Meeting God in the Margins

Dundanim/Keith Hoffart

Meeting God in the Margins

Tierra Nueva combines discipleship training, spiritual deliverance, and advocacy to bring healing to both the lost and the found. b y A llison D u ncan

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Meeting God in the Margins and they — along with the peasants they taught — rediscovered the gospel.

This communal discovery of grace is at the heart of the Ekblads’ ministry today. In 1982 they founded Tierra Nueva, a ministry birthed in Honduras that later expanded to western Washington. In the city of Burlington, they established the People’s Seminary, an ecumenical organization that seeks to share the good news of God’s liberation in Jesus Christ with both privileged and underprivileged people. Among their ministrants are migrant farmworkers, new immigrants, and permanent Hispanic residents in western Washington.

“At the heart of Tierra Nueva’s mission is that mainstream people and those on the margins would hear and experience together the very good news of God’s love and liberation in Jesus Christ,” states the website. Through this ministry, both majority and marginalized people discover the gospel of grace and are affected by it through Bible study, healings, spiritual deliverance, and social activism.

As director of Tierra Nueva, Bob Ekblad teaches at the People’s Seminary, leads Bible studies among prison inmates and migrant workers, co-pastors bilingual faith communities with his wife and others, and intercedes for people. Ekblad points to Gustavo Gutierrez, Peter Maurin, Carlos Mesters, and Gerald West as theologians whose ideas have inspired and helped shape the ministry.

Gutierrez’s and Mesters’ writings challenged Ekblad not to assume that he understood Scripture but to be evangelized along with the poor. Maurin wrote that scholars and workers needed to labor, reflect, and pray together, developing a “workerscholar synthesis,” and West encouraged training the disadvantaged to think critically.

“Bring the best to the least,” Ekblad says. “Bring what you think is good news from the academy to the marginalized.”

According to Ekblad, this good news will refresh both teacher and students, and it may take on deeper or different meanings as the teacher considers it in the context of the underprivileged.

In this vein, Ekblad teaches marginalized and mainstream students in the People’s Seminary about the gospel that they all need, equipping them to share it and to demonstrate it through service.

Practical challenges accompany this work. Migrant workers often have erratic, exhausting schedules during harvest, and some have never finished high school. So Ekblad and other Tierra Nueva staff mentor people one-on-one and offer different levels of teaching.

The work requires Ekblad to be aware of his assumptions so that he doesn’t reinforce negative images of God. Rather than implying that God is an oppressive judge, which Ekblad fears Christians do too often, he teaches that Jesus is the friend of sinners who forgives and heals them even before they confess.

Troubled by the legalistic interpretations offered by Honduran members of the Bible study they led, Bob and Gracie Ekblad prayerfully proposed a new rule: Members could only discuss what the text said about who God is and what God has done for them, rather than what the text said they had to do to get right with God. Already under strain from living in poverty among Honduran peasants, with impending burn-out from the demands of teaching health and sustainable farming, the Ekblads faced further challenges in confronting local church teachings. The Honduran churches in the 1980s were hotbeds of legalism, each trying to outdo the others in sanctimoniousness and shunning peasants who couldn’t keep up with the long list of regulations. Consequently, the Ekblads’ Bible study members had a monochromatic view of Scripture as a rulebook.

But when the Ekblads introduced their topic restriction, the tyranny of church rules began to crumble. God’s mercy flowed over the Honduran group members and began to free them, filling them with joy. In watching this renewal, the Ekblads were likewise set free from burdens of guilt and duty,

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Tierra Nueva’s teaching and social advocacy ministries help immigrants and inmates to see that God loves people like them. They read the Bible for the first time. They begin to learn how to hear good news.

Tierra Nueva’s teaching and social advocacy ministries follow this model, Ekblad says, helping immigrants and inmates to see that God loves people like them. “A lot of people begin reading the Bible for the very first time, and they’re learning how to hear good news,” he says. Ekblad and other staff accompany them as they learn, providing pastoral support, biblical teaching, and healing prayer.

“Sometimes there are blocks that need to be removed so people can hear good news,” Ekblad says. So in addition to these other ministries, he and the staff listen and address people’s wounds and sins through intercession for healing and deliverance, calling on the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead.

They have seen many freed from work- and gang-related injuries, tormenting dreams, rage, anxiety, and addictions.

“It’s not enough just to do social advocacy,” Ekblad says.

“A man might get free from jail for a criminal offense, but if he doesn’t get free from his rage, he might kill his girlfriend.

Social advocacy goes hand in hand with being able to administer healing to people’s hearts through inner healing and deliverance ministry.”

“It doesn’t work to operate out of a single stream,” says Ekblad of Tierra Nueva’s ministry. “We need the whole body of Christ.” Isolated from each other, evangelistic, social advocacy, and healing ministries aren’t enough; although they may appear successful at first, no one approach can offer lasting rescue and healing from problems as severe as life sentences, domestic violence, and heroin, meth, and crack addictions.

The body of Christ must be more reconciled in order to bring the gospel of truth, love, and liberation that people need, Ekblad insists.

To illustrate the multifaceted approach of Tierra Nueva’s gospel-rooted ministry, Ekblad recounts his October 2008 visit to Guatemala to train servants of the poor and to minister to gang members in violent prisons. A few days before leaving, he dreamed of a gangster covered with tattoos and with a hole in his side. He was learning about walking in the power of the Holy Spirit, and he wondered if this dream was related to his upcoming trip.

Ekblad and a team of four other men passed guards armed with machine guns to enter a Guatemalan jail. “It’s a chaotic environment,” Ekblad comments, with some inmates smoking marijuana, answering cell phones, arguing, or sleeping with prostitutes — distractions with which the team competed while inviting the men to a Bible study. Ekblad has compas-

sion for these men, many of whom come from Christian homes but lost fathers in the war of the 1980s and subsequently joined gangs and began selling drugs.

“Gangs run the prison from the inside,” Ekblad says.

Gangsters may kill fellow members who become Christians, because they see conversion as joining a rival gang — the church. Churches sometimes perpetuate this perspective by pulling gangsters away from their familiar gang community and bringing them into an exclusive, legalistic group, explains Ekblad. Local prison chaplains wrestle with how to prevent violence against those gang members who want to follow Christ and still provide the Christian community and discipleship they need.

Ekblad saw a gangster who resembled the one in his dream, with tattoos and a large scar. He stopped to ask the man where the bathroom was, and a conversation ensued. Ekblad gradually learned the man’s name was Piranha and that he was a top gang leader with a 132-year prison term.

“Would you like to see my cell?” Piranha asked humbly.

The offer surprised Ekblad, but he gladly accepted. During their conversation in his cell, Piranha revealed that he knew he

Migrant workers and their families are an important part of the Tierra Nueva community. Photos by Bailey Tanaka

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Meeting God in the Margins needed God. Ekblad told him about his dream and gave him a worship CD and a copy of his book, Reading the Bible with the Damned (Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), about biblical interpretation from the perspective of the condemned.

Piranha gladly accepted the gifts.“He opened up and received a lot of love,” Ekblad remembers, astonished at the hardedged gangster’s response. He prayed with Piranha, asking that God’s peace and presence would fill his life.

Piranha’s presence with Ekblad gave the team credibility, and they were able to gather about 40 inmates for the Bible study. One team member sang songs of deliverance as Ekblad got permission from the men to lay hands on them and pray.

Music broke through the din of the prison, and gentle human touch softened men accustomed only to rough contact.

The text the group studied was the calling of Matthew.

Ekblad described how hated Jewish tax collectors were because of their extortion crimes against their own people.

“Who might fit the description of tax collectors today?” he asked. The inmates exchanged glances and smiled knowingly.

Ekblad knew that most gangsters earn money by imposing tariffs on neighbors, threatening to kill them if they don’t pay.

These men saw a reflection of themselves in Matthew.

“What was Matthew doing when Jesus called him?” Ekblad

been welcoming Jesus through our presence with them.”

The group looked at Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ disdain. Jesus dismisses the hypocrites, those commonly seen as healthy, and identifies himself instead with the sick, recruiting them as his friends and followers. Rather than feeling offended at being considered sick, the gangsters acknowledged their need for healing. They appeared to welcome the truth that Christ valued them and desired to be with them.

“What would you need to be healed of if Jesus were here right now?” Ekblad asked them.While they didn’t dare answer openly, Ekblad and his team laid hands on these men and prayed for their healing.

As they left the jail, the team thanked the jail warden.

Ekblad acknowledged the difficulty of the warden’s work and asked if they could pray for him. The warden agreed and, in a spontaneous gesture of vulnerability, pulled his gun from its holster and bullets from his pockets, disarming himself before the team. They asked God to give him wisdom in his job and asked for healing for the burning pain across his shoulder, arm, and chest from a machete injury. “All the pain is gone,” he said after they prayed.

During the remainder of the trip, Ekblad and his team taught a group of ministry workers about forgiveness and

Gangsters may kill fellow members who become Christians, because they see conversion as joining a rival gang — the church. continued.To their surprise, the men discovered that he wasn’t going to church or doing anything religious. He was stealing from his people when Jesus approached him. “What does this reveal about Jesus?” Ekblad pressed, helping them to realize that Jesus lovingly pursues sinners, even while they are practicing sinful behavior.

“Do you think Jesus is calling you to leave your gang?”

Ekblad asked. The men shifted uncomfortably, guessing which answer Ekblad was fishing for, but he surprised them by pointing to the verse where Jesus goes to Matthew’s house to eat with him and other sinners.

“So who follows whom?” Ekblad asked, watching the men’s reactions. Jesus is the one who joins Matthew’s crowd, the inmates discovered. It was an insight Ekblad had only recently received, and one that he is sure God gave him specifically for these gangsters.

Looking at Piranha and another gang chief, Ekblad asked a further question: “So what do you think — would you let Jesus into your gang?” Although the men were wary of making a positive response in front of their gang, Ekblad sensed their wonder and openness. Ekblad remarked later, “I had just come from praying with Piranha in his cell. Already they had

prayed for God’s Spirit to refresh each of them. The team marveled at how God was renewing all of these people— inmate, warden, and minister alike.

Through diverse ministries like these, Tierra Nueva seeks to bring the evangelistic, charismatic, and advocacy streams of the church together. In this unified body, the powerful and the poor discover and experience the gospel together.

“I see more and more Christians becoming excited about ministry to people on the margins,” Ekblad says. In the process, they become more won over by God’s love, he adds.

“That’s one of the major fruits — being evangelized in the whole process ourselves as we discover the good news alongside people.” n Learn more at Tierra-Nueva.org.To purchase Ekblad’s book, Reading the Bible with the Damned, or to read a sample chapter, visit Tierra-nueva.org/Publications.html.

Allison Duncan works as a marketing assistant in Broomall, Pa. She has a BA in English and theology from Eastern University, and she enjoys using her training in both these fields to interpret the good news in biblical stories.

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