What do you think is “Night Shift’s” most important contribution? – Part I

I think I want to give two answers to this question.  First, Night Shift does something I have not found in any other book to date, which is the main reason I wrote it. This book answers the question, how do we minister when the doors shut and we cannot minister – or at least we think we can’t. 

In Night Shift, my response is, why would this stop us any more than it stopped Daniel or Gideon or Esther?  Or to throw in the New Testament, well, throw in the whole New Testament and a few generations after that: can you think of a time in the Scriptures or the Early Church when they had it easy?

Here is a book that says believers are designed to operate in the night even better than we can operate in broad daylight – and in fact this is when we shine most brightly.  As I write in the book, “God is calling us into the night, including places where it has been night for a long, long time, and where our artificial lighting systems will not work.”

This is a message I have been endeavoring to get across for decades now – and I think the time for this message is this very hour.  Way back when, before going to college even, I was always amazed when believers feared the darkness instead of stepping boldly into the night.  As I add in the book, “We can either curse the night or embrace it with God’s love.”

A childhood memory is forever embedded in my mind.  As a little boy, I was visiting the home of a dear saint in the church.  A severe thunderstorm blew over her house and the thunder was deafening as it followed immediately on the lightning.  The saint, bless her heart, was filled with fear and gathered us (I think my brother was there, too) on the sofa and began to pray in earnest as if we were on a ship at sea and about to be swamped by a killer wave.  And I thought to myself, why, if she says she trusts Jesus, is she so afraid of this storm?

That is what has long bothered me about how we far too often react to the storms we encounter in the world we live in – our responses are primitive: fight or flight.  What I see instead is us being called to engage and win over. 

There are books on ministering in what are termed “creative access” settings, places closed to traditional methods of ministry.  But these books tend to settle on one concept, the one they call “tentmaking.”  (I take this concept to task as well, by the way.)  What I endeavor to achieve is a theological basis for really ministering in “creative access” settings. 

In addition, I expand the meaning of that phrase to include working and living situations in places like the USA and other more open societies.  We think if we can’t minister the way we’ve always done it, well then our rights are being infringed, which I take as a big fat excuse to use when we get to God’s throne and have to explain away why we didn’t do anything.  Okay, okay, back off.

This book is a manual for working in what I call “the night.”  It sets out to explain why, mostly, but also how we do just that.  And it ties all this into an even larger picture, which brings me to the second answer, something I’ll have to save for the next posting.