For a couple of summers during my high school days, I served on staff at Camp Tula, which served Boy Scouts in what is now the Ouachita District of the Quapaw Area Council. Located in the wilds of Southwest Arkansas, it sat on the shore of Lake Greeson, fed by the Little Missouri River. One of those summers, I was a “site leader,” the guy who hosted visiting scout troops from towns like Malvern and Benton assigned to my particular cluster of two-man tents erected on wooden platforms. I was a combination concierge, logistician, counselor, docent, and long arm of the law, and part of my portfolio was the task of bringing “deep thoughts from Jack Handy” around our little campfire at day’s end. One night, I told them the legend/lie of the wounded Indian who still frequented our grounds, a haint who could be identified by the sound of his dragged leg as he moved through the briars, pine needles, and underbrush of our campground. Of course, this story would be followed, once they’d settled down on their cots, by my moving among the tents with a simulated bum leg. As I made my rounds, I could hear a lot of anxious conversations through the canvas.

On another evening, I shared some material from a book naming various bad operators in our fair land, one species being the litterer, “Swinus Americanus.” We, being scouts, were concerned to leave the places we visited as good as we found them if not better. In earning our merit badges (e.g., Nature, Wildlife Management) we went deeper than appearances, but appearances counted big time. For one thing, trash was an eyesore; for another, it was a health hazard, attracting vermin or threatening to smear or cut our bare or moccasin-shod feet.

Which brings me to the sad scene I came upon recently as I turned into parking at a neighborhood coffee shop. Obviously, some knucklehead had cleaned out his car without the slightest regard for the rest of us. As my dad or mom once observed, such folks are quite tidy, but only with regard to their own environment, the vehicle interior. The rest of us be hanged. Of course, it’s a paradigm of selfishness, not even in the ballpark of concern with “What if everybody did this?”

Actually, if you travel to parts of the developing (or disintegrating) world, you find spots where, in fact, everybody is doing this. Once, on visit to NAME (North Africa/Middle East), I was walking through a neighborhood awash in rubbish, with the smell of burning garbage accented by diesel fumes. A veteran of ministry in such regions, he remarked, “Ah, smells like missions.” 

Yes, I know that trash collection can be a luxury in some districts, but it’s more than a matter of economics. It’s a cultural issue, one with a distressing, cascading effect. Remember James Q. Wilson’s 1982 account of the downward spiral that follows from inattention to appearances? Here’s a short statement of it I pulled off the web: 

The broken windows theory states that any visible signs of crime and civil disorder, such as broken windows (hence, the name of the theory) vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking, and transportation fare evasion, create an urban environment that promotes even more crime and disorder. 

Well, there’s a litterbugging version of this. Strew your trash and others will be encourage to strew theirs, whether from a sense of “I guess it’s okay; no big deal” or “What’s the use; my discarded stuff won’t make much of a difference.” And so you get blight and pestilence. And, again, these people could make it different if they cared. But that’s not a compelling cultural value or priority to the mass of people raised in this milieu. Call this a “Western” value; I call it a civilizational value.

So back to “it smells like missions.” A debris-infected neighborhood (or parking place) is quite likely a mission field, in that its clutterers lack a key aspect of regenerate character, regard for the moral, economic, and aesthetic well-being of their fellow men. No, you’re not saved by cleaning up eyesores, and you’re not damned by littering, but when you get saved, you start to see eyesores as something to be addressed in love and even indignation. It can find expression in “Don’t mess with Texas” or “Come on, guys, let’s pay attention to this. Just think of the improvement we could make with a little effort.”

Speaking of missions, let me mention a ministry we started as church planters in Evanston, Illinois. Some call Evanston “the restaurant capital of Chicago’s North Shore,” and there were, indeed, a great many eateries clustered around the city’s El stops, particularly the Davis Street station, just west of downtown. The food was great and amazingly varied, but the alleys behind the restaurants were sometimes marred by overflowing dumpsters and even urine-stained cardboard, on and under which dumpster divers would curl up to sleep off their alcohol-fueled-and-generated misery. 

We commissioned an “Alley Sheep” (as opposed to Alley Cat) logo, enlisting the excellent services of Rick Boyd in Oklahoma City, the man who did the graphics for me at the SBC Executive Committee and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. We put it on our T-shirts and on the cards we handed out to those asking, “What are you doing?” We used them to explain that we were tending to a need in our city as “sheep” in Jesus’ flock (with an account of how you become a member of his flock). And once our big black trash bags were full, we slapped a “Serving Evanston in Jesus’ Name” sticker on them (bearing our church logo, another Rick Boyd production) and deposited them beside the city’s sidewalk trash receptacles (with city permission).

As such, we chose taxonomically to be Bovidae Caprinae Ovis Linnaeus Christus (pardon the Latin mutilation) rather than Swinus Americanus, which we might well have been, save for the grace of God.