My friend Larry Marshall passed away last week, several months after being critically injured in a drilling accident. In his honor, I'm reposting this article I wrote about Larry and Cindy for the Nov. 2007 issue of Focus on the Family Magazine.
Mud and rock spew upward as the pneumatic drill carves a shaft through 80 feet of West African earth. Larry Marshall grins, wiping his forehead on the sleeve of a sweat-soaked polo shirt. “Looks like another four-shirt day,” he says over the din of the diesel rig.
The 56-year-old rancher is drilling his third well in as many weeks, this one in the outskirts of Monrovia, the impoverished capital of war-torn Liberia
Heather and I visited Larry last year and learned something about the new breed of evangelical whose faith is demonstrated by social action.
Cindy Marshall, immaculately dressed in a traditional Liberian gown, offers a bottle of water to her husband. Her pristine appearance belies the oppressive African heat and winds that fill the air with fine red dust.
“How’s it going?” she asks.
“I’m through the rock,” Larry says. “Should have water any minute.”
When finished, the well will provide clean water to a neighborhood of over 1,000 people. The existing hand-dug well had run dry, leaving residents to walk several miles for water, often infested with cholera. The couple has been in Liberia for two years, digging wells, building schools, and distributing sponsorship funds to over 150 children.
A Long Way from Rapid City
Larry and Cindy had been living in Rapid City, S.D., for eight years when they sold their 1,500-acre ranch and moved to Sierra Leone in 1980. They supported themselves from the sale of their land while raising rice, which was sold to African pastors at cost. Since then the pair has worked at building roads and planting churches in Africa, directing a men’s treatment program at Olive Branch Mission in Chicago, and distributing livestock in Mozambique.
The Marshalls represent a new strain of evangelicals who are committed to making a difference in society and around the world.
A New Kind of Evangelical
The recovery of global concern is gaining momentum in the North American church according to Jo Anne Lyon, executive director of World Hope International, a faith-based relief and development organization that operates in 31 countries. “I believe we are finally rediscovering a biblical sense of justice,” says Lyon, who notes that the majority of the health care in Africa is now provided by faith-based organizations. “There is a new wave of compassion sweeping the nation.”
This movement is especially prominent among younger Christians, who tend to see social justice as integral to faith. “To the students I teach, worldwide social action is just as much a part of being Christian as having personal devotions was to their parents,” according to Keith Drury, associate professor at Indiana Wesleyan University. “To them, social action is not an elective.”
From One to Many
The movement is driven in part by the greater value placed on community by many younger evangelicals, who see the work of God as transforming society as a whole rather than the individual alone. As a result, these believers place a greater emphasis on demonstrating God’s love through acts of compassion than on personal piety or traditional evangelism.
“My generation tends to be more aware that the good of the community ultimately leads to good for us personally,” says Jessica Petrencsik, a 33-year-old teacher serving an urban charter school in Albany, N.Y. “Ministry today is more about meeting people where they are and attending to their needs with the understanding that this witness will likely lead to a genuine thirst to know more about our God.”
Kingdom Bound
Christy Lipscomb was raised in a suburban megachurch. Yet after she and her husband, Adam, graduated from seminary in 2004, they moved to the inner city of Grand Rapids, Mich., to establish City Life, a multicultural congregation that ministers to the urban poor and recovering addicts. “We found Kingdom theology to be particularly inspiring as we began our work,” says Adam, “the knowledge that when God’s kingdom comes it will restore all creation.”
This recovery of Kingdom thinking has led to a growing emphasis on environmentalism among many evangelicals. Professor Richard Eckley ofHoughton College, explains, “We’re realizing that if people are to be ‘saved,’ that salvation must exist within the context of the world in which we live. God the Creator desires to redeem the Creation—all of it.”
‘Glocalization’
More than 1.2 million people obtained legal permanent residency in the United States in 2006, and nearly every metropolitan center contains a large immigrant population. This global-local reality causes many Christians to see global ministry not as a distinct arm of the church but as something all Christians should do.
“We’ve had a global missions pastor for years,” says Jim Garlow, senior pastor of Skyline Church in La Mesa, Calif., but we recently added a local missions pastor. We have to be both global and local when it comes to outreach.”
Alternative Values
“Younger Christians don’t have the baggage that many of their parents have regarding making a living,” according to Rich Avery, global outreach pastor at Kentwood Community Church in Kentwood, Mich. “They’d rather make their lives count for God.” Avery cites an upward trend in the number of younger Christians who take a gap year, 12 months devoted to a service project before entering college, as well as in the number of university students preparing to minister in remote and dangerous places like Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq.
Well Done
It is nearly 6:00 p.m. in Monrovia when Larry Marshall lowers a small electric pump into the new well to test the flow. A geyser of clear water erupts from the line. A group of Liberians has gathered. One of them calls out the beginning of an African song. Others answer the call, singing, clapping, and dancing. Larry grins again, his fourth shirt now drenched with sweat. “We could be here awhile,” he says. “The last time I dug a well, the people danced for twelve hours.”
When pressed, Larry and Cindy will tell of the difficulties of their work—the constant lack of funding, the scarcity of supplies, the challenge of recruiting local leaders. But noticeably absent from their conversation is any sense of regret over the life they left behind.
“I’d do it again,” Cindy says emphatically. “I know we seem different to some people, but God has given us the privilege to learn many good things from other cultures. Our lives have been changed—we’re not the same.”
Tomorrow, Larry will install a hand-pump on the new well. For now, he turns off the electric motor. The water stops flowing; the pump goes silent. Larry and Cindy sit for a moment, resisting the heat, covered with red dust, and drinking in the joyful sound of African voices.
All in all, not a bad day for two ranchers from South Dakota.
