The Beat-Attitudes

eric posted on July 15, 2009

Marlon Hall is the cultural architect and spiritual leader of the Awakenings Movement, a grassroots church community of social visionaries who worship in and serve out of coffee shops, clubs and bars in Houston, Nairobi, and Detroit.

I’m a leader in a church designed to reach folks on the fringe. We discover sacred potential in secular places by worshiping and doing life in public all over the inner-city of Houston. In fact, during the week we work out of a Muslim coffee shop where we do our coaching, hold meetings, and host discussion communities and Bible studies.

It sounds cool, but it’s hard. This approach to living out the Great Commission makes us open to public criticism and persecution daily. Our theme verse could easily come from The Beatitudes, where Matthew 5:10 says: “Blessed are those who are beat up, kicked, and thumped for righteousness, because the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.” I like to call this verse on of the “Beat-Attitudes” because we are constantly emotionally and mentally beaten.

For instance, one day I was in the coffee shop talking to Thurman “T” Brown—an agnostic filmmaker who had “beaten” me often and who, I assumed, was only using my faith as a reference for future film projects about “misguided” Christians—when an unfamiliar patron began a conversation with us, saying she’d heard I was a “down-to-earth prophet and priest of the coffee shop” and needed to talk.

I pretended to be hard of hearing and asked, “Could you say that again?” (Just to be sure T heard her too.) She then stated that what we were doing for Christ in the shop was working.

Finally, our hard work in the trenches of grassroots ministry was paying off! Like an inner-city Enoch, I had finally ascended to heavenly places. In that moment I was practically standing to the right of Moses, who was to the right of Christ, who is seated at the right of God the Father. I was the man, next to the man, next to The Man.

With a soft, sweet voice she said, “I need your help.”

I wanted to respond like an astute urban Pope with a, “Yes, my child”, but I kept my cool. “Yeah, what’s up?”

Then out of no where, in a volume more elevated, she asked, “How does it feel to propagate a white man’s copy-cat religion that promotes drinking blood every first Sunday?”

At first, I was speechless. Then I realized this was my weekly tax for public life ministry. After a few doctrinal references, curse words and passionate arm-flailing gestures (not as many on my part) I soon realized there was nothing casual about this conversation, and I felt like a failure.

To this woman, I was just the man, next to the man, next to the other culturally irrelevant, simple-minded pastors she’d experienced all her life. To her, I—as well as my message—lacked authenticity.

Even though I was hurt, those Beat-Attitudes kicked in. I stopped to process her challenge differently. Like a shopper who thumps a cantaloupe and then listens to test its integrity; she was thumping me to hear God’s freedom resound in my heart. This wonderful woman was seeking to authenticate Christ’s presence in the world from her seat in that coffee shop and God had chosen me to help her do it. I was the melon in the garden of God’s grace that she was thumping, to test His integrity. What an honor it should have been to be the resonant vibration of God’s power in the face of persecution.

As she shared her closing statements, I was awakened to the fact that by living out the Beat-Attitudes, I get to see real love, freedom and truth flow through me. And then, just as I was about to stand and declare that I was honored to be a member of a mystic tribe that lives in a promised land of freedom which flows with emotional milk and mental honey, guess who stood up for me?

T.

Thurman T. Brown stood and boldly stated, “Calm down, sis. This dude is the real deal.” He went on to say that what he’d seen in our weekly discussion community and our very presence in the community represented something true, something real.

I suddenly saw that this dude who’d made a habit of thumping me himself in that same coffee shop, just authenticated Christ in that precious moment.

To this day T. and I still talk about life, love and film over a cup of coffee like we always have, but lately, for me, our conversations seem to be about so much more. 

Written by Marlon R. Hall