Immerse | A Journal of Faith, Life, and Youth Ministry

It is difficult to read stories like the one Cody Fisher tells and not think, Wow, that is so cool, and it has nothing to do with me. I have never been to Iraq, and it is likely that I never will. Fisher’s story is at once fantastic and fantastical. It’s not that I don’t believe he went to Iraq and ended up saving the lives of dozens of children from life-threatening heart conditions. Quite the contrary. I read his story and immediately place it in some other world, some other context. It is, to be honest, a bit like reading the stories in the gospels.

“What then shall we do?” the crowds asked John the Baptist, and I, like Fisher and his youth group back in California, immediately translate that into, “What then shall I believe?” or “What then shall I say?” It is much safer to figure out how to tell the story properly than it is to figure out what to do with the story or how to live into the story.

But we are not called into safety. Our baptismal vows call us into something wholly different. Read what John the Baptist tells the crowds in Luke 3. When each asks, “What then shall we do?” he responds with a sort of backhanded answer. To the tax collectors, it is, “Don’t take any more than you are required to,” thereby implying, “Because you’ve been taking too much.” It is the same with the soldiers, to whom he says, “Do violence to no one.” (What have the soldiers been doing so far?) If Fisher’s story is fantastical, then John’s silent admonishments sound eerily familiar. They sound like the broken relationships we find so often in churches.

When I started out in youth ministry, I was a youth director for a mid-size church in Texas with a whole lot of problems. Everything came to a head during our summer trip to San Antonio, where the adult youth sponsors sat my ministry partner and me down and proceeded to berate us for about an hour in full view of the youth. Looking back now, I can see the path that led us to that awful night. The sponsors didn’t feel valued, I spent too much time focusing on the youth and not enough on the volunteers, we had been over eager in our plans for the week, etc. But at the time, all I could see was fear and shame. When I asked the group, “What then shall I do?” I heard only recrimination and blame, and I responded in kind. That story did not end with reconciliation.

Understanding what reconciliation truly means has been a long process for me. I wanted to be a doctor once. It was, I thought, a noble calling: to figure out what was wrong with people and fix it. It was what my grandfather did, and I knew scores of people who had been “fixed” by him. Becoming a doctor was the best way I knew to help people. It is all too easy for me, then, to envision the work of reconciliation as a way of fixing people. That is to say, if I could’ve just fixed the perceptions of those youth sponsors, everything would’ve been fine. This kind of thinking, I’ve come to understand, is a trap. Fisher instead astutely casts part of the work of reconciliation as preemptive love. He writes, “Preemptive love is something we believe can change any culture.”

It’s a curious thing, this concept of preemptive love. I first encountered it as an English major with an eccentric advisor. He commended to me a dry old tome by Alan Jacobs called A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, and it’s been one of my favorite books ever since. In the book, Jacobs says that the problem with the way most people read is that they believe in order to love a book, they need to first understand what it’s about, the author’s point of view, all that literary nonsense you learn to do when you’re an English major. Not so, says Jacobs. Instead, in order to understand something, you must first love it.

This is reconciliation: to love first, in spite of everything, so that healing work can be done. Miroslav Volf, and particularly his book Exclusion and Embrace, is a helpful theological companion for me in untangling the nuances of Fisher’s story. For Volf, reconciliation is about recognizing a “shared humanity” among enemies, and we fail only when we try to force people out of that circle. He writes that “forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.[1]” In other words, forgiveness fails when we try to fix the person sitting across from us without recognizing that we too need fixing. I am called to love the person who has wronged me because we share much more than what is broken between us. We share the very quality of brokenness.

Even understanding all of that, what then shall we do? As I said, Fisher’s story seems fantastical because it is so far outside my own context. The typical church council isn’t going to let my youth group go do a reconciliation mission to Iraq, and neither should they need to. It’s easy to imagine reconciliation as work done by others: Sunnis and Shi’ites, Palestinians and Israelis, North and South Koreans. But the fact is, there is reconciliation work to be done in my community, in my context, right now.

Fisher’s story forces us to look at our own communities and say first, Where are the breaks within my church? How has my ministry contributed to those breaks? An older, wiser version of myself can look back to that terrible meeting with those youth sponsors and say, They were wrong, but so was I. I had not been preemptively loving them for who they were, instead focusing only on their immediate failings. And, as much as I wished they had been the first ones to come forward to start the process, Fisher makes me realize that it has to start first with me if I want it to start at all. It’s up to me to be the first to ask the question, Whom do I have to love preemptively? My senior pastor? My volunteers? Myself? What then shall I do, not what then shall I wait for?

Fisher’s work in Iraq gives me pause, though. Figuring out where reconciliation needs to take place in the walls of our churches is well and good, but Fisher’s context pushes me to think about what is happening in my broader community, and specifically to ask, In what structures of oppression does my church participate? What are my responsibilities as a ministry leader toward recognizing and dismantling those structures? If we focus only on our ministry relationships, I fear we aren’t participating fully in Volf’s “shared humanity.”

The values of preemptive love would suggest that we have to open our eyes fully to everything that is going on around us. Do I know what that really looks like? Not yet. But Cody Fisher makes me want to look around and begin trying. As he says, “God hasn’t let up, so why should we?”