Tim Keel | Revolution in Jesusland

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!

Tags: Brian McLaren, capitalism, Consumerism, economics, Tim Keel

Jacob’s Well, Kansas City November 12, 2007

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 4 comments

After months on the road, we set up a home base in Kansas City. We’ve been here for most of the last two weeks and I really love it.

Just in our neighborhood, I think there are at least four old church buildings that were built way back by mainline denominations, but are now inhabited by non-denominational churches.

Jacob’s Well is just a few blocks away. It began in 1998, and now fills its large, classic, Presbyterian-built sanctuary three times every Sunday.

Elizabeth and I attended the evening service last night. These people are HIP. Really, I was intimidated. Such cool clothes, hair, tattoos and attitudes. But these are Christian hipsters, and so they were really nice and welcoming.

The founding pastor of Jabob’s Well is Tim Keel, who is also one of the leaders of the Emerging Church movement. He’s been teaching the book of James for twelve weeks. Last night, we caught the closing sermon in the series, which focused on James 5:1-6:

Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered innocent men, who were not opposing you.

You could hear a pin drop after he read the passage. He asked the congregation for reactions. Several hands went up. Tim seems to be on a first name basis with his entire church, and called on folks one by one. Reactions varied:

“I don’t like it.”
“It makes me angry.”
“It’s so mean.”
“I think James has a tunnel that he’s writing through to our time.”

It is in these sermons, on the most difficult parts of the Bible, where I see God. Because how else can you explain why relatively affluent churches would find themselves struggling with—and applying to their own lives—the words of ancient revolutionary Prophets and defenders of the poor and oppressed? I’m serious. Try to come up with a good explanation that doesn’t involve supernatural forces for that. I’d like to hear it.

Tim was gentle in how he introduced James’ hard questions for those with wealth, but he allowed no escape. He said that James was speaking here not to rich people, but about rich people to poor people. He was speaking about land owners who exploited the community who he was speaking to. So what’s the message for you if you have wealth? You need to use that wealth in service of the poor, in service of justice, in service of building a better world.

So what are the implications for us middle-class Americans who live in the top few percent of worlds income earners?

Tim focused on consumer choices—who is making our stuff? Workers in poor countries. Are they being exploited? Yes, extremely. What do we do about it? Make different choices.

He introduced Advent Conspiracy, that the church will be participating in. It’s a national program for churches to change the way Christmas is done—refocusing it away from giving junk that will break to giving funds for essential infrastructure to people living in extreme poverty. Advent Conspiracy deserves a post of it’s own here—coming soon. I don’t know who started it. Could have been Tim, now that I think of it. Typically, the web site offers no clues. Wouldn’t want to TAKE CREDIT for something, that wouldn’t be Christlike.