Reviewed by Peter Schuurman, Educational Missions Leader,2008
Ma, Jaeson. The Blueprint: A Revolutionary Plan to Plant Missional Communities on Campus. Regal, California, 2007.
“Revival or death!” he prays. “Give me the campus or I die!” he cries.
Jaseon Ma is 28 this year and he has written a campus ministry charismatic thriller. The book is a chronicle of his campus praying, preaching, healing, and evangelizing and serves to promote his Campus Transformation Network along with the group entitled Campus Renewal Ministries. There are hundreds brought to faith in the pages of this book, as Ma lets you in on his blogs and prayers, and reveals his plan to evangelize America, China and eventually Israel and the rest of the world.
I am honestly struggling with this book. It is a lot of Jaeson: his amazing faith, his visions and his deeds, his charge of “power failure” against the church. It begins with his testimony of a life of caught up in smoking pot and theft that ends with an astounding conversion and a Holy Spirit baptism. The book is deeply enthusiastic, bordering on hype at times, with constant references to his desire to re-create the book of Acts. It follows some of the old church-growth material (like Peter Wagner) and challenges all those in campus ministry to be bold for the gospel in a world that does not seem to have a clue.
This is the blueprint: passionate prayer, power evangelism, planting simple churches. From there he offers practical tools for the reformation of society. It is a book of power, practicality, and promise.
Now if all that was important for a campus mission was spectacular miracles, large numbers of new Christians, and gallons of evangelistic energy, this would be a superb book. Ma’s method is to get a small group (or “simple church”) going within every student group on campus—in every dorm, every athletic team, and in every class. Through prayer and evangelism, these groups grow, and leaders are formed who multiply themselves and the groups as swiftly as possible. Like the house church movement, his mantra is that we do not bring people to church, but bring church to the people, right where they are.
Ma is building on Neil Cole’s vision of “organic church”—described in his book Organic Church: Building Faith Where Life Happens (Jossey-Bass, 2005). Cole, who I’ve heard at Ivy Jungle conferences, rightly suggests we are putting programs before people and raising the bar on worship performance while lowering the bar on discipleship.
So Ma takes a cross and preaches in the UCLA quad for hours sometimes shifting into speaking in tongues. People gather around, and he even miraculously heals one student’s leg. Students cry to be baptized and the water bottles comes out to serve the occasion. It is spectacular, and apparently transferable. Ma offers a “10 Steps” approach for pretty much everything, including healing prayer, prophetic evangelism and even casting out demons. He considers it all to be like another Great Awakening for the church.
One part of me is challenged by this and I want to encourage our CRC ministries to be as bold, expectant, and energetic as Ma. I personally want to be as open as I can be to the movements of the Holy Spirit. People do respond to soap box preaching. Miracles can happen. Still, I would feel stiff and shy beside Ma.
The enthusiastic Ma, however, misses the heart of the campus. While he does mention that prayer leads to revival which leads to social reformation, he doesn’t say much about the latter. He does not talk about what a university is today or what God calls it to be. His love for the university seems limited to the “lost” hoards he preaches at in the quad. There is no mention of God’s call to learning, researching or teaching, and very little on vocation.
He rarely mentions faculty or administration, not to mention staff. The campus seems to be an alien place to him from which he builds up his “simple churches.” It would be interesting to compare Ma’s revolution with Shaine Clairbourne’s Irresistible Revolution, the latter showing a deep concern for the poor, not just for the souls of the non-Christian. Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change would be another broader, more inclusive view of God’s mission in the world today.
This is the crux: there is no intellectual engagement in this book with anything that surrounds Ma and his simple churches on campus: there is no recognition of the self-serving careerism, rampant capitalism, aggressive militarism, intense pluralism and technological reductionism that plague our planet and its people. Except for the assumed empty secularism, Ma seems to operate in a cultural vacuum. For a Christian university movement, this is unfortunate.
Furthermore, and on a different note, Ma, like the emergent church, embraces a primitivism that suggests the Holy Spirit has not been with the church for about 2000 years. The history of the body of Christ begins with Acts and then jumps to what Ma is doing in California. This bespeaks a low view of the incarnation, in my mind, which I believe should include Christian tradition(s). I’m not so sure God abandoned the Church that quickly.
Ma should not simply be chastised, however, at age 28, for what he is not doing. I think Stephen H. Webb’s recent remarks on Campus Crusade also apply to Ma:
Crusade is frequently criticized for not doing more to change the intellectual climate of higher education, but Bright viewed universities as centers of socialization, not intellectual debate, and he was probably wise to do so. As universities marginalized the role of Christianity—which occurred during the peak of Protestant liberal hegemony over American culture—students could only turn to the margins for their spiritual education. (Books and Culture, May/June 2008).
Webb goes on to say that while the sophisticated counter-culture of the sixties went on to join the establishment, Campus Crusade is a gigantic organization today, recruiting over 1000 staff members annually for its work. In other words, if the university will not engage the spiritual lives of students, CC and Ma are eager to oblige.
Here is the quirky way I’m shaping my opinions on this movement. Ma may be the John the Baptist figure who loves the book of Acts and puts the Great Commission first. I feel more like a Nicodemus figure who loves the book of the Psalms and Colossians and sees the Cultural Commission as foundational and first. These are jumbled caricatures, I know, and no one should be selective about the Bible. The point is, we all embody some aspects of the Biblical tradition more fully than others.
If one of his “simple churches” were on a campus where I was chaplain, I would hope we could work together. His spiritualizing, anti-intellectual tendencies and anti-church sentiments might make it difficult, but we could learn much from each other. Synod’s study report on Third-Wave Pentecostalism suggests as much. I imagine his groups spread pretty thin with poorly trained leaders, dubious doctrinal standards, and all kinds of energy with no place to go. Like the burgeoning church in Africa, Asia, and South America.
I do not think we can ignore this movement. The Pentecostals are the beating heart of world Christianity today. You certainly cannot accuse them of lacking passion or thinking small. As Gamaliel said in Acts, we shall see what comes of this new thing.
