Acts revisited Part II

I am busy helping Janey put up Christmas decorations while breathing in the pine scent of a fresh-cut tree. There are colored lights around the windows, and three stockings hang from the mantle. I assume we’ll have a crèche, maybe even a Moravian putz. Unfortunately, when I was trying to figure out the correct spelling, I found putz comes up as Yiddish for “stupid person.”  I have a collection of nativity scenes myself, sleeping peacefully in a box in Mexico. There, images of saints are a big deal. There’s a shop in my town with a sign out front saying, “We dress saints,” which, for this season, would include the “child God,” or baby Jesus, that is often dressed specifically for local culture, an “incarnation” of sorts.  Young women are warned that if they don’t marry, they will be the ones left “dressing saints.” Many Mexicans believe that the images have spiritual power in them, and that if you care for them, handle them, or give them gifts, the power rubs off on you. This is not a belief evangelicals share, although sometimes we come close by turning other things into power objects: our own emotions, our own emphaticness, our own time spent praying, or our own lists of doctrines and rights and wrongs. We trust in these things to ward off evil and lead us to goodness. The temptation to idolatry for us as evangelicals is far more insidious.

Among the Mixtecs I know, Jesus is often no more than a statue, and not the most important one. But I have witnessed what happens when Jesus comes off the wall and changes people’s lives. My last post was about a martyr who brought his Mixtec village to Jesus: Juan Mercenario. Those who came to Jesus through his witness formed the first evangelical church in that language group.

And this baby church decided to change some things about the way people in Yuvinani lived—decided these things on its own, with little input from outsiders, with little knowledge of Scripture, but full of  the renewing power of the Holy Spirit. The church decided to stop drinking alcohol because alcoholism was a terrible problem in town, resulting in much domestic violence and brawls. One of the Christian wives has a scar across her head, where her drunken father had slashed her with a machete. The church decided that abandoning alcohol would help their families. The church decided to stop requiring money for their daughters when they were given (or sold, as they labeled it), as brides, because they felt this would bring more honor to their daughters. The church decided to stop charging interest on loans because, in the mountains, interest rates ran between 50 to 100% per month, and many ill things came from the desperation caused by great debt. The church decided to call five men as leaders of the church, all respected family men with proven leadership skills. These men would share responsibility for the church, rotating the preaching role every year. They chose a pluralistic model because it was in keeping with the traditional Mixtec model practiced in their village.

What I want to point out is how close this story is to the story of the early church in Acts. A charismatic leader stood up in a public place and called people to repentance and faith in Jesus. People, hearing the Good News in their own tongue for the very first time, were moved to respond. They made a public commitment that same day. The church took immediate steps to care for one another in sacrificial ways. The Holy Spirit took hold of their hearts and minds, and this showed immediately in their actions.

Like the early church in Acts, this church payed for stepping outside cultural traditions. People around them felt threatened by the believers’ new way of living and tried to shut them down by killing their leaders. Within the year, John was dead, the church’s first martyr. The murmurers hired an assassin, who stepped out from behind a truck in the middle of the day and shot John, on his way to a hardware store in the market town to buy supplies for building a house for the baby church.  Soon afterward, another leader was killed. Some of the new believers walked away from the church in fear after these deaths. But most stayed. Today more and more people are coming to know Christ in this culture. Jesus has come down off the wall, off the cross, out of the manger, out of the grave, and lives there among them, not as a figure to be dressed and handled but as their and our Emmanuel to be loved and served.