Links In The Chains by Jean-Marc Saint Laurent

Hello dear friends,

I am happy to say that the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated —I just live in Florida, simply meaning that I have traded outrageous train fees for outrageous gas fees and crazy neighbors for crazy relatives.

But living with family has its benefits, namely the chance of finding someone else's food to eat and picking up their stories while I have the chance.

"Your mother was about two months pregnant with you, " my father began, cleaning our Sunday chicken with grocer's lime, one Saturday night before.

It was the Autumn of 1985, my mother, growing rounder by the month took respite on the second floor of our Brooklyn home. Quite randomly, a visiting Nigerian pastor, my father met in a home prayer service came ringing the doorbell asking that they both see her right away.

He told my father to place his hand on her belly and pray. "You will have a son and he will be a servant of God" said the pastor and laid his hand on my father's in agreement as they both prayed for my destiny.

Months later when I was presented to the church, a newborn. I am told of the elderly pastor that held me and prophesied much glory over my life, only to die three days later.


No one recollects what denominations they were with. They were simply men of God.

Contrast those glorified predictions with this August, as I sat, much older in an old chair at my old church, with the eyes of an inquisitive old man watching me carefully.

"So you want to work with our young people?"He asked flatly.

"Yes," I began my explanation, "Ever since my uncle gave me the opportunity to speak with them I feel like God has just kept them on my heart"

"You are going to school, your uncle told me?"

"Yes"

He asks for the school name and it is given him.

"What kind of school is that? What is their affiliation?"

"I believe it is run by the Assemblies of God"

He retracts back into his leather armchair and I can tell this will be difficult. "Hmm...” says the pastor in apparent heavy thought, “Pentecostals."

My uncle, the formerly invisible third of our triad is jolted awake. "Pentecostals?" He asks.

"Yes, Pentecostals"answers the senior pastor. "That is a problem, because we are Baptists and this is a Baptist church"

"Ok"I retort nonplussed.

"How do you see yourself? What are you?"

I could feel a smile coming on, "a Christian" I said.

"Yes...we are all Christians..." he began as though I were some preteen in his Sunday school class needing correction, "but what denomination do you identify with?"

"I am non-denominational"said yours truly to no effect.

"Yes, but when you go to school they will teach you their doctrine, and we cannot have that because we are a Baptist church. That is the problem"

He stared at me for what seemed like a day while a creeping sense of self righteousness came to my aid:

"So how do you suppose we solve this problem?"

As far as I was concerned, the meeting had long been over and I secretly planned on never returning back to the church, but due to the quick thinking of my uncle and his offer to “watch” and “supervise” me, I was and am allowed one Sunday a month to speak with the church's teens. Even in the face of this small victory I could not shake off the feelings of disturbance now resting inside of my chest.

What a cold building in the middle of summer! What discord in a faith of love! But separation is not new to Christianity, in fact you can say it was one of our earliest growing pains.

"You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? For when one says, "I follow Paul," and another, "I follow Apollos," are you not mere human beings?"

-1 Corinthians 3:3-4

I can almost hear the disbelief in our brother Paul's voice as he penned this letter to the church he had founded. He had brought these Gentiles the message of God and advent hope, once a secret wisdom(1Cor.2:7) reserved for Jews gathered in temples and synagogues. The Corinthians repaid him by using the gospel as a tool for segregation:

"For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?"

-1 Corinthians 4:7

So what modern implications do we find?

Did the Methodists invent the church of God? Are Southern Baptists the only believers standing publicly with Christ? Did Pentecostals invent intercessory prayer?

 Methodism, a system of thought founded by John Wesley as a return to “true religion”a return to recognizing the significance held by the Scriptures, spiritual tradition and experience, all the while utilizing our human reason. Southern Baptists were defined during the Civil War by their radical focus on missions, giving and stewardship and the Pentecostal church was birthed in large by the spiritual revival experienced on a little strip called Azuza Street in Los Angeles.

Paul was not condemning the teachings of Apollos, whom he complimented in his writings, and he was certainly not condemning his own. What he condemned was friction among those serving the same Lord.

Are we not all Methodists in thought and deed, if not in verbalized affiliation? Can we not call ourselves Baptists in Spirit or see the spiritual fervor in Pentecostal circles as something we should aspire to? Are we not all Catholics? For after all, the word itself only means “universal” (from the Greek term “katholikos”), the idea being that we as believers should be unified.

We are “one body”(Romans 12:5), erecting the same “building”(1 Cor.3:9), that is all part of the kingdom of God. The Reformation could not have started if all Catholics were heretics. Wherever there is abuse in the Church of Jesus Christ, there a refocusing to Him.

We must always strive to see the individual over the building.

As the people of God we are called to battle “against the powers of this dark world” (Eph. 6:12), not our neighbors.

Plots&Prejudice

"And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons." So Jesus called them over to him and began to speak to them in parables: "How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.

-Mark 3:22-24

I am reminded of those mystery films in which the writer does their best to present someone as a villainous monster. If we follow the writer's innuendo long enough, we begin to agree with their characterization. Surely they are only capable of evil activities such as blowing up city buildings with blocks of C4 and crushind children's toys with their feet. Surprisingly, once we have them pegged, the reversal comes.

All it takes is the uncovering of a major clue to reveal that the “monster”does not exist and it was all a set-up.We are taken off guard to find out that the bank heists were to pay for a sick daughter's surgery. At this point, the most popular response is:  "I knew it was [unsuspected character's name] from the beginning.”

These über exciting film points are what I find most disappointing at the movies. I always wonder how and why it took so little evidence for me to condemn of another human being. I was justified in it all until I reviewed the facts.

Eyes Open

Discomfort around southern whites had always been a given for me in years passed. I never questioned it and often ignored it. There I was in the waiting room of the optometrist office I had not graced in years. I was soon called in by the older blonde-haired gentlemen that had once prescribed the slim silver glasses of my high school days.

During my exam, he asked what I was doing these days, and having informed him of my pursuit to enter professional ministry, our conversation flourished. He spoke honestly about his disappointment with our current culture and people not knowing their neighbors. He reminisced on living in the  Fifties' South and how even though they his small town was segregated they were family. “We never used the word African-American, we all just considered each other Americans.”

What had I really known about the South before the Civil Rights Movement other than what I had gleaned off a few books and movies? Nothing. As tears welled up in his eyes while recounting how his son helped a marginalized youth teaching, I gave great consideration to a reversal of my own. Was the western world of just sixty years prior only marked by constant hate wars? Not likely. As with our previous movie characters mishap, sometimes the monsters we believe in do not exist.

People by definition, live in three dimensions, not two.

How can all this unity stuff really work you ask? Pick up a Bible and hold it.

You now hold over two-thousand and one-hundred years of divine inspiration written by over forty human hands. These people were as different as could be imagined: shepherds, politicians, the well-educated, the simple minded, monarchs and men thankful for their daily bread. Though they were separated by nation, language, and approach, they were all used by the Spirit of God to narrate the story of mankind's salvation. The same Spirit lives in us to bring about a unity amongst Christ's body.

"for whoever is not against us is for us"

-Mark 9:40

I had felt it many times lately, that there were specific reasons why this article took a month to wrie: school, yes was one of them, but I mainly attribute this timing to God.  Our Creator knows that had I written anything earlier it would have been a lament. I actually began writing this at university:

"As I write a portion of this, I sit in a cafe, nearly desperate to start a conversation with someone. But what separates me? Difference in age (I, being some years their senior), culture, appearance?"( August 2011)

And though I no longer write about it at length, I would be a liar to say that it is not what I feel at times. I preach at churches and I visit churches, all the while missing the life I have left behind. I miss the unity amongst fellow believers I once enjoyed. But in the midst of it all,  I have seen the hands of God beginning to bring about great and unexpected things. I believe greater unity amongst His people will be one of His soon completed tasks, even though it may not always seem that. No matter what there is always hope.

C.S. Lewis so eloquently put it this way:

"Compared with the development of man on this planet, the diffusion of Christianity over the human race seems to go like a flash of lightning--for two thousand years is almost nothing in the history of the universe. (Never forget that we are sill 'the early Christians'. The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy: we are still teething. The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age. But it has thought that very often before. Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man came to life again. In a sense--and I quite realize how frightfully unfair it must seem to them--that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started: and each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us.)"

The key there is "us". May we always remember it.

In Him,

Jean-Marc