People will

This evening I'm headed to Alaska. This trip is a home repair mission to a little town outside Anchorage. There will be nearly 300 of us spending a week sleeping on floors in a school and fixing the homes of elderly, disabled and disadvantaged people. This is a costly trip for everyone who is attending. Airfare to Alaska, especially in the summer, is ridiculously expensive. Then there is the cost of the mission experience itself. People have spent the better part of the last year preparing to go on this trip. They have raised money, attended meetings, prayed together, and made all the necessary adjustments to their schedules to go. They chose to do all this for the sake of making a difference in the lives of others.

People fascinate me. Given the right motivation or the right invitation people will do all sorts of things. This has contributed to humanity's greatest and most terrible moments. The outpouring of support for tsunami and hurricane victims is one example. And I'm not talking about money. We learned yesterday that money can be diverted and abused. How in the world does $1.4 billion get misappropriated? That's a tangent for another time. No, it's not money but the sacrifice of time and effort. Tens of thousands of people have left their churches and flooded the Gulf region with labor and love to help restore lives. But, on the flip side, we can look to stories like the Jim Jones debacle of the seventies where seemingly normal people followed a madman into the jungle and descended into a paroxysm of suicidal horror. That whole thing started as a fairly mainstream church in Indiana. Then there's David Koresh and Waco in the nineties. People sacrificed their own children in a fiery conflagration believing they were following God's call.

People will do the most outrageous and wonderful things...given the right circumstances. Knowing this, why is it that so many leaders in the church never truly challenge the people in the seats every Sunday to anything more than sitting still and listening attentively for an hour or two? Why don't we trust people to be world changers? And if we do trust them, why aren't we offering more challenges to actually prove it? I know plenty of churches that send mission teams, run homeless shelters, staff crisis pregnancy centers, provide elder care and on and on. I also know that, on average, only about 20% of the people fully engage and accomplish 80% of all this work. One hundred percent of those who were committed to the cause of Jim Jones followed him into the jungles of Guyana. I can't imagine the conditions. One hundred percent of those people drank the kool aid laced with poison. In the end, yes he needed armed guards to keep some of them there. My point is that in the beginning they followed. All of them. If that many people will follow a madman for the sake of evil, don't you think people will follow God fearing, Christ following leaders for the sake of good? I think they will...if we ask.