The Last, First

(pre-publication excerpt from Between the Lines:  Christianity for Misfit Christians)

I was spending a long weekend with a former protégé in Auburn.  (The first of many weekends and protégés, friends, as it turned out.)  A local parachurch ministry, Auburn Christian Fellowship, was about to demolish a building and build a new one in its place.  So what to do?  Why, airsoft games inside the old house, of course!  (Capture the flag, but with plastic pellet guns and goggles.  Fun!)

So we’re hanging out while other students arrive, and eventually there are about 20 people on hand for this little episode of spontaneous warfare.  Teams start getting chosen.  And a funny thing started to happen.

After a few minutes in a group like this, it’s pretty evident which are the socially gifted ones, and the less-gifted ones, and the downright awkward or shy ones.  It was obvious that night.  Perhaps it’s easier to see for those of us who were picked last, or picked upon, or just not picked at all.

The gifted ones were calling out the awkward ones, the ones who didn’t know how to fit.  “Aaron, come on over here, be on my team.”  All the gifted ones were doing it.  Just trying to look good, right?  The awkward ones looked surprised...they’d learned their schoolyard lessons all too well.

The game commenced.  At this point, I sort of expected the less-outgoing or less-fit ones to be sort of ignored as we planned and executed our assaults and defenses.  After all, our team is less likely to win if we rely on them, right?  Well, maybe so.  But that isn’t what happened at all.

We were all players that night.  The leaders weren’t just posing their interest in “the last and the least of these.”  It was real; it was happening in the heat of battle, so to speak.  We shuffled sides and played again, and again.  And it happened, again and again.

You see, those young men internalized and personified a key element of leadership in what the Bible calls “ekklesia,” church.  The goal wasn’t to win, or to see which team member could arrive first.  The goal was to arrive together.  The way that’s accomplished is by putting the “last” ones “first.”    It may sound strange to some, but we had church that night.  That night, we were Church.