us went to Skid Row to let God turn statistics into people.  As we arrived, the brokenness and despair were palpable:  people passed out on the sidewalk, marijuana being smoked in public, and a smell of urine, trash, and neglect.  One of our female students, Maria, shared her difficulty in recognizing the Skid Row homeless as human, and recoiled from making any physical contact.  Yet by the end of a fifteen minute lunch, something had begun to change.  In saying goodbye, the homeless woman embraced her and gave her a kiss on the cheek…as she did, Maria later shared that she sensed God speaking to her, “You are both my daughters.”

Students discussing issues underneath the "web" of injustice

We also made a point to help students understand the complexity of urban issues.  Each time we discussed the brokenness in the city, students identified issues (unemployment, drug abuse, domestic violence, etc.) wrote them on posters, and hung them from the balcony of the church.  As they saw links between these issues—unemployment can lead to depression, which can lead to drug abuse, which can lead to prostitution—they tied yarn between the posters.  By the end of the week, our sessions were a parable for the true spiritual state of the city:  continually living under an oppressive web of interconnected issues of injustice.

We ended the week speaking about God’s coming Kingdom which has been bursting through into our world since Jesus came to earth.  As we worshiped and proclaimed God’s good news of healing and redemption, students cut each piece of yarn, one by one.

Pray with me that this will be more than a metaphor, but that students will let God’s love for the poor seep into their hearts, and that through their own lives, they will see his Kingdom coming and his will being done in the city, as it is in heaven.

Off to the Races!

LAUP 2011 Interns Worshipping Last Summer

LAUP is off to the races!

Tomorrow morning eighty four students and staff will gather in Lincoln Heights and be sent out in fourteen teams to urban communities all over the LA area including Pomona, Long Beach, Boyle Heights, South LA, and Northwest Pasadena.  This will be our biggest group we’ve had in almost ten years, and I am really excited.

As we launch the summer, we’d love to have you participate with us in various ways.

1)  You can pray for us.  I’ll send out weekly updates with specific reports and requests.  For starters, please pray for God’s work on students’ hearts this first week.  We’ll be in session for 12 hours each day, Monday through Thursday, anchoring students in God’s heart for the poor and teaching about systemic injustice, building relationships, and prayer.

2)  You can mentor students at our LAUP alumni day.  Saturday afternoon, July 28^th, we’re inviting LAUP alumni or other Christians with a value for social justice to share about how they live out God’s heart for the poor in their various careers and neighborhoods.  Please contact Scott if you’re interested:  Scott_Hall@ivstaff.org

3)  You can join the LAUP for Life campaign.  We’re building an army of financial partners who want to see LAUP sustained and expanded through monthly support.  The first goal of LAUP for Life is sustaining the lease of the LAUP house in South LA, through which we brought over 100 students this past year.  To learn more visit:  http://www.laurbanproject.org/laup-for-life.html

Thank you for being a part of the LAUP family, and for your partnership for the future generations of LAUP students.  I can’t wait to share how they are being launched into our city and world as kingdom disciples who are living as good news to the poor!

Close to Home

     Something new is happening with our LAUP summer program that touches me at a deep personal level.

     Lucy’s closest neighborhood friend is a girl named Simi. In November of 2010, Simi’s dad went to work doing construction as he did each morning…but he never came home. He hasn’t been home since. Though she was born here in Los Angeles, Simi’s mom and dad were not, fleeing desperate poverty in Guatemala to come work in this country, illegally. Simi’s dad spent 14 months in federal immigration prison in Arizona before being deported in March of this year, and is now living in Guatemala. Simi is 7 years old, and has seen her dad only once—during a prison visit—in 19 months...but she cries over him every week.

     This summer, LAUP is adding a new component of training our students in urban ministry called “borderlands”. We have assigned three teams of students to learn about issues of immigration, to study the Scripture, and to seek God for the right way—as American Christians—to approach this complex issue. These students will be spend the summer serving at the Guadalupe Homeless Project—an undocumented homeless men’s shelter in East Los Angeles—making a trip to Casa de Migrante in Tijuana—a Catholic ministry that provides 12 days of housing for recently deported men—and learning about the issues surrounding immigration from conversations with published authors, seminary professors, attorneys, and community members. Beyond a political position, we are seeking to empower these students to learn about the layers of complexity related to immigration, to learn about U.S. immigration policy, and to wrestle with what it looks like to live by the call of the Scripture to “love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 10:19)

      Today, the plan of Simi’s family is to leave the U.S. to return to Guatemala, and then—because the kids are U.S. citizens—to send Simi and her younger siblings back to the U.S. to attend high school and live with relatives. But…Simi’s 11 year-old brother will not go with them: he was born in Guatemala and came to the U.S. as an infant. When Lucy asks me, “Why does Simi have to leave, Daddy? Why is her family being split up?” I don’t have a very good answer.

     From my past year of interacting with judges, attorneys, and Christian leaders, no one has a good answer. As I have spoken to people with a wide range of positions on immigration, no one seems to like the way our immigration policies are constructed. Both President Bush and President Obama pushed Congress to reform federal immigration policies: Congress wouldn’t touch it either time. Through the borderlands project of LAUP, we’re seeking to raise up a new generation of Christian leaders who can transcend partisanship, and can bring the wisdom, justice, and compassion of Jesus into the conversation in a way that feels right, and makes sense.

     As I watched Lucy and Simi playing in the back yard yesterday, I felt a heaviness in my heart. In one month, this friendship will dissolve, possibly forever: suddenly the issue wasn’t a political one, it was personal. I know that the issues are complex, but I feel compelled to seek God for better answers and to invite the borderlands students on that journey with me. Please pray for me and for LAUP this summer as we lead students into gaining God’s heart for the poor, the immigrant, and our country.

     LAUP begins June 24...in just two weeks! Please be in prayer for students raising funds, and that God will prepare the teachers and interns for all that he has in store! I will post regular blog updates during the summer, for those of you who want to stay current, and to pray specifically.

The Circle is Growing

Here's a snapshot from the front yard of the LAUP house today.

True to their commitments, over a dozen of the USC students who experienced the joy of bringing the healing, hope, and light of God to the South LA urban community have been coming back every week.

Except now it's more than a dozen.

Today they had Bible study in our front yard before mentoring youth and serving the neighbors. The original five kids from the neighborhood have grown to 10. (If you look, you'll see them all in the Bible Study circle.) The original dozen from USC have grown to 15. The circle is growing.

There is a movement of God growing right here on the grass of the front yard. Urban kids are finding mentors they never dreamed of. USC students are gaining a heart for kids navigate an alternate urban reality. Both of them are caught up in the Kingdom of God...which may leave none of them ever the same!

Pray for God's power to go before this movement: to protect it, to deepen it, and to use it to not just transform 25 kids on a lawn, but to make God's grace, healing, and salvation real to a whole city.

Living the Dream

Thirty Two students from USC and Occidental College just finished spending five nights of their spring break together in the LAUP house. Their presence here did something that will change this house forever.

The goal of this LAUP "plunge" was to help students gain God's heart for the poor, and to give them a practical experience of bringing the light, hope, love, and generosity of God's Kingdom to the South Los Angeles urban community. All of that happened...and then some.

If you haven't been to the neighborhood, it's dirty. Trash everywhere, overgrown weeds, chipping paint, broken couches on the sidewalk...not to mention a general feeling of danger and depression. So they picked up trash on the whole block, pulled weeds, painted people's fences, planted a lemon tree...and gave the LAUP house itself a makeover.

And as they did that, neighbors came out of the woodwork. Urban youth helped paint, played with the students, and joined us for dinner every night. A woman donated dinner one night. Another loaned us four ladders. The plumber across this street cut us a deal to fix the water main (broken by an overzealous student taking a pick-axe to tree roots). Today, my neighbor across the street came to share his gratitude to the students. "You're here on your spring BREAK?? Are you kidding me? Wow...this is something special." In my seven years of living here, I've never seen the neighborhood react with such warmth, gratitude, and community as I saw in these past five days.

This isn't the typical spring break for today's college student. Yet at the end of a week in the inner city, working hard, sharing three bedrooms with 32 people, one student captured the feeling of the whole group. "We're living the dream."

Another student captured it like this: "I participated in the LAUP Plunge over spring break, and I witnessed so much of God’s work and His love. My heart was transformed, not just temporarily, but for life, to a point where I can’t turn back. I heard God’s calling to serve so clearly and I strongly desire to be part of His plan in whatever way I possibly can. The Plunge was an incredible experience, and I am drawn so strongly to continue working with the poor here in LA."

The USC students are returning on their own, Saturday, to host a neighborhood barbecue. They will come back to mentor the kids on the block every Friday and Saturday. They ARE living the dream: Jesus' dream of the kingdom of God. For these students and for this neighborhood, what was once just a dream is becoming reality.

Hope in the 'Hood

Written on the wall of the LAUP House after her weekend experience of God’s heart for the poor, Marilu’s testimony reads, in English: "I constantly fight with the lies that tell me I can’t be a Latina leader, but God keeps reminding me of the truth and of his promises: 'And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time like this?' Esther 4:14”

Marilu was one of 25 students who spent the past weekend in the new LAUP house. 21 of these 25 were Latino students from East Los Angeles College, and Pasadena City College. Though they were moved by God’s love for the poor--both in Scripture and on Skid Row--just as other groups have been, something here was different.

The first night my staff partner, Erna Hackett, shared that Jesus himself was born to a teenage mother who became pregnant out of wedlock and who was raised by a man who was not his biological father. As we asked how these things affected their view of God, Matthew responded,

"That’s just like me. I never thought about that before. It makes God feel less distant…more near to my experience."



While we ended with our usual call that students live as good news to the poor and let God’s Kingdom come to the world through them, I sensed that something else needed to happen. “But God doesn’t just want his kingdom to come through you, but to you…to your families, to your pain, to your numbness.” Suddenly you could feel something penetrating deeper. We moved into a time of music and prayer as students renounced the effects of poverty and depression upon their lives. I closed our time praying in Spanish that they would receive the spiritual mantle of leadership I sensed God placing upon them.

It was after this—like others—Marilu wrote upon the walls of the house, testifying to the empowering words God had been speaking to her for the future student groups who would share this experience.

These are the students that mainstream America often forgets, many the first in their families to go to college. They are from the schools that don’t catch much attention. Yet as God chooses the weak to humble the strong, so I sensed God doing something in these young urban leaders that is unsurpassed in all the other students with whom I’ve worked...not unlike the story of Esther.

Thank you for partnering with LAUP to bring God’s Kingdom near to our city. It is coming, and it is good.