Be the Weirdo You Wish to See in the World

I used to accompany church youth groups on spring break trips to Florida—beaches and Bible studies, theme parks and service projects, hormones and holiness, that sort of thing. Our evening programs were largely dependent on the talents the kids brought with them, and consequently the content of the programs, outside of a central talk about the lordship of Christ, would typically flirt with (and sometimes actively collude with) what the fundamentalists like to call “worldliness.” I learned a lot of song lyrics those evenings, let’s just say, that I wouldn’t ever pick up on Sunday morning.

We had a bus driver who regularly joined us on these trips. In addition to driving a bus, he was an associate minister at his home church and, oddly enough, an Elvis impersonator. He liked the talks our leaders would give about trusting Jesus, and he eagerly accepted our invitations to perform his Elvis act (one time with his fly open, to his extreme embarrassment). But he repeatedly struggled with the “worldliness” he observed among the students in between “Love Me Tender” and “Jesus Loves Me.” “What about,” he agonized privately to me, “ ‘Come out and be ye separate’?!?”

That’s from the Bible, in case you didn’t know. Shame on you if you didn’t.

It’s a legitimate question, and I must confess I didn’t treat it as such in my conversation with my pastor-impersonator-chauffer friend. No less than Jesus himself prayed that his followers would be in the world but not of the world. He acknowledged that being in the world was a nonnegotiable; to be is to be in the world, unless you’re an astronaut. I do think that more often than not it’s taken to too much of an extreme; there are countless congregations out there who believe they’re doing the Lord’s work by never ever leaving the upper rooms of their sanctuaries. They’re usually also a little self-deluded; they may have “come out” from the Hip Hop music industry, for example, or separated themselves from the independent film industry, but worldliness finds its way into their homes and hearts anyway. Worldliness, if we might imagine it as being sentient, is remarkably creative; and we protect ourselves from it as much by denying it as we do by blockading ourselves from it.

But there’s an opposite yet similar self-delusion that we often indulge, the notion that by spending time among those who don’t fit our personal profile, we shed the impurities of our selfliness (my friend Jesse coined that term). That self-delusion showed up less in our spring break Florida trips and more in our summer short-terms to Costa Rica or the Navajo reservation. Such trips are eye-opening both regarding the immense need in the world and in the general sameness of people. They’re also mercifully short; we don’t stick around long enough to be confronted by the otherness of these people whose lives we’ve invaded.

Some people, of course, never come back from such trips. I marvel at the ministries of organizations like InnerCHANGE and Word Made Flesh, where people born into privilege relocate themselves permanently to places of extreme poverty in order to discover, embrace and embody the good news of Jesus. Having scrupulously avoided that life calling myself, I find myself in awe of the commitment to forgo the prosperity and power available to a privileged class and instead follow Jesus’ example of moving into a neighborhood and communing with those in need. Here’s where it gets tricky though: those relocators can get books published about the neighborhoods they move into; I’ve read them and even, as an editor, contracted and published them. Their next-door-neighbors, on the other hand, can’t. They also can’t duplicate the ministry of their friends by incarnating themselves, by sheer force of will, among the wealthy; that’s not how it works.

There’s a certain amount of power and privilege that undergirds any missionary enterprise, I think. Someone with the luxury to wonder about their calling feels called to go elsewhere, to live in a manner other than their upbringing. I’m not suggesting that they abuse their power and privilege; in fact most of them on balance wind up embodying the good news they profess through this audacious undertaking. What I am thinking is that such a missionary may never stop being the weirdo—the person who lives voluntarily on $2 a day while his neighbor struggles to achieve the same level of wealth, the person who can take a meeting with a publisher or philanthropist while her neighbor can’t make eye contact with people. I suspect that any attempt to be a missionary—any attempt to enter into the world of an other—requires not only a commitment to leave one’s life behind but an inner resolve to be the weirdo forever, and to be OK with that.

Being the weirdo might actually be the calling for all Christians. When Jesus called disciples their whole identity changed—from fishermen to fishers of men, from women at the well to village evangelists. It may be that we’re called not merely to be fully present to the people around us—to be in the world, carriers of a good news virus—but to be out of this world as well, resolutely and defiantly weird to the glory of God.