For most of my life I have sought to develop solutions to the problems that have caused human hardships while remaining personally removed from others’ pain and suffering. I have attempted to identify with people’s need by studying it but without experiencing it alongside them. Even through all the work I’ve done with homeless people over the years, it has been my wife who has gotten down and dirty in the midst of their pain, diving into their circumstances, while I studied it and sought to create prevention mechanisms or remedial options. I have glibly written off the difference in our approaches to her extroversion and my introversion, or to her management skills versus my analytic abilities.

Matthew’s bold and consistent action has caused me to see the error in my assumptions.

Some of my reticence to immersion in people’s crises can be traced back to my upbringing. My parents worked hard so I could go to good schools and learn how to be successful in the world. I was set up for and expected to get a good job, live a comfortable suburban life, and have the “privilege” of being insulated from economic and physical hardship. Our guiding life philosophy included ideas like every man for himself, get all you can while you can, work hard and enjoy the fruits, expect others to make their own way as you did.

Matthew, on the other hand, was not raised to pursue and expect comfort and pleasure, but to create or seize opportunities to serve others. The guiding philosophy of his life was that success is based on obedience to God and loving people in tangible ways.

Thinking back on the research I’ve done about the importance of how we are raised by our parents, I can see the huge impact of the expectations and worldview each of us was raised to embrace. We both had parents who loved us and wanted the best for us; what was different was the foundational worldview that our parents possessed, professed, and modeled.

Now, many years later, I supposedly know better. I am certainly blessed with knowledge and experience that by now should have redirected my thoughts, emotions and actions to mirror those of Jesus. But the old ways, ingrained during my formative years and practiced without challenge for decades, are mighty hard to shed. Despite good intentions those old and un-Christlike ways often emerge as my default response to opportunities to serve without prejudice or hesitation. Sometimes it takes exposure to a Christ-like servant, like Matthew, to bring the gap between Christian aspiration and personal behavior into clear focus.

Matthew has voluntarily and enthusiastically walked through the pain and struggles with numerous people who have endured the worst that this world has to offer: substance addiction, sexual perversities, economic deprivation, emotional devastation, mental illness, physical limitations, and so on. He has invited thousands of people to join him in jumping into that world of pain in order to partner in helping to love hurting people into a better place.

That was how Jesus did it, too. He was not the isolated expert waltzing into a scene, observing at arms-length, dispensing the solution, then leaving to solve the next problem. He recognized that the heart of the solution is tangibly expressing God’s love to hurting people, sharing in their misery and giving them hope – even if it’s not much more than the hope of not having to face the hardship alone.

Every hour that Matthew has spent on the streets or in people’s homes, moving through the difficulties with people, was time he could have spent at the office making critical leadership decisions. But after studying Matthew’s process and the nature of the Dream Center ministry, I believe that heart of the Dream Center is simply a reflection of the heart of its primary leader – one who is totally in touch with the pain and shattered dreams of the people that ministry seeks to serve. The Dream Center is effective without obsessing on efficiency because “success” is defined by expressions of love rather than clever programs, extensive buildings, growing attendance, or national reputation. Matthew is an effective leader because he serves; he doesn’t just enable others to come and serve. Again, that was the lesson that Jesus modeled for us.

I fear that as leaders we are too often able to send others into the battle to do the dirty work of loving the unlovable. As you examine your leadership efforts, are you in the trenches with those who need to be loved and helped, or are you outside that sphere of pain, working hard to create systems, policies, programs, content, and structures that address the situation without being personally engrossed by it? Is it necessary to achieve – and if so, how? – a balance between immersion and breadth of engagement?

If you are raising children, or influence those who are, think about these issues. The worldview and life expectations we pass on to children have a lifelong affect. What are we passing on to them? How will they embrace kingdom values if we do not plant them as the cornerstone early in life?

(By the way, please don’t complain that I am setting up Matthew as a unique servant of God. I realize that there are thousands of dynamic disciples of Christ who have surrendered comfort and prestige in order to better relate to and serve those in need; Matthew is not the only one. I am not campaigning to carve Matthew’s face onto Mt. Rushmore. I just happened to be fortunate enough to spend a lot of time studying what he does, why he does it, how he does it – and to have been kicked in the butt by the Holy Spirit through that experience. He was God’s educational instrument for me in those moments.)

This is a superficial use of the data, ignoring the reasons for the apparent discrepancy between atheists and born agains. For instance, merely looking at the divorce numbers overlooks the fact that atheists have less divorce because they marry less often; they tend to substitute cohabitation for marriage, and those relationships have a shorter duration than marriages.

Another common error in such arguments is that of assuming that being Christian is synonymous with being morally perfect. As any thinking Christian will admit, we remain sinners – aware of our moral failings, convicted of our moral imperfections, and seeking to raise our game to a higher level. I am not aware of any mature Christians who claim moral superiority over other people – that would be judgmental, which itself is a moral failing – but know many who lament the fact that Americans (be they atheist, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish or otherwise) are not living up to a higher moral standard.

Another dimension of the atheist arguments I have recently read is that there is no standard to live up to; morally, in that view, is a personal choice, based on their determination of what serves their needs best. To me, that’s really scary since that renders murder, rape and other atrocities morally viable if so determined by personal preference.

It is abundantly easy to identify social statistics that support any desired perspective. What’s harder is to offer a compelling, comprehensive and viable worldview that does not have God’s moral standards at the center.

Because I am a professional researcher, I wanted to get everything just right; it’s a matter of professional pride. So I read the cover letter carefully. I read the simple questionnaire form a couple of times to be sure that I understood what they wanted, to see if professionally I could learn anything from their questionnaire construction, and also to address my surprise at just how short the form has become. (The Bureau now supplements the decadal census with massive monthly surveys, allowing them to reduce the census questionnaire to just a handful of questions – much shorter than the versions used in previous cycles.)

I filled in the information about myself and my wife without problems. Smooth sailing. Quick and simple. But then I got to person #3 in our household, our oldest daughter. She is adopted from Guatemala. Under question 4 – a question about origins – marking her down as Hispanic was a no-brainer. But the related query, question 5, stumped me. It’s about racial identity. The options provided were white, black, American Indian, Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Native Hawaiian, Guamanian, Other Pacific Islander, and Other Asian. Nothing that fits anyone from Guatemala. Or Mexico, the nation that has provided the U.S. with the largest number of non-native residents. In fact, there was no category that would describe American citizens of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origins who came from any country located in Central or South America.

It made no sense that there’d be categories provided for groups that represent less than one-half of one percent of the population, but no category for those who represent 16% of the population. And yes, I understand that the Bureau will combine the two variables of origin and race to create a Hispanic origin category, but without instructions, how will the more than 50 million Hispanic residents of the U.S. complete that second question? Will many of them check one of the boxes provided, assuming they apparently belong to one of those groups since infinitesimally small racial groups had their own category to mark? Surely the uber-funded Census Bureau, with the nation’s professional and scholarly talent pool available to draw upon, and a 10-year window in which to create their six question survey, would not have developed a confusing, incomplete question. Especially with trillions of dollars at risk. Clearly, 30 years of experience and advanced degrees in survey research notwithstanding, I was missing something.

And the problem was compounded by my realization that I’d face the same dilemma for person #4 of our household, our next-oldest daughter, who was also adopted from Guatemala.
Stymied, I called the Census Bureau. First, I got the recorded messages which walked me through the process. However, the pre-recorded explanation did not address my concern, so I indicated a need to speak to a representative. Once a live Bureau staffer came on the line I explained my dilemma. She offered to read me the same statement that I had just heard from the automated voice. After I respectfully declined the offer, she indicated that she was not allowed to tell me how to answer the question. I explained my frustration with that, knowing that real money was on the line here – how my tax dollars (and trillions of others) would be allocated according to the percentages emanating from the Census statistics. She was well-trained, though, and refused to help me beyond telling me she was not allowed to assist me in figuring out how to answer their question.

So I hung up feeling as if my concern had not been heard or cared about – which, of course, is nothing new when dealing with the federal bureaucracy. And for my two daughters from Guatemala, I half-heartedly checked the “Other” box and wrote in “Hispanic/Mayan.”
What a bizarre situation. Robert Groves, who heads the Bureau, is a very competent, experienced, and respected researcher. I doubt that he would let a gaffe of this magnitude go unrepaired, if he had the ability to make revisions. Perhaps the questionnaire contains this unfortunate question because the most dreaded event in the life of a researcher occurred: questionnaire design by committee. Departmental committees. House committees. Senate committees.

In the end, the bad news is that there will inevitably be a lot of inaccurate information collected and reported from our government’s $15 billion tax-funded research project, resulting in inappropriate financial allocations of our other tax dollars. But the good news is that I did not have to wrestle with this issue over person #5 in our household, our youngest daughter, who was adopted from Russia. I’m pretty sure she is “white.” And the best news of all may be that I am not the Director of the Census Bureau, forced to have political committees approve the art of survey research and having to deal with complaints from people like me.

For instance, England has a government agency – the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) – whose job is to determine whether or not someone should be barred from working with children. This vetting process applies to volunteers as well as paid staff. Each paid individual who will work with children at a church must pay ISA a one-time registration fee (about $100) to be approved for their job by the agency. (Volunteers must go through the same registration process but are exempt from the fee.)

Approval is based upon making it through the screening process without raising any concerns such as pertinent criminal convictions, other cautions listed in their official records, or additional red flags raised by police or intelligence sources. Any concerns that do surface cause the person’s file to go to the agency’s examination board, which will determine the acceptability of the candidate. The files of all individuals who are approved are then continuously updated through automatic database searches. Further, any suspicious or inappropriate behavior around children that is observed by or submitted to an employer must be reported in a timely manner to the regulatory agency.

Reflecting the seriousness with which the Brits take the health and well-being of their children, these regulations will apply not only to churches but to any organization that deals with children – health care, educational, athletic, social service and faith-based organizations.

In my own travels I have found that the lengths to which churches go to protect children varies substantially. Even in states where the laws are fairly rigorous, compliance tends to be inconsistent. There are a couple of important insights I gleaned from some research the Barna Group conducted on this matter. First, the safety and well-being of their children is one of the most important attractions to parents who visit a church. If the ministry does not impress the parents with its commitment to ensuring the security and care for their child, the parents are unlikely to return to that church, regardless of their reaction to the church’s ministry to adults.

Second, we discovered that churches that are most effective at helping parents to raise spiritually healthy and active children place such security matters at the head of its priority list. We saw that such churches typically go well beyond whatever the government statutes require in an honest effort to do “everything possible” to make sure that children are well taken care of while they are under the umbrella of the church.

Think about what you have seen or experienced related to the ministry to children at churches you have attended or visited. How adequately do you think we protect our children? What could we do better? Is there anything significant to adopt from the British approach?