The Great Commission and Helping Hurting People

This article was transcribed from portions of the Leading Trauma-Informed Ministries: Helping Kids Depend on Jesus webinar. You can watch the full video here.

Lord, take me as close as you can to the most chaotic of places and teach me what it looks like to look like you there.

Go Into All the World: The Great Commission

I want to show you a picture of a church I took with my iPhone. That picture is a picture of a church in modern day Turkey—what we know as biblical Asian minor. I just took this with my iPhone recently when I was there studying. And I wanted to start here because whenever we talk about the topic of trauma, we’re talking about people who are hurting.

Photo of Sardis by Beth Guckenberger.

When talking about trauma today, we’re talking about people who have experienced very hard things. And we all have our natural reactions to hard, right? Some of us run away from it because it’s painful. It’s hard to be around people who are hurting. Or some of us get critical or judgmental of people because that’s our nature.

And sometimes we feel helpless or hopeless about hard things.

Part of His Story

But one of the things that has lately been putting some steel in my spine about working with people who have a trauma history is the fact that I’m a part of a really old story. We are not just now coming up with it, but God has been asking His kids to go close to traumatic events from the very beginning.

That’s why I took this picture I took with my iPhone when I was standing in the biblical ruins of the town called Sardis (Revelation 3). This is the church that John writes to them about bloodied robes. And the reason he says that is because in Sardis they were worshiping Kybele, a fertility goddess.

The way they worshiped her was that they would dress in white robes, and they would flog themselves just until their robes were bloodied. And because she was a goddess of fertility, the way they worshiped her was through some pretty grotesque and perverted sexual practices with the animals and children and strangers and in groups and all the things.

Imagine You Were There

So for a minute, I want you just to put yourself in the shoes of the disciples who watched Jesus’s ministry and His death at His resurrection.

Fifty days later they received the Holy Spirit, and they were sent out with that great commission. And they head out in the world to tell people about the feeding of the 5,000 and about Jesus walking on water and all the good news that comes with the gospel. They show up, and they walk to this town. And the reason Turkey is such an important town biblically is because it’s the cross section where the east and the west were meeting each other.

And so, they went right to that spot so that they could establish a church. So, as people were heading east to west and west to east, they would cross God’s kids doing God’s work in God’s house. And they show up in Sardis where people are bloodying themselves with their self-harm, and they are in perverted sexual practices.

Going to the Hard Places

If I were a disciple, I’d be like, listen, this is crazy town over here. Should it be included in this great commission? These people are crazy. I’m going to go and set up our church five miles away from here where there’s none of this, so I don’t have to look at any of this and none of this gets on me.

I took this picture because what you see on the right side of the picture is like the ruins of an old temple that was a temple to Kybele. As you can see, 2,000 years later, it’s still basically standing. I mean obviously it’s the ruins, but it was an established building and practice in that town. I love this picture because the little brick building on the left is the ruins of an early evangelical church.

And where did that church decide to set up? Not five miles out of town where they wouldn’t be near the traumatic events that were happening to the people who were worshiping a false God. They got as close as they possibly could get to that temple.

We don’t know exactly what they did when they got there. But I’m hoping they passed out band-aids and water bottles—that they were as practical as possible about the felt needs of the people who had experienced trauma.

But what we do know is that in a pretty short period of time relative to history, the worship to Artemis and Kybele fell, and Christianity became the dominant faith in the region because God’s Way works. And it’s my favorite square footage in all of Turkey.

Lord, Take Me There

When I go there, I stand between those two buildings. I put my hand on the white building, and I put my other hand on the brick building, and I make a commitment to the Lord every time I’m there.

Lord, take me as close as you can to the most chaotic of places and teach me what it looks like to look like you there.

May that be our prayer as we go into all the world and share the good news of Jesus carrying out the great commission He sends each of us on.