Last year, David Platt who is the pastor of The Church at Brook Hills, a 4000 member SBC Church in Birmingham, AL, wrote a book called “Radical” that has really caused alot of discussion in the Christian community. The book is a challenge to American Christians who have unwittingly baptized the “American Dream” and called it Christianity. He calls for the church to return to the Real “Radical” Gospel of Jesus Christ which is found in the New Testament in places like Mark 8:34 -“Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.

     Part of that DENYING is to give up our consumerism and material dreams and give away our possessions in order to help the poor who are near us in our community and also those who are hurting around the world. In chapter 6 of the book, David Platt challenges us to consider the fact that “Today more than a billion people in the world live and die in desperate poverty. They attempt to survive on less than a dollar per day. Close to 2 billion others live on less than $2 per day. That’s nearly half of the world struggling today to find food, water, and shelter with the same amount of money I spend on french fries for lunch.”

     Then Platt moves on to the story of Lazarus and the Rich man (Luke 16) and continues “I am much like the rich man and the church I lead looks a lot like him too. Every Sunday we gather in a multimillion-dollar building with millions of dollars in vehicles parked outside. We leave worship to spend thousands of dollars on lunch before returning to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of homes. We live in luxury! … My goal is simply to help open our eyes to realities in the world that we would rather ignore and to call us to look at those realities through the eyes of the One who “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9).”

     Now that thousands of copies of this book are in circulation – it is causing a stir in churches. I’ve already been called by a church member concerned about their young pastor wanting to cut repairs, maintenance, improvements, and other programs from their church in order to send money to the poor around the world. Baptist conventions are under pressure to cut local missions so that more can be sent to international missions.

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