Embracing Compassion and Change in a Diverse World

[inspiring, upbeat music]

I'm at a particular age now where for the last 15 years, I've made the exact same New Year's resolution. That's how old I am. I made the exact same resolution, which is to lose a little bit of weight and get a little more fit. And I make it every year 'cause I don't lose a little bit of weight and I don't get a little more fit.

But last year, in 2016, I said I'm gonna take this very seriously and I really want to lose a little bit of weight and get a little more fit. And like any professors, we research. So I go online and I research what is the best way to lose weight and get fit in American society today.

And I found out it's something called CrossFit. Have you heard about this? CrossFit? Yeah, P90X, another name for it. So I read up on this thing and the philosophy behind CrossFit and why it's so effective is that it applies a concept called muscle confusion. I love that concept 'cause that's been my approach to exercise my entire life. [audience laughter]

Which is for months and months I don't go to the gym, and when I go to the gym, my muscles are really confused why we're there. [audience laughter] So it turns out that a little bit of confusion is actually not a bad thing. That sometimes when things are disrupted, that actually could lead to growth and health.

And I was thinking about that in our spiritual lives. That sometimes we need a little bit of disruption, confusion, if we're going to grow in our spiritual lives. I say this because about a year ago, in 2015, my commentary on the Book of Lamentations came out. I spent five years working on this book. My wife makes fun of me, "You spent five years, you're gonna sell about five copies, 'cause nobody wants a book on Lamentations, come on. Y'know why didn't you write something about Romans or Ephesians, who cares about Lamentations?"

Well, it turns out that people really don't care about Lamentations. [laughs] [audience laughter] If my book sales are any evidence. So, people, excuse me. [laughs] [audience laughter] Lamentations is not a popular book of the Bible.

How many have ever heard entire sermon series on the Book of Lamentations? Yep, that's about right, two hands, that's right. God bless you for those who have heard sermon series. Generally speaking, it's not a book we teach on, it's not sermons that we hear, and get this, it's the theme of lament, that's a key part of Lamentations, those themes are absent in our worship life.

And we don't engage lament in our worship life. So a study was done by Denise Hopkins, she's an Old Testament scholar at Wesley Seminary, and she was looking through the Psalms and she realized that in her tradition, she comes from more the liturgical traditions, so these would be the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, Anglican Episcopalian, and Methodist, who were kinda guided by these books that say at this day you're gonna preach on this passage, and read this psalm and sing this hymn.

So there are strict guidelines in liturgy for these liturgical churches. What Denise Hopkins found was that when churches got to passages about lament, suffering, and struggle, they just kinda glossed over them, they skipped 'em. They didn't sing those hymns that were a little more depressing. They didn't read the psalms that were a little more like lament and suffering psalms. They just skipped over it.

Another study was done by Glenn Pemberton, and he looked at more traditional services that use the hymnal. And when he looked at the hymnal, he said, if you look at the psalms in our Bible, which was kind of the liturgy and worship life of Israel, he says that of the 150 psalms, 60% of our psalms are about celebration, victory, good things happening, celebrating good things.

But 40% of our psalms are psalms about suffering, pain, struggle, lament. And what he noted is if you look at a typical Baptist or Presbyterian hymnal, 85% of our hymnal are psalms about, hymns about, celebration, victory, triumph. And only 15% of our hymnal talks about suffering, and pain, and lament.

So I took that same idea and I applied it to something called CCLI. Any of you know what CCLI is? Anytime you sing a contemporary worship song that gets projected onto the screen, you're supposed to say this is by CCLI permission. So you're supposed to, every month or so, if you're at a church or even at a Christian college that sings these worship songs, you let them know what songs you sang.

So that the person who wrote that song gets their wings, I don't know what they get but they must like, 15 cents they get for every time you sing that song, something like that. But anyway, they keep a record. Because everybody reports these are the contemporary worship songs that we sang on Sunday.

And they keep a list actually, so every year in August, they publish a list of the top 100 most popular contemporary worship songs that are sung in American churches and Christian gatherings. So how many of you say just like in the Bible, that of the top 100 worship songs, contemporary worship songs, 60, 40% of our contemporary worship songs are songs about lament and suffering, raise your hand.

Oh, 25% of our songs are about, how about 15%, do I hear 10%? I went through every lyric, I went through every song title, and found that of the top 100 most popular contemporary worship songs, five, maybe 10 would be considered songs of lament and suffering. And I'm using the word lament as generously as possible.

The song starts out, "I cry out, oh thank God, a lament song," [audience laughter] the rest of it is "I cry out for joy," no, I still have to count it, this is such a pathetic low number of lament songs.

So whether you are from the liturgical tradition, or from the hymns tradition, or from the contemporary worship tradition, the one common denominator in almost every expression of worship, and I'm gonna get to one of the exceptions to this in a little while, but one of the common denominators in expressions of worship in the United States, is that we avoid lament.

We want to get to stories and songs and narratives about success, and victory, and triumph, and we don't want to hear about suffering and pain. And that's why I want to direct us as we talk about being Repairers of the Breach, we have to know what that breach is. We have to know that there is indeed a legitimate and important reason why we have to lament.

So we're gonna look at the Book of Lamentations. If you have your Bibles or your phones available, you can turn to the Book of Lamentations. You can find out for maybe the first time where it is. It's right after the Book of Jeremiah. So you can look kind of in the middle of your Bible and the Book of Lamentations, if you got a phone you can just type in Lamentations.

So Lamentations chapter one reads like this: "How deserted lies the city once so full of people! How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations. She who was a queen among the provinces has now become a slave."

So this is a reminder of what Israel had once experienced. They were once a great nation, once a city filled with people, this is talking about Jerusalem. Some of you know the story of Israel under King David and King Solomon, Israel becomes essentially a superpower. David's a great military leader, Solomon's a great economic leader. At the end of their reign, Israel's one of the richest and most powerful nations in the ancient world at that time.

But you also know if you read through your Bible, that the rest of the story is not as good. So we find out that the following kings, and the kings that followed after David and Solomon were not as godly, were following idols and worshiping false gods, and disobedience to God, and so they end up splitting the nation first of all, to the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom, but also a slow deterioration of godliness and holiness among God's people.

So that's why it says she was once a queen among the provinces in verse one but has now become a slave. Verse two: "Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are on her cheeks. Among all her lovers there is no one to comfort her. All her friends have betrayed her, they have become her enemies."

And this is a description of Israel. A once great nation now fallen from those heights. The northern kingdom has been wiped out, the southern kingdom has been wiped out, and the only thing left of this once great nation was the capital city of Jerusalem.

And what we encountered in Lamentations chapter one, verse three is that reality that now even Jerusalem has fallen. The Babylonians have come, laid siege to the capital city, and there's nothing left of this once great city.

"After affliction and harsh labor, Judah has gone into exile. She dwells among the nations, she finds no resting place. All who pursue her have overtaken her in the midst of her distress."

So, picture this scenario. Jerusalem, once a great city, heavenly city, city of David, city of God's peace, all of these good things, and now they have been completely devastated. The Babylonians that came were brutal conquerors. They tore down the wall, they tore down the temple, they took all the gold, silver, precious metals out of the temple and looted it. They wanted to make sure that Jerusalem could never rise up again.

So they burned the fields, their crops, but not only burned them, salted the fields. So that a land once flowing with milk and honey has now become a barren desert. And they wanted to make sure that those who were in Jerusalem could never ever rebuild that city.

So what did they do? And you know this story, they took the prophets, the priests, the kings, the most able-bodied, the intelligentsia, those who could read or write, they took all of the people they said could potentially rebuild Jerusalem and took 'em and sent 'em away into exile.

And of course, that's where we encountered the story of Daniel and his friends, because they're among those who are literate and potentially able-bodied men who could rebuild the city. So who's left in Jerusalem? The widows, the orphans, the lame, the crippled, the blind, the sick, and the infirmed. They're the only ones that are left in Jerusalem.

So now here is this moment in Israel's history, where God's people are probably and actually unquestionably, at the lowest point in their history. They really can't get any lower. They've lost their homeland, they've lost their capital, all the people that they think could rebuild society have been taken away, and the only ones left are the most marginalized, the most suffering of that society.

Now into this reality, there are actually three potential responses to what's happening. We're gonna cover the first two today, and then we're gonna cover the third one tomorrow. The three potential responses, the first two are run away and hide, and give up. You've lost, your homeland is done, you're in exile, so one option is to say we give up, we're gonna run away and hide.

The second option is, well if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. So we lost to the Babylonians, so let's become like the Babylonians. Let's give in. So the first two options, which of course are negative options, are either one, give up, or two, give in.

And Jeremiah writes a letter to the exiles saying, those are not viable options for the people of God. Jeremiah chapter 29, a verse that you might be familiar with. This is what the Lord Almighty says, to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.

So Jeremiah writes a letter to the exiles in Babylon. "I want you to build houses and settle down, plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry, have sons and daughters, find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there, do not decrease."

What he's saying is even though you are in Babylon, you still need to live your lives. You still need to do what it means to be called the people of God. And this is the kicker. Jeremiah chapter 29, verse seven, many of you are familiar with this passage.

"Also seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile; pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."

Now look at that and highlight. Seek the peace. 99.9% of the time in the Old Testament, when you see the phrase seek the peace, what city are you supposed to seek the peace of? Bible quiz, seek the peace of? Okay, half of you failed that Bible quiz. Go back to your schools and learn this passage.

In 99.9% of the time in the Bible it says, seek the peace of Jerusalem, and that makes perfect sense. Jerusalem is the heavenly city, it's the city of David, the capital of the promised land, of course you seek the peace of Jerusalem.

This passage is one of the rare exceptions where you don't seek the peace of Jerusalem, but you seek the peace of Babylon. And it makes no sense to the chosen people of God. Jerusalem, of course, David's city, heavenly city, capital of Israel, the promised land, but Babylon? Babylon is Las Vegas, LA, and New York rolled into one.

You cannot get more sinful than Babylon. Babylon is the symbol of everything that is wrong with the world. It is the exact opposite of Jerusalem, and yet in this passage, Jeremiah is said, by the word of the Lord, you are to seek the peace not of Jerusalem, but seek the peace of Babylon, the center of sinfulness and brokenness and all that is wrong with the world.

Why? Because as followers of God, as followers of Jesus, as the people of God, we never ever ever have the option of giving up. That should never ever be in our vocabulary. Even God says you, in the midst of the most wicked city imaginable, surrounded by the most wicked people imaginable, even then you are still to seek the peace of God.

Even then, even though everything around you is changing, and everything around you is falling apart, you as God's people, we do not ever ever ever have the option of running away and hiding and giving up.

Now I raise this because American church history teaches us that we have not done a good job of living into Jeremiah 29, verse seven. That we have often actually, when changes and challenges come up, we have often run away and hid. Rather than being the people of God in the broken circumstances of the world around us. And we don't have that option of running away.

But that is what we've done. So let me give you a little bit of kind of a quick history lesson here. In the 17th century, when America's being formed as a colony, then eventually the United States, we see that the people who are coming from Europe, the colonizers from Europe, the conquerors from Europe, the settlers from Europe, they viewed the new world, which really was not a new world, but they viewed the continent of North America as the promised land, given to the people of God.

And they developed a whole dysfunctional theology around it. We are God's chosen people, we've come to the new world, to build a new civilization. And so the image that's often given is of the first governor of Massachusetts. Winthrop, he gives a sermon in the Massachusetts Bay overlooking the future city of Boston.

And he says, "I see in the new world a city set on a hill." A city set on a hill. And the expectation was that these places in urban centers and cities in the new world are gonna be places where the gospel goes forth. The light of Christ is gonna go forth, and so he declares Boston will be a city set on a hill.

Now, Boston actually takes that seriously. And so one of the major streets in the city of Boston is Beacon Street. And one of the most important neighborhoods in the city of Boston is Beacon Hill. It's the idea that these new world cities like Boston and Philadelphia, they're gonna be the centers of light, and life, and the gospel is going to go forth.

And that narrative, by the way, holds from the 17th, 18th, and the 19th century, but it begins to change in the latter half of the 19th century and two major historical events occur.

The first is up there, the first major event is the influx of European and southern immigrants into these urban centers. So when these cities were filled with white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, these cities were Jerusalem. They were Zion, they were cities set on a hill.

But when these eastern and southern Europeans started coming in, wait a minute now, these cities aren't as holy as we thought they once were. Why? Because southern Europeans were Italian Catholics. And eastern Europeans were Slavic Orthodox Christians or Polish Jews.

So now you get these non-Protestant folks in your city, and the cities are no longer cities set on a hill, they now become Babylon. They are no longer Jerusalems, they are now Babylons. This is the work of Robert Orsi, I love this language, or I'm actually disgusted by it but it's kind of funny.

The way they describe these cities once seen as Jerusalem and Zion, now they describe them as caves of rum and Romanism. That's how they're described in the city because these eastern and southern Europeans have showed up in these urban centers.

Now, one of the movies that somebody told me you have to watch, you write about racial reconciliation, you write about race issues, you've gotta watch The Gangs of New York. It's about a race war in New York. I got all excited, "Oh cool, a race war in New York, gotta see this."

So I get it on DVD, how many of you have seen The Gangs of New York? Okay, so I get it on DVD and I put it in, and I'm watching this movie and I said, "How is this a race war?" The leader of one gang is Daniel-Day Lewis, the whitest guy in Hollywood, and the opposition gang is Leonardo DiCaprio, the second whitest guy in Hollywood. [audience laughter]

And how is this a race war? Well, it turns out that one gang represented the older immigrants, kind of the Protestant, white Anglo-Saxon immigrants, and then the new gang represented the non-Protestant, eastern and southern European gangs. And they literally would fight over turf in these urban centers.

So the cities, because they have now become caves of rum and Romanism, are now places that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants no longer feel comfortable. Now there's another factor, maybe even a bigger factor. Is the influx of not only of eastern Europeans but, as you see here, the great migration of African Americans.

So post-Civil War, after the Emancipation Proclamation, 80 to 90% of African Americans live in the Mississippi delta, in the south. That group converts to Christianity in massive numbers. It is unquestionably, as someone who studies Evangelism, the most significant evangelistic effort ever in US history.

Forget about, Billy Graham's awesome, but he didn't have the effectiveness of the African American churches post-Civil War. Saddleback, Willow Creek, great great churches, but they have very little effectiveness compared to the conversion of African Americans.

It's hard to track the numbers, but it's believed that anywhere from 70 to 85% of African Americans commit their life to Christ and join a church within one generation of the Emancipation Proclamation. Now a lot of that is they already were Christian, but now with freedom they can join churches.

And so you have this incredible community of believers. Fired up Christians who are joining Baptist churches, and Methodist churches, and Pentecostal churches. There's a massive revival in the Mississippi delta because African Americans are converting to Christianity in huge numbers.

But they can't stand the south. You're not going back on the plantation to work, you try to start these communities, and some of you know the story, the Klan comes in and burns down these towns, so they start looking towards the north and the east coast and even to the west coast, to say we need to get out of the deep south.

Where do we go? And they start moving in large numbers, the great migration towards Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and also Los Angeles. So you see this great migration of African Americans, excuse me, from the south to the north.

Now one thing to note, as I said earlier, these are not non-Christians. These are deeply committed, fired up, evangelical, church planting, revivalistic Christians. In fact, when the African American moves into these urban centers, the urban centers are revived with the gospel because they start planting churches all over the place.

But what happens to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who see the African American community move in? This is where we see the phenomenon of white flight. So, this has nothing to do with are they of a different religion? Are they of a different faith 'cause these are fired up Christians moving into these urban centers.

One story on this, the very first megachurch in the US was not Willow Creek or Saddleback, they're not even close. The very first megachurches were on the south side of Chicago, were in Detroit, were even in Buffalo where African Americans would move in large numbers to these urban centers.

In Detroit, there was a church at the turn of the century that had 10,000 people in it, an African American church. 10,000 people at the turn of the century. Detroit wasn't even that large back then, and yet you had 10,000 at a church in Detroit. There were several churches, there were several thousand people on the south side of Chicago.

And they became influential, dynamic, revivalistic, evangelical churches on the south side of Chicago. There's a story of one church, it was such a powerful community and fired up spiritual community that they had this massive building on the south side of Chicago.

And the city wanted to build an expressway, and they said we have to tear down your building, eminent domain, we're gonna tear down that black church, and then build you a new building four blocks away. The pastor, because he had such a large constituency in his church and they were voting, said you're not moving our building, you're not tearing down God's house.

So the city, and it's a massive building, about the size of this building, they literally dug the building up out of the ground, put 'em on rollers, and moved the entire building four blocks west of where they were, and then they built the highway. That's how influential and powerful these dynamic, Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist churches that were moving into Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia.

But, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants said, but our streets are not as safe as they were. Our schools are not as good as they used to be. Our housing prices are going to drop. And that led to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant flight out of the city and moving to the suburbs.

This is one of the most dramatic places where we see the church, instead of saying the change is occurring, what can we do to be a part of the good work of God? Saying instead, let's run away and hide in our suburbs.

That's actually why a lot of Christian colleges are not in urban centers. They were Christian colleges following the population or vice versa. So you had Christian colleges not in urban centers but leaving urban centers to move into Wheaton, uh, other parts of the city. [audience laughter] Just kidding, just kidding.

Now, one of the ways we can evaluate this, by the way, is that these people who moved, the white flight from the city to the suburbs, they start building new church buildings. So this is the work of Winthrop Hudson, who notes that in 1945, 26 million dollars was spent in the entire US on new church buildings.

And this is actually adjusted for time periods. [coughs] Excuse me. Which means that half the money that costs one building in your campus to go up is what was spent in the entire US on new church buildings. So think about it, just 26 million dollars spent, you know that some of these building projects, not only at the Christian schools but at big churches, 26 million dollars is just one building, half of one building.

In the entire US, 26 million dollars is spent. 15 years later, in the year 1960, the amount spent on new buildings is one billion dollars. In 15 years. Think about that exponential jump from just 26 million spent on new buildings to one billion dollars spent on new buildings. Why? Because the whites had left urban centers and had moved to the suburbs and started building churches in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and into the 70s.

New buildings start springing up in these suburban communities. Now what I notice is that when I look at the architecture of churches that were built in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, many of the churches look like this.

Now you see this a lot in the Midwest, some in California, but if your church building was built in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, this is oftentimes what the sanctuary would look like. How many of you have seen church buildings that look like this, a slanted roof, a little bit of an arch on the side, very common form of architecture.

In the late 70s, I was at a church that had just built this building that looked like this. I was about 10 years old, 11 years old, and I saw this building and I said, "This is a really stupid idea. This is a really bad design." As a 10-year-old, I knew this is a bad design.

It was the middle of January when we were dedicating this building, we're in a cold weather state, the heating vents are on the floor, where does all that wonderful hot air go? Right up into the rafters. You literally have the frozen chosen sitting on the floor, [audience laughter] and you got all this wonderful hot air up there, and of course you have to build ceiling fans to push down the warm air, and then charismatics can't come worship with you, 'cause they keep hitting their hands on the ceiling fans. [audience laughter]

So you end up with a form of architecture that just makes no sense whatsoever. This is a stupid, stupid idea and I knew this as an 11-year-old sitting in a church building and I'm saying, "Whose stupid idea was this to build this building like this?"

The senior pastor gets up and he starts saying, "It was my idea to build the church building to look like this," and he said, "I want you to imagine this entire church building turned upside down."

And what are you looking at? You're looking at the bottom of a really big boat. Now where in the Bible do you read about a really, really big boat? Yeah, Noah's ark. Noah's ark, of course that's where you read about. [laughs] A really big boat.

Now think with me about the symbolism and the theological significance of saying your church, thank you very much, is Noah's ark. What do you say to the world when you say your church is Noah's ark? We don't care if the world gets destroyed, in fact we like it that the world has been damned and judged and destroyed, we are, as long as we're safe, in Noah's ark we're okay.

And now we're gonna say we're gonna hang out in Noah's ark. In fact, what we're gonna do on Noah's ark is build a little Christian community that looks like the world out there. So if the world has secular art, we will have our Christian art. If the world has secular music, we will have mediocre Christian music. [audience laughter]

If the world has secular romance novels, we'll have Christian romance novels, secular coloring books, Christian coloring books, secular underwear, Christian underwear, you name it, we're gonna build a little Christianized version of it right here on Noah's ark.

Now, how do you do evangelism out of Noah's ark? Really badly, actually, really poorly. Here's how it works in evangelizing out of Noah's ark: Uncle Joe floats by. Of course you love Uncle Joe, he's one of you. He's family, so you take a little lifesaver, you throw it out, and you bring Uncle Joe onto the ark, of course you love Uncle Joe.

You're gonna fit right in, Joe. But then, a neighbor of yours floats by and you pause for a moment because you lent him your mower two weeks ago and he hasn't given it back, but maybe more importantly, we're not sure he's gonna fit on this ark.

On our ark, we like to clap one three and we know he likes to clap two four, so that's gonna be a real problem here, 'cause he's gonna throw us off in our clapping pattern, it's just not gonna work. We might have a lot of mayonnaise, we didn't bring any Sriracha sauce, we know this guy likes Sriracha sauce, and we just have one bottle, it's gonna be gone in a week, he's just not gonna fit in on our ark.

We do things a certain way, we act a certain way, we got a certain culture going on here, he's just not gonna fit in our ark, we're just gonna hope that there's another ark down the street that's more for his kind of people.

And that led to some extreme levels of segregation. Because we wanted to hide out in Noah's ark with people and with friends and with relatives that are just like us. So at a moment the world is changing, the moment that society is changing, and cities are changing, instead of the people of God saying we are going to be a part of God's move, the revival that he's bringing to the city, we're gonna be a part of it, instead the church actually ran away and hid.

Now I raise this because this is not a phenomenon simply from decades and decades ago. In fact, we're seeing a repetition of that phenomenon in the 21st century. And we're seeing it in the fear and anxiety over immigration.

And one of the most significant changes over the last 40 years is immigration and the way it's changed American society. In 1965, there was a change in the immigration laws in America. Now what people don't understand is it was not, let's just throw open the doors and let anybody and everybody come in, that's not what happened.

What happened was that there was a certain distribution of the number of immigrants, x number of immigrants, and the next year it went from 200,000 to 210,000, but the distribution actually changed. So it wasn't all from Europe and Canada, now you get immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

And so that changed the face of immigration and the way it changed in 1965 is that there were a series of racist laws before 1965. The first of these was called the Chinese Exclusion Act. Can anybody guess what the Chinese Exclusion Act did? [audience laughter] Yes, it excluded Chinese people.

They really weren't playing games here. They called the Muslim ban, the Muslim ban. It's the Chinese Exclusion Act, we're trying to exclude Chinese people, no games here, they just were honest about it and they had a whole series of laws that says, we don't want certain types of people, particularly from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

And so what it did was it had immigration almost exclusively from Europe. 1965 gets rid of all those racist laws and so now we wanna be open. Now again, the number of immigrants does not change much. There still is an x number of immigrants we take every year, it increases ever so slightly.

But we didn't just say let's let everybody in, we actually said we're gonna let x number of people in, but now we're gonna allow more people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. So that from 1965, we do get a slow and steady stream of non-white immigrants into the United States over the last 50 plus years.

So that by 2008, a third of the US population is now of non-European descent. Here's the major threshold that most of us need to think about. In 2011, six years ago already, in 2011, half the births in the United States were now of non-European descent.

That's a major, major factor because that is not going below 50% ever again. And so the corresponding number, 2015, five years later, the incoming kindergarten class is not European majority. Very simple logic. You've got kids born, five years later when they go to kindergarten, you're gonna have those kids go to kindergarten.

So now you've got 2011, the birthrate crosses that 50% threshold, five years later the incoming class it passes that threshold, and by 2023, because of the rising birthrates, you're gonna have half the children in the United States be of non-European descent.

And this is what I say to Christian colleges. If by 2023, your incoming class is not half of non-European descent, you're probably not gonna survive as an institution past 2023. [audience clapping] Because that is the inevitability of it, and by 2042, half of all Americans are gonna be of non-European descent.

These are census data and census projections. In other words, the browning of America, the diversity of America, is not tied to immigration anymore. Here's a study that was done by the Pew Foundation, they're not a liberal group, it's a Christian conservative group, they said from 2009 to 2014, in a five-year period, the net immigration from Mexico was negative.

The net immigration from Mexico was negative 140,000 Mexican immigrants. Why? Do you remember the whole undocumented immigration issue came up? The issue was, well we've got 12 million illegal aliens in the United States, and they said that 15 years ago, and what do they still say? We've got 12 million immigrants in the United States.

So the net gain of immigrants is actually below zero. So in that five-year time period, more Mexican immigrants were going back to Mexico than were coming into the United States. This is the Pew Foundation research.

So what this means is the browning of America, the changing diversity and makeup of American society, is not due to immigration, it is due to birth rates. So forget the wall, let's build a dome. [audience cheers]

We'll get Canada to pay for that dome, we don't need a wall, we need a dome. We will hermetically seal the United States of America. Guess what? It will not change those numbers one bit. Because diversity is based on birth rates, not on immigration.

So when I say that to different groups, it's like now you still wanna pay 30 billion for a wall? Because this is not going to change the diversity of America. It's a done deal, people, deal with it. We are dealing with incredible diversity that is going to be the reality going forward.

>> Audience Member: Woohoo!

So what we need to do then is to say are we going to run away and hide from these changes, or are we going to see God in the midst of these changes? So I'll give you an example of this. I'm at an age when I remember 30 years ago when I was in college, and I was in seminary, I went to a lot of missions conferences.

They had them everywhere and we were praying for several decades for missions. And our primary emphasis on prayer was the communist block nations. Some of you who are close to my age remember going to conferences and hearing about how can we reach the gospel in communist China? How can we bring the gospel into the Soviet Union and to the eastern block nations?

We were praying for the fall of Communism and that the gospel can go into these places. And guess what? Those prayers from 30 years ago, they got answered. They got answered. My senior year in seminary, my missions professor was eastern European.

And right now, according to the latest numbers, and there's several different numbers on this, China might be the most Christian nation in the world right now in terms of raw numbers. So the state numbers is that China has 30 million Christians, that's just the state numbers that go to the official state church.

If you count, and it's hard to do this, if you count those in the house church movement in China, that number can potentially skyrocket up to 240, 250 million Christians in China. Now in the US we have 320 million people.

And so if we even say generously half of our population is Christian, even say 75% of our population is Christian, that doesn't even come close or it's still second place to the number of Christians in China. So guess what? God answered our prayers.

The gospel is going into places like China, eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. But guess what happened? Once those prayers were answered about 15 years ago, we started switching our prayer towards another people group and that group was the Muslim world. The Muslim world.

And we started having prayer meetings and conferences, and you go and look at all the books that have been written in the last 20 years, "Lord help us reach the Muslim community, help us reach these nations where there's Islam," and we started praying for these communities.

That's why it is so ridiculous for evangelical Christians to say we don't want 20,000 refugees. That makes no sense! [audience applause] That makes no sense. We can't even pretend we're a Christian nation anymore because the one way we can be a Christian nation is to show compassion for the alien and refugee among us.

Let's not even pretend we're a Christian nation anymore. [audience applause] That's a lie, that's a falsehood. If we took those 20,000 individuals who want to come into the US as refugees, and every church, five churches adopted one, this could be the most incredible evangelistic effort in American history.

Where we can convert 20,000 to the gospel of Jesus Christ if we would only show a little bit more compassion and just stop thinking about ourselves for one second.

>> Audience: Amen!

The world is changing, yes. There are challenges, yes. We never ever ever have the option of running away and hiding. That is not within the realm of possibility for us.

So my challenge to you, and we're gonna talk more about Jeremiah tomorrow night, my challenge to you is when the world changes, when your colleges change, when your neighborhoods change, when the makeup of your classes begin to change, and your schools begin to change, will you say thanks be to God and be part of the move of God, or will you run away and hide?

I hope Christian colleges actually might be the place that demonstrates that we want to be part of the move of God rather than shutting those doors.

[uplifting, upbeat music]

>> Announcer: Biola University prepares Christians to think biblically about everything from science to business to education and the arts. Learn more at biola.edu.