{..} The New Friars..

So I chose to read this book called The New Friars: The Emerging Movement Serving the World's Poor by Scott A. Bessenecker for one of my classes (the class is called: Principles of Christian Sustainable Development) and it's got some beautiful/inspiring/challenging/perspective-changing thoughts. It invites those who are tired of suburban Christianity to embrace solidarity with the world's urban slum dwellers. It invites the reader to join the movement of North American young people choosing to live under the same roof and eat the same food as those they are serving, kind of like how the monks did it from the missionary monastic orders of old. They become brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers instead of "missionaries" and "development workers."
If you don't mind, I'd like to share a few quotes with you:

"Perhaps what we as outsiders to garbage communities see as resignation or hopelessness is really a healthy dose of realism - a very practical view of the world."

"God's heart yearns for his children to have more than the dung that surrounds them: not riches, but a life in which their needs are met in a way that doesn't mask their need for him."

"Sin is more expensive in poor communities."

"The communities of men and women moving into slums with a commitment to love and to preach are building the kind of trust relationships that breathe life into the brokenness of the poor. They have an innate sense of what a holy life looks like but are sinful enough themselves to know not to preach from a pedestal but from the dirt."

"The disciples needed to strip themselves of the insulating power of money, food and extra clothes. Their profound neediness was a gift, a gift that would force them to depend on the Father whom Jesus talked about and upon the generosity of the townspeople to whom Jesus was sending them (Luke 10:7-9)"

"They would become real to the poor by becoming poor themselves, imitating Christ who voluntarily chose physical poverty and "moved into the neighbourhood" (John 1:14 The Message)."

"Living alongside drug users, asylum seekers and refugees taught her the lessons that kindergarten teachers long to teach us but rarely take root - to share our things and play well with others."

While the qualities that are emerging among new friar communities seem radical, they are ones all of us would do well to embrace:

• Incarnation - tearing down the insulation and becoming real to those in trouble
• Devotion - making intimacy with Christ our all-consuming passion
• Community - intentionally creating interdependence with others
• Mission - looking outside ourselves
• Marginalization - being countercultural in a world that beckons us to assimilate at the cost of our conscience. 

These new friars are saying to the prostitutes: "See, your Savior comes" (Isaiah 62:11.) They are carrying within them light, they are holding the hand of one of his beloved and they are telling her she is remembered. For her Savior remembers her. He comes for her, to her, into the darkest of nights, into her darkest of rooms. He stands with her there and holds her hand. 

See, your Savior comes.

"It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born." - Wendell Berry