The famous Burning Man Festival takes place in the desert north of Reno. About 50,000 people from all over the world gather together to celebrate—uh, all sorts of things.
If you ask them, they will give lots of different answers as to why they are gathered together, but one thing is for sure: BM is a great place to connect with people who are in search of a spiritual connection.
As you watch the news footage about Burning Man on Labor Day, the lessons below might put things in better perspective.
There are two of the little known facts people generally don’t know about me.
A. A few years ago I went with a team of friends to serve folks at Burning Man, and
B. I was a guest on the Jerry Springer Show. (Yes, you can see the episode on YouTube, but I’ll save the story for another article.)
Here are a few lessons I learned at the Burning Man festival when I was there with a team a couple of years ago.
1. Being around extreme people tends to beat negative religion out of a judgmental person like me.
We will not be effective in outreach as long as we carry around judgmental attitudes toward not-yet believers. Pretty much all of us have some measure of a judgmental attitude, it’s just that we are in denial of that truth.
As far as outreach goes, it’s vital we break free from the grip of negative, judgmental attitudes. When I use the “R” word, I’m referring to human attempts at making something spiritual happen without the power or presence of God. That kind of religion is common, but it is something God hates, something people outside the Church hate and, above all, something God despises.
Extreme people are a gift to Believers. God will bring Burning Man people into your life—not literally, mind you—but those he will use to reshape you. Resist the temptation to isolate yourself and only hang out with those who think like you, look like you, drive cars like you and who work where you work.
2. We need big hearts for others if we hope to be successful in outreach.
You will never get a heart for others while you are stuck at home just thinking thoughts or reading books. Change happens when you get around others.
3. To be successful in outreach, we need to destroy ridiculous myths we carry about regarding “those kinds of people.”
Perhaps in all of our lives, there are some we categorize as ones who are impossible for God to reach. We think of them as “those kinds of people.” They may be people who have wronged us, or maybe they have even done something wrong to all of America. We may feel obligated to dislike them.
As my friends and I drove up to the entrance gate of the BM event, I was rubbing my eyes a bit like Mr. Magoo (if you have seen those cartoons of the nearsighted man on TV Land). I wasn’t sure if what I was seeing was real. It was a scene that resembled what I imagined Woodstock would have been like—only a few steps beyond that event. People sported fluorescent wigs and crazy get-ups beyond that even.
I had always had categories in my mind—that there were “easy-to-reach” people, then there were the “hard-to-reach” ones. People at events like Burning Man were in the latter category because of what seemed to be their wild ways. But surprisingly, when I actually got around them, I quickly discovered they were super nice, very approachable, in many ways, easier to reach out to than middle-class people I’d been reaching out to for decades in the suburbs across America. Go figure!
It was important I just stop judging them, open my heart, talk to them and, most of all, listen to them. As my inner chatter stopped a bit, he began to speak to me about his love for them.
