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Going back over to ZackExley.com March 14, 2010

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OK, I’m switching back over to blogging at ZackExley.com. I think Revolution in Jesusland has run its course.

I started this blog when I had just been introduced to the church. I wanted to dispel misunderstandings and mistranslations, and to highlight new developments, and old traditions, that no one outside the church seemed to know about.

At a certain point, I felt like I was writing the same thing over and over again. Also, there’s a lot of other stuff I want to write about. It’s time to move on.

So I’ll keep writing about the church back at zackexley.com, but I’ll be writing about other stuff there too. Please follow me over there!

(Note that I imported the full archive of RIJ into zackexley.com — just in case this site gets lost in the shuffle someday.)

First post in 9 months! December 12, 2009

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 4 comments

First post in nine months. Here’s why:

Esther hi

Esther was born May 31. It’s been awesome.

Typically, something as interesting as that would inspire me to write more, not less. But one side effect of Esther’s arrival was that I had to take over some of Elizabeth’s responsibilities to friends in need. She was eight months pregnant but calls kept coming in from refugee families needing help with medical, legal, financial and paperwork emergencies. So I finally crossed the line that I had been resisting for 20 years: I started getting wrapped up in the messy details of other people’s hard lives — as opposed to “organizing” them, or advocating for “policy” to help them.

Finally getting my hands dirty in various hopeless situations stunned me into silence. What it actually did was give me TOO MUCH to say, and left me tongue tied.

For the past 20 years, I witnessed and condemned systemic injustice. I thrived on the drama of “organizing” against it. But I carefully avoided ever getting my hands dirty in the messy business of merely surviving in the face of it. I hope it takes me another 20 years to get over the humiliation of having to admit that.

At the same time, I’m angry in a whole new way about the Democrats bailing out bankers while barely leaving crumbs to people suffering out here. And I’m angry in a whole new way about Christians who say it’s the churches’ responsibility and not the government’s, but who do nothing but donate a little money, or show up somewhere one Saturday morning a year.

See how easy it was for me to go from humiliation to self-righteous anger in two paragraphs? That’s why I’m not fit to be writing publicly.

There’s another reason I can’t write publicly about the stuff I’m doing now though: simple privacy concerns. And it kills me because I’m meeting the most amazing characters. I’ve always talked about “organic leaders” who sustain communities and make the world go ’round. As an organizer, I saw only one of their dimensions up close. I always liked to think my strength was that I knew they had many other dimensions. But I only caught glimpses of those from a distance. Now I’m getting to see all those brilliant, radiant dimensions up close and at length. The American People are fantastic.

OK, so now it’s time for me to shut up again!

I’d like to write a weekly or monthly email to friends, though, and anyone else who’s interested. If you’d like to get those, email me at info@revolutioninjesusland.com or my personal email if you know it.

Overheard in Springfield, MO March 21, 2009

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 7 comments

There’s a table of senior men behind me talking about whether, “China is going to foreclose on us.“

Left Behind at the Coffeeshop March 19, 2009

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I just came out to my favorite work-outside coffee shop, the Filling Station.

It’s an amazing Spring day. This place should be a mad house. But there’s no one. NO ONE is here.

I joked to the lone hipster tattooed worker behind the counter, “Maybe we’re the Left Behind.” I quickly realized you can’t joke about that kind of thing in a place like Kansas City. I don’t know whether he thought I was serious, or whether he was seriously considering the possibility, but he looked really upset all of a sudden.

“Just kidding!” I said. And then he told me it was the first movie his father ever brought him to — when he was 10.

It is Jesusland, after all.

My first Christian reading group March 18, 2009

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 5 comments

It finally happened! I was invited to a Christian reading group. We’re reading a book called Reading in Communion. We meet at Homer’s, the Christian coffee shop I wrote about a few weeks ago, a place that’s filled with several study and discussion groups at 7:30am.

I lost my book somehow — at least I couldn’t find it yesterday when I went to catch up on the reading. (This is our 4th week, but I was out of the country for the last two.) So I had a flashback to grade school when I had to admit I didn’t have my book. A friend let me read along in his. It was completely marked up, notes in the margins and big highlighted chunks everywhere.

We talk some about the book. And talk some about other stuff. It is great.

Meanwhile, a friend from the secular lefty side of my life is telling me I should read the McCullough bioraphy of John Adams. She suggested we try to get a reading group set up! Of course, she grew up a fundamentalist Christian before rebelling and leaving that culture in college. I know that it’s not only Christians who do reading groups. In fact, my parents each had a book group for decades. But I can’t think of a single book group that’s taking place among all of my progressive/lefty friends — and they’re a pretty intellectual and engaged group. Actually, there is one acquaintance who is attending a group — but it’s a Christian Bible study group that he’s attending out of curiosity!

This gave me an idea to survey 20 friends on the left side of my life and 20 on the Christian side and see how many reading groups they’ve heard of in their circles. Maybe I’ll do that.

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Untitled March 16, 2009

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 6 comments

Hey all! Listen, this is just a rough draft for discussion — just an experiment to try to figure out how to make some of these points. Let me know if you have any reactions.

Middleclass Christians are trying to figure out how to use their wealth to eliminate poverty around the world. It’s a beautiful movement that’s infecting churches everywhere. Last week I listened to this message at a church in London and then came home yesterday to the same message at church in Kansas City.

Ending poverty has been a central mission of the church since the beginning. For most of the 20th century, however, much of the church picked up a “conservative” (I’d say radical) ideology that shifted responsibility to the the “invisible hand” of the market to take care of the poor. But as we dive into this new era, we find ourselves relying on ideas from that old conservative ideology.

In his book Everything Must Change, Brian McLaren, suggests we change the story we live by — away from a story of competition and greed toward a story of sharing and love. Millions of Christians are doing that. But even if the plot is changing, the setting and characters are still taken from the pages of the old story. We have to change the very elements from which we’re constructing this new story of the church.

In the old Capitalist story, the main character is the individual — or family, or small group — who works in jobs or starts enterprises for money. The story follows our main characters from job to job, enterprise to enterprise. It’s a story of freedom and independence because the characters are free to choose any job or start any enterprise — and free to spend the money earned however they want.

Mainstream Middleclass Christians are mainly focusing their rethinking on the conclusion of that story: on what they should do with the money they earn. They’re questioning whether the freedom to float from cubicle to cubicle, even with a high salary, is the right kind of freedom to chase. They’re seeking instead a different kind of freedom: the kind that comes from vulnerability, dependence and community. (The strength of a religious approach to social justice shines here. Listen to Tim Keel’s sermon (March 15) that I witnessed yesterday at Jacob’s Well church in Kansas City and try to imagine a non-religious equivalent. To bolster our confidence in taking the leap of faith toward community, he has available both a big-picture philosophy of the world as well as an incredibly powerful and useful philosophy of the self. A non-religious approach (today at least) simply has to say, “Do this because it’s the right thing to do.” Which isn’t anywhere close to being enough.)

But how to get there? Two answers are popular now. The more mainstream one is: Give your money to the poor. The other one, a little more radical, focuses more on the system itself as a problem. It’s answer is to withdraw — for example by quitting your capitalist jobs and starting a cooperative enterprise. Most churches who have caught the anti-poverty bug include people who are pursuing a mix of both approaches.

The problem with both of those new stories, however, is that the main character held over from the old story — the individual or small group as an economic producer and consumer — doesn’t exist anymore in the real world. When we understand that, then we are led to a different kind of story because the setting and characters are different as well as the plot. I’ll get there, but first let me try to back up and explain what I’ve said so far.

Have you ever met anyone who has a perfectly inverted picture of themselves — for example, parents who believe they are raising independent children, but who are really smothering them? Well, our economic system, capitalism is a little bit like that. The story that capitalist society tells about itself is a story about a society made up of free, independent workers and entrepreneurs. That story has been told by philosopher/economists from John Locke to Tom Friedman, and woven into every breath of popular culture. The reality is the exact opposite: Capitalism’s revolutionary project during it’s 500 year run has been to build one great unified machine of production in which we are all completely dependent on each other. I realize that sounds a little bit like the interdependent community that Christians are looking for, but it’s not as simple as that.

Think of some items that you could not do without: I don’t know, maybe a drug that saved your life, the furnace that keeps you from freezing in the Winter, and your bicycle that gets you to work. Nearly every important thing we rely on is produced through the social effort of thousands — possibly millions — of workers. (Remember to count not only the workers who assembled the thing, but also the ones who made all the parts, the ones who made all the machines and equipment used in the process, the ones who mined, transported and prepared all the materials, and so on.)

When times are good, and jobs outnumber workers, it’s easy to forget about our interdependence because, as we float from job to job, and our paychecks command more than we could possibly consume, we could not feel more independent.

When the system contracts, on the other hand, our utter dependence becomes immediately and painfully clear.

But, in these hard times, in this capitalist system, who do we find that we’re dependent on for our living? Our fellow producers? No. We’re dependent on the owners of capital — the system is set up to serve them, not us. But bear with me for a second: I’m not talking about some cartoon class of fat cats. Maybe 300 years ago that kind of caricature of a small group who ruled the world to their advantage would have been appropriate. But most of us work for companies that are owned technically by millions shareholders. Most of those shareholders have no idea of what companies they might “own” in their 401Ks or other investments. The “owners” of capital have thus become an abstraction. And yet we rely on these owners — I could almost say imaginary owners — for our jobs and our paychecks.

What about the CEOs and boards of directors? Recently they’ve been looking a lot like that old caricature, right? Yes, but before you give them too much credit, remember that they are only the stewards of capital for the owners (a group that includes about half of the American people as shareholders). Their job is to increase the capital owned by the owners. They are actually legally required to work toward this end: shareholders can sue them if they intentionally do something else. Practicalities are a much better inducement though: if they don’t increase the chunk of capital that has been put in their care, then the owners will treat it with scorn and starve it of investment (”Sell!”).

By the way: understanding this “abstract owner” of the economy is the key to understanding the financial crisis. The owner is only interested in things that grow, and it doesn’t care how or why they grow. The owner is manic: it is a pulsing network of computers programmed with growth-maximizing algorithms, people programmed with career-maximizing algorithms and media programmed with ratings-maximizing algorithms. The owner is us — even if we’re only looking for 3% on our savings account.

This blind, hungry beast always eventually gets sucked back into the kinds of scams — legal and illegal, intended and unintended — that are coming to light newly each week. These scams offer increasing share prices, house prices, etc… But when the scams finally unravel, then the abstract owner is inconsolable (for a time) and refuses to invest anywhere. That’s why prices keep going down, down, down.

During a “bubble” like the one that soared for most of the past 25 years, there are plenty of jobs for everyone — even totally useless jobs. Remember some of those Dot Coms in the 90’s? It was an odd kind of socialism: Guaranteed work for everyone, no matter how dumb your idea! In those times, when all the numbers are going up, we feel free and independent.

During a “crash” like the one we’re beginning to feel now, there are few jobs. When the factories, stores and offices in our communities start shutting their doors, then there is a terrible sinking feeling. Suddenly it’s perfectly clear that we don’t control our own means of making a living. Suddenly we realize that even though we worked as a part of an interdependent society of producers, we are unable to stop the destruction of our means of producing. Suddenly it’s clear that the one calling the shots is that “abstract owner” of the economy — or, as it’s called in polite society, “the market.”

OK. Back to the new stories that Christians are trying to live by in their mission to end poverty. The first: We middleclass Christians in the rich countries should give away our money to the poor. The second: that we should withdraw and make our own living outside of the system.

How does the first story play out when capitalism is destroying the means of making a living of billions of people? (And when the income of rich country people is shrinking too?)

We can still give away as much as we can. But what’s happening in the world right now — 250,000 factories have closed in China in the past year! — shows us that we are called to do something much deeper and much more difficult than simply giving away some money. We do need to give away our wealth. We have to do it, and do it wisely. But what else?

The second story, is heading there: building up a means of making a living that is in the hands of people who care about people, not some “abstract owner” that only cares about numbers that go up. However, the scale of what’s happening in the world right now is also showing us that small cooperative enterprises are equally dependent on the “abstract owner” as everything else. That won’t be true in every case. But on the whole, coops are going to be subject to the ups and downs of the broader economy. Traditionally, crises are times when a lot of them go bust or get bought out by bigger companies. The food co-op down the street from me was just bought up by Whole Foods, for example. And something tells me they’re not going to keep it open for very long.

What’s the solution? The solution is to depose that abstract owner. This doesn’t mean some kind of violent revolution — or even an angry revolution — against the rich. Rich people own a lot of stuff and make up a big chunk of that “abstract owner.” But guess what: we middle class people dwarf the rich in our share of ownership of the economy. We are the owner! What it means is that we have the power to depose this system non-violently and with a relatively smooth political transition because this is a revolution to depose ourselves from a mindless, knee jerk role that most of us don’t even know we’re playing.

We shouldn’t be naive. This system we live under is a high-voltage, super-heated, radioactive tangle of wires, pipes and waste. Taking this thing apart is going to be incredibly dangerous. There will be unforeseen consequences that will hurt a lot of people. But that is already happening, for example, thanks to the latest financial bubble burst. The question is are we going to keep subjecting ourselves to these kinds of disasters?

There will also be people who feel it’s their duty to protect the status quo. Some of these will be in the pay of people who benefit from things staying as they are, but many will be acting on ideological grounds — in other words, they really believe that the current system makes us free and that all alternatives are chains.

And then there will be opportunists who try to seize the day in the toughest moments of the transition. When things are getting harder and we’re saying, “Let’s share more,” these will be saying things like, “Throw out the immigrants, so that we can keep more for ourselves.” This is the most dangerous thing. But that kind hatred is going to become very powerful as the economy continues to decline whether we act or not.

It’s going to be hard. But this is our generations’ charge.

The only thing wrong with Wikipedia February 1, 2009

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 4 comments

is that there are hyperactive wikipedians who delete articles because their subjects aren’t ‘notable’ enough.

I was just looking for info on the New Earth Coffee house, which closed before we moved to Kansas City. Every now and then I hear about it. But there’s no info anywhere on its story. There was a wikipedia article once, but wikipedian ‘HappyMe22‘ deleted it. And he’s a Christian — a Presbyterian even! Now, what is a nice Presbyterian doing going around deleting other people’s articles?

UPDATE: Found this one article…

What next? January 23, 2009

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 12 comments

Sorry for the long hiatus! I got busy. Also, it felt like I was in an infinite loop here. My purpose with this blog was to show my “secular”, atheist, agnostic, liberal christian friends back in DC, NY, SF, etc. something about this alternate universe of the changing evangelical church—and how, within it, along with a lot of bad old baggage, there’s something really, really good and new happening. Well, I convinced them. And so now what do I do? Maybe I should call it quits here? My work is done.

On the other hand, a whole bunch of Christians are reading the blog. Why are you guys reading? I have really enjoyed the conversation and connection. I’d love to kind of restart it in the mode of the millions of cool Christian blogs out there.

I’ve felt a lot of essays percolating up, and maybe I should be posting here, working them out here. Essays about:

What do you think?

Spiritual movement based on ancient Eastern texts sweeps Midwest! November 17, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 1 comment

Just judging from trips on planes in and out of Kansas City, my new home has got to be one of the most Bible-studying American cities. There’s always at least one wild looking hipster studying a heavily marked up bible. I’ll grant you, it’s an unscientific survey, but it’s been very consistent in my way-too-big sample size lately.

I’m writing this post on a plane. The guy across the isle and in front of me is reading Chronicles. The chapter is all marked up, lots of notes, highlighter marks, checks and underlines. He was just reading for a while, and now has his face in his hands. Now he’s looking at the ceiling. He’s thinking his brains out. The book is open again and he’s reading away again. Think of how many times he’s read this book in his life. But he’s going back, once again, to see something new. And obviously, he’s seeing it. He just jumped back to Kings 19. The first several paragraphs are highlighted in yellow, in addition to many notes and underlines.

I see this all the time. Walk into any hipster coffeeshop in Kansas City and you’ll see at least one kid doing this.

Step back and think about what is really going on here. This Kansas City guy—who fits many Midwestern red state stereotypes—is reading, and living by, 2,500 year-old Jewish texts. He believes these texts are guides for his own life. He believes God is speaking to humanity through these stories. The way to understand how amazing that is, is to imagine this probably conservative Kansas Citian reading Taoist or Buddhist texts, and really studying them, really trying to understand the roots and historical context of them. For some reason that sounds cool, right? But he’s just reading ancient Jewish texts instead of ancient Indian or Chinese texts. If I put it that way, doesn’t it sound a little cool as well? And keep in mind, he doesn’t just read this book. He’s probably read hundreds of books about the book—books that explain the cultural, political and economic context of the narrative of the book.

Obama narrowed the ‘God Gap’ November 6, 2008

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Steve Waldman breaks down Obama’s reclamation of Christian voters in WSJ.