Letter to the Sword of the Spirit

Brothers and sisters in Christ,

I write with a hopeful heart, from a city that is tired of hoping. I am one of the members of a small but tenacious community outreach in Detroit, Detroit Community Outreach. For ten years now, we have been praying for, working with, and reaching out to the people of Detroit. In the past few years, we’ve seen some inspiring results: an expanding youth group, a dynamic afterschool program, and (most promising) a couple of local families that have developed a strong connection with us.

These developments are wonderful, but other facts are more sobering. In the past seven years, only two members of the Sword of the Spirit (both celibates) have moved to Detroit and become a part of our community on a long-term basis. We have a tremendous number of relationships with neighbors and fellow churchgoers, with whom we would like to share the blessings of community life. But there are so few of us living community life here that our life together is hardly conspicuous. We have vision and determination, but our legs are failing. By earthly reckoning, some might say that our small Sword of the Spirit group in Detroit cannot survive long-term.

We are not bound to earthly reckoning, however. Our Father has good gifts to give us, and He does not forget the needs of His beloved. The Lord has already called brothers and sisters from our own neighborhoods into our midst in the past year, and I suspect He is not done calling. There is no limit to the abundance out of which God gives, and yet He has chosen to do His work through the actions of men and women like us. If we do not ask, we do not receive.

And this is why I write: to ask your help. I know how many of you have sent your money and your prayers – even your children! – to aid the mission in Detroit, but I am asking you to consider something more. If the circumstances of your life allow it, I am asking you to prayerfully consider moving to Detroit and joining our community outreach.

Of course, I realize that this call is not for everyone. But I imagine that it is for someone reading these words, and all I’m asking is that you listen to whether that person is you.

My conviction is this: that some of us are missing out.

I believe that Jesus hides out in places of great need. That’s why I’m in Detroit, because God showed me – over the course of years – that He didn’t have a place in my comfortable life. When I grew up in Rochester Hills, when I went to school in Ann Arbor, I rarely knew need, only abundance. Every time I would try to fit God into my suburban world, I would find another distraction instead. I would find myself serving my own desires, not His will for me.

I needed to be uprooted. I don’t mean to say that it is impossible to live in those places and seek after the Lord with your whole heart, but only that I personally always found it difficult. I needed to live someplace whose emptiness cried out for a Messiah, just as my own emptiness cries out for Christ.

A place of need is different. Detroit holds no appeal to my flesh, no appeal to my “need” for comfort, no appeal to my desire for control. In many ways, Detroit is uncontrollable. It is not particularly safe. It is poor and damaged, and a preppy white kid like me might almost find parts of it a little bit disturbing.

Did I mention that you’re missing out? Your children are missing out if they don’t visit, if they don’t walk into the ruins of hundred-year-old houses and work to make them whole again. Your college students are missing out if they don’t spend time relating with young people in Detroit, discovering the things they do (and don’t) have in common. You yourselves are missing out if you don’t step into a soup kitchen, if you aren’t confronted with that homeless man on the street, if you’re not dealing with the specter of poverty and racism on a regular basis.

I’m missing out, because – even though I live in the midst of all this – I often hide out in a comfortable shelter of my own making, pretending I can supply for my own needs. But I am called to love my neighbor – whether he is hungry, homeless, or imprisoned – even at the risk of feeling uncomfortable. And I must trust God that He will provide for my needs.

This is the day-to-day challenge of being a Christian. There are more than enough of these kinds of challenges in Ann Arbor, or Lansing, or Ypsilanti. You have to rely on God when you lose your job, when you take your toddler into the hospital, when your daughter moves away to college. The question is not “Where is Jesus?” but rather “Where am I?” Am I in the place that Christ can use me best to build His kingdom?

Moving to Detroit would be a major step, of course, but it does not mean that you would be going into full-time missionary work (unless you want to!). Priscilla and I play a relatively small role in the activities of our community, since we are largely occupied (read: overwhelmed) by the responsibility of paying the bills and raising our children. And yet, we have had the blessing of serving in little ways, little ways that help allow our outreach in Detroit to succeed. We’ve been able to open up our house to guests and mission trips, to bake bread for Lord’s Days, to have youth workers and city kids over for barbeques. We’re not missionaries, but we do hope to be “disciples on mission”.

Josh and Yvette Rock, Dave O’Connor and Ed Conlin – they are indeed missionaries here in Detroit, and the fruit of their labor is astonishing to me. But a community cannot be made up only of full-time missionaries; a community is all about unity in diversity. In Detroit, we want a community with everyday Joes as well as missionaries, a community as black as it is white, a community of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox.

Nothing about living in Detroit is essential to my life, but so much is an opportunity. It is an opportunity to choose to rely on God, to be weak as He was weak, to be strong in His stronghold. For that is what our little community is in Detroit: a stronghold, a pocket of disciples called to be faithful. There are other strongholds in this city, and we are part of a developing network of prayer and action on behalf of God’s work here.

It may be that you are called to join this stronghold. Or perhaps your son or daughter is. Or perhaps you are called, like Howard & Janet Distelzweig or Jon & Melody Wilson or Joe & Mary Firn, to be an integral part of our mission here, even while living elsewhere.

I don’t know what the Lord wants for you, but, emboldened by the Spirit, I ask you to consider. Because I know (from my own experience) that the devil is also bold, and that he has a thousand fearful arguments that keep ten thousand faithful Christians from moving to Detroit or other similar places of great need.

Living in Detroit, even for a short time, has had a powerful impact on hundreds of youth from the Sword of the Spirit. The mission of Youthworks is discipleship, discipleship for both inner-city and community youth. If you have ever served in Detroit before, you have seen the need, and I hope you have seen the beauty. If you have never served in Detroit before, I invite you to come and see – perhaps for a day, a week, a summer. You won’t regret it.

I have seen boys and girls from our communities grow up alongside boys and girls from Detroit and Highland Park, and there is no more beautiful sight I can imagine. The racial and social divisions that divide city from suburb, black from white are (to borrow from C.S. Lewis) “deep magic”, the work of spiritual powers that will stop at nothing to separate us. And yet, when teenagers from our communities play joyfully alongside teenagers from Detroit, there is a “deeper magic” at work: the miracle of healing, the miracle of redemption, the miracle of Jesus.

The Spirit of Detroit, a statue in the heart of my city, quotes 2 Corinthians: “Now the Lord is Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

Where is the Spirit of the Lord leading you?

Blessings,

Daniel Propson