Turning the hearts of parents and children towards each other

I have been especially pondering the last two verses of Malachi this Advent, longing to see more and more reconciliation that prepared the way for Jesus.

“Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. And he will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse” (Malachi 4:5-6).

Elisha was always my favorite prophet of the Old Testament. His humility before his master Elijah was impressive and he ended up doing twice as many miracles: literally 14 to Elijah’s 7. So why was Elijah sent as a forerunner to the Messiah, and not Elisha?

My question was answered by Ron Kuykendall, an Episcopal priest friend from Florida who came and did some teaching at Tierra Nueva’s The People’s Seminary in September.

Ron taught that Elijah is the prototype spiritual father, and Elisha a prototype spiritual son. Elijah is the only Old Testament prophet who passed on a double anointing. Elijah embodies God’s heart: that our sons and daughters (spiritual or biological) would go far beyond us, standing on our shoulders. John the Baptist embodied this with his attitude towards Jesus: “He must increase. I must decrease.” He pointed to Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29),” and not to himself. “After me comes a man who has a higher rank than I,” he continued.

Jesus surely had a much greater anointing. And yet he too embodied towards us his disciples the father heart visible in Elijah: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go to the Father. And whatever you ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:12-13). Surely Jesus sent us his Holy Spirit to empower us to continue in this same tradition, as we continue to prepare for Jesus’ final return: “the great and terrible day of the Lord.”

In the jail where I serve as chaplain most of the men and women are estranged from their fathers, and often their mothers too. Gangs are on the rise everywhere in part because of a crisis in father/child relationships. The church too is disempowered in part because of rivalries and ruptures that need to be laid down. I long to see the turning of hearts between actual biological fathers/mothers and daughters/sons and also between spiritual children and their parents. Reconciliation, healing and true empowerment begins with forgiveness, as the following story shows.

I first met Santos (“holy” in Spanish) twelve years ago when he was a 20-year-old Latino gangster doing six months in Skagit County Jail. Santos is unforgettable because of his warm, sensitive spirit. He also has a nervous wince that hits his left eye like a crashing wave every thirty seconds. Halfway through a Bible study about Jesus' healing of a blind man by applying spit to his eyes two Thursday's ago, Santos said: "I feel kind of vulnerable asking for this, but can you pray for me to be healed of this nervous tic in my left eye? It's been bothering me my whole life, but more and more lately."

With only five minutes before the guards came, I invited the other inmates to gather around Santos, and placed my hand on his left eye. Immediately I got the strong impression that his father had hit him in the head. I asked whether this was true, and Santos began to cry and say he was beaten a lot when growing up. Later he told me that as the oldest, he'd often taken the blame for things his younger brother and sister had done, to keep them from beatings.

I briefly told him that when someone sins against us, it brings great suffering, but if we hold resentment and unforgiveness, the sins of the other person infect and continue to hurt us. He said he was willing to forgive. I led him in a prayer of forgiveness, and he even began to bless his father. I prayed that the peace of Christ would come over his face and that the nervous flinching would be calmed in Jesus' name. The presence of God came over all of us. It was very peaceful.

The next day, I called Santos to check on him. He said he was 100% healed and the twitching had stopped. I called him four days later and he says he's still completely healed—the tic has not returned. He has had this problem for 32 years. “People who know me are all noticing it!” he said. He also told me that the night he forgave his father, his dad called his girlfriend's house looking for him—something his father rarely if ever does.

I am profoundly grateful for this new beginning as hearts are turned and Jesus comes again, and I long to see more. May you experience this Christmas season reconciliation, healing and peace born out of forgiveness as you anticipate and welcome Jesus’ coming.

Empowerment by the Spirit in France

On Saturday, November 17 after a rich five days with Scripture Union in Alsace I flew to Paris to spend the weekend ministering in the Église Reformée de Belleville followed by a three-day retreat for French reformed pastors.

The church is Belleville is one of the largest churches in the Église Reformée de France. Like many churches in Paris, its membership is diverse: many French people together with first and second generation immigrants from Africa and other countries. I even met a woman from Mexico and people from Columbia. The Belleville church is at the heart of the section of Paris with the largest Jewish community, many North African immigrants and a burgeoning arts scene. Unlike most churches in the Église Reformée de France which are highly intellectual and traditional, Belleville is more evangelical and has been deeply influenced by charismatic renewal.

Serge Jacquemus is the pastor-- a good friend who did graduate studies with me in Montpellier in 1991 who I later met up with in 2004 at a pastor’s conference at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship. Randy Greer is an American missionary friend of mine also ministering at Belleville. He leads an inspiring after-school program serving North African immigrant youth. Serge has invited me to minister in Paris for the past few years, hoping to see his church reach out more effectively to the neighborhood, empowered by the Holy Spirit. I arrived in the middle of a national transportation strike, but the Saturday afternoon training drew many people. We acted out Jesus’ encounter with the woman caught in adultery and the woman bent over by an evil spirit. These stories served as a basis for inviting people to drop their stones of accusation and to step into Jesus’ ministry of announcing forgiveness and deliverance from evil spirits. Nearly everyone came up at the end to receive prayer for freedom from invisible powers that oppress them (shame, guilt, fear, unworthiness).

Sunday morning I preached two services to the 500 member church. I spoke on the Spirit upon Jesus and the anointing for ministry to the poor, prisoners, the blind and oppressed based on Luke 4:18ff, ending with fire tunnels where everyone could lay hands on everyone. People enthusiastically engaged in this style of prayer after I presented it as a near perfect enactment of the values of the French revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité (freedom, equality, brotherhood). The priesthood of all believers happened as people excitedly formed two long lines facing each other to make a prayer tunnel. Nearly everyone in each service passed through at least once, receiving prayer from the many who laid hands on them calling for God’s Spirit to come to heal, fill and empower.

A three-day pastor’s conference began the next day at noon. Since all the trains and subways were still nearly shut down by the national strike, only 20 or so pastors were able to make it to the retreat. This was ideal since the focus of the retreat was on ministering personally to each pastor. Pastoring in France is particularly challenging. French society is increasingly fast-paced and impressively secular. Pastors of the historic Église Reformée often minister in traditional parishes to small, aging congregations made up of members often spread out in a wide geographic area. Ministry opportunities to non-Christians are very challenging. The majority immigrant population is North African and Muslim. Pastors are highly trained professionals who know Scripture and theology well, but have had little training in ministering physical and inner healing, deliverance and prophetic ministry. Though they place a high value on the priesthood of all believers, they often feel stuck when it comes to really seeing parishioners get empowered to step into their callings.

My focus was to help them become more secure in a Biblical theology of empowerment based on Ephesians 1:3ff and 2:7ff and many other texts and in ministry with the gifts of the Spirit (Eph 4:7-10; 1 Cor 12-14). Many pastors bear the weight of an entire congregation’s calling and suffer under their own and other’s expectations that they have to be gifted to meet every need. My hope was that they would become more comfortable receiving more from the Holy Spirit and facilitating people’s empowerment to move in the gifts of the Spirit. I presented on the five-fold vision of ministry in Ephesians 4:11-16 and we discussed and practiced how to identify and recruit people into callings such as apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher with the objective of equipping all the people (Eph 4:11-12).

We used a “prophetic presbytery” style of prayer we practice every week as a staff at Tierra Nueva. This involves laying hands on each other, blessing, praying and sharing impressions, pictures, scriptures—perhaps in some way similar to ways early Christians ministered to each other (Acts 13:2-3; 19:6; 1 Tim 4:14; 2 Tim 1:6). After beautiful worship and some teaching, over the course of three days each pastor had a turn to sit in the middle of a circle to receive prayer and prophetic words of encouragement and direction from the leaders of the pastoral, each other and me. We laid hands on each one and invited the Holy Spirit to come to fill, bless and reveal. It was amazing to see how God spoke consistently and personally words of clear encouragement, comfort, clarification of gifting and direction. After praying for some 25 people each one of us had significantly more experience by the end of this retreat to take this model back to our ministries and parishes. There is still so much to learn about discernment of spiritual gifts and empowerment for life and ministry, but I came home deeply encouraged by the power of people humbly gathering around each other to bless and build up.

Please keep these French pastors and the Belleville church in your prayers: that the Spirit would keep filling them more and more. That the light of Christ would shine brightly on them and through them for their families, communities and for France.