McGill and Me: How a theologian fixated on poverty, suffering, and death inspired me when I needed it most

I’d been a Boy Scout, earned four college degrees, served as a foster parent, and even published a book. But nothing in my life has been as draining as the past five months raising funds to be a missionary. God’s call to the mission field disrupted my life by making me so needy and so helpless in meeting my needs, and that’s in just getting to Brazil.

It’s also turned me to God with the help of Arthur McGill, a little-known American theologian who battled diabetes his whole life, eventually dying after complications with a kidney transplant. McGill talked about death more than life and God’s neediness more than God’s might. His only published works are entitled: Sufferingand Death and Life—two topics Joel Osteen will likely never write about.
Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Missionaries
Everything these days is terrible with missions, at least that’s the message I often see on social media. Some missionaries aren’t directly involved in churches overseas, hard-earned money gets wasted on people who don’t deserve it, and the ones who think they are helping others across the ocean are actually hurting those poor people.
Maybe American Christians have finally gotten the message. The largest Baptist group in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, recently downsized their international missions efforts, laying off hundreds of people in the field and selling off global assets left and right in order to balance their budget. The Baptist group I grew up in once boasted hundreds upon hundreds of missionaries in the 1970s with my in-laws being among them. Today they still have over a hundred missionaries, but those young men and women from forty years ago are nearing retirement age. Most of them will not be replaced.
And why should they? If the message is that missions is something of the past and perhaps even harmful in the present, that’s going to do little to inspire anyone to become one, especially considering how hard we make it on people to become missionaries. Not only do you have to move to another country, become fluent in a foreign language, and figure out how to thrive once there. You also have to convince a large group of people to fund your efforts in doing so. Oh, and until you do convince enough of them, you likely won’t have any income for your family in the meantime. And yet, by the grace of God, there go I.
Excited, Eager, Persistent, and Burned Out
Six months ago my wife and I signed the paperwork to become appointed missionaries to Brazil, sent by our conference of churches, the North American Baptists (NAB). Originally started by German Baptists in Philadelphia in the mid-1800s, the NAB today has 400 churches scattered across Canada and the United States. The NAB is active in a handful of mission fields across the world, focusing on supporting local churches in the field through assisting with education, medicine, and even technology. Liberally adding up our career, short-term, and partner missionaries, the NAB boasts about 30 or so missionaries out of 400 churches. That’s roughly one missionary for every 13 churches.
Thirteen churches should easily be able to send one missionary, so with those odds I didn’t think it would be too difficult to find supporting churches and get to the field within 18 months or so. After all I’d served as a pastor in the conference for several years and never once been personally contacted by an NAB missionary who is raising support. I’d like to think that if I ever did receive such a call or email I’d respond and want to help. But perhaps not. Pastors and church leaders by and large do not welcome being contacted by a missionary in need of money. Most emails go unreturned and voicemails go unanswered. For example, I emailed and then later called every pastor of an NAB church in one state, and the only two who responded were pastors who at one time were themselves missionaries. After going through that I wondered if these are the unresponses from my NAB colleagues this is going to be a lot tougher than I thought.
Despite the overwhelming indifference to my letters, emails, and phone calls, I was still able to get ahold of several NAB churches. Some of them would respond that they just didn’t have space in their budget for a new missionary. Others were more frank, saying not only do they not have the funds, but even if they did other missionaries would get them before I would. A couple pastors explained their church’s strategy for supporting missions, and how I didn’t fit into it. A few welcomed me to come and present at their church, but without any guarantee of support other than a one-time love offering coupled with a potluck meal or trip to the local café afterwards.
Like the parable of the sower and the seed, some of my correspondence fell on good ground. I’d contact a church that not only had available funds but, more importantly, my mission of helping train church planters and leaders in southern Brazil matched their church’s investment in missions. In Jesus’ parable the good ground seemed to receive about a fourth of the seed. In my five months of fundraising I’d say the good ground is around 5-10% or so. That same percentage holds when it comes to reaching out to family, friends, and neighbors—a number that I assumed would be quite lower than the response from churches, but it’s not.
The Extras of Life
Whether I contact churches or people I sometimes get the vibe that few of them have any extra money laying around and what I am asking for is something extra. That makes sense because our family doesn’t have any extra money laying around either. Our church, on the other hand, is more flexible. When I became pastor I wanted our church to become more missions-minded. I vowed that we’d always have a missionary speak at our missions-emphasis Sunday. We’d also look to increase our missions giving each year by giving the church a bigger target to hit with hopes we could add more missionaries with more money. Without leadership driving them toward a specific goal, few churches will accidentally give more money to missions. Given the responses I received from my pastoral colleagues, word seemed to have gotten out that missions was a thing of the past. Few pastors would even feign interest in what God was calling my family to do and where. They just wanted to tell me quickly how they couldn’t help me, especially if I’d tried contacting them several times before without any response.
In some of my most cynical moments I’d imagine myself a salesman, trying to convince a person or a church who had extra money that I was worth giving it to. And who wants to do that? No missionary wants to reach the field through someone’s excess money. Rather, we need partners, whether families or churches, who are willing to adjust their lives to make room for being a part of what God’s doing overseas. When our family became foster parents it was not out of any excess time, energy, or love we had among the five of us. Rather, we decided we would invest in the children that were brought to us and adjust our lives accordingly. Making room in a family or church budget is much less disruptive than opening your home to little strangers, but it is disruptive nonetheless. And we Americans don’t like to be disrupted. We like being needy even less.
Good Neediness?
Raising funds has brought intense focus, which is sometimes good but usually comes with heartache. When I was writing my book I was focused on my argument incessantly, thinking about it morning, noon, and night. I devoted hours of my day to finessing it until it was complete. At that time I had a big goal to finish the book and could work as hard as I wanted to work toward completing it. Now, I have a big goal, raising $8,900 a month to be a missionary, but there is very little I can actually do toward completing it. It’s not really my goal, it’s God’s. He will have to provide. Human nature often shouts out God’s revelation in presuming his provision comes in health, wealth, and blessings. But when God has spoken in the prophets, Scriptures, and Jesus Christ, he reveals his provision also comes in neediness and poverty, which create space for us to receive his love.
Fundraising not only makes me needy in front of churches, family members, and friends, but also in front of God. I always should be needy in front of God, but I often forget to be.
As Americans we are so used to enabling ourselves. I’m only in my thirties, but I remember having five television stations and just watching what happened to be on one of them. My kids can choose on a whim any number of hundreds of programs online. Instead of catching people at home on the phone or leaving a message, we text and expect an immediate response, worrying if it even takes one minute for their reply. With headphones and smartphones we don’t need anyone or anything, except free Wi-Fi. Arthur C. McGillWe turn to the things we have in order to tell ourselves we don’t really need anything, but to be human is to be needy, no matter what things we have. As Christians, McGill argues, the lesson of the Incarnation and Atonement is that to be needy is also divine:
The focus of God’s claim in Jesus is rather for the growth and rootage of human existence in that receiving which is based on neediness, and in that sharing which opens boundaries and involves vulnerability.   Yet no instance of the temptation to refuse these qualities is more destructive than the effort to worship an unneedy and invulnerable God. If such a God indeed excludes every possibility of needy brokenness, this God also excludes the life actualized in Jesus. For this God is not the creator of shared life but simply a product of the human outrage at evil. This God canonizes the life of wealth.   If God’s rule in Jesus Christ points away from suffering, it is not because God stands in inviolable self-sufficiency. Such self-containedness is precisely a source of human suffering, the avarice and arrogance to exclude neediness from ourselves, and the heartless refusal to respond to the neediness in others.   The love of God sanctifies our neediness for God and for one another, because neediness belongs properly and naturally to God (Sermons of Arthur C. McGill, 51).
Ancient people who first heard the gospel of Jesus Christ often imagined that what separated the gods from mere mortals was their lack of neediness. Whatever a god is, they figured, that god must be by definition beyond all need. When Christians preached a God who became needy flesh in Jesus, ancient people often balked. Paul said the gospel was a stumbling block to fellow Jews and foolishness to Gentiles for good reason (1 Cor 1:23).
The Needy, Eternal God
McGill covers the disputes over Arianism in the fourth century on this exact point: if being divine means being self-sufficient and without need, then the eternal Son sent to become flesh and dwell among us cannot be divine, just as Arius thought. But if Arius was wrong, and the church concluded that he was, then God knows what it is like to be needy, to be dependent, and calls us to go and be likewise. God didn’t give out of his excess. He gave himself.
The Arian controversy might’ve been ecclesiastically settled long ago, but there is no shortage today of American Christians, myself included, who tend to equate neediness with the evils of the world rather than God and his rich blessings. We think of love in terms of what we can give rather than what we receive. Here’s McGill again on the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-12):
The meaning of these beatitudes becomes a bit clearer when we remember the New Testament emphasis on love as giving and receiving. When churches address affluent people like us, they tend to talk about the importance of giving, of attending to the poor, the sick and the oppressed. The assumption always is that these teachings refer to other people we are called to help.   What churches have not made clear is that the primary human relation to love does not consist in giving but in receiving. In fact the New Testament is wholly preoccupied with God’s loving the world that people may receive. Beatitude is to receive the fullness of life.   What Jesus’s beatitudes do is to make clear the indispensable condition for receiving. We cannot receive unless we lack, unless we are in need. The need doesn’t have to be excruciating, though it may be. But if we are to know the kind of love emphasized in the New Testament, the love that constantly gives nourishment and strength and order for a true life, we can only receive that gifted nourishment to the extent that we need it. Otherwise the gift will not touch us deeply, and receiving the gift will not arouse in us much gratitude or much life.   What Jesus’s beatitudes say is simply this: Blessed are those who receive into the depths and center of themselves. And only those can receive into the depths and center of themselves who are impoverished there, or who are sorrowful there, or who are hungry there, or who are persecuted there.   In other words, if you are not willing to be one with your neediness, you cannot be blessed (Sermons of Arthur C. McGill, 28, emphasis mine).
Earlier this week America observed Memorial Day, and I sat with dozens of people in our local school gym to pay respects to the men and women who died in uniform, serving our country. All of us there were touched deeply with the gift these people gave us, arousing in us much gratitude and much life. Yet I couldn’t help but think about the previous day, the Lord’s Day, and how the gospel of Jesus Christ doesn’t seem to touch us as deeply or arouse in us much gratitude. But why? It reminds me of Jesus’ statements that healthy people don’t seek out physicians and those who think they don’t owe much aren’t very grateful. It’s the sick and the poor who flock to Jesus, and in America we despise being sick and poor, so we don’t flock to Jesus. Instead, we’ll do whatever it takes to avoid being sick, poor, or needy.
The message of Madison Avenue is built on the foundation that neediness is evil, but the message of Golgotha rests on the foundation that neediness is necessary. As Leonard Cohen once sang, “There’s a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
We Are Not Good Samaritans
Once we’re cracked we can receive the light. My favorite McGill sermon in print is on Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). He also writes about it in his book on suffering:
The good Samaritan is Jesus Christ. This story is indeed a parable. Like all Jesus’ other parables, it does not tell us about our human love and how we can go about displaying it to needy people. It tells us about God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. It requires us to identify ourselves, not with the heroic Samaritan, but with the poor wounded man on the side of the road. It reminds us that the one who truly serves us and is our neighbor, who saves our life and therefore draws forth our love, does not come with all the badges and character recommendations that we expect. He does not come with charity shining conspicuously all over him. He does not come as a priest or a Levite. The parable warns us, not of the difficulty we face in trying to love others, but of the difficulty that all of us will have in appreciating the one who loves us and lays down his life for us, namely, our neighbor Jesus Christ.   Jesus alone is our true neighbor. He comes to us as a Samaritan might come to a Jew. On the surface he is simply not impressive enough to satisfy us. And yet he heals our deepest wounds and brings us the gift of eternal life. From the world’s viewpoint, he comes in a broken and contemptible form, apparently incapable even of preserving himself. He is not powerful in terms of his title and function, as is the priest and the Levite, or the chairman of the United Fund or the director of the Red Cross. He is only powerful—but supremely powerful—in the life that he gives to men, healing their human sickness and opening to them the gates of paradise. He so fully restores them that they are enabled to become his servants, and in his name may be compassionate to others as he has been to them. He so heals men that by his power they too can go and do likewise. They too can be a neighbor to others in his name.    The fact that we may be neighbors to one another, however, is only the consequence of the fundamental fact that God himself has given Jesus Christ as our neighbor (Suffering: A Test of Theological Method, 110-11).
Who wants to relate to the man who was attacked, stripped of his clothes, beaten, and left for dead? We’d rather see ourselves as givers, rather than the needy. As Will Willimon says, “we prefer to see ourselves as givers,” but the biblical account of Christmas portrays us, “not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are.” We humans can take no more credit for Christmas than we can for being Good Samaritans. Paul asks the Corinthians, “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” (1 Cor 4:7b).
The Wounded Giver
When we reach Brazil we will have nothing that we didn’t receive. Literally. God has so far raised up many people and churches who have not just given out of their excess but have partnered with us, and I’m amazed at how God works. Right now, five months into the fundraising process we are about a fourth of the way there. Has God provided?
Yes, not only through the 25% but the other 75% as well. His provision comes through my intense neediness. His provision comes through my reliance on receiving his love. And if I turn to him to receive his love, there will likely be something real that I can share with others.
All of us are hurting, not just people like me raising funds. We all hurt, and we hurt in such a way that no prescription, liquid bottle, push-button notification, or human relationship will heal. Living as only givers and never receivers will not last us very long in this fallen world.
If you, like me, are needy, then embrace it. It won’t magically solve all of life’s problems: God never promises such things in this life. But it will open you to receiving from him again and again and again, and in that learning you will discover his love in all its height, breadth, and depth.
Here’s how McGill concluded his sermon on the Beatitudes:
When Jesus relates a need and suffering to love, when he calls people into the life of love, this call is not a call for people to give love. It is also a call for people to receive love in connection with their suffering. Just at this point the power of the mind to hide our suffering from us comes into play. Because the mind is the greatest narcotic, it is extremely difficult for any of us to know our suffering, especially the deep suffering that belongs to our daily life. Therefore, to know our suffering, much less to discover the meaning of love in connection with that suffering, involves a work and a constant learning the whole rest of our lives (The Sermons of Arthur C. McGill, 30).
I should’ve been learning this all along. Sometimes God gets through to me, like when my father died of cancer or I struggled to find a job after training for it for more than twelve years. These past five months he’s gotten through to me once again amid all the prayers, phone calls, and emails.

Maybe he wants to get through to you too.