Looking For Trolls & Truth

Jimmy Dorrell's mind is in the toilet, literally, some days. As the executive director of Mission Waco, Texas, and pastor of Church under the Bridge, he's in charge of a half-dozen aging facilities throughout inner Waco that seek to meet the needs of people in his neighborhood—members of his flock or not.
"We have 83 commodes in our ministry," he said with a reporter in a World Cup Cafe—a nonprofit coffee shop operated by some Hurricane Katrina refugees that is the newest venture of his sprawling ministry.

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The concerns of Dorrell's mind, heart and soul are laid bare in Trolls & Truth: 14 Realities About Today's Church That We Don't Want to See (New Hope Publishers). Armed with a toilet plunger and a Bible, we set off to look for the trolls.

WITTENBURG DOOR: Tell us about Trolls and Truth.

JIMMY DORRELL: It's based on the premise that often times those who are marginalized, the poor, are rejected by our culture. Really, in the kingdom of God, they have eternal truths that we need to learn from. And that's not my view, that's the Biblical view, we believe.
You look at the teachings of Christ, so many times would come when He'd point to a widow who was giving her last two mites, or a leper who thanked Him or a tax collector who was rejected or ... a prostitute. So it was through these uncommon, rejected folk of our culture that really some of the most important truths that Jesus taught were given to us. And the reminder, alternatively to that, that the very ones who were doing the teaching most often were the religious like us who come from a culture of superficial religion—we have a lot of words and Bible memory and church-dom—and yet the core value of the kingdom of God is not understood by us as well. We become sorta the flip-flop, where we need to learn to listen to the people who we often times think we understand and we're going to "go help those poor people." We have this almost sickened idea of charity today.

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DOOR: Um, most Christians are uncomfortable going up to a homeless guy and saying, "Hello! We're the Pharisees!"

DORRELL: The scarier part is, there's a sort of half truth. Those church folks are usually good people. They're going to give turkeys at Thanksgiving and they're going to have a special offering and they're going to have benevolence at the door when people come in. But our approach is somewhat of a condescending arrogance.

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DOOR: Are you saying, "If the poor you will always have with you, we might as well use them"?

DORRELL: Let me explain it this way: What we have done with the poor is, what we have not recognized is, if we really believed what the Scripture said—the poor, the ex-con, the mentally ill—all have gifts just like we do that God have given us for the church. But somehow we think that those gifts are for the seminary-trained or the special Bible teachers.

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DOOR: Explain your use of the word "trolls" in your title.

DORRELL: My fear is that people will think it is a condescending mind set. But we've become the scum of the earth. When you compare the holiness of God to our sin, we are scum and all of us are scum, and trolls understand this. The background, of course, is the old "Billy Goats Gruff" story. The trolls are the ones under bridges, like we are, who are maligned and misunderstood. There's some fear of trolls that we all have. And we all celebrate when the goat throws him off the bridge to wherever he goes. Maybe it's the troll-looking person who we see nothing in their face or their demeanor that brings attention to themselves but there is value in their life.
All of us under the bridge, we understand it is not a derogatory term. It is an acceptance of our unworthiness—middle class, poor, whatever we are, we're just trolls. And yet we have value because God has given us value.

http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/archives/dorrell.html