With Love from the Streets.: Encouraging the Church to Carefully Consider What We've Come to Believe

By Nate Bull

With Love from the Streets is a confessional about the process of repentance from a model of church that has been learned all over America. Challenging and sometimes disturbing, this love letter to believers comes from Nate Bulls years as a domestic street missionary and asks many questions about what the church in the west has come to believe and why.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Dec 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490856131

Nate Bull

As the director and co-founder of Vanguard Street Ministries, Nate Bull has been leading inner-city street ministry efforts around the world since 1999. A graduate of Western Theological Seminary, Nate is also an ordained minister in the Reformed Church of America and has been preaching in churches since 2004. Nate has a passion for revival in the church of the west and for the church to remember its call to the lost, wherever they are to be found. He has a wife, two sons, two daughters and one granddaughter. Currently Nate lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with his family.

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Copyright © 2014 Nate Bull.

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All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-5611-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-5612-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-5613-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014918386

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/10/2014

Contents

Introduction

1 This Is My Friend

2 Sin Sucks

3 The Spirit Can Use Anyone Even A Pastor

4 Hidden Life in Giving of Yourself

5 The True Power of Prayer

6 The Lion, The Witch & The Kingdom of God

7 The First or Last Adam?

8 What’d You Say?

9 The Voices in My Head

10 Not So Free Will

11 God Is Your Provision

12 The Return of The King

13 Discipleship, Street Style (And of Course Jesus Style)

Introduction

Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

Acts 17:11

I am a street minister. More technically I am an urban missionary. I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church of America. This was a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand I learned many godly principles and saw godly men and women acting in ways that exemplified the best of Christian behavior. I also committed many Bible stories and Scriptures to memory during this time and discovered teachings that formed a foundation that I would later use in leading my family and the ministries God began through me.

I also accumulated some garbage because of this early exposure to church. I don’t want to go into this junk in detail, because I want to be careful with anything that sounds dishonoring and critical (especially because the Church is the Bride of Christ and I wouldn’t take well to people talking bad about my wife). What I will say is that at a very early age (11 or 12), in my heart, I left the church. What was the main reason? I saw a disparity between the God in my church and the God in my Bible.

The God in the Bible was exciting, mysterious and even dangerous. The God in my Bible was full of love (like my church declared), but that God was also able to part seas, calm storms, raise the dead, multiply food and cast out demons. The God in my church was nothing like this. I assumed one version had to be wrong and, even though I was only in elementary school, I decided that the God in the Bible had to be true and so I left the Church in heart only. When I was old enough to decide on my own I physically left the Church.

This decision got me into a lot of trouble, so if you’re reading this and identify in any way with what I was feeling and sensing, please don’t make the same mistake I did. Stay with the fellowship of believers or find some Christian fellowship somewhere because the world loves to chew up and spit out believers who are running from the Body of Christ. The decision to leave the Church led to having a child while I was a teenager, strained family relationships, and problems with addiction.

When I eventually came crawling back to the Lord I still had all these questions about the God I saw in my heart and the God I saw in the Church. Could He still raise the dead? Could He still calm storms with just a word? Could He still use people to slay giants and restore nations? If I was going to give my whole life to any god then that god should be able to do god-type things. My convictions told me that the Jesus of the Christians was where the answers were, but I still felt restless.

And then the Lord began to move. The first thing He did was put me in contact with people who were seeing the miraculous happen in their lives and ministries. This was like fresh manna from heaven and I couldn’t gobble up fast enough what I was learning. Secondly, my wife and I began to hold a Bible study in our home each Friday night.

In the beginning the Bible study was just Starr (my wife), myself and a few friends who were hungry like we were for the Living God. But after a while the group grew and we regularly had prayer meetings that went into the early morning and Bible studies where we poured over the Scriptures with an appetite that sometimes felt unquenchable. It was during this time that the Holy Spirit began to do some miraculous things. We had prayer after prayer miraculously answered and, for a period of time, every prayer request that we brought to the group was answered quickly.

It was also during this time that the Lord began to give us a pattern for how to strategically do street ministry with excellence. We were so excited that we ran out into the streets and began ministering to anyone and everyone we could find there. After some months of praying, planning and deliberating we came up with a way to implement this pattern and we began to make plans to unveil this in the streets. But the enemy had other ideas and, for various reasons, our group was scattered.

During this time I was teaching in the alternative schools in the Kalamazoo Public School system and I had also taken a job as a youth leader at Bethany Reformed Church. Street ministry became a regular part of what we did as a youth group and we even did street ministry events in Detroit, Holland, and Muskegon during this time. All the while, I was gathering information and techniques and testing theories we had while we were just a prayer group. This was a very formative time for my family and I and we learned many valuable lessons during this season of our lives.

After a while, we made the incredibly difficult decision to step out in faith and do the street ministry full time. We used the name Vanguard (which we already had in place from our time in the prayer group) because that meant the front line of an advancing army. I asked the leadership of a local church plant named the River if they would be willing to house the ministry and Vanguard Street Ministries was legally established (although we had been preaching in the streets since 1999).

We have done street ministry all over the place. We’ve done work in Detroit, Holland, Muskegon and Kalamazoo as already mentioned. We’ve also ministered in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Sierra Leone, Benton Harbor and Miami. During this time of formation I was putting personal theology to the test. For me, theology (our thoughts and talk about God) that was only on paper didn’t make much sense. For me, theology that was any good had to be practical and tested in the harvest field.

As the street ministry blossomed it wonderful to see all the different people cared for in the name of Jesus the Christ. If we told stories about all that we have seen and the miraculous things that have happened to us during these last years, this book would be too big to publish. For now it will be sufficient to say that we ministered to hundreds of people, all the while receiving ministry in every city. What I never realized was that the things that I was learning and experiencing would be valuable to the Body of Christ in a tangible way.

This is one of the main reasons I am writing this.

I have a holy jealousy for the Bride of Christ. It’s the prophetic part of me. It makes me angry to see the Church give its attention to anyone or anything else. Since I grew up in the Church I have a special place in my heart for those in the Body who, like me, sense that the something else they’re longing for has to be available somehow and some way. It is my hope that as you read through these testimonies and lessons I have learned you will be stirred up to search deeper and harder for an encounter with your Savior. I found out after years in the streets that this Jesus is actually better than His word. I’m confused about how that’s possible but it is truth.

So I’m writing to those who have struggled with their faith and long for something more. I’m writing to the Church that has been lulled to sleep by marketplace gospel techniques and church growth strategies. I’m writing so you will join me in crying out to the Lord for the Church in the West so that true repentance rings out and Jesus is lifted up in every arena we touch to the glory of God the Father.

I do hope you enjoy this, but whether you do or you don’t I have a request: Be as honorable as Bereans. In Acts 17:11 Luke wrote, Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. You might get excited with what you read. You may get angry at what you read. Whether you get angry or excited, be honorable enough to search the Scriptures to see if there is any truth to what I am proposing.

You may be able to hear in the above statement that some of the things you are getting ready to read may be hard to swallow. My theology looks somewhat different from the churches I grew up in. Please don’t be alarmed. The basics are the same and the essentials are unchanged. But I admit that the truths that I learned that led to miracles, signs and wonders, along with the lessons I learned about how to live by faith, I didn’t learn from people with a United States address. But is that so bad?

Think about this: The United States has seen the Church slowly lose influence and vitality over the last century. What was once a bastion of integrity and truth has slowly been compromised and diluted. If we’re honest with ourselves we are only receiving the fruit of what we have been planting. I question why are we not more open to challenges to our theology. If what we are doing now is producing the results we are getting, how is it possible that we are so closed minded to rechecking what it is we have come to believe?

As Marilynne Robinson said, We routinely disqualify testimony that would plead for extenuation. That is, we are so persuaded of the rightness of our judgment as to invalidate evidence that does not confirm us in it. Nothing that deserves to be called truth could ever be arrived at by such means.¹ I don’t know how to say that better.

So enjoy.

I hope that some of you have to stay up late wrestling with what has been written. At the time of this writing I am still fairly young and don’t intend to stop working in the streets, which means that there is a strong possibility that I’ll learn more, which means that there is a strong possibility that I’ll write more. This is what I’ve come to believe so far.

Lastly, I write this in an effort to honor my King, Jesus the Nazarene. Looking back over all these years it is very evident that He has been waiting around every corner in an effort to harvest me and then, through me, harvest others. I am continually amazed at what He can do. His love for the lost is astounding and His care for the whole world is stunning. If any of what I write can coax people to live more fully for Him or can persuade people into the harvest field I will be overwhelmed. I write because I am convinced that submission to Jesus Christ is the only way to live that will bear any fruit, and expanding the depth of that submission can only bring life and even that more abundantly.

As sincerely as I know how, N8.

1

This Is My Friend

Repentance precedes revival and we desperately need revival. What that means for us as American Christians is that we need to cry out to the Lord to show us where our ways don’t line up with God’s ways. Then we need to be willing to change (repent) and turn wholeheartedly to the more excellent ways the Holy Spirit shows us.

Our work in the streets has led us to a face-to-face encounter with one of those areas of repentance, producing revival in that part of our hearts. It has to do with friends.

Jesus was a friend of sinners. If you don’t realize how deep this is, take a moment to think about it. For a long time I have been thinking about Luke 7:33–34. Jesus had just finished affirming the ministry of John the Baptist and then turned to the crowd and said,

For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, He has a demon. The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and ‘sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by all her children.

Jesus questioned the discernment of the masses and exposed the rumors that were floating around. Some spread the story that John the Baptist had a demon. Others said Jesus was a drunk. Jesus said the way of wisdom is proved right by the fruit it produces. The wisdom that I have seen in this scripture, in connection with my time in the streets, is being a friend of sinners.

Being a friend is the hinge point of my experiences and an important part of the story in Luke. Webster’s defines a friend as one attached to another by affection or esteem.² To describe someone as your friend is pretty deep. It is much different than an acquaintance. A friend is more than someone who you know by name. It is someone to whom you are attached with affection. A friend is someone you spend time with on purpose and someone you can’t wait to call when you get that promotion, she says yes or _____________________ (you fill in the blank). When that new movie comes out you call your friends to set up a time to see it as soon as possible. When you’re going through a tough spot in life, your friend will come and sit with you, like Job’s friends did, and bear your pain and burdens with you. Friendship is an important thing.

Jesus became known as a friend of sinners.

Wisdom is proved right by her children.

Is there something we should learn from Jesus’ actions? I believe there is. But before we get more practical and move to my experiences in the streets, I want to propose something. In this particular area of friendship, I think we need to take the lead of children. Jesus was pretty specific in Matthew 18:3, when he told his disciples they needed to become like little children to enter the kingdom. Becoming like a child seemed important to excel in kingdom business.

To become like a child you need to transport yourself back to a playground some years ago when you were young enough for recess. Remember the kickball games and boys chasing girls? Remember the joy when the bell rang to go to recess? But something else happened to me, and maybe to you, on more than one occasion. It goes something like this.

You are on the playground, pretty much minding your own business, when another kid comes up to you and says, Hi, my name is Pedro (or Laquesha if it’s a girl).

You say, Hi.

Then the person