Would Jesus Hangout in a Strip Club: My Response

  In a word, yes! I have seen Jesus in a strip club, many times over.  Jesus, the flesh and blood manifestation of the wisdom of God will be found where he said he’d be, bringing good news to the poor, sight to the blind, encouragement to the oppressed, freedom to the captives and proclaiming the Jubilee(Luke 4.16-19). Jesus resides wherever broken people are, where ever pain and loss and despair seek to stifle out all light and hope and love, that’s what Jesus does, that’s who Jesus has always been and will always be.

The word ישוע the Hebrew form of the name Jesus means literally, deliverance, salvation, liberation. Inherent in the work of freedom is the leading people out of bondage. If you have ever worked with people in chains, literal, economic, social, political, psychological, physical or figurative, you know that they don’t walk away on their own, it takes someone, walking in, encountering them in their place of trouble, showing up over and over again, proving to be a safe person and ever so slowly helping those in chains believe again in the love of God so they can wake up to their dreams. This is slow, deliberate, Jesus work so that one day, these who are beloved of God can by Spirit power take your hand and walk out into the light.

So yes, Jesus shows up in the strip clubs in my town often. Every other week my team and I walk in the door and our friend who is the house mom and bartender shouts, “Jesus is in the house!” We smile, rush over to hug her and greet all our other friends whom we call by name.  These women have become a hymn to me, and the relationships forged in mutual sorrow amidst the brokenness of all our lives have become my song. I sit with them in the darkness, and they sit with me and we hold hands and tell each other the truth, share the pain and dissonance of our stories together before the next rotation on the stage. We laugh and we drink and we have conversations that are real and human, we admit what we cannot know and hold on to one another anyway. I bring them gifts and they shower me with love and we sit in the ash heap together, skin on skin, heart to heart and hope for a better tomorrow.

You would think it is hard to talk about Jesus in a strip club, but it’s not, it’s actually the easiest place in the world. I have been forging friendships with women in sex trade for the past four years, and it turns out that Jesus can be found right where he said he’d be, in the “least of these” (Matt. 25.45).

There is a prevailing notion and prejudicial image of women who take their clothes off for a living, we believe them to be seductresses and overly sexualized cat like figures using their feminine prowess to earn a buck but this couldn’t be further from what I have experienced as true. People in strip clubs are like people everywhere else, they are hurting. The difference is the women in the club are literally stripped bare so that they cannot hide their sin sick souls like we do, those of us huddled in the church in the suburbs, and it is in the stripping back of all pretense and pretty, the peeling away of what is not real or raw that I have come to know Jesus in the deep suffering and in the kindness of strippers and prostitutes. It is not only that Jesus is in me and I bring him into the dark, it is that Jesus is in these women, with them and for them, showing up in all the ways they love and welcome me; a busted up, self proclaimed church girl in search of what is Jesus, what is true.

Would Jesus Hangout in a Strip Club? This is my response to a recent Christianity Today blog.
Learn more about our ministry Stripped Love here

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