Jesus’ Friends

Have you heard Tony Campolo tell of the time he ended up at a greasy spoon diner in Hawaii at three-thirty in the morning because jet lag kept him from sleeping?  While there he overheard a prostitute remark to her friends that tomorrow was her birthday.  It gave him the inspiration to ask the owner for permission to bring a cake and decorate the diner for a party the next night. 

The place was wall to wall prostitutes when she arrived to a “Happy Birthday Agnes” and wild cheering.  Agnes was stunned saying that she had never before had her own birthday cake and asked to take it home to show her mother.  After a few uneasy moments when she left, Tony finally blurted out, “What do you say we pray?”

He prayed that God would make her new that God would give her back everything that had been taken from her.  After the prayer Harry the owner said, “Hey, Campolo, you told me you were a sociologist.  You’re no sociologist, you’re a preacher.  What kind of church do you belong to?” 

Tony Compolo answered, “I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at three-thirty in the morning.”  The owner came right back at him with the response, “No you don’t!  No you don’t! I would join a church like that.”

This story reminds me of what Tim Keller said in his book Prodigal God.  “In every case where Jesus meets a religious person and a sexual outcast (as in Luke 7) or a religious person and a racial outcast (as in John 3-4) or a religious person and a political outcast (as in Luke 19), the outcast is the one who connects with Jesus and the elder-brother type does not.  Jesus says to the respectable religious leaders, “the tax collectors and the prostitutes enter the kingdom before you” (Matthew 21:31).

“Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious of his day.  However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect.  The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones.  We tend to draw conservative, button-down, moralistic people.  The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church.  That can only mean one thing.  If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.  If our churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we’d like to think.”