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Be careful who you give those Bibles to October 12, 2007

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 5 comments

Yesterday morning, while I was hunting for coffee outside of the convention center, I found myself walking alongside a very tall, very bearded college student who was hunting for breakfast. Over breakfast I got his story.

Erik grew up deeply religious in a small town in Arkansas attending a conservative Southern Baptist church. In 2003, he was accepted to the Air Force Academy, which, if you don’t know, is extremely difficult to get into, and a huge honor, especially for someone coming from Erik’s community.

Over his first two years at the Academy, he was more and more troubled by doubts about his decision to become an Air Force pilot. Partly, it was getting away from his home church that gave him the space to reconsider what his faith had to say about a military career. He was already well versed in the Bible, and kept studying it—now with somewhat fresh eyes. He became more and more certain that, if he really believed in the gospel, he couldn’t go dropping bombs on people in Iraq or anywhere else.

But how would he explain his decision to his friends in the Academy and back home, his parents and his church?

He found the resolve to quit after a bout with the flu that left him bedridden and alone with the Bible for several days at school. While reading one of Paul’s letters, something just clicked and he knew his decision was made.

Now he’s back in his home town attending a local college. I fished around to see what other influences there might have been that made him think about things differently. One, he said, was a young Bible teacher in his private Christian high school. “He told us, you really need to ask yourself whether you believe what’s in this book,” Erik said.

Erik is now a part of a house church community founded by that teacher. And for the past couple of years, he lived, “in a house with eight other guys where we had church all the time.”

Recently, Erik went down to Waco Texas to visit and learn from the “Church Under the Bridge,” an interdenominational church “with a call to the poor and the marginalized.” He said he was looking around to see what other Christians were up do—and that’s why he’s come to this conference too. With friends he’s sought out enclaves of homeless people and people living in extreme poverty in his own area, where he humbly and openly wrestled with the same dangers of inadvertently doing more harm than good that everyone at this conference is dealing with.

As I’ve written before, one amazing thing about this movement is how spontaneously it seems to be rising in so many different communities. Over and over, you see the same patterns. And often, they’re taking place without any contact with the national/international voices that are representing the movement. For example, Erik hadn’t read Shane Claiborne or Greg Boyd or any other anti-militaristic Christian voices before he left the Air Force Academy.

Erik’s story may seem exceptional. But this conference is full of young people on the the same kind of radical path. (Catalyst was too.) But one thing that’s so interesting: even though some of them may have drifted away from the church in which they grew up (sometime just temporarily), they have not drifted from the “church universal.” These young revolutionaries are staying right inside the heart of the church, never giving up.

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I’m doing this for God, not you October 11, 2007

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 7 comments

CCDA session pict

This Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) conference is largely about the art, science and theology of building relationships and partnerships among Christians across class and race lines. For me, everything about the way they’re doing this is fresh and fascinating. It’s so different from the attempts I’ve seen at this on the left. But also, it’s just amazing to me that this Christian movement to “love each other across class lines” is as broad, deep and sophisticated as it is—and that I didn’t even know it existed just a year ago.

I’m in a session right now called “Do’s and Don’ts for Urban-Suburban Partnerships.” The presentations were fascinating. And now we’re into audience questions. Each person speaking up represents a different batch of upper middle class white folks somewhere who’ve made a scary decision to step outside of their comfort zones—and a bunch of poor folks have made a scary decision to deal with them.

It’s hard stuff. They’re openly and positively confessing their failures, their train wrecks, their stagnation. The struggle burning in these white folks’ lives is: How can we eliminate poverty and tear down the barrier we’ve built up around ourselves…WITHOUT veering into paternalism and doing more harm than good.

I haven’t seen any counterproductive white guilt here yet. I think there is something about these folks’ spirituality that cancels it out. It’s already part of their theology to accept and confess that they are utterly flawed sinners—broken people living in a broken world. That’s a pretty humble platform from which the Haves can go make relationships with the Have Nots. It seems to work pretty well for them (despite the mishaps they’re confessing, there’s a foundation of unmistakable, astounding success at helping huge numbers of people and developing communities).

The leadership of the Christian Community Development Association is multi-racial. The founder is black. The new executive director is Latino. At least a few of the top leaders in the movement are white. They all live in poor urban communities.

I’ve had friends who were the children of the Catholic Worker movement—whose parents moved into poor urban areas in the 60’s. I remember thinking that must have been some dying gasp of the Christian progressive (then, socialist) movement.

But, as it turns out, (conservative!) evangelical Christians picked up where that movement left off. A lot of these leaders moved in to their neighborhoods starting in the 80’s and 90’s. And now the movement to move into “broken” neighborhoods seems to be reaching a fever pitch. I don’t have any stats to back that up, and I doubt anyone does. But it’s the new must-do thing for Christians who are “on fire for Jesus.” A few anecdotal examples from our recent travels:

I’ve seen Shane speak now in several different Christian forums, and as he talks about how “my life really got messed up when I found Jesus” (because of the sacrifices he started having to make) you can see the Christian kids in the audience sinking into their seats as it dawns on them what Jesus is calling them to do. And then they go do it. These are some of the most mature young people I’ve ever met—I think because they’re experiencing at very young ages the kind of sober, selfless impulses that come in the secular world only when people have kids.

Yesterday during a break from Bob Lupton’s talk, I was talking to a young guy—maybe 25 years old—who’s working as a missionary in Mexico, in an operation that provides all kinds of services and development assistance in a small community across the border. He looked a tiny bit overwhelmed as he was thinking out loud about the implications of what he was coming to grips with at this conference:

He said something like: “It’s easy being down there. I mean, it’s draining physically and emotionally. But I don’t have to change to be there. And it’s cool. You know—it sounds exotic. People back home get why I’m there, and think it’s cool. The whole church is behind me. But, living in a poor neighborhood in my own city in America…no one’s going to think that’s cool. And I don’t want to do it. It’s going to be awkward for all kinds of reasons. Being a foreigner in another country is one thing, but being a foreigner in your own neighborhood—that seems like that’s going to be really hard.”

But it sure sounded like he was headed for exactly that. Why? Because Jesus wants him to do it. I said something about how I have already seen more comfortable people in the Christian world make that uncomfortable decision than I ever had in 20 years in the secular left. (Mind you, they’re not just moving into the neighborhoods, they’re crossing boundaries and becoming responsible, as members of communities, for their neighbors’ lives.)

He said, “Hmmm…Yeah, that makes sense. The ONLY reason I’d do it is for Jesus.”

A year ago, I would have thought that sounded crazy. But I’ve seen that having God as the primary intellectual motivating factor in service has advantages. For example, it solves the biggest problem with The Haves trying to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem—it can help overcome the paternalism problem.

Hear me out. When that kid moves into some poor neighborhood, he’ll have a better defense against paternalism than most, because—as he helps set up after school tutoring programs, job training programs, etc…—his stance will NOT be, “I’m the great white hope come to save you,” (normally, the default) but instead: “I’m not here to help you. I’m here to serve God. My God wants to alleviate poverty, and I’m doing his will.”

And most of his neighbors will understand and trust that because most of them are already practicing Christians and most of the rest at least grew up in the church. (He’s in a Midwestern, mostly African American and white city.)

Compare that rhetoric and experience to, say, an Acorn organizer’s rap. How does an Acorn organizer explain why s/he’s willing to stomp around the neighborhood working for nothing. It’s hard for neighborhoods to trust that person’s motivation.

OK, this post is way too long. And I haven’t come close to doing justice to the actual content of the session—all about how to avoid specific mistakes in relationships between Haves and Have Nots that can easily mess everything up. The leaders are teaching from decades of experience of, often, messing everything up.

And hundreds are sitting here learning, eating it up, ready to go back to their communities and push this movement further.

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I could listen to Bob Lupton all day October 10, 2007

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 1 comment

You should try it yourself:

http://www.urbanministry.org/bob-lupton

Or if you really don’t like listening to stuff, then read this.

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Prayer, Service, Development October 10, 2007

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 1 comment

Cyber Cafe, Prayer RoomYesterday, Elizabeth and I caught the first day of Mission America’s “Loving America to Christ” conference in Kansas City. Then we drove over to St. Louis for the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) conference, that started today.

The two conferences represent two different, but overlapping, movements among Christians to serve, improve and “show Jesus” to their cities.

Yesterday’s conference and all the people we met there were amazing. Once again, I can say I’ve never seen anything like it. But it’s going to take a whole lot of translation to explain without making a mess of it. I’ll have to attempt to translate what these folks meant when they talked about “grace,” “prayer,” “spiritual warfare,” “the Kingdom,” “the Body of Christ,” and the “hands and feet” thereof. It’s going to have to wait until next week, when I have a block of free time.

Right now I’m at one of the first CCDA classes. This one is on “Empowerment,” led by Bob Lupton, who’s done incredible neighborhood economic development work over decades in his city of Atlanta—and has taught others all over the country. (Thanks to UrbanMinistry.org, you can listen to many different classes and lectures by Bob here. I highly recommend listening to one of those talks. He’s a great speaker and he’s speaking from decades of humble and brilliant trial and error.)

He just told a story about a talk he was invited to give recently at a “very, very biblical” college.

He asked the students, “What is the number one mandate in the Bible?”

One student answered, “Evangelize!”

He pressed them, and finally another answered, “You mean ‘love God and Love your neighbor’?”

Bob answered, “Yes. And so, who teaches the courses on neighbor loving here?”

Blank stares.

“You have a whole department here on evangelism,” Bob said to them, “But you’re telling me that you don’t have a single course on neighbor loving? No ‘Love Your Neighbor 101′ here?” And then he joked with them: “You know the problem with this place? You’re not biblical enough.”

He told us (I’m paraphrasing): “You get what they were doing? They were skipping over the great command on their way to the great commission. You can’t do that. The commission flows through the command—it’s a by product of the great command.”

I don’t think we’re going to hear much about direct evangelism at this conference. But yesterday’s “Loving America to Christ” conference was directly and explicitly all about evangelism. However, they really were doing it Bob’s way (Bob would say: Jesus’ way). When they talked about “showing our cities Christ” they were talking about providing health care, housing, counseling, etc…. To them, service and Jesus were literally one in the same thing. And I mean, LITERALLY. They believe that when they serve, they are acting as the physical body of Jesus on Earth and talked about it explicitly like that, very often with tears in their eyes. The folks at this CCDA conference, believe that too, though the terminology is a lot more accessible to non-Christians.

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