If I Were a Missionary

In New York City


If I were a Christian missionary in New York City, I'd like to emulate Naomi and Chris Lawrence, a
couple who try to follow Jesus and have four children and a dog.  Here is what is important to them.
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  • Reaching out to families who are suffering or in crisis
  • Advocate on behalf of people who need help to raise their voices
  • Reconciliation and bridge-building between different groups
  • Reaching out to youth involved in gangs, violence and drugs
  • Encouraging local churches to become involved in the lives of needy people
  • Helping those who wish to follow Jesus
  • Support toddler groups and kids’ clubs
  • Work in local schools
  • Provide access to debt counselling
  • Support environmental projects
  • Offer Classes in cooking and music to local families and children
  • Pray for those working in mission around the world
  • Prepare meals for children who don’t get enough to eat at home
  • Lead Bible studies
  • Visiting people in prison
  • After-school tutoring
  • Sports ministry
  • Outreach to vulnerable children
  • Intensive physical therapy for children with disability
  • Community-based care for those living with HIV/AIDS
  • Support for community activists with active non-violence training

And if I were influenced by Christian process theology, I would understand all of these activities as ways of practicing process theology.  Or, to be more honest, as ways of following Jesus and sharing in his journey in faith.  As I see things, Jesus had faith in a loving God whom he addressed in deeply familial terms, as Abba.  I would speak of Abba's loving activity in the world as the Christ-like side of God.  I wouldn't insist that others think this way, but it's how I'd think.  This would affect how I understand my own work.  In preparing meals for children who don't get enough at home, I would see Christ in the faces of the children and the spirit of Christ in my preparing the meals with a joyful heart.   

There would be an artistic side to it, too.  I would also see Christ in the artwork below, created with help from many by Naomi Lawrence.  I'd be a missionary for kindness, to be sure, and also a missionary for beauty.   I'd be helping people discover the inner beauty of their own hearts and the beauty of cooperating with others to help create art.   Indeed, I'd be teaching people to crochet and play guitar, if they were so inclined.  I'd want people to be able to tell their stories through art and music.  I would say to people that God is love, and that love is beauty, too.
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"Naomi Lawrence’s crocheted flowers are beloved and familiar accents around the East Harlem neighborhood. Using acrylic yarn, Naomi Lawrence has created a colorful mural fence mural made of crocheted flowers that celebrate the diversity of people who make up the East Harlem community one intricate, crocheted petal at a time. There is a trio of giant flowers including a pink dahlia for Mexico, a purple and yellow Christmas orchid for Colombia, and a red hibiscus for Puerto Rico. These are surrounded by smaller flowers like white frangipani representing the Ivory Coast, lush pink bayahibe representing the Dominican Republic, and impala lilies representing Ghana. The smaller flowers were created in collaboration with fiber artists from the neighborhood. At 12 feet high and 25 feet wide, this is the largest installation the artist has completed to date."  (NYC Art in the Parks)


Random Acts of Beauty
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After five years of semi-secret random acts of beauty, Lawrence wants to “step out and be bold.” She wants to enrich her relationships with neighbors. Lawrence observes that in el Barrio, “people like to tell their stories through art, through music.” She says, “I don’t want only my art to do my engagement anymore;” and has begun teaching crochet in schools and local senior centers. She runs sessions at la Galeria del Barrio with a Creative Engagement grant from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council which will result in a huge community-made mural on 121st and Park Avenue in July. Fueled by her Christian faith, Lawrence wants to “to use what I do to love my neighbors more.” She knows from experience that the deeper relationships she seeks will happen more organically in the slowed-down space where she teaches the interlocking loopings of crochet alongside grandmothers, mothers, and their children.

-- Naomi Lawrence Interview in Mom Egg Review,
​Literature and Art, Ana C.H. Silva, MER VOX Gallery Editor


Following Christ
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The Story Behind the Story
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"Chris and Naomi Lawrence moved to East Harlem New York City in 2014 from England UK.  Naomi is a fiber artist working in the local community and Chris focuses on befriending and being creative with local seniors.  Both Chris and Naomi are committed to supporting under-documented migrants. They have four children and a large dog." 

They work for a Christian missionary organization called innerCHANGE (spelled that way, with CHANGE in caps. They launched its East Harlem NYC group in January 2019."   Here are some phrases on the innerCHANGE website that are common to all missionaries who work with innerCHANGE:
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  • ​Recognizing that “the earth is the Lord’s and all it contains” and that I own nothing.
  • Voluntarily accepting a level of income and lifestyle which allows me (and my family) to live incarnationally with the poor to whom Christ has called me to minister. Through this lifestyle, I will seek to better discover the presence of Christ and what it means to be rich in faith and relationship with Him without relying on material possessions.
  • Modesty and temperance in all things so that there may never be an offense to the gospel because of my covetousness.
  • Giving joyfully and generously of the life and resources God has given me in order to see the urban poor experience the love of Jesus and to model freedom from the tyranny of self.


The Vision of INNERCHANGE

InnerCHANGE is a Christian missionary organization
 that is cultivating followers of Jesus at the margins

from the website:
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  • Our purpose is to make disciples of Jesus and work for community transformation.
  • Our vision began in the early 1980's in inner-city Los Angeles with the InnerCHANGE founder, John Hayes.
  • We are a community of people from all walks of life working together.
  • Today, we send out teams to live and serve in places of poverty across the world.
  • For us, mission is about living and working alongside people - we want to minister from the inside out.
  • Our purpose is to make disciples of Jesus and work for community transformation.
  • Making the choice to live and work in places of poverty gives a purpose beyond lifestyle and comfort, and leads to an attitude of joy and commitment.
  • Sometimes journeys take us in unexpected directions. As teams, our daily rhythms of prayer and fellowship help us make decisions about the best way forward, and overcome obstacles.
  • As we live and work with the poor, we deepen our experience of and insight into people’s lives. This helps to deepen our own contemplative response, and helps local churches to deepen their love for those on the margins.
  • We journey with people through the ups and downs of life .
  • In the places we work, we don’t offer services or try to take over. Instead, we help individuals to find their own inner resources, and begin using these in a sustainable way.


A Word of Thanks
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As a Christian, I support all of these activities supported by Naomi and Chris.  I am a process theologian and also a Christian influenced by Buddhism.  See Can a Christian be a Buddhist, Too? and Learning from a Zen Master.  I sense that many evangelicals would secretly or not-so-secretly say that I am not really a Christian.  But I don’t sense that Naomi and Chris would say this. 

​Admittedly, there are aspects of process theology they would not agree with.  In the mission statement of innerCHANGE one statement says that God needs nothing.  Process theologians disagree.  They – we – believe that God needs us for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, and that God is enriched by the world itself, apart from which God’s own life would be less full.   We believe that this view is much more biblical than, say, the view that God needs nothing.  

Naomi and Chris may also not be as interfaith in orientation as are process theologians.  We process theologians believe that God’s spirit and saving love can be present in many religions, not Christianity alone, albeit in different ways.  Naomi and Chris Lawrence may well believe that in Christ and Christ alone salvation can be found.  I don't know.

What I know is that, if you look at how they live and try to live, you can sense that they are practicing an open and relational (process) way of living in a wonderful way, and that their way enriches how Christian process theologians understand service to Christ.  By service to Christ we mean service to the living spirit of God at work in the world, or what we call the universal Christ (the Logos in the Gospel of John.)  With them we see this side of God as revealed uniquely, but not exclusively, in the healing ministry of Jesus, including his death and resurrection.  And with them, we believe that the heart of Christian life lies in sharing in the journey of Jesus inwardly as well as outwardly, which takes our own lives in unexpected directions.  And we see the sharing of beauty – moments of joy as elicited through art as well as kindness – as a natural and too often neglected expression of the universal Christ.  And it is just these kinds of activities,named above. that are what we mean by sharing beauty.  May we all be missionaries of kindness-and-beauty, and if we are Christian may we see kindness-and-beauty as the very place where Jesus is present, moment by moment, day by day, in a world sorely needing love.  What I want to say to Naomi and Chris Lawrence is: Thank You.

Addendum: Short Videos on Yarn Bombing
Open Horizons