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YouthFront July 30, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | write a comment

At that meeting over the weekend I met an amazing guy named Mike King. He hosted us at the campus of YouthFront, an organization he’s worked for and led for 33 years. I got some of Mike’s story in the car on the way and filled in some details reading his book later, Presence-centered Youth Ministry.

After driving through Missouri and Kansas fields and forest, when we finally arrived at YouthFront I immediately thought of that scene in the Matrix when Neo walks into the Oracle’s apartment for the first time. Remember the scene?: those kids, rebels in training, are sitting around silently meditating, levitating, bending spoons with their minds—sharpening their resistance to the Matrix. In her living room that Oracle character was building a revolutionary counter culture right in the belly of the beast.

So when we pulled up into the YouthFront compound, a couple hundred teenagers were scattered individually in silence around the grounds: they were sitting alone under trees and in doorways, in quiet meditation, writing in journals or studying the Bible. There was a magic energy. Like…you could just feel how much these kids were into what they were doing.

Earlier, the kids had been in a session with a “story teller” who (and I’m sorry if I’m getting it a little wrong here) tried to help them see the Bible as a story, and help them to see their own lives as stories inside of God’s story. I think an insufficient but helpful secular translation might be: they were finding significance for their own lives in the grand unfolding of history.

After the first part of our meeting, we joined the kids in the sanctuary where they were meditating, praying silently and out loud, reciting scripture and participating in liturgy. They were together accessing ancient Christian traditions of worship and prayer. (Again, my description will seem off to Christians because I still don’t understand the nuances of all these words.)

Mike King has been with YouthFront for 33 years. I think he started right out of high school. For most of that time he has been the leader of the organization. I also met the camp manger who has been there for more than 20 years, and he didn’t look more than 40. In other words, this place is being built by people who have dedicated their entire lives to it. That kind of dedication to and continuity in institutions is almost unheard of in the world I come from. Maybe it’s more common among Christians because the central model of leadership is of pastors and volunteers who often live out their adult lives—or their whole lives—serving in a single church.

And after all this time, YouthFront seems to be only just getting started. The same revolution/movement of the spirit that’s sweeping the church everywhere is at work out here in these Kansas woods, in this one-time outpost of extreme Fundamentalism. There is a feeling there of a whole new project, a whole new world unfolding. It made me think of the Highlander Folk School. Highlander had already been around for 25 years by the time it emerged as one of the incubating institutions of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50’s and 60’s. It was a place where young leaders of groups like the SCLC and their mentors gathered for practical training, study and spiritual retreat. I thought of the importance of the unconscious traditions that are embodied in these “long haul” leaders like Mike King: all of the knowledge and habits, all the little things, as well as the big ideas and inspiring words, that make a place work smoothly and make it a place where people can unfold and find themselves and others and, in this case, God.

A little more about Mike’s story: he grew up in a mainline church, was a bit of an “experimenter” in high school in the early 70’s, and then got sucked up into Christian fundamentalism through his participation in Youth for Christ (later renamed YouthFront). Youth for Christ started out in the 40’s as a relatively progressive (for it’s time anyways) church organization to serve the masses of adolescents left behind by World War II (by their fathers who were fighting and their mothers who were in the factories working overtime). Then in the 60’s and 70’s, the movement become consumed by the expansion of Fundamentalism (no rock and roll, no dancing, “literal” interpretation of the Bible, exclusive focus on salvation as getting to heaven when you die, etc…).

I’ve read that when the Christian Rock scene rose up, there were a whole lot of Christian fundamentalists taking issue with it. To a certain subculture, Rock was still the devil’s music. That’s still out there actually. I heard an anti-Rock tirade just last year on a rural Christian radio station. The speaker described a scientific study that played Rock music and Gospel music to plants. Yes, Rock music killed the plants! They thrived when exposed to Gospel music. Except… (yes, really) the Marijuana plant! It thrived with Rock and shriveled with Gospel.

Mike was one of those guys. But eventually one day (or one year) he woke up and said, “I’m a Pharisee.” The Pharisees were the religious sticklers in ancient Israel who Jesus was always challenging. They were concerned with following the rules of scripture to a T, but had lost sight of their overall message. Jesus’ engagement with the Pharisees is one of the key defining stories of this rising movement in the church.

So Mike was born again, again. Just as the whole church is being born again, again right now. You step anywhere near YouthFront’s beautiful 600 acres of sacred space and you can feel it happening right under your feet.

It sounds like YouthFront has suffered a little bit of blowback for these changes. Some fundamentalist and conservative evangelical churches have stopped sending their kids. But “postliberal” and other evangelicals have taken their place. It sounds like a lot of mainline churches that had kind of lost their steam are getting it back partly with the help of evangelical and fundamentalist refugees. I have seen some examples of this, but for some reason I didn’t sense that it was a movement with any momentum. Now I have a word for it (”postliberal”) and I’ll look for more examples of evangelical workers injecting a little extra passion into mainline churches that might have gotten a little too low key for their own good.

Before we left YouthFront in the evening, the teenagers were finally acting like normal kids (what a relief!), chasing each other around, playing games, being incredibly excited about everything (remember that?). Thank you to Mike for hosting us and taking the time to talk to me about YouthFront when he had so many other things that day to do!

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A bunch of new stuff July 28, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 15 comments

I got to hang out with an amazing group of Christians for a few days this weekend. The small group included Christian rockers, publishers, preachers, youth workers, post-liberals (a new one for me!), post-evangelicals, recovering fundamentalists, recovering mainliners, reclaiming-it-mainliners, emergents, resurgent Catholics and all kinds of other chaos.

I am not going to tell you who all was there because, like I joked a couple posts ago, I am making people crazy jealous of all these famous Christians I’m getting to hang out with. It’s so unfair. They’re like, “You don’t even know who that is…I’ve dreamed about meeting him my whole life…” I feel so unworthy. So I’m going to keep a lid on it lest some jealous rank and file Emergent beat me up on the street one of these days.

Labels are a cruel thing when it comes to faith and spirituality. They’re necessary if we’re going to use language at all. But no label can do justice to even one person in this realm. Being around these folks was constantly unsettling because they kept blowing up all kinds of things I was hoping I understood.

And it was incredibly exciting. I feel like I just got to the top of another hill on this journey and can see miles of new territory to be explored:

Those were just of the few new spaces that opened up for me this weekend.

“The Emergent Church” July 19, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 4 comments

Imo’s PizzaOver the last week, I have been living the dream of every rank and file Emergent Christian.

First, I got to hang out with the guys from the Church Basement Road show: Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt and Mark Scandrette — and Emergent leader Tim Keel, who’s church, Jacob’s Well, was hosting the show. They were doing their performance/book tour at Jacob’s Well in Kansas City. Like a groupie, I finagled my way into their RV and wound up going on a pre-show walk with Tony Jones. He told me the insider’s history of the Emergent Church — and I felt so privileged. I didn’t realize at the time that it was the second chapter of his book! — but I still feel privileged.

After the show, Elizabeth and I bribed our way into their lawn chair hangout session outside their RV with two large Imo’s pizza. Again, what a privilege to talk to so many of the early leaders of the Emergent movement at length!

Often, people have commented on this blog, “You’re writing about the Emergent Church, why do you keep saying the movement doesn’t have a name?” But the Emergent movement is a sub-movement within a much larger phenomenon. These guys are the ones who were willing to be overt and explicit about the full implications of the wider movement. A consequence of that was accepting a name, and therefore becoming an easy target for fierce criticism from conservatives. It also means that pastors and leaders who’ve been ostracized, demoted or chronically ignored in the struggle to change their churches find their way to Emergent mailing lists and websites. These Emergent leaders carry weight on their shoulders: they see the consequences of working toward a new future for the church. From my perspective as newcomer and outsider, it all looks good. I can easily see the change the change that’s happening in the church, but it’s not easy for me to see the pain and turmoil that abundant just under the surface. These guys are seeing the friction and tension and hurt that are an inevitable by-product of any sea change in a tight-knit culture.

I have to admit, I still don’t really understand what Emergent is all about. I feel like I should understand it, because I’ve studied all the postmodern philosophers who these guys like. They seem to share many of my positions social issues. And their style of “doing church” appeals to me more than any other. So if there are any Christians I should understand, it’s these guys. But the more questions I asked them, the more of a mystery they became. So, I’m diving into some more of their books. Right now I’m reading Tony Jones’ The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. It is an incredible overview of this chunk of the Revolution in Jesusland, covering all aspects of the Emergent church from its history to theology to church methods. And it’s a great read.

And then, to make Emergent visitors to this site even more jealous, I got to visit with Brian McLaren before the Matthew 25 Network event in DC the night before last. What a great guy! Since he stepped down from being a pastor in 2006, he’s been to some crazy number of countries learning about the global church (and a lot of other things). A lot of good is clearly coming from his travels.

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Put one back in the Mennonite column July 8, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 12 comments

We went to a church house group Sunday night. A few people there said they read this blog! So they will laugh when they see see this story. Or maybe they were just humoring me and they don’t really read the blog. I will soon see…

So, here’s a typical and awesome story. I’ve met a whole bunch of people with a progression similar to this. There were at least a few other people with the same basic story there tonight; I also met a bunch of these guys on my visit to Ozark Christian College; and I’ve met scattered others.

“Ted” is about 23 (I think), really tall, blond, with a smile that never leaves his face. He grew up in a conservative evangelical family, going to a small country church in South Dakota.

His church had thread of historical connection to the Mennonites. He remembers in high school talking to a Mennonite pastor who served briefly at his church about pacifism. Ted couldn’t understand how the guy could oppose just wars of liberation or self-defense (like, I suppose, Iraq—this would have been the early days of the war). The pastor told him, “I used to feel the same way as you. Just read the Word of God and see what it has to say.”

Ted didn’t take him up on that challenge right away. After high school, he went to (very conservative) Calvary Bible College in Kansas City. After a couple years, he then transfered to another conservative Bible college. I can’t remember the exact name but it was: Midwest Bible…or Baptist…or Christian College — and yes, all three of those possible entities actually exist.

There he read Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, a best selling memoir of a young hipster/geek/intellectual Christian writer. One of the characters in the book was a pacifist. This got Ted thinking and he finally started to do a little Bible study on the topic, just like his pastor in high school had suggested. (And it’s funny, because the group had just been joking about how Donald Miller is the “gateway drug” to a radical Christianity. And, further, that Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis is when you start lacing the gateway drug with something a little more serious.)

A little later, in a Christian bookstore in South Dakota, Ted picked up a copy of Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution. It was right there on display, and he also had heard some other students talking about the book. Reading Irresistible Revolution sent him back to the Bible for more serious study. (Shane must be the Crack Cocaine of radical Christianity.)

Just like several other young, recently-right-wing Christians I’ve met, he wrote a list of passages in the New Testament that might justify violence in certain circumstances, and another list of passages that ruled out violence. The first list was very short, the second was very long. Moreover, just reading the words of the Bible through this new lens seemed to make the non-violent message of the Gospel stand out crystal clear and very loud. Ted became a pacifist—or “peacemaker,” as he prefers to say, because “it sounds more active.”

Ted graduated from college and went to work at an elementary school that mostly serves a refugee population in Kansas City. He believed in helping people in his community on a person-to-person basis, and he started living out that philosophy in his school.

I suppose he still had some partisan Republican instincts clanging around in his head and heart, and that’s why he threw himself into the Ron Paul campaign, with its mix of “conservative” social values (anti-abortion, etc…), libertarian economic policies and hardline, anti-imperial/anti-war stance. It was the perfect combo for Ted and he couldn’t resist. He dove in head first and spent a ton of time working in the Great Ron Paul Netroots Army.

Around the time that Ron Paul pulled out of the race, Ted read Shane Claiborne’s latest book, “Jesus for President.” Thanks to Shane, Ted realized that the government is not the solution to humanity’s problems. He decided to withdraw completely from politics. He plans not even to vote this year.

I asked him about Obama and McCain. Right off the bat he said that he doesn’t want McCain because he doesn’t want more war.

So what about Obama? Ted says he is really moved and excited about Obama when he sees his speeches on YouTube. But then he goes to the Obama website and looks at his polices. There’s nothing there that excites him. “There’s no substance. Obama talks about Change, but what is he really going to change? How is he really going to change it? I think both the parties are just out for power,” he said. He remarked that when he went to Ron Paul’s site, there were convincing specifics about how he was going to really change America.

I bet there are at least a million Ted’s out there. They are a group to watch. They have insane leadership skills thanks to the well-organized training grounds of their churches, camps, schools, conferences, etc… They are personally and emotionally well adjusted. And they are willing to sacrifice their lives (either literally or just in hard endless work) to save the world.

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Misquote June 11, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 3 comments

Check this out, it’s interesting. Someone who was quoted in that NYTimes article I posted last week says she was misrepresented…and has the power to set the record straight thanks to her own blog:

This particular article ends with a quote from yours truly, so I feel I must comment. It says,

Letitia Wong, 32, who said she favored a fence along the Mexican border to keep out illegal immigrants, added: “As much as our faith informs our political views, we aren’t united in one way of thinking. What unites us at the Journey is the power of Jesus Christ.”

I don’t remember saying specifically anything about a border fence, other than when asked how many people present thought it was too easy to enter the US, I raised my hand. And, if you think my quote sounds a little weird, so do I. In its proper context, I meant to convey that The Journey’s primary emphasis is on faith in Christ and not on political stances. We have thoughtful liberals and thoughtful conservatives in church who derive their political leanings from their interpretation of how the Bible’s precepts apply to public policy, and I think that’s fair enough. We can disagree all day long about who and what to vote for, but at the end of the day, it is important that we recognize that we are Christian siblings who share the love of Christ. And in that context, politics takes a back seat.

I have been misquoted a number of times, so I know how this feels. And I think that too many journalists feel free to be careless with the quotes of “ordinary people” — i.e. people who they don’t mix with in their professional and personal life. “Ordinary people” have no recourse. They’re not going to be on TV saying, “That jerk misquoted me!” They won’t be writing an oped refuting the claim.

But more and more, they have the power to blog about it. And tools like Technorati and Google alerts ensure that people following the conversation will hear about it…like I just did.

Is Bad Organizing Biblical?
(Or: What Would Jesus Do With Democracy?
 Or: Next Step for Christian Big Thinkers, Part 3.
 Or: Review of Jesus for President, Part 4.) May 16, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 13 comments

I’ve been watching this rising movement of Christian radicals for a few years with nothing but complete awe and admiration. But I’ve finally worked up the nerve to ask a few questions—to pose a challenge even.

I think the movement is making an idol out of smallness and slowness. Small and slow can be beautiful, but making an idol of them is wrong because big and fast can be just as beautiful and just as central to living as a follower of Jesus. By ruling out big, unified, global political organizing, the movement is tragically limiting the Christian imagination at a time of great opportunity. Jesus didn’t limit himself to the small or slow, and I can’t find anything in the Bible to make me think he’s calling us to limit ourselves now.

But maybe I’m missing something. So I’m going to ask you guys in the movement a bunch of questions here. I’ll treat Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw as the movement’s spokespeople on this small+slow+local dogma through their new book Jesus for President.

I’ll tell you where I’m going with this up front: I think what’s happened to the rising Christian radical movement is that we’ve applied deep-down, empire-bred instincts to our politics…and to the gospel. It’s the same kind of thing that happened so often to Roman citizens who converted to Christianity. It wasn’t long before they were ruling by the sword in Jesus’ name, because ruling by the sward was all they knew. Our empire doesn’t rule over (white, middle-class, Christian) people with violence. It rules over us with a different kind of idea. This idea shapes our every thought, but we are barely aware of it. It was the same for the Romans: if you asked them, “Does Rome rule by the sword?” they wouldn’t know what you were talking about.

Our empire enforces hopelessness by raising us to believe that humanity is unfit to work collectively, on a large scale, to redeem creation. It says the only way to change the world is through decentralized efforts by individuals and private groups. And then it does everything in its power to make sure those efforts never add up to anything that can threaten empire. That idea is vital for the survival of empire today because modern empire has been forced by centuries of resistance and subversion (mostly by Christians) to put down the sword in governing most citizens. We citizens of empire are now free to dismantle empire non-violently (I realize that’s a big case to make; I’ll try to make it below). That’s why so many young Christians who want to be martyrs have to go across the world to Iraq or Sudan. I don’t want to demean those efforts, but that is theater at the margins of the empire. Empire today has learned that, when it kills its “own” people as martyrs, they spring up one thousandfold. And so it won’t dare touch us. It will instead bog us down in absolutely unglamorous political machinations. Most of us mock that work as being futile, just as revolutionaries in Jesus’ day rejected his work on the cross as futile. But that is the cross that we have to bear in our time. We have to bear it like Jesus: not as a messy, self-serving compromise; but as a messy, beautiful, selfless triumph over death.

OK…so I’ve written about 50 pages in an attempt to get the rest of this post right over the last week…and then I realized that this is just a blog. So I’m just going to put it up in little, very imperfect pieces. Stay tuned.

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The Next Step for Christian Big Thinkers: Part 2 May 1, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 23 comments

I grew up an atheist, but recently I have fallen in love with a movement that seems to be the most dynamic element of Christianity in American today. It’s a movement based on radical idealism, a faith that “all of creation will be redeemed.” These people are working toward a world with no poverty, no violence, no hatred or racism. And they believe they can do it. Even some of the most conservative evangelical churches are beginning shift away from the narrow, exclusive theology of “personal salvation” to a holistic gospel that calls Christians to build the “Kingdom of Heaven” right here on Earth. My whole life, I’ve been searching for a movement that has the guts to try to truly save the world. The progressive movement in which I grew up has been in a downward spiral of lowered expectations. Meanwhile, Christians are charging forward with revolutionary zeal—and are even calling themselves “revolutionaries”!

There is one big problem, though: These revolutionary Christians have adopted a theory of social change that is just as narrow and unimaginative as the old theology they just left behind.

Revolutionary Christians are throwing themselves into direct, person-to-person anti-poverty projects at home and around the world—sometimes with reckless abandon, sometimes with careful planning, but always with passion and love. And it’s a beautiful thing. It’s helping a lot of people, and it’s teaching wealthy Americans a lot about the world. (In this context, middle class Americans are wealthy.)

Even the Christians who are doing the most see that what they’re currently doing is not enough to really fix this broken world. And so they feel God’s call to do more. But most think that means only more of the same: dig more wells, fund more micro loans, build more schools and orphanages, etc… And for sure, God is calling us to do as much of that as we possibly can.

But a certain dogma regarding social change has taken hold of the Christian imagination, and limited it to only projects that are small, local, “relational” and that they can personally witness themselves. Those who have been bitten by this dogma go on the faith that, if we all just live as followers of Christ in our neighborhoods, churches and workplaces, then God will work out the rest. They believe it’s wrong to work for social change at the level of the whole society because that requires political power, and therefore leads to all kinds of messy compromises, unintended consequences and, ultimately, corruption.

For me, this selective limitation of imagination is heartbreaking because these are the only people I can find with an otherwise boundless imagination and faith that we can make the impossible possible. And it’s totally unnecessary.

This dogma, which is strangling the radical Christian imagination, has nothing to do with the Bible or any Christian tradition, but is actually just old-fashioned laissez-faire economic doctrine recast in a new role. We’ve been fed this doctrine all our lives in many forms, so it’s understandable that it should shape our instincts, usually without us even knowing it. (Those of us who went to college have been especially dumbed down by this doctrine.)

Radical Christians are dreaming of big, deep social transformations—such as reshaping a whole economy to make sure everyone has the means of making a living, and cleaning up the environment while we’re at it. Laissez-faire says that only families, small communities or individual companies can plan collectively, inside themselves, for goals like that. If you want any higher-level organization, then what you can do is form a “community of communities,” a trade association, or something like that, where no one member can be coerced by the larger body. The minute you try to plan on a social level, let alone a global level, then your on the road to serfdom with Stalin, Mao or…Caesar.

If you’ve read radical Christian writers like Shane Claiborne or Greg Boyd, that all sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? How did it happen that the global capitalists who party at Davos share the same fundamental ideology about society’s role in economics as the people camping out at Christian anarchist festivals?

Well, the doctrine of Laissez-fair is so alluring because it is so beautiful in its simplicity: Every individual, family, community and company only needs to take care of itself and act responsibly towards others*; if we would all just do that, then the big picture would take care of itself. It all goes back to Adam Smith (and a bunch of other classical economists) who created these ideas when feudalism was breaking down in order to justify the rising economic system that would eventually be called Capitalism. Nowadays, laissez-faire economists (also called neo-liberal, neo-classical and conservative) have math equations and charts to show how it works. But Smith said the “invisible hand” of God was the driver. In a way, laissez-faire is the big brother in economics of biology’s theory of “Intelligent Design.”

But is it biblical? Obviously, my answer is no. But before I get into that, let’s dig a little deeper into what exactly we’re talking about here.

planningLaissez-faire doctrine says that whenever society tries to organize and plan big solutions, it always fails. But for clarity’s sake, it’s important to understand that laissez-faire is OK with some types of organizing and planning. Most liberals and progressives believe in strong use of regulation and tax incentives to coax the economy in the right direction. And they believe in heavy investment in infrastructure (roads, research, etc…) and public services (schools, healthcare, etc…). All that is perfectly consistent with the laissez-faire doctrine, at least in it’s most honest form. If that sounds odd, just go to Frederick Hayek. He was the 20th century’s Godfather of laissez-faire who inspired and popularized the revival of the dogma after it had almost died out forever. Check out his book The Road to Serfdom in which he supports strong regulation, taxation for social services, socialized medicine, universal public education and more.

So, because of our upbringing/brainwashing in the laissez-faire ideology, we are OK with the society doing public services, regulation and tax incentives. But also because of that upbringing, we are terrified of the idea of we, as society, intentionally retooling our for-profit industries to make their impact on the environment sustainable, or to reduce the work week to give people more time with their families, or for any other non-accidental (a.k.a. “market-driven”) purpose.

The only way to do that kind of big transformation is with political power. And the rising generation of radical Christians are against anything that has to do with political power.

But, once again, is that biblical? I’ll have to get into that in the next installment.

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The Salvation (Red) Army April 28, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 1 comment

Is this real? And how did I miss it?

intro/translation for non-Christians before I get to part 2 April 28, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 5 comments

You know all that “Left Behind” stuff? It’s real. There really are Christians who believe that, in a very specific Armageddon scenario, Jesus will come back, make grape juice out of non-believers, and send everyone else to heaven.

Do you know what Jesus’ criteria will be for who gets to stick around in paradise and who burns forever? Just look, the Bible is perfectly clear. Jesus, after separating all humanity into two groups…

“…will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“[Jesus] will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” (Matthew 25:31-46)

For most of the 20th century, fundamentalist Christians took the hell and heaven part of that and other passages literally; but they they took Jesus’ constant focus on social justice as figurative or ancillary.

Many of the Christians I’ve been writing about on this blog have retained their belief in the heaven and hell stuff. But they’ve taken off the blinders about what what Jesus was actually talking about: i.e. that “the meek shall inherit [a redeemed] world.”

And that has turned millions of Christians into fanatics behind the cause of ending world poverty. What is so exciting is that they have gone beyond charity and are seeking ways to change the fundamental structure of the world economy. They do not believe profit should be the primary organizing principle of the relationships between people and communities, but rather—as corny as it sounds—that love should be.

And they’re serious about this. They’re giving up Christmas to build wells in Africa. They’re selling they’re suburban homes to move to broken neighborhoods of the city. They’re sending teams to buy back land for the landless in Central America.

For me, this “conversion” of millions of Christians, has all been the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

In Part 1 of this series, I teed up a challenge to these social-justice oriented Christians over the means by which they’ll actually change the world. In Part II, I’m going to try to spell out my critique and suggestions for a way forward.

By the way, I have been having this same conversation (without the brimstone) with the progressive mainstream. Interestingly, they/we have absorbed the same obsessive focus on small-scale, piecemeal changes as the Christians. Hmm…I wonder how that happened. If you ask me, it’s obvious: we’ve absorbed the official ideology of the current economic system so deeply that we’re simply unable to think in terms of any alternative.

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The Next Step for Christian Big Thinkers: Part 1 April 26, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 12 comments

As an activist and organizer, I used to have a vision of my role in social change that kept me protected in a certain way from people and their problems. When I was a union organizer and community organizer, I spent countless hours at workers’ kitchen tables listening to their problems. Often they cried. I consoled. By a few months into a campaign, I knew enough about so many interconnected lives in a workplace or neighborhood for 100 John Sayles screenplays.

But my purpose wasn’t to help people, it was to “help them help themselves.” I wasn’t a social worker. In fact, as hard-nosed organizers, we were taught disdain for social workers who ministered directly to people’s short term needs. We were even advised by many of our mentors not to socialize with the people we were organizing, “because it could complicate things.”

When I met her, my wife Elizabeth became a new mentor to me. As a Christian who had always led a “missional” life, there had never been a time in her life when she wasn’t personally intertwined with a whole bunch of troubled lives. When we were first dating, she was visiting several times a week an old disabled man in one of the poorest sections of DC. Though he was confined to a wheelchair, he had no ramp to get in or out of his house. He was also half blind, and yet somehow was (barely) taking care of his two adult mentally retarded children. The man’s house was a disaster of filth and decay. Elizabeth was organizing a group of her coworkers to clean and fix it up. A few times she tried to get me to go visit with her. I resisted, saying things like, “I think we often just mess things up worse when we get involved in lives so different from our own,” and, “I choose to make a different kind of contribution.”

It’s a few years later now and, thanks to Elizabeth, I have finally gotten out side of my own “four walls” and into other people’s lives as a participant, not just an observer/organizer. It’s been a life-altering experience, even though I’ve only just dipped my toe in the water.

I remember, in college, during one building take-over protest (I can’t even remember what the cause was), when we angrily read/barked Franz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” (a great book) at passers by through a mega phone. The Christians I’ve been hanging out with lately, spend their lives trying to live with and directly aid the “wretched” of their neighborhoods and towns. So I’m incredibly grateful to Christians for what they’ve taught me over the last few years.

And now I want to give something back.

Too many Christians these days are rejecting the paradigm of “organizing” (intentional, structural social change) just as dogmatically as I used to reject “service” (individual, sacrificial social change).

These days, Christians are asking really enormous questions. They’re asking, “How can we eliminate poverty completely?” and “How can we stop harming the environment altogether.” What’s so great about them is that their faith in Christ leads them to believe that total redemption is possible. That is the miracle that makes their world irresistible to me.

But they’re attempting to answer these questions almost in complete ignorance of humanity’s long history of tackling problems of that scale and scope at the social level, at the level of whole societies. In other words, they’re approaching big social problems just as cluelessly as I have always approached “little” individual problems.

Today I attended Brian McLaren’s Deep Shift conference. One of the agendas of the conference was to get Christians engaged in social problems such as poverty. Both Brian and local pastor Tim Keel told some horrifying stories about what life was like in the slums of some African cities. And through Bible teaching, they left no doubt that Jesus called us to do something about it.

But when it came to, “HOW?” they could only offer the political economy of the personal: Be a good-hearted business person. And consume less.

Brian said something remarkable (if you’re able to place it in historical context): “Capitalism is our only option. So we have to figure out how to practice good capitalism instead of bad capitalism.”

Tim Keel said something equally remarkable (if you place it in the context of Brian’s statement, and have spent some time thinking through how capitalism actually works): “When we consume less here, we can build up prosperity and security over there.”

Those statements represent the two pillars of today’s pop economic thought. And all alone, they’re really harmful. They are the equivalent in political economy of Joel Osteen’s pop theology. “Think good thoughts, make good choices, and all will be well.”

[I should add here that Brian, Tim and so many other Christians are participating in and seeing with their own eyes a lot of *real* efforts where consuming less to give to development projects is working, and where practicing “socially responsible Capitalism” is working. My point isn’t that Christians should stop participating in those kinds of things, it’s that those kinds of personal efforts will unfortunately never be enough to even scratch the surface of world poverty. That kind of personal/relational work does form the foundation of any sincere big picture transformation…but only if we go beyond the personal to the (yes, I know, it’s horrible) political in a really big way.]

I’m not getting down on Brian, Tim or any other Christians—or, for that matter, non-religious lefties, who share the same economic thinking. In the present day, when it comes to economic thought, we’re all starting at zero. For a couple hundred years up to the early 20th century, there was a long tradition of deep, experiential and theoretical work done in economics by passionate people who had the exact same goals as today’s Christians who are saying, “Everything must change.”

But twists and turns of history have hidden all that experience and knowledge from current generations. In some ways starting from zero is a good thing, because so much baggage had accumulated around those old traditions. But it’s wrong for us to simply repeat those two hundred years of trial and error, making every mistake they made, and ending up inevitably crushed by that same old debilitating baggage in the end.

OK…so in the next installment I’ll get into the economics itself. This post is way too long already!

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