1. Shouldn't all groups/races/nations have the same chance? Why doesn't God bless them all directly?
That's probably how we would have drawn it up. Give each group a piece of the truth and eventually the groups will fit all the pieces together and get the big picture.
The trouble is that groups don't actually want the one big unifying picture. They want the partial picture that will work in their own favor and allow them to dominate other groups, or at least protect them from the attacks of other groups. The more power a group holds, the more tightly it clings to its own partial picture.
There is a long tradition of assuming God gave one nation or group a license to dominate others, but that is not the Abraham Strategy. Jesus gives no such license to his team, Abraham's descendants. He and they are definitely on a campaign but absolutely not on a crusade.
2. Won't the campaign team members get arrogant and condescending if they think God has chosen them to bless all the other groups?
Yes they will. That is such an obvious and serious danger that God has set up a three-pronged defense to prevent it.
A. The campaign's origin
Team members have to remember why God launched the campaign in the first place. He loved the whole human race and the whole created world, not just the team members.
B. No bragging rights
God's Spirit changes team members inside at a deeper level than they can change themselves. The Spirit puts some of God's love into them. They become different people, not by working harder to be good but by opening up to the Spirit's influence. No bragging rights are involved. Their abilities to do campaign work are a gift to them, not an achievement, and the gift was not given to them because they deserved it. It was given so they would play a role on the team.
C. Required campaign methods
Team members have to realize that if they do campaign work in arrogant or condescending ways, they are working against the campaign goals, not for them. Their attitude gives the whole campaign a bad name. The campaign is not just about aiming at the right goals (connect, heal, bless) but using the right methods, namely, be unafraid to engage with people of all kinds, sense their pain, and share your stuff with them. That is why team members have to keep reading the Bible and listening to the Spirit's guidance within them.
3. Isn't the whole Roots idea a dangerous mistake?
The classic song "Imagine" (John Lennon) claims that roots are the problem in the world today--religious roots, ethnic roots, ideological roots, any kind of roots. They divide us.
As the song goes, instead of clinging to our roots, we should just imagine a better world of unity, peace, and freedom and call others to imagine it with us. “Imagine there's no heaven. . . no hell below us, above us only sky. . . nothing to kill or die for. . . and no religion too.” The hope of the song is that the vision of "all the people sharing all the world" will come true when enough people buy into it and let go of their roots.
By contrast, the big idea of Roots Season is to get rooted and stay rooted in Abraham's story, growing toward unity and peace from there.
Imagining is great. In fact, at the end of the SYNC annual cycle, we will devote a whole season to it--Vision Season. But our vision of the future is not just in our heads, and staying rooted in Abraham makes a better world more likely to come about, not less. Abrahamic roots provide life and strength to work for the vision.
3. How is Jesus's campaign any different than any other campaign or strategy for a better world?
Unlike other good causes we might join, this campaign was never a human brainchild, and it does not work like human campaigns that try to leverage power and get control. God's strategy is to bless. In fact, it is to create a whole campaign team of "blessers"--the physical and spiritual "descendants" of Abraham.
In the "Abraham Strategy" the blessers are not just do-gooders bringing a free meal or naive optimists telling others to look on the bright side of things. The blessers' mission is to connect, heal, and bless the world, breaking whatever curse people feel they are under. That should make Abraham's descendants the natural allies of everyone on the planet. They are aiming to bless everybody without concentrating power in their own hands.
And anybody can join them. In fact, they are actively recruiting new members. New members can enjoy all the security and significance that goes along with being a blesser on God's ancient team.
4. How do I know if I am already on the campaign team or not? If I wanted to join, how would I do it?
The simplest way to tell if you are already on the campaign team is to ask yourself where you get your security and significance. If it has anything to do with God's Abraham Strategy (see above) and you getting adopted through Jesus into the team carrying out the strategy, you are in.
If not, or if you aren't sure what any of that means, read the 2-minute "Who Are We?" story called "Uprooted" (see under "Story of the World") and ask whether you see yourself as part of that story. The "Reflections" at the end of the story include five ways to tell whether you are on the campaign team or not. You might realize you already are a working member of the team but you have never thought about it that way.
If you are not on the campaign team but want to be, the way to join is basically to respond to the "Who Are We?" story by saying, "I'm in," the same way you might say, "I'm in" when someone asked you whether you wanted to go along on a trip or take part in a business deal. Obviously you have to understand the trip or the business deal. Otherwise it doesn't mean anything to say, "I'm in," and you will opt out pretty quickly.
In this case, your "I'm in," means, "OK, God of Abraham. Please sign me up. I see what you are doing, and I like it. I want to belong to your campaign team and share in its purpose of bringing your blessing to the world. I'm not saying I'm qualified, but I am saying I believe Jesus Christ died to get me onto his campaign team, and I'm saying yes to that. I will honor Jesus as the campaign leader, and I will be a team player. I will read the Bible with other team members so I understand the campaign better, and I will listen to the Spirit of Jesus for my personal assignments."
Unlike your physical DNA, fixed permanently at birth, your spiritual DNA can change, and it does when you join the campaign team. The transformed inner DNA is a gift that comes to you through the Spirit of Jesus as you SYNC with the good intentions God had for everyone when he made the promise to bless all through Abraham.
You are a different person because you belong to this team. This is where the idea of being "born again" comes from. The old you was not on the team. The new you is a campaign insider, belonging as completely as if you were born into it. Spiritually speaking, you were.
5. "Blessing the world" is a lot for God to ask of us, isn't it? Won't this turn into a colossal chore?
It can feel like one but it won't if we realize that the whole Abraham Strategy goes back to a promise, not a command. God does not command Abraham to have enough descendants to bless the whole world. Abraham can't do that, and he knows he can't. God promises Abraham, an old man with a barren wife, that he will have enough descendants to bless the whole world.
God's command to us is not, "Bless the world." The command is, "Trust me." And "trust me" never turns into a chore. It does get very risky, as it did for Abraham, but then God keeps his promise and we end up more grateful than we were before we took the risk.
Like Abraham, we don't have what it takes to keep God's promises for him. He has to keep them himself. When he keeps them through us as the spiritual descendants of Abraham, we are in on it but it isn't really us who are doing it. God is making it happen, which means we can relax and just do whatever he decides to do through us.
That is why Jesus says, "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light" (Matthew 11.30). There are responsibilities that go with being on Jesus's campaign team and risks that go with carrying out our assignments, but the campaign "burden" still feels light because God himself is doing most of the heavy lifting.
Our duty as team members is not to do everything we can think of that could help connect, heal, and bless the world. That is Burnout Boulevard, not Duty Drive. Our duty is to keep reading the Bible, keep listening to the Spirit, and keep doing the things God puts in our mind to do, no more no less.
He knows exactly what we can handle. He never gives 18 assignments to the person who is built to handle 4, or even to the person who is built for 17. If we ever bite off more than we can chew, it's because we were not listening to his voice carefully enough.
If you are not used to listening for your assignments in God's campaign, check out Just Do It Groups (see under "Activities"). Those groups are a way to get a couple of family or friends cheering you on as you get better at listening to God's personal instructions for you.
6. What if the world doesn't want to be blessed the way God's campaigners want to bless it?
It helps to think of God's campaign as an awareness campaign or a public health campaign. It is not a military campaign that depends on violence to force a desired result.
An awareness campaign lets people know they have an option they didn't know they had, and it tries to persuade them to take advantage of the option for their own good and the good of the community, but it does not punish them if they don't. The county health department tells people where they can get vaccinated, but it does not go house to house with a military escort, forcing every person into it. God's campaign is like that, persuasive not coercive.
People with good intentions become truly dangerous when they believe they are supposed to enforce their good intentions on others. This is true whether the groups are religious people, right-wing fascists, or left-wing revolutionaries.
They want to bless the world, but they want to do it by getting more power into their own hands. They trust themselves. "Our plan will work. In the end, we will make the world such a wonderful place that everyone will thank us, that is, everyone we have not had to suppress or eliminate in order to make the world wonderful."
In the case of our campaign team (Abraham's descendants) God prevents this by giving us not a command to bless but a promise that the world will be blessed through us. That means we do not have to force things, which means we do not have to seek more power. We can afford to bless others gently as God instructs us even if that looks like a lame approach, too weak to change anything.
Jesus shows us how it is done--accept death for the campaign rather than kill to impose blessing on your own terms. Leave it to God to redeem the situation when it seems too late. That is exactly what God did when, in the nick of time, he saved Abraham's son from being sacrificed. He did it again when he raised Jesus, God the Son, from the grave.
The risen Jesus did not then go on to force his blessings down the throats of the people who had killed him. Instead he sent his campaign team out into the world "like sheep among wolves" (Matthew 10.16). The whole New Testament is full of instructions to God's campaign workers to prepare them for fierce, even deadly, opposition while they are trying to connect, heal, and bless in the name of Jesus. The New Testament gives no guidance at all about seeking or using earthly power to force blessings on anyone. That is not how the campaign works.