Let us, then, go to Him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace He bore. Hebrews 13:13

Disgrace – noun – a person or thing regarded as shameful or unacceptable

Are you willing to be regarded as shameful or unacceptable by anyone — even everyone — but God? 

So, let’s go. It’s time to leave the soft, protective environment that Christians have spent 50 years and billions of dollars creating and go out into the world, “outside the camp,” where Christ has been all along. Time for us to join Him.

The most recent spiritual revolution (the Jesus Movement) actually started outside the camp. It started in the streets as a counterculture, but it soon worked its way inside. The commercial bonanza that its music created spilled over into its own subculture where it gathered social and political strength and took over the church. Suddenly it was the new “inside” bolstered by a multi-billion-dollar industry that helped it become its own institution. 

Bob Marlowe, singer/songwriter and member of the Salt Company, an early Jesus Movement folk group out of Hollywood Presbyterian Church, wrote a song about Jesus clearing the temple of the moneychangers who were making a commercial success out of His Father’s house. The song is a scathing rebuke of greed and exploitation, and it ends, quite bluntly, with: “Jesus, He came on through here today and asked everyone to leave.”

It’s time to go. Our discussions this week have been prophetic and significant. While much of the industry is celebrating a 50-year history (The Jesus People Oral History project at the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, and its resulting conference this weekend at Biola University, and the new “Jesus Music” movie), it is time to close the book on the Jesus Movement and go meet Christ outside the camp. If God is going to do something new in the world, it won’t be inside. It will be out; and it will have nothing to do with the Christian subculture, Christian music, CCM, politics, or religion. It will be outside of everything Christian, and it will be entirely new.*

You can avoid disgrace in the Christian subculture or the church; the disgrace is outside. Are you ready to bear the disgrace Christ bore? Because it is through His disgrace and ours that we come to know grace, and finally, grace turned outward.

*[For more on this, be sure and listen to our interview with Paul Clark. And listen through to the end because that is where he gets prophetic. You really need to hear this.]