Stephen Johnson
We're all refugees...
Above is a picture of me with my sister, Amanda.
My name is Stephen Johnson. I was born in South Korea, and I was adopted when I was four months old. I am 23 years old from The Woodlands, TX, and have lived in the great state of Texas for the majority of my life. I recently graduated from Baylor University with a Bachelor’s of Social Work degree. When my time in Clarkston is through, I would like to continue pursuing an education in the helping profession.
I enjoy reading, writing, living, playing, and sharing life with others; especially with my wonderful girlfriend, Whitney Rachel Petty. If you don’t know her, you definitely should.
So why Mission Year?
At this point in my life, it just seems to fit perfectly. I don’t want to waste my life trying to be efficient and effective. I would like to learn how to love in a radically quiet kind of way.
The Mission Year core values align with the way in which I would like to live my life, loving God and loving people. Please be sure to explore the website for more information: www.missionyear.org
I first heard about Mission Year a couple years ago at a Christian Community Development Association conference in Philadelphia. I’m not really sure why I was there or how I got there, but that seems to be the story of my life…
Where is Clarkston?
Clarkston, GA is a small, one square mile town just a few miles east of Atlanta. It is made up of a large population of refugee families from all over the world including Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Somalia, Colombia, Haiti, North Korea, Liberia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Bosnia, Croatia, Bangladesh, Mexico, Burma, Cuba, and many others. This is where I work and live; constantly reminded of my own refugee status in this world.
Thank ya’ll for stopping in, please come back, and I’ll be sure to keep you updated on what is happening in my life, in my community, and on specific ways to pray for us here in Clarkston.
You are loved.
About Mission Year
Mission Year is a year long urban ministry program focused on Christian service and discipleship. We take teams of young people, place them in an area of need, and help them to serve people and create community. We are committed to the command of Jesus to “love God and love people,” by placing the needs of our neighbors first and developing committed disciples of Christ with a heart for the poor. Learn more about our first year program…
Stephen Johnson's Blog
The great injustice of our age...? / Jul 9, 11:02 AM
At every point in history, humans seem to have missed the point on some major moral, social, or religious issue. From the crusades to colonialism to slavery, Christians are not exempt from the phenomenon. If the religious leaders of Jesus’ time largely misunderstood him, who are we to say that we are any different?
What are we missing the point on today? What is the great injustice of our age that as a whole, we have yet to see? What will we look back on and wonder what we were thinking? Will it be the environment? Technology? Human rights? Ethnocentrism? Economic structure? Evangelism? Salvation?
For those rare visionary folks with the gift of discernment and prophetic voice, please share your thoughts…For anyone else willing to acknowledge our role in certain societal failures, please share your thoughts as well.
And for my sister and others who enjoy some Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29245
For those who like to read:
Adventures in Missing the Point by Tony Campolo and Brian McClaren
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Outcasts United / Jun 24, 02:51 PM
Below is an excerpt from a book I read recently about the Fugees Family and Clarkston, Outcasts United: a refugee team, an American town, by Warren St. John. The author articulates my world better than I could. Enjoy.
Such moments of despair and deep frustration were common among those who worked in refugee resettlement in Clarkston. The work had a Sisyphean* quality. Individual refugee families often needed more help than an individual could give, and because new families kept arriving, the need was constantly multiplying. Resources for providing help were limited—there were never enough English classes or decent jobs. Sometimes refugees themselves were distrusting and rejected help. And adding to the frustration was a sense that the world beyond Clarkston seemed not to know or particularly to care about the struggles taking place there. For many who worked in resettlement, the steady accrual of disappointment eventually led to burnout.
Those who stuck out the frustration and remained committed tended not to strike a balance between their private lives and the lives of the refugees so much as to give in to the idea that Clarkston and the refugees were a large part of their lives. They tended also to be searchers who were capable of reframing the terms of transaction between themselves and the newcomers in a way that emphasized the benefits of getting involved.
“You have to remember that you’re being given a lot more than you’re giving,” said Jeremy Cole, a youth services coordinator at Refugee Family Services, an aid agency just across the Clarkston town line in Stone Mountain. “Because the refugees give you something in return—an understanding of international cultures, of generosity.”
Cole was emblematic of a small but passionate group of volunteers and social workers in Clarkston who powered through the daily frustrations and who as a result had found their lives transformed in surprising ways…When I sat down with him for the first time at his cubicle at Refugee Family Services, Cole was working on the case of a troubled thirteen-year-old Sudanese boy whose father had killed himself three months before.
“He has a lot of problems—discipline problems—which of course were made much worse with the suicide,” Cole said. The boy had been arrested for carrying a gun at a local mall, he said, and suspended from school for unrelated disciplinary reasons. “So I’m dealing with trying to get him back into school,” he said. “And working with his teachers to figure out what’s going on whole also referring him to a new mental health program here.”
…Cole understood the difficulties they faced. They were caught between worlds, first as teenagers moving from childhood to adulthood, but also as resettled refugees, transitioning from one culture to another. Social scientists refer to the state of being between worlds as liminality, which the anthropologist Victor Turner described as the state in which a person “becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification; he passes through a symbolic domain that has few or none of the attributes of his past or coming state.” The process is hard enough on the average teenager, but compounded for refugees and immigrants, who social scientists say possess “double liminal status.” A teenager who’d left Liberia at the age of seven or eight for America—and who now spoke English fluently, had friends from around the world, and had been educated in American culture—was not Liberian exactly, or American. In fact, the hardest moments for kids on the Fugees came when they were expected to be entirely one or the other: when their parents pressured them to dress and speak the way children did in the old country, or when American kids at school mocked them for their accents, strange mannerisms, or unfamiliarity with American customs.
“We hear a lot of stories about parents with kids, because our kids are the ones who are getting in trouble,” Cole said. “The parents see this and know the kids are on the wrong track, and they go into this long story about ‘what I went through to get here—I walked carrying you on my back, barefoot, for a hundred miles in the desert, just so we could survive, eating roots and anything I could, and you’re acting like this?’ It’s sort of a guilt trip—it is a guilt trip—and it’s a hard thing for the kids to deal with.”
Understanding this dynamic in abstract terms was useful, but it didn’t necessarily help Cole get through to young men or their parents, because of the profound distrust many refugees had built up through the process that led to their flight in the first place.
“They’ve been betrayed by their country, their government, their soldiers, the police, the refugee camps probably,” he said. “How can you trust easily having gone through those circumstances?”
…The refugees Cole worked with came from literally dozens of different countries and ethnic groups, and yet there was something culturally similar about them in Cole’s eyes. They tended to value family above all else. Most were pious Christians or Muslims. Many were welcoming and reflexively generous in ways Cole had never experienced in America. Whatever their personal troubles, most seemed blissfully nonmaterialistic and free from the consumerist obsessions that drove the world that Cole inhabited when he was not at work. And Cole was taken by something else he saw in many of the refugees he met: an improbable optimism and clearheadedness about what was important.
“To be ripped from their home and forced to another place is enough to make you think that people would give up,” Cole said. “Not only do they keep going, but they cling to the vital aspects of their lives as closely as possible—family, friendship, love, kindness, community.”
Pgs. 220 – 223
*Sisypheus is a character of greek mythology noted for being banished by Zeus to a life of rolling an enormous rock up the slopes of an eternal hill. Don’t worry, I had to look it up too.
What do you know that you haven't learned from someone else? / May 25, 08:46 PM
Something to think about.
What do you know that you haven’t learned from someone else?
For example, I got this question from a training session we had a month ago on Transformational Change by David Hooker. The question continues to place life in the proper perspective. We are the product of every experience we have ever had. Even the great inventors were influenced by those who broke ground before them. In the beginning was only God. Who am I to claim originality?
In the words of singer, songwriter Derek Webb
“and i am like a mockingbird
i’ve got no new song to sing
and i am like an amplifier
i just tell you what i’ve heard
oh, i’m like a mockingbird”
Individually, we are really pretty insignificant. Corporately, we are everything. Too often, we succumb to the United States’ ideal of hyperindividualism. Yes, we are each uniquely created with love. But without the combined spiritual essence of others, we are vaguely substantial beings.
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What's so emergent about the emergent church? / May 25, 08:45 PM
Let me apologize beforehand. I seemed to have temporarily lost sight of objectivity. This one turned more into a vent than a forum. But hey, it’s my blog, and I can whine if I want to.
What’s so emergent about the emergent church movement? The conversation still looks too much like the old one. Deconstructionism needs to become less about postmodern rhetoric and more about justice seeking pragmatism. The incessantly repetitive literature has become nothing more than circumlocution. There is too much talk. Where is the change? The adoption of postmodernity’s pluralistic paradigm is not reflected in the picture of the church’s emergent response. Let’s look at an example. In the Emergent Manifesto of Hope, the leaders of the movement come together to outline what the movement represents, placing themselves at the forefront of what where the church is heading. Included in this manifesto is a chapter written by African-American leader Anthony Smith titled, “Practicing Pentecost: Discovering the Kingdom of God Amidst Racial Fragmentation.”
Smith defines the role of the church as this:
Practicing Pentecost is about participating in the shalom of God that is producing local ekklesias that will embody a racial and cultural unity while also resisting death-dealing Powers in their profound rebellion of influencing ways of doing church that perpetuate racial divisions and hostilities that are ultimately an affront to God’s intent for a new creation that is to be found in Christ’s Body.
The chapter seems more like a cry to be heard than an appeasing addition to an already settled proclamation. Has the emergent church turned into the white guy who says, “I’m not racist, I have black friends,” without sufficiently recognizing the systems in place that perpetuately polarize people along the lines of race and ethnicity? Sunday mornings have become the most segragated hour in the United States. I’m certain the emergent leaders would agree. The problem is big. Far bigger than many of us are ready to acknowlege. We are far from the New Jerusalem.
How far? There are seventeen official publications by Emergent Village, with every single author being white. A quick glance at the books written for the emergent church reveals a long list of white males under the age of 40: Brian McClaren, Tony Jones, Dan Kimball, and Doug Pagitt.1 My neighbors are from Somalia, Nepal, and Burma. They couldn’t care less about goatees or Rob Bell’s glasses. Where is their voice in an emergent church? Where is my voice, as an Asian American, in a church that predominantly speaks to the white majority? Where is the single mother’s voice? The immigrant? Those on the margins? I have yet to see it. Being relevant within God’s Kingdom should have nothing to do with the majority, and every to do with those living on the fringes of society.
To begin, lets define some terms:
Postmodernity—“Postmodernism refers to an intellectual mood and an array of cultural expressions that call into question the ideals, principles, and values that lay at the heat of the modern mind-set.”2
Emergent Church—“communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures. This definition encompasses nine practices. Emerging churches (1) identify with the life of Jesus, (2) transform the secular realm, and (3) live highly communal lives. Because of these three activities, they (4) welcome the stranger, (5) serve with generosity, (6) participate as producers, (7) create as created beings, (8) lead as a body, and (9) take part in spiritual activities.”3
And I’d like to introduce a new term—Postemergent—it has yet to be defined by the church, but the direction that it takes will certainly demand that the church embraces all voices, breaks free from cultural infatuation, and strives to rewrite the normative scripts that define postmodern Christianity.
This is not to disregard the many positive additions the Emergent Church Movement has added, but let’s please keep adding, and not subtracting. The good news is that there are positive voices speaking to the the Emergent Church. Will they be heard?
Anthony Smith’s blog defines racism as this:
Racism, within the North American context, is the making normative of white European culture with its attendant hegemony of power. Racism is the denial of God’s new creation whereby one’s cultural presence dominates the existence of other cultures. Racism is the denying, through political and ecclesial institutions, the imago Dei of other human beings that are not descendants of Europeans. That is the more contextual version of racism as it relates to North America.
Racism, in the North American context, is embodied when European-American Christians assume, oftentimes unknowingly, the normativity of their expression and practice of the Christian faith. This is exampled by European-American churches that think they are racially diverse but still have a white, middle-class aesthetic while having people of different cultures present in their worship. Such practices are racist and are examples of the church being handmaiden to the Principalities and Powers that continue to oppress and render hostile different cultures towards each other. Racism is capitulation to Powers in their perpetuation of hostility and oppression between different cultures.
As the world continues to globalize, things are beginning to come full circle. Nations that were once targets of missiologists centuries ago are now returning missionaries to the countries where it all began. With this in mind, it now seems almost arrogant for a relatively small group of white men to claim their churches as emergent. According to the book Emerging Churches (2005), by Fuller Theological Seminary professors Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs, the number of churches and communities that would qualify as emerging in the United States was only about 150.3 This is not the emergent church. The emergent church is in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Emergent Church Movement is not relevant to the majority of the world’s Christians.
From Jamie Arpin – Ricci’s blog, author of “Looking Forward: Facing the Future of Christian Leadership”:
I was once visiting a church where a First Nations woman began to dance to the worship. A (white) woman leaned over and said, “Isn’t it just lovely when they dance around with their feathers? The church needs to encourage that sort of thing”. While this woman was sincerely genuine in intentions, too often our desire to see culture celebrated never goes beyond external novelties, requiring nothing of ourselves as the Church. We need to go deeper.
We need to go deeper.
[1]Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the church from Western Cultural Captivity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), p.111. Many of the ideas for this entry were spurred on by Rah’s book.
[2]Stanley Grenz, A primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p.12.
[3]Ryan K. Bolger and Eddie Gibbs, Emerging Churches (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), p.331.
[4] Photo borrowed from DJChuang
Do you have to go through Christianity to enter the Kingdom of God? / May 18, 01:04 PM
This one has been discussed ubiquitously and passionately in our community. I wanted to share it with you, so that you can share your thoughts as well. Because we live in a religiously diverse community, this issue is indeed intensified. But for others in more homogeneous social environments, I will try to give some background information to help contextualize the question.
Note: My intent is not to support any particular argument, but to simply ask the questions. Please forgive any inherent bias that comes with being human.
Question of the Week:
Do you have to go through Christianity to enter the Kingdom of God? (And when I refer to Christianity, I am referring to the cultural, political, and religiously affiliated sense of the word.)
In my neighborhood, many of my neighbors identify themselves as Muslims. At times, this is nothing more than a highly nominal or politicized sense of identification.
In other places that I have lived, I have also encountered similar cultural Christians. I would imagine that you too can conjure up some picture of people who identify as Christians simply because they are Americans, yet their faith lacks depth or transformative substance.
In the same way, there are some in Clarkston who identify as being Muslim or Hindu simply because they come from a predominantly Muslim or Hindu background, region, or country. To leave this cultural association would inherently be to also give up part of their heritage and community. Is salvation reached by faith in Christ or by religious affiliation? Can Messianic Jews join the Kingdom? Or in the words of Phil Parshall, are we “going too far” in the contextualization of the gospel message?2 If cultural Muslims can enter the Kingdom of God, is it then appropriate for Christ followers to become cultural Muslims in order to further extend their message? Can Muslims remain Muslims, yet live as true followers of Jesus the Christ?
Despite your interest in the soteriological debate, this question has both corporeal and other-worldly implications, and deserves some attention. According to Rebecca Lewis, “The New Testament addresses a nearly identical question: ‘Do all believers in Jesus Christ have to go through Judaism in order to enter God’s Family?’ It is important to realize that for both questions, the nature of the gospel itself is at stake.”3
Please join the conversation. Hit the comment box below, I’m anxious to hear your thoughts…
[1] Jama Masjid, Old Delhi, India – Photo taken by Stephen Johnson, 2007.
[2] Parshall, Phil. “DANGER! New Directions in Contextualization.” Evangelical Missions Quarterly, 34:3. October, 1998: Wheaton, IL.
[3] Lewis, Rebecca. “Insider Movements: Retaining Identity and Preserving Community.” Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, 4th Ed: 673-677.
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