(Note:
This blog entry is based on the text for “Cornbread Muffin Evangelism”, originally
shared on September 2, 2021. It was the 145th video for our YouTube
Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Cornbread is a popular food in many places
and for many cultures. Does it mean anything in particular to you? It makes me
think of both racism and evangelism. How are they connected? Today, we’re going
to find out.
First, we’re going to talk about what cornbread muffins have to do with
doing evangelism.
I bought two boxes of cornbread mix when I was at the Aldi grocery story
recently. I was there shooting some background video so I thought I should buy
something.
I saw the boxes and thought it would be fun to make cornbread muffins. I
remembered the mix boxes from years back and thought they were pretty cheap,
about a dollar a box. The shelf said they sold for $1.99 but, OK, inflation.
When I got to the check-out counter, the cashier rang them up at $1.99 for two!
She said they must have been mis-labeled. Deal!
They’re pretty easy to use. They’re a mix! (Fun fact: when cake mixes
came out in the 1950’s, all you had to do was add water. They didn’t sell
because people thought that the effort to make a cake was a big part of the
gift. So, the manufactures changed the formula so that cake mixes required eggs
and other ingredients, and of course effort, and they began to sell.)
To make cornbread muffins, the box says, you need to add one egg and 1/3
cup of milk to the mix in the box and stir until it’s a little lumpy.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Grease a muffin tin or find some
paper baking cups to use as liners. Let the mixture sit for 3-4 minutes then
stir the mixture again if you want the maximum “crown” on the muffins. Fill the
greased tin or paper cups 2/3 full and bake for 15-20 minutes or until the
muffins are golden brown. That’s it!
Cornbread muffins remind me of a trip I took to another world when I was
in high school.
I was a part of a student exchange with students from La Grange,
Georgia, 20 from each school. It was 1965, and the Civil Rights Movement was
taking root.
Manitowoc, Wisconsin, my hometown, had almost no people of African
Descent. But my church, particularly my church’s youth group, was active in
learning and seeking justice. Pastor Nelson Trout, who later became my bishop,
the first African American Lutheran bishop west of the Mississippi, was a
leader in the national church body of which our congregation was a part,
particularly in youth ministries.
The movement for desegregation hadn’t reached everywhere, including La
Grange, where we lived for two weeks in the homes of the same kids who had
first lived in our homes for two weeks.
We attended their white high school. We were shown the high school where
the Black kids went on a tour, and we were told how magnanimous the white
community had been in building them a brand-new school and how they didn’t
appreciate it. It was a segregated school.
I remember many arguments over the dinner table with my host family. It
seemed to me that the mom in my host family was sympathetic not just to change
but to real community, the dad was not, and my student counterpart was ready
for a new worldview.
I went back the next summer to work in a camp near La Grange for what
were then called “underprivileged” children, a term that ironically seems very
contemporary now. They were all white.
On my way home after the camp’s program ended, I was in the Atlanta bus
station and decided I needed a haircut. I knew it would make my mom happy, and
I felt very responsible getting a haircut on my own.
I walked into the station’s barber shop and was motioned to the one open
chair by a barber. He was a large, white man with a nearly shaved head. Call it
stereotyping but if I had heard him called “Bubba” I wouldn’t have been surprised.
He snapped a sheet around my neck, and we started talking.
He detected my “northerner” accent immediately and asked me what I was
doing in the South. Remember, these were the days of the Civil Rights Movement,
and northern white “freedom riders” were becoming notorious.
I explained that I had been working at the camp, and he asked me what I
thought about what was happening with race relations there. I started talking
just as he began sharpening his straight razor to trim around my ears and the
back of my neck.
You know what I thought just then? I thought, “Today I am a man!” In my
hometown, boys were trimmed with electric clippers. Men were trimmed with a
straight razor. I had always been trimmed with the clippers. But not today!
As he began to shave, he said something really offensive and as the
emotional temperature of our discussion went up a few degrees, I felt something
warm trickle down the back of my neck.
“Oh, that aint nothin’,” he said. “I can fix that right up with a little
styptic pencil.”
So yes, I tell people that I learned an important lesson that day: never
argue with a man who is standing behind you with a straight razor in his hand! 😊
But, back to the cornbread muffins.
Cornbread muffins were served at every school lunch, and they were eaten
in a particular way: we would poke a hole in the center put a little butter in
it (optional) and then fill the remaining cavity with honey. So good.
The first two ingredients in the cornbread mix are wheat and corn. Maybe
that’s why they call it “corn” “bread”. 😊
Both of those ingredients come from the same place: a seed.
You plant a seed. You try and plant it in good soil. It gets rained on
or you water it. Sometimes you have to add fertilizer to the soil. The sun
shines on it and the seed invisibly germinates. Then, it sprouts and grows
until the fruit is ready to be harvested and made into something good.
Evangelism works the same way.
God gives you a seed. Planting a seed is sharing your story. Your
story is titled, “Why I am a Christian” or “Why I remain a Christian.” Planting
a seed is not offering a subtle hint of the Gospel. And it’s not finding a
sneaky way to share the Gospel, like putting broccoli in your child’s smoothie.
It is your witness, your story of what you have seen.
You find the best results when you plant that seed in good soil.
Good soil is often a friend or a relative, someone who finds your witness
believable. They know you, and they know you have nothing to gain for yourself,
just something good to give, or you wouldn’t be trying to give it to your
friends or family.
Sometimes its not someone really close, but someone you know, like a
co-worker or a teammate, who is at the point of need in their lives where the
history of salvation, and your story in particular, is of interest to them and
who is open to hearing it. Pray for those others whose heart is rocky, or
filled with thorns, or shallow soil, but be aware especially of those whose
true self is good soil for your seed and share your story.
Once you have shared your story, be an encourager. Encouragement is
like water to a seed. There is more around us to take us away from God than
to draw us near. Encourage those in whose hearts you have planted a seed with
prayer for them. Offer literature. Invite them to come to church with you and
to sit with you. Ask if they have any questions. Follow-up.
From here on out, God takes over. Our task is to point to God and get
out of Gods way.
As Paul writes in his first letter to the Church at Corinth, in 1
Corinthians 3:5-7:
5 What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants
through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. 6 I
planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So
neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who
gives the growth.
Sometimes, a person doesn’t see much change in their lives right away
after the seed has been planted and they wonder if God is real. That’s when
they may need some fertilizer. A growth enhancer. For that, God provides
a gift.
All Christians are called to evangelize, to share the good news of new
life and salvation in Jesus Christ, but some people have a special gift, like a
specific organ in the Body of Christ, a spiritual gift as in Ephesians
4:11-13:
11 The gifts he gave were that some would be
apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12 to
equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of
Christ, 13 until all of us come to the unity of the
faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of
the full stature of Christ.
If that’s not you, a person may benefit by being introduced to someone
in the body of Christ who you believe has the gift of evangelism.
Then the sun shines. Encourage people to receive its rays.
Encourage a prayer life. Encourage Bible reading. Encourage regular
participation in worship. Encourage community with Christian friends. Encourage
their openness to the work of the Holy Spirit to bring them a new life, to make
of them a new creation, born again to love God and neighbor in word and deed.
One day, The Holy Spirit cracks through and they germinate. They
“get it.”
They sprout, they become visible, and they grow!
The good soil, the water, and the fertilizer are all still needed. There
will be many challenges and temptations to steal them away. But God is
faithful, and God will continue to be steadfast.
They will grow and bear the fruit of changed lives. What does the
Christian life look like? What is its fruit? Paul answers in Galatians
5:22-23:
22 By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23 gentleness,
and self-control. There is no law against such things.
Some of that fruit will bear seeds that will be planted and grow and
bear fruit. It will become part of an unbroken string of shared lives, planted
seeds, that has gone on by the grace of God for the past 2,000 years.
And in every step, God has taken the initiative.
Share your story humbly, not to make a “score”, but as one serving the
Lord. Plant a seed today.
But let’s get back to the cornbread.
How could the people I met in LaGrange, most who were, I think,
Christians have tolerated their racism in thought and action for so long? And
why were some of them open to change because of their Christian conscience at
that time? Because voices were raised. Witnesses came forward. The evil was
brought to the light.
We must confront evil, whatever defies God, as evangelists. But we also
have to ask ourselves where we have resisted the fruit of the Holy Spirit in
our lives so that when we point to the sins of others, we might do so with
experience, humility and love as we are first aware that we, too, are sinners
and capable of evil.
Things that once were considered normal are now considered evil because
the light has dawned.
What will future generations condemn us for that we accept as normal
today? The internal combustion engine? Eating red meat? Income disparity,
Air-conditioning? Materialism? Consumerism?
We need to name the evil as God gives us the eyes to see it.
Then, we need to poke a hole in that evil, like in a cornbread muffin,
and fill it with something better. Our witness rings pretty hollow if we can’t
offer something better. Do we model holy living most of the time? Do our
churches offer anything but mediocre entertainment, or a sweetly artificial
form of “family”, or incidental community service? Or do we offer changed
lives, a solid foundation for better living, and abundant life here and forever
through Jesus Christ?
When Jesus began his public ministry, he proclaimed his message:
17 From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 4:17; also found in Mark 1:15)
We are
called to turn away, to repent from everything that is not of the Holy Spirit,
and toward the living relationship with the one true living God for which we
were created. The already-but-not-yet reign of God has come and will be brought
to perfection in the life to come. Meanwhile, how does it come? Jesus said, in Mark
4:26-29:
26 He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if
someone would scatter seed on the ground, 27 and
would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does
not know how. 28 The earth produces of itself,
first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29 But
when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest
has come.”
We aren’t perfect, but we are always growing because God worked through someone who told us about the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, by the grace of God, in the power of Holy Spirit. May our lives also bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit, may we plant its seeds, may we offer the world a better alternative for real living, and may we be always ready for when the final harvest comes.
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