As it turns out, that filmmaker was Jamie Moffett. Like me, Jamie is an Eastern University alum. He recently completed and is now promoting a film called Return to El Salvador, featuring the story of an anti-mining activist who had been killed for speaking out, as part of a broader picture of what has been happening in the country as a whole. It’s narrated by Martin Sheen and endorsed by heavy hitters like Ron Sider and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Needless to say, it’s a very important – and at times quite disturbing – film.

I got in contact with Jamie and lined up a time to meet. Slightly modified versions of our interview have now been published at Upside Down World, which focuses on Latin American politics, and in the ePistle, the weekly communiqué from the good folks at Evangelicals for Social Action. Below is an extra that didn’t make the cut for either version, but explains a bit about what Jamie has been up to of late and why he’s crazy enough to go “all in.”

What are the next steps for you and for the film?
We screen a portion of the film June 15 for Canadian Parliament at the request of MP McKay, and specifically the clips related to mining and corporate accountability.  Following that, we present week-long multi-city screenings in Canada starting with out World Premiere at Toronto’s Underground Cinema in Chinatown. Screenings in Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver follow.

In the United States we are working on lining up a few cities. One of our options that we’re currently developing is a number of one-week runs around the country. We will be doing it in sort of a communal way where we agree to acquire the theater and then faith groups or social justice groups can choose to sponsor a night. They get half the tickets where you get a discount and turn it into a fundraiser if they want. But more importantly, they’re keeping the theater open to folks who may not be in on the story but can walk into the theater and get exposed to it.

We have no backer, no big money in the back pocket. I’ve had to sell my home to complete production, but I believe in the film and know that this critically important story needed to be told and shared with as wide an audience as possible.

There are a lot of folks like me who want to be the change we want to see in the world, but we simply don’t have the information. I’m happy I can say I spent this time of my life gathering the information and making this story. In a way, it was an education, like going to grad school. It took eighteen months and cost as much as a masters degree! Return to El Salvador is about listening; enabling people to deeply consider how the situation got this way, and now with this knowledge how we, together, can take action.

See also Jamie’s article in The Huffington Post, “Still A Nation Of Immigrants“

I kept that in mind as I read The Fruitful Life: The Overflow of God’s Love Through You by Jerry Bridges. He writes books that urge deeper understandings and practices of discipleship. I read his classic The Pursuit of Holiness on a trip to Africa several years ago and found it to be a tremendous challenge to the sort of haphazard attitude toward discipleship that I can easily fall into.

This book is about the fruit of the Spirit. In recent years I have come to see just how relational the evidences of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives really are, and I have been trying to read the Bible and other books through that lens. Too often, when it comes to application time at the end of the sermon we are asked to examine what’s going on inside our heart and mind, and whether we have been spending our quiet time with God, and based on these questions to gauge our spiritual health. There’s nothing wrong with this sort of introspection. But if the Spirit of God is alive in us, the fruit isn’t just going to show up in these very personal, private ways. It’s going to turn our relationships upside down. Changed hearts will mean changed lives, and our lives necessarily involve other people.

To be honest, I expected to have to read this into Bridges’ reflections, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that he is eager to make this point as well. He writes that the fruit of the Spirit is both formational and relational, and that “several of these character traits have a definite outward focus to other people” (p. 8). In fact, in Bridges’ work with the college ministry of The Navigators, he says that they are intentional about making sure that when they help to lead students in discipleship it always involves serving others. Discipleship does not happen in a vacuum.

Chapter by chapter, character trait by character trait, Bridges leads us through reflections that both challenge and encourage us as we seek to be good soil in which the fruit of the Spirit can grow in our lives. The Spirit’s work takes root in the deepest places of our being, transforming us at the core, but it doesn’t stop there. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control will eventually begin to emerge in the lives and communities of transformed people, and the world will never be the same.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from NavPress Publishers as part of their Blogger Review Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

For that reason, I’m thankful for thoughtful people who know where they stand, but who aren’t intentionally or flippantly divisive about it. Tim Morey, author of Embodying Our Faith: Becoming a Living, Sharing, Practicing Church, is one of those thoughtful voices.

Morey is a pastor and church planter in California, and this book is a reworking of his dissertation from Fuller Seminary. What I so appreciate about the book is that while Morey asks a lot of penetrating questions (“Is a church really a church if it exists only for itself?”) he goes about the task humbly, without any apparent axe to grind. He seems genuinely concerned with helping the church – his own and the North American church more broadly – to become, as the subtitle says, a living, sharing, practicing church. His is a high ecclesiology without ever slipping into the realm of wishful thinking.

Morey writes as one who at one point walked away from the church before coming back to make pastoring and church planting his life’s work. This gives his perspective and insight some added legitimacy, in my opinion. He understands and empathizes with those in our “post-Christian” culture who have left the church or simply see no reason for it, but he is also deeply committed to help bring them back. Or, perhaps more accurately, he is committed to helping the church go to them. He takes up Lesslie Newbigin’s plea for the necessity of being a missionary church to our own Western culture and urges us to develop an “embodied apologetic” rather than a merely rational one.

Importantly, while urging us to embrace the “whole” gospel through an embodied apologetic including both compassion and evangelism as the fabric of our life, he warns that we run the risk of losing sight of the simple core of Christ’s teaching: discipleship. Highly rational, propositional evangelistic approaches – arguably the norm in evangelical churches – have tended to de-emphasize the importance of what’s supposed to happen between conversion and death. Many of us are guilty of a sort of bait-and-switch evangelism in which we offer a fire insurance policy for free and only later share the fine print about what is expected of us as Christians, disciples of Jesus. Alternately, others of us have tended to focus on compassion but never get around to what it is that’s uniquely Christian about our activity.

Morey comes to basically the same conclusion I have been coming to of late: discipleship entails a life in which compassion for others (regardless of need) and a call to conversion (most often a process rather than an event) are but two parts of a seamless whole.

Though he might have turned more heads and sold more books by taking sides in the hot-button theological debates of today, Morey has chosen the better way. He engages these pressing issues in a smart yet humble way and, through his example, urges us to move beyond reactionary rhetoric and towards the building up of a more Christ-like community of faith that truly embodies the good news for our neighbors.

Special thanks to the Origins Project and InterVarsity Press for providing this book for review, free of charge.

By way of background, Richardson lives and works in the world’s largest Muslim nation, where he helps to run a network of innovative Christian schools. That right there warrants the book’s title, if you ask me.

In some ways, Richardson reminds me of John Eldredge, who has written about the Christian life being an adventure and how a lot of us settle for a pretty boring existence. He also reminded me of Erwin McManus with his one-word chapter titles like “Engage” and “Absorb” and “Release” and his talk of God’s dreams. The latter should come as no surprise, of course, since Richardson is connected to Mosaic and McManus even provided the forward. As for the former, whereas Eldredge tends to liken the Christian life to that of a gladiator or a samurai warrior, Richardson prefers to focus on the artistic side of things.

Quite a few of my friends are artists in one way or another. For any number of reasons I’m drawn to the creative type. I find their idiosyncrasies refreshing and fascinating, and honestly, I think I can relate to them because of it. I like artists. I like art. But I realized while reading this book that even so, I’ve tended to view art as somehow frivolous – somehow less important than real work, whatever that means.

Richardson draws our attention to Genesis, where we see that men and women are made in the image of God. And who is God? Throughout the Bible, our understanding of God deepens as he is called by many names and is alluded to through various metaphors and parables and, most fully, in the person of Jesus himself. But in Genesis, in the Garden, God is Creator. And it is in the Garden where we learn we’re made in his image. We are creative beings by design, which ought to suggest that in our churches maybe we’ve been wrong to marginalize the most creative and artistic people among us.

Now, obviously we’re not all made to sit at an easel wearing a beret and contemplating the reflection of the sun on lily pads, but I think the creation account in Genesis has a lot to teach us about vocation and about our calling as creative beings.

As an artist whose medium of choice is the written word, it makes a lot of sense to me when Don Miller writes about our life being a story. He uses a literary metaphor, and that clicks for me. If you’ve been looking for a theological green light to rip the head off a lion with your bare hands or ram a spear through someone’s armor, Eldredge might be for you. Of course, anger management therapy might be for you as well. But for artists of all sorts, Richardson’s artistic imagery will help to spur a creative response to the work of God in our lives.

Richardson connects artistry and creativity with the mission of God. You might think he would have left the frivolity of art behind in southern California when he moved to southeast Asia. But you’d be wrong. In fact, it’s at the core of what God is doing through him, his ministry, and the growing, evolving church of first-generation followers of Christ we read about in the book.

Exceptionally written and inspiringly real, it’s a different sort of “missions” book in the best possible sense. I sure hope this isn’t the last we hear from Paul Richardson; I have a hunch it won’t be.

Let’s use a bit of imagination, take a step of faith, and strike out to explore the possibilities that God has waiting. How might we activate our own assets to create in response to the opportunities in the world around us?

PS – You should know that despite the Gandhi in me, I have in fact enjoyed Eldredge’s books and have found them quite inspiring. They’re not nearly as crazy as I make them sound. Consider my exaggerated characterizations “creative expressions.” Much love, John. Let’s go scale an ice-capped mountain in the winter in our bare feet. Arrrh.

This section is about how all the previous parts of the puzzle fit together. The crucial point is made that it doesn’t work to seek social justice in abstract generalities, opposing “injustice” and on the side of “the poor.” Rather, social justice is about specific people, specific events, and specific actions. They translate this to mean that casting blame on “structures” doesn’t solve our neighbors’ needs. This is partly true; expecting a focus on abstract oppressive “structures” to produce justice is certainly naïve. But behind structures are real people making real decisions that have real ramifications for real people. To ignore structures and pretend that being a good neighbor to the person next door will solve everything is equally naïve, in my opinion.

Again, I’m in agreement with what they hammer home over and over again in this concluding section, the idea of concentric circles: the closer you are the better you understand the person and the issues they face, and the better equipped you are to respond compassionately and appropriately. I definitely think that grassroots efforts in most cases are smarter and more effective than bloated top-down ones. And as is pointed out, love isn’t something the government can offer – it’s something people extend to other people in a mutually enriching way.

One of the contributors cites Mother Teresa, who said that if you look at many, you won’t act. If you look at one, however, you will. Now, I have a world of respect for Mother Teresa and I think the way she lived her life looked a lot like Jesus.  But the fact is, while much of the time we can indeed be faithful Christians by loving the neighbor and the enemy immediately around us, I think there does come a time to set our sights higher – without disregarding those fundamental parts of the Christian life. When injustices are ingrained in society and protected by law, followers of Christ can’t be content to allow the “structures” to remain untouched. We can thank God that spiritual giants like William Wilberforce and William Carey, among countless others, didn’t settle for the unjust structures in their day. They were undoubtedly committed to loving their immediate neighbors in great and small ways, but it didn’t end there for them. [Interestingly, in the recommended resources at the end of the study, a book about Wilberforce is recommended, but how his life example supports their framework is left to the imagination.]

If we’re truly concerned about social justice in a real, lasting way, libertarian “hands off” values alone won’t get us there, and it’s at this point, I suppose, that I part ways with the makers of this study.  Of course, digging in and figuring out why crimes like sex trafficking and economic exploitation continue unabated is no substitute for small acts of love. If we had to choose between addressing oppressive structures and loving our neighbors, I’d choose loving neighbors in a heartbeat. But that’s a false choice. We don’t have to choose, and indeed, we can’t afford to.

So we come to the end of the study, and as I reflect on it as a whole, I suspect that one of the goals behind it was to redefine “social justice” for an audience not necessarily predisposed very favorably towards the term. The cynic in me worries that it’s merely an attempt to co-opt the word, to cheapen it. The optimist in me – who I diligently try to pay more attention to – is hopeful that it will serve to get more people talking about these substantial things and in turn, more people will be getting their hands dirty in the hard and important work of seeking social justice. God knows we need all the help we can get.

One thing remains clear. Seeking social justice will not be easy. It will take all of us making sacrifices, getting personally involved, crossing boundaries we haven’t dared to cross before. I’ve affirmed much of the study’s message, and I’ve voiced my concerns. But whatever you take away from the series, disagreements aside, however you decide to seek social justice, please…

Make it real.

Make it personal.

Join others.

Allow the process to transform you.

And don’t be afraid of what might happen next.