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.