I’m into my second day of a three-day private prayer and fasting retreat at a friend’s fishing cottage in southern Louisiana. Except for an occasional dog bark or gull call, it’s utterly silent here–the perfect atmosphere for intense prayer.

This morning I woke up at 4:00 and will pray until about 11:00 tonight. I’ve already prayed through the more than 1000 specific requests that came into our office. I’ve now started speaking to God the first few thousand names of the more than 50,000 total friends of Faith and Action. It’s very demanding (especially on my eyes!), but it’s also wonderful and interesting. The panoply of people God has given us–from every state, several provinces of Canada, and even a few other countries–is astounding!

In case you’re interested, I’m doing this is by using a portion of scripture as a framework, then announcing several thousand names, one-by-one (and only first names!), and offering up thanks for each.  (See the photo with this post. If you’re concerned by my posture–yes, I do change positions regularly!) I take brief and routine breaks, then choose a new scripture text and begin again.

This has been a spiritually renewing exercise for me and it’s already given me a much deeper connection to our growing family of supporters. Like anyone, I get bored with some of the endless lists of sometimes difficult-to-pronounce names in the Bible, but now I appreciate more why they are there. Names equate to the people who bear them. Names are very important and are inextricably connected to our identity, personal value and human dignity. I’ve pledged to our supporters that they will never be simply a computer file number to us!

Just saying these names aloud in prayer draws me closer to each one and strengthens the bond we already have in the Lord.

If you’re on this list, I thank you for the privilege of letting me pray for you. In the end, I may get more out of it than you do!

- Rob

Writing this at 24,000 feet somewhere above Indiana (I think) on the way to Chicago where Cheryl and I will attend a family bar mitzvah. See my YouTube Check-In of 3-20-09 to learn more about our trip and this important Jewish ritual in the life of a young man. For now, though, a short reflection on an experience from yesterday:

Even in the supposedly “new era” of bipartisanship and “anti-politics-as-usual,” it’s still hard to find anywhere Democrats and Republicans are working together on truly meaningful issues. Yesterday was an exception. My Chief-of-Program, Peggy Birchfield-Nienaber, and I went to a special briefing by the Congressional Caucus on International Religious Freedom held in the US House Rayburn Building, part of the US Capitol Complex. Among the participants were two members of Congress, Democrat Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri and Republican Trent Franks of Arizona. In their public remarks and in private conversation with me, both men said basically the same thing: Religious Freedom is the most important of all freedoms. Rep. Cleaver, a United Methodist pastor, called it, “the mother of all freedoms,” and Franks called it, “the first of all freedoms.” More importantly, both renewed their extraordinary commitments to doing something about it.

As you know, I’ve given a good deal of my prayerful time and attention to what I agree with the congressmen is our First Freedom. I’ve served with various groups that advance religious freedom here and around the world and I’ve personally advocated for it in places like Morocco and Sudan. (BTW: It was Democrat Cleaver who said at the podium we have our own problems with religious liberty right here in our own country!) Whether it is Morocco, Sudan, China, our own backyard, the freedom to openly worship God, to proclaim His message and to evangelize others–without intimidation or government interference–will always be at the top of my list. Unless we preserve this, the greatest freedom, that finds its expression in the deepest part of our being, the soul, no other freedoms can have true meaning!

Yours for the First Freedom of body, mind and soul,

Rob +

What does rural Alabama, suburban Illinois and a small German town have in common? The people in these places are experiencing the enormous pain of loss, sadness, fear and bewilderment. In the aromatic south, an otherwise “well-liked” young guy murdered his own mother before going on a multi-town rampage killing nine others. Just days before, in Marysville, Illinois, another man, about the same age, had walked into a classic brick colonial Baptist church, raised a pistol and shot the pastor in front of his congregation. In Winnenden, Germany, population 28,000, a now all-too familiar black-clad and deeply disturbed teen returned to his former High School and summarily executed students as they sat at their desks. In all three incidents, the perpetrators didn’t stop at their random victims; they victimized themselves by violently taking their own lives. The church killer wasn’t successful. He survived to face charges.

These incidents, disturbingly more frequent in this country, defy comprehension. Americans haven’t gotten over Columbine and Virginia Tech, yet, not to mention other multiple shootings, the details of which are lost to memory. Now, here we go again. Mass killings are hard to absorb. Not only can we not figure out what’s going on in the heads of these shooters, but worse, we can’t figure out what to do to prevent them. The fact is, we can’t prevent them without dealing a serious injury to the liberties Americans have come to accept as their right. I’ve traveled to plenty of countries where citizens are routinely surveilled, phone lines are tapped and innocent people are detained and interrogated. Americans just don’t stand for that. We want to live free.

Still, there is a push to pass more laws, deploy more police officers, establish more courts and build more prisons. Yet the finest laws, best trained police, most capable judges and maximum security cells can never stop what occurred this week. The only thing that could have stopped Terry Joe Sedlacek from putting a bullet through the heart of Pastor Fred Winters was the conviction of his own conscience. The same is true for all these other tragedies. Notwithstanding Hollywood fantasies like 2002’s Minority Report, law enforcement officers cannot see into the future–or into people’s minds–but God can. When the Creator gave humankind the Torah–His moral laws–He commanded, “teach them diligently to your children . . .talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up . . . bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6: 7 – 9) In other words, make them a part of your consciousness; ingrain them in the hearts and minds of your young people so they become part of them.

It’s only this internal governor that can stop a crime before it happens. And if it isn’t because a young person has a love for what is right, perhaps it will be because they have a fear of what will happen if they do wrong. The Bible says some must be saved “by fear.” (Jude 1:20-23). There needs to be a fear of judgment in our souls. God is just as much as He is loving. Years ago I watched a television interview with Jimmy the Weasel” Fratianno, a Mafia hit man who admitted to several brutal murders. Fratianno made clear, though, he had never killed an innocent person. “You’d go to hell if you did that,” he said, ironically.

The point is even criminals once had a code of honor–a sense of right and wrong, as distorted as it may have been. In a progressively more secularized culture, the only thing to fear is the inconvenience of arrest and prosecution and the temporary pain of earthly punishment. A murderer can take care of that minor problem by taking himself out as the grand finale–and we’re seeing them do exactly that. What they need to learn in this life is that there’s more than just this life. This life is followed by “a certain fearful expectation of judgment.” (Hebrews 10:27) If only Terry Joe Sedlacek  had understood that, he may have walked that Marysville church aisle for a very different reason and with a very different outcome. If only.

I’ve decided to finally do something I’ve long wanted to do: Journey with one of my heroes into the realm of true Christian community. This fall, I’ll launch a Book Club at our Faith and Action ministry house with a discussion of Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was the 1940-s era German Lutheran pastor martyred by the Nazis at age 39. He was one of the most brilliant theologians of the last century, but that’s not the reason I’ve always been taken with him. Bonhoeffer was more than an intellectual, he was an activist. He conducted his ministry during this extraordinarily difficult time, when Adolf Hitler’s regime menaced not only Bonhoeffer’s native Germany, but much of the world. In fact, the world around Bonhoeffer would have appeared to collapse entirely into a murderously satanic chaos as the years of his ministry went on. His was not a theoretical theology, but a practical one that had literally life-changing and life-saving results against enormous and seemingly impossible odds.

Bonhoeffer and his fellow ministers in the “Confessing Church,” the underground movement against Hitler that Bonhoeffer in part led, operated an illegal seminary that was eventually brutally shut down by the Nazi’s secret police. It was his experience as director of this persecuted community that was the inspiration behind Life Together. I chose this book and this subject because achieving anything close to Christian community in Washington, DC is fraught with problems. The challenges to relationship–both with the Lord and with brothers and sisters in Christ–are plenteous: The frenetic pace of a 24/7 city, the unique pressures for people working in the most powerful government on earth, the fierce competition among high achievers and the tensions brought on by political polarization. Still, nothing we experience here begins to compare with what Bonhoeffer and the members of his underground Christian community faced. If it worked for them, it can certainly work here in Washington.

My prayer is that this study group will provide an island of relief from all these alienating forces and that it will strengthen Christians in their resolve and ability to challenge the prevailing winds of political culture. The best people to evangelize those who work in government are those who work alongside them. Peer-to-peer evangelism is the most effective and fruitful, but it won’t happen when Christians feel weak and alienated from each other. Many people who work in or with government view their time in Washington as an “out-of-town” experience, no matter how long they are here. A person’s “home church” is usually exactly that, back home–in another state–far away. I hope and pray this new outreach will substitute for the vital Christian community so needed but so lacking here in the hurly-burley of Capitol Hill.

Please pray for the success of this new outreach. Capitol Hill-types like books and they like discussion, it’s part of the culture. I’m hoping the heroically courageous testimony of this young and brilliant pastor, Biblical scholar and evangelist will strengthen the witness of the Gospel here. God knows we need it now more than ever!

Reading the reports out of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, I must confess, I felt relief. The International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s military coup-installed leader, Omar al Bashir. My thoughts on it constitute a confession because my relief wasn’t that a criminal against humanity has finally been named by a prosecutorial power–as welcome and important as that is–but it’s instead a rather self-centered relief. I’m just glad I was in Sudan two years ago and not now. I traveled to Sudan in April of 2007 as part of a fact-finding delegation led by Joe Griebowski of the Institute on Religion and Public Policy. Of the 40 countries I’ve been to–some at war–Sudan was the most disconcerting. It’s really a very scary and nearly lawless place.

OK, I’ve confessed to being a coward. (I’ve long said that I’m not always God’s “man of faith and power for the hour.” In fact, I’m not that very often at all.) Anyway, after the warrant for al Bashir was issued, and I watched the Sudanese strong man literally dance  in the street defiantly and menacingly threaten America and all foreigners in his country, a shiver went down my spine. I remember feeling quite insecure in Khartoum and, later, Nyala, in Darfur State. Not because of our direct hosts, they were actually very pleasant, warm and comfortable people to be with, notwithstanding they worked for the dictator, al Bashir. My fear (yes, fear–I know, a failure of faith) was generated by a particular event. It was something we would never see here in the U.S.

When one of the high-ranking civilian officials we were with let us take photos of the merging of the White and Blue Nile Rivers from a  bridge, he was suddenly and loudly taken into custody by a truck-load of soldiers.  It is apparently a no-no for foreigners, especially Americans, to take photos of structures like bridges. (We were told the government feared such photos would help America should we ever launch an invasion of their country! )The most disturbing aspect of this experience was to see a top-level civilian official manhandled and interrogated by screaming uniformed low-level soldiers. Here in the U.S., we take for granted that our military is controlled by civilians–and answerable to civilians. That was a brilliant guarantee designed by our American Founders to ensure the military does not use its weapons to dominate the citizenry, as is the case in Lt. General al Bashir’s Sudan.

OK, having gotten my own self-centeredness out of the way, my heart and prayers are now turned to the few Christians I met in Khartoum. There, the leaders of a small Christian community pleaded with our delegation to urge United States Government leaders not to enforce or impose any further sanctions against their country. “These sanctions cut us off from the rest of the world,” explained one church elder. “And when we are cut off, it is very dangerous for us. Please tell your country not to cut us off.”

I knew what these church leaders meant, and I did communicate their message to the last administration, and I will reiterate it to the new Obama White House and Clinton State Department, as well as the leaders of Congress. As you’ve read, our Faith and Action emphasis this year is the two Great Commandments of Christ, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength,” and, “love your neighbor as yourself.”

If sanctions posed a real and present danger to our Sudanese brothers and sisters in Christ, this latest development must double that threat. As retribution, the Sudanese Dictator is expelling all foreign aid groups he considers a threat. That doesn’t bode well for the people of God in Khartoum and elsewhere in the country whose only connection to the outside world may be one of these groups. Please pray for the church in Sudan–they will need your spiritual help now more than ever.