PRISM March-April 2011

PRISM Robbin’ the ‘Hood Payday lenders prey on the poor, but Christians are fighting back

From Croatia to Haiti— what real help looks like Moms take on the global challenge of AIDS Celebrating the power of advocacy!

March • April 2011

PRISMMagazine.org

PRISM Vol. 18, No. 2  March-April 2011

Editor Art Director Publications Assistant Copy Editor Financial Operations Publisher

Kristyn Komarnicki Rhian Tomassetti Katherine Coulter Leslie Hammond Sandra Prochaska Ronald J. Sider

Contributing Editors Christine Aroney-Sine

Clive Calver

Rudy Carrasco

Andy Crouch J. James DeConto

Gloria Gaither

Vernon Grounds

Ben Hartley

Jan Johnson

Craig S. Keener

Richard Mouw

Philip Olson Jenell Williams Paris

Christine Pohl

James Skillen

Al Tizon

Jim Wallis

Myron Augsburger Issac Canales M. Daniel Carroll R. Paul Alexander James Edwards Perry Glanzer David P. Gushee Stanley Hauerwas Jo Kadlecek Peter Larson Mary Naber Earl Palmer Derek Perkins Elizabeth D. Rios Lisa Thompson Heidi Rolland Unruh Bruce Wydick

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After Shock In the wake of the historic earthquake in the fragile country of Haiti, Kent Annan considers suffering—from the epic to the everyday—as a problem for faith. Along the way he discovers that he is not alone, that from the psalmists of old to our neighbors today, people have followed life to the edge of meaning and have heard God even there, calling for honest faith.

137 pages, paperback, 978-0-8308-3617-8, $15.00

“This is a credible book for anyone who has ever wondered where God is in a world full of suffering.”

—Jim Wallis, president, Sojourners

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A Publication of Evangelicals for Social Action The Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy www.EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University All contents © 2011 ESA/PRISM magazine.

The body of this magazine is printed on 85% post consumer waste recycled paper.

“If you lend money to my people, to any of the down-and-out among you, don’t come down hard on them and gouge them with interest. If you take your neighbor’s coat as security, give it back before night-fall; it may be your neighbor’s only covering—what else does the person have to sleep in? And if I hear the neighbor crying out from the cold, I’ll step in—I’m compassionate.” Exodus 22:25-27 (The Message)

March/APRIL 2011

Contents 2 Reflections from the Editor Unshakable 3 Talk Back Letters to the Editor 5 Celebrate Rejoicing in the power of advocacy!

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6 Kingdom Ethics

Seeking the Truth about What Our Nation Did

8 Leading Ladies

10 No Such Thing as a Free Loan

Online Drive

Predatory lenders target poor communities and keep them in financial bondage. Take a look at the creative models of financial freedom that a handful of Christians are offering.

9 May I Have a Word?

Toward a DemandBased US Drug Policy

39 Faithful Citizenship Speaking Up for Recovery 40 Washington Watch

Corporate Political Giving

41 Art & Soul

Witness to Eternity

42 Book Reviews 46 Music Notes

Songcraft: Savoring Life by the Slice

18 Milk, Sugar & AIDS Activism

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Two mothers, one from suburban America and another from Sub-Saharan Africa, discover their voice as they advocate for AIDS education.

24 Reparing Broken Walls

Meet two Christian communities that are using a biblical blueprint to rebuild their urban neighborhoods.

32 Help That Heals

Partnering with the poor in humility and mutual vulnerability is the healthiest way to make a real difference—for all involved—in the long run.

47 Making a Difference “Woman, Be Free!”

48 Ron Sider Finishing Well

24 Cover photo by Galina Barskaya

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PRISM is now printing all inside pages on 85% post consumer recylced paper.

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R eflections from the Editor Unshakable Listen. Can you hear the joists creak? The windows shudder? Yep, the big bad wolves are out there again—out there still—huffing and puffing, threatening to blow the house down.

You follow the news, you know their names: Unemployment, Foreclosure, Debt, and the big daddy of all them all, Despair.

Even those of us who do not lose our job, home, savings, or sanity often succumb to that last one.

Each wolf has its minions: pricey CEOs, unscrupulous mortgage dealers, usurious lenders. The latter are the focus of this issue’s cover story—the loan industry sharks who systematically target and prey on single moms, the working poor, and SSI/public assistance recipients. Advocates of the payday and title loan industry say—and they are correct in this—that the poor will always need quick cash to cover emergencies. But it’s what they don’t say that is so nefarious.

When advertising their “free” or “discount” loans, for example, they don’t say that the average advance will need to be paid back at over 400 percent interest. When they show photos of gleeful people clutching fistfuls of $100 bills, they don’t show the tears and anguish a borrower will begin to feel within two weeks of taking the loan. And naturally they don’t talk about the bait-and-switch tactics that allow them to advertise one kind of loan while offering another.

You don’t have to be ignorant, foolish, or oblivious—as some people would like to believe is the case—to fall into their clutches. No, just ineligible or in too much of a hurry for a bank loan...and desperate.

Horror stories abound of hardworking folks getting trapped on a running wheel of debt.

What don’t abound are stories about groups that offer alternative loans and how they can free folks from financial bondage even while educating them in essential fiscal skills such as saving, avoiding hidden fees, and investing. But we’re going to change that here and now. In these pages we celebrate the small but growing number of innovative faith-based programs that are providing viable substitutes for carnivorous lending practices.

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The God-given creativity of the people devising and administering these programs—and the results they produce—will do more to chase the despair wolf from your door than most of the news we hear these days. Likewise, the community-redemption efforts we discover in another of our features—“Repairing Broken Walls”—reveal what a committed group of people can accomplish when they follow the upside-down ways of our Savior. Renovating and moving

into a house in inner-city Indianapolis or Albuquerque may look like a bad investment from a financial-planning perspective, but not from a kingdom-building one. It’s positively glorious to see how God’s economy plays out within genuine, Christ-centered community.

It’s also proof that the antidote to those furry, fire-breathing beasts at our door is holistic solidarity—real connection through real community in the body of Christ. Not because there’s safety in numbers, because there isn’t. Ask a group of cows that are being rounded up for slaughter; ask a group of paycheck-to-paycheck folks who are being targeted by payday lenders—and they’ll tell you that being part of a crowd can just make you easy pickings for the predators.

No, there’s no safety in numbers, but there is safety in connectedness. When we put our heads together to solve problems; when we line our shoulders up against some great barrier; when we make our bed, knock heads, and break bread—together—we are strong.

Kristyn Komarnicki

Like everything else Jesus calls us to do—love our enemies, die to live, get at the end of the line in order to arrive first—living in community is counterintuitive. Joining hands with those who have “less” than we do initially makes us feel vulnerable—until we begin to see the things they have that we not only lack but also desperately need: faith, flexibility, humility, whatever the case may be. Living in full view of others also makes it hard—no, impossible—to hide our flaws, fears, and shortfalls.

Lifting our small voice to protest injustice, to do battle with global Goliaths like AIDS, or to advocate and pray for people in war- or disaster-torn countries thousands of miles away from us—these things require courage, creativity, and the conviction that, in the long run, it all matters because we’re building something eternal when we build Christ’s kingdom.

Thank God for all the everyday folks who are living precisely this way, enterprising, innovative, faith-fueled folks whose lives—tattered and road weary as they may be—nonetheless “shine like stars in the sky” (Phil. 2:15). These are the kinds of stars I want to dance with (sorry, Jennifer Grey and Derek Hough).

There’s quite a line-up of just such folks in this issue of PRISM. So pull up a chair and gather round to hear their tales— from Haiti to Croatia, from Zambia to New Mexico. We’ll light a fire in the chimney, warm ourselves with a big pot of stone soup, and call out in chorus to the wolves that would harm us, “Huff and puff all you want. This house was built on the cornerstone of Christ, and it cannot be shaken!”

Truly he is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken. Psalm 62:6 Kristyn Komarnicki is editor of PRISM, a job she loves because it allows her to divulge a passion for sniffing out Christ’s grace, truth, and joy in some of the hardest places of this hard world. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three sons.

Letters to the Editor There is no way to say this gently. The review by Tania DoCarmo of Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, in the November/December 2010 issue is misleading and even dishonest on several points.

Twisting a quotation completely out of context, the reviewer writes that the authors “partially blame women for their own oppression.” Then she repeats the charge, flatly stating, “Half the Sky goes so far as blaming women for their own oppression.” Two more times in this brief review she insinuates the same false charge, saying that it is counterproductive to suggest that women have not been forced and coerced in their situation (when the authors suggest no such thing) and that “we cannot afford to relay messages that further oppress the very women we advocate for.”

On the contrary, what Kristof and WuDunn really write about, among many other subjects, is the plight of 3 million women and girls worldwide enslaved in the sex trade who are not voluntary prostitutes or even those coerced to sell sex by economic necessity, but rather are those who have been forced—through rape, threats, and violence—to engage in sex with customers.

Your reviewer’s charge that the authors of Half the Sky blame the women themselves for their plight is not only false, it is ludicrous. Does anyone really think that two Pulitzer Prize winning journalists for the New York Times, whose book has received almost universal praise (except in PRISM) would be so reactionary as to blame poor and powerless females for allowing themselves to be enslaved for sex? This charge does not even make sense.

Furthermore, if Half the Sky puts even some of the blame on the women themselves, isn’t it a bit strange that none of the other reviewers have noticed this about the book? Far more detailed reviews published in the Washington Post, New York Times Book Review, and the New York Review of Books, as well as many other respected reviews, examine virtually every aspect of Half the Sky, yet none of them finds the slightest hint of blaming the victim. Even the Guardian in London, which is critical of several aspects of the book, says nothing about this fabricated charge.

Moreover, this is not the only false charge in the review. The review says, “Nor is throwing money at schools and microfinance the overriding solution. ... Sex trafficking and gender-based violence are global issues, and money alone won’t fix them.” But nowhere in Half the Sky do the authors say or even suggest that money alone will solve these problems.

Also, without giving a single example, the reviewer claims that the authors’ work is “underresearched and lacking adequate depth and accuracy” and that it “pass[es] inaccurate analysis off as ‘fact.’” She even ventures to explain why the authors published such shoddy work—they “base information on their experiences as journalists and not researchers or practitioners on the ground.”

So the reviewer, who, according to her bio at the end of the review, is a “researcher” and has been a “practitioner on the ground,” is apparently upset because Kristof and WuDunn didn’t write her kind of book, which sounds like those fact-filled research studies that gather dust on academic bookshelves.

Instead the authors, who are journalists, used their abilities to write an incredibly important book on the major issues (not just sex trafficking) facing women and girls around the world.

Since your reviewer gave PRISM readers a so-called “review” built on a key assertion that is simply not true—that Half the Sky blames trafficked women for their plight—let me state the conclusion that any fair-minded reviewer would reach: This is a terrific book, extremely readable, with eye-opening examples of female oppression and helpful suggestions about how ordinary citizens can help. (The last chapter is called “What You Can Do,” and an appendix lists and briefly describes many groups that specialize in supporting women in developing countries.)

It would make a great book for adult discussion groups, in or out of church.

Roland Chase Newport, R.I.

?

Do you have some thoughts to share? We would love to hear from you. Email us at Kristyn@esa-online.org.

T alk Back Reviewer’s response: I don’t think Kristof had bad intentions, nor do I think absolutely everything in his book is bad.

Just as Kristof suggests, it’s very important that we look at gender issues and evaluate what is happening to the least privileged populations in the world, many of whom are women. But I do think that this book made some very critical errors and those errors should not be ignored.

Just because the book has gotten positive reviews by other publications does not mean that it’s an accurate book. Not all book reviewers are necessarily experts in human trafficking.

The majority of the public’s knowledge of human trafficking is based on sensationalized information anyway, not on survivors’ or practitioners’ accurate experiences, so of course the media would not pick up on Kristof’s sensationalism or lack of accuracy.

I stand by my assertion that the book is under-researched and inaccurate. I did not have the space to nitpick through the entire book with every incorrect detail but instead wanted to give an overall critique. If I were to provide a list of inaccuracies, the first on my list would be that Kristof can’t even define trafficking correctly, and actually defines it in a way that is counterproductive, suggesting that a border is required for trafficking to occur. If we’re going to talk about providing solutions to trafficking and exploitation of women, it’s important his readers understand exactly what it is and what actually causes it. Trafficking is not, I repeat, not caused by globalization, AIDS, and the fall of Eastern Europe but by forces of supply and demand. The dynamics of prostitution and human trafficking are complicated—let’s not simplify them.

The book doesn’t need to be a piece of academic research, it just needs to get its facts straight. One of my biggest problems is that many of Kristof’s sources are actually fellow journalists rather than experts or practitioners. Take Bernard Krisher in Cambodia, Kristof’s primary source in that country. Krisher is a journalist who used to work for Newsweek and then started a newspaper in Cambodia called the Cambodia Daily. Organizations in Cambodia that I’ve spoken to about this book are absolutely shocked that he is highlighted as an informant, especially since many of the Cambodia Daily’s articles on trafficking tend to be inaccurate and sensationalized. Krishner does do philanthropic work in Cambodia, but it’s focused primarily on education, not trafficking. Yet Kristof treats him as an expert on sex slavery, not education. There are

3

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well over 75 expert organizations specific to sex trafficking in Cambodia that we work with, so why didn’t Kristof interview any of them?

My guess—at least about Cambodia—is that organizations have refused to work with him since he is looking to interview victims and take their pictures—something that is completely inappropriate and is, in fact, now against Cambodian anti-trafficking law, which stipulates that organizations are not to release any information on child clients (Article 9, Prakas on Minimum Standards) and that the press is not to release information to the public on the identities of victims. The fact that Kristof had access to these victims immediately after their rescue is completely unacceptable and breaks so many best practices that it makes my head hurt. That would never be allowed if these women were American citizens.

Regarding what I said about the authors blaming women, this is very prevalent throughout chapter 3. It’s true that Kristof does say he’s not blaming women—but then he goes on to do it anyway, hiding behind his good intentions and simplified solutions. Kristof makes the argument that women need to speak up for themselves or it will never stop. Sure, that would be great.

However, to say that this is the way to make the abuse stop puts the focus and blame on the women and not on their perpetrators. Wouldn’t women speak up if they felt they could? To say they just need to speak up misses the whole point. Kristof says that if girls would just scream, protest, and run away, traffickers would stop. This demonstrates a clear lack of knowledge regarding the reality of the situation, painting victims as pathetic and incapable. We need to blame perpetrators’ actions, not the women they victimize.

My criticism about throwing money at the problem may not have been specific enough in the review, but I stand by my assertion that his solutions miss the mark. Almost all of Kristof’s solutions indicate giving money—primarily to education, iodized salt, and fistula relief—suggesting that these three areas are pivotal to the future of women. These solutions completely sidestep the root causes of what is happening. Decades of foreign aid have taught us that we cannot just invest money on foreign issues and expect them to go away. I really wish Kristof had been more strategic in his solutions, providing suggestions other than simply donating to his handpicked organizations.

Finally, research means a lot, but it means almost nothing without experience. The vast majority of my opinions have been formed by my experiences working with the expertise of people who have worked in this field for a long time, not by reading dusty books.

Tania DoCarmo Director & Vice President Chab Dai USA Folsom, Calif.

ChabDai.org I appreciate the articles on North Korea in the January/February issue of PRISM. However, I was struck by the complete lack of reference to the church in China and any responses by Chinese Christians. Since the church in China is huge and “on the scene” I believe they must have a significant role to fill in this desperate situation. Perhaps a collaboration between various expatriate groups and Chinese Christians living somewhat near the China/N. Korea border would be fruitful.

I recognize that for purposes of safety references to the involvement of Chinese Christians with North Koreans may have been omitted from this issue.

Don Wallace Littleton, Colo.

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www.bread.org

C elebrate!

We’re launching this new column as a way of recognizing—and rejoicing in—the power of advocacy. Good news, especially when hard won, demands celebration! When we speak out—boldly, respectfully, prayerfully—for justice and truth, things really do change. It might take years, even decades, for us to see a shift, but we are called to continue faithfully—fighting one day at a time, without abandoning hope—to defend the vulnerable, insist on peace, and protect God’s creation, among other things.

Want to help us out? Send any good news you want us to celebrate to Kristyn@esa-online.org.

New START treaty ratified On December 22, the US Senate ratified the New START treaty, which will re-establish mutual, on-the-ground verification of American and Russian nuclear arsenals and cut the deployed strategic weapons on each side by about a third. Learn more at TwoFuturesProject.org.

Craigslist pulls the plug on its “adult section” worldwide Last September, following significant protest by anti-trafficking groups and the suicide of a man who was accused of murdering women he contacted through its adult listings, Craigslist removed the adult section from its US version. In a major triumph for abolitionists, the online advertising site shut down the rest of its adult sections around the world in December.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said in a statement, “This worldwide shutdown of erotic services sections on Craigslist is a victory in the fight against sexual exploitation of women and children and human trafficking connected to prostitution. This move is another important step in the ongoing fight to more effectively screen and stop pernicious prostitution ads.”

Historic victory against mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia In January, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced its decision to protect mountain communities and the health of Appalachian citizens by vetoing the largest single mountaintop removal coal mining permit in West Virginia history, the Spruce No. 1 Mine. In making this decision the EPA reviewed more than 50,000 comments from concerned citizens. Learn more at ILoveMountains.org/Spruce-Mine and at ChristiansForTheMountains.org.

Critical improvements for hungry Americans December 2 was a historic day for Bread for the World, the nonpartisan collective Christian voice that fights to end hunger at home and abroad. On that day the House of Representatives passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a five-year renewal of child nutrition programs. Already approved by the Senate, the bill was signed into law by President Obama on December 13.

Immediately after that, the House passed the Middle Class Tax Relief Act of 2010, which included tax credits for low-income workers. The bill protected the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC)—goals of Bread’s 2010 Offering of Letters (learn more at OfferingofLetters.org).

The reauthorization of child nutrition programs—at $4.5 billion over 10 years—is the largest such increase for these programs. This victory was possible because Christians have advocated faithfully through Bread for the World to keep children and their needs constantly before Congress MTV’s Skins takes a blow Almost there: Thanks to letters from consumers like you, nearly a dozen sponsors have already dropped advertising support for MTV’s Skins since the show’s premiere in mid-January. Featuring a cast ranging in age from 15 to 19, Skins purports to address “real-world issues confronting teens in a frank way,” but in reality, it depicts teenagers living extremely dangerously—engaging in indiscriminate sex, drinking, using drugs, breaking the law—yet all without any real or lasting consequences.

In January, the New York Times reported that executives at the cable channel were concerned that some scenes from the show “may violate federal child pornography statutes.” As we go to print, several companies have yet to respond to pressure to abandon the show: Visit ParentsTV.org to add your voice.

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K ingdom Ethics Seeking the Truth about What Our Nation Did I write today about the newly launched “Task Force on Detainee Treatment.”

This is a national nonpartisan independent commission that will study the treatment of terrorism detainees by the US government. We will begin our inquiry with the Clinton administration and carry forward to the present day.

The panel has been organized under the auspices of the Constitution Project, a respected Washington think tank that works on constitutional and rule-of-law issues in the United States. With funding from a broad spectrum of foundations and individuals, we have 12 to 18 months to do our work.

It was a talented and distinguished group that gathered around the table for that first meeting: • Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint congressional inquiry on the September 11th attacks • Asa Hutchinson, former Republican congressman from Arkansas and undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush • James Jones, former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma and former Ambassador to Mexico • Sandy D’Alemberte, past president of the American Bar Association and president emeritus of Florida State University • Richard Epstein, law professor at NYU and senior lecturer at University of Chicago Law School • Azizah al-Hibri, law professor at the University of Richmond and president of the Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights • David Irvine, a retired brigadier general and strategic intelligence officer

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•William Sessions, former US attorney, judge, and FBI director •Gerald Thomson, Columbia University medical school professor and former president of the American College of Physicians •Patricia Wald, former judge in the US and for the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia •I am the eleventh member of the panel; we may add a few more.

David P. Gushee drain the partisanship out of these issues.

And I certainly hope that the bipartisanship, civility, and credentials of the panel will help gain the report credibility and a wide audience.

What does any of this have to do with the Christian faith promoted in this magazine?

For me, at least, I undertake these responsibilities as a citizen who cares about my country and as a Christian who seeks to be faithful to Jesus Christ. I will try to bring Christian moral principles to bear as I participate in the reflections of the panel.

I believe that every human being is of sacred worth—both the people our nation is trying to protect from terrorism and those our nation detains as suspected terrorists.

I want to help us develop policies that reflect the sacredness of all people before

That these professionals would agree to serve on this panel speaks well of the survival in our country of a citizenship that goes beyond partisanship and polemics.

The entanglement of the debate about our detainee policies with That these professionals would agree to serve on this partisan panel speaks well of the survival in our country of a politics has made it very citizenship that goes beyond partisanship and polemics. difficult to even have a civil conversation about the God our Creator and Sovereign. real issues involved, let alone come to a I have also come to believe that one common account of what happened and of the most important ways that the sawhat we need to do as a nation moving cred worth of each human being is proforward. tected is through adherence to the rule The task force exists as a private of law. The constitutional framework so citizenship initiative rather than an official thoughtfully developed by the founders of government panel precisely because of the our nation was inconceivable apart from messy politics blocking an investigation. both high valuing of each human life and Many activists called on President Obama recognition that abuses of state power are to initiate such a panel when he first took a major source of harm to people. No one office, but he declined, citing the need to stands above the law, no situation permits look forward rather than look back. Con- us to suspend the law, and if Christians gress has undertaken several specific in- care about society we must care about vestigations over the last decade, but they the strength of our nation’s commitment have lacked national consensus-building to the rule of law. capacity and have been riven by partisan division.

Learn more at ConstitutionProject.org.

Our panel aims to fill this void by gathDavid P. Gushee is ering the relevant facts and laying them director of the Center out clearly and honestly. We will assess for Theology and the applicable laws and policies and how Public Life at Mercer they were implemented at each stage. We University, Atlanta, will develop recommendations for future Ga., where he is also detainee policies, along with some assessa professor of Chrisment of whether our past policies adhered tian ethics.

His latest book is Religious to the rule of law. We nurture the hope Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul that we can offer a cohesive policy frame(Mercer University Press, 2010). work that can gain wide support and help

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Photo courtesy of: Connie Rock

L eading Ladies Online Drive Many women in need of practical education for ministry are finding exactly what they need online. Internet-based study options have grown in popularity over the past decade, with more and more online educational programs gaining both accreditation and respect.

Even Ivy League brickand-mortar colleges are increasing their online presence, offering everything from single courses to full degrees.

Given the flexibility of online study options—which allow study at any hour of the day or night and anywhere from waiting rooms to commuter trains to the kitchen table—it’s not surprising that women make up the majority of online students.

According to the American Association of University Women (AAUW), over 60 percent of those currently studying online are women, most of them over 25 years old.

Education options for women are exploding online, including opportunities for women to prepare for various roles in ministry. Steven Douglas, president of Campus Crusade for Christ International, said that “the future for leadership training is Christian distance education that is not dependent upon location, schedule, or having everyone physically present, but the education is taken to where ministry is taking place.”

Without the online option, I highly doubt that I would have been able to achieve my terminal degree. Why? Because I have a husband, two kids (one with special needs), a job, and a ministry—and I wasn’t about to relocate to become a full-time, financially stretched, on-campus student! Seems that women everywhere feel the same: A report by the AAUW Educational Foundation states that women—already recognized

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for their multi-tasking ability—are now adding what is being called a “third shift” to their day. Not content with just being employees, mothers, and churchattenders, women are taking advantage of the current online learning trend to earn degrees that will enhance their personal growth, long-term job security, career, ministry, and even calling.

While accessing the classroom via a laptop can pose a variety of challenges—pedagogical, technological, and/ or social, depending on the learning style, experience, and/or temperament of the student—the benefits usually outweigh the difficulties. Online learning is a preferred education option for women because of these factors: Family. Women love the fact that they can eat dinner with the kids, help them with homework, and then bundle them off to bed before sitting down to their own studies. They appreciate not being forced to choose between parenting and being a student.

Flexibility/comfort. Not having to cope with the travel and time constraints of the traditional classroom makes online studies highly attractive. Older women also say they feel less out of place learning from home than in a classroom full of 18-year-olds.

Finances. While tuition and fees may not be substantially less than traditional classes, online learning means women save on babysitters, parking, gas, tolls, and meals on the run.

Fulfillment. Many women set aside their personal goals early on to start a family or to support one by entering a career field that isn’t fulfilling. The number one rea-

Elizabeth Rios son women cite for going back to school is not only to increase their knowledge and expertise but also to walk towards a dream or calling they felt obliged to postpone at one point in their lives.

I earned my master’s degree at Regent University (Regent.edu), which is ranked number two in the nation for its online degree programs. They offer more than 30 fully accredited college programs both on campus and online.

But it isn’t cheap. Those looking for a more wallet-friendly program might want to check out City Vision College (CityVision.edu), where I serve as the academic dean. This term 31 percent of the students are people of color, and 60 percent of the students are women. An accredited, degree-completion school, it has two major undergraduate programs: Missions (with a choice of concentration in urban ministry or nonprofit management) and the less common Addiction Studies. Students can also pick up an individual course, taught in eight-week terms. What I particularly love about this school is that courses are approximately $500 per class (not per credit) and free for students who qualify for a Pell Grant.

The urban ministry practitioner’s dream is located where affordability and accessibility converge!

I mention here only those with which I am familiar, but many other online options exist to help clear the hurdles for women wanting to return to school.

While it can be challenging and stressful, most women who earn an online degree are proud of their success and recommend it to others. If you’ve been contemplating a return to school but were worried about how you would fit it in, consider learning online. Chances are good that it will lead you in your journey to becoming a leading lady.

Rev. Dr. Liz Rios, a mom and wife, serves as academic dean at City Vision College, executive pastor at Save the Nations in Davie, Fla. (SavetheNations.com), and is founder of the Center for Emerging Female Leadership (CEFL.org).

Bruce Wydick

Toward a DemandBased US Drug Policy Not long ago I returned from a research trip to Latin America with the following message from our southern neighbors: “The US is killing our people.” This wasn’t a leftist chant against the CIA or against US military funding. It was about narcotics. There is something terribly wrong about the approach of our government toward the “drug war,” a scourge on our nation that should concern Christians of all political stripes.

Drug cartels, drug-based organized crime, and gangs have begun to take over the political and economic systems of many Latin American countries. Why? Because the lure of the highly profitable drug trade is irresistible to many living in poor countries.

Last December, Mexico announced that 30,196 people had been killed in the country’s 4-year-old war against the drug cartels. Reflect for one moment on the immensity of that number; it far exceeds the UN definition of a civil war. Some of these were casualties of President Felipe Calderon’s war on drug cartels; others were victims of clashes between drug cartels themselves, fighting over the profits to be made in the lucrative US market.

Ever since the Nixon administration began the “war on drugs” four decades ago, we have been fighting this war with a supply-side approach, a strategy based on interdiction and eliminating foreign and domestic drug dealers. Of course such a policy can never work in the long run, because it violates the most fundamental law of economics: People respond to incentives.

As we “succeed” in reducing supply, we also succeed in hiking narcotics prices and making the American drug market more attractive, drawing more dealers into the market.

President Obama has met with Calderon to discuss providing millions more in the war against the Mexican drug cartels. This will quickly prove to be a waste of lives and resources, as is obvious from past experience with supply-based narcotics policies.

An alternative proposed by civil libertarians is to simply legalize drugs, but thankfully most Americans do not support this, and neither do most Christians in our

M ay I Have a Word? country. The majority perceives narcotics as associated with irresponsible and antisocial behavior. A much deeper and broader conviction exists about the prohibition of narcotics than, say, alcohol and tobacco, and legalization remains a political nonstarter. Americans refuse to look to Amsterdam as a model for social progress.

The third alternative is a demandbased drug policy. It is over this alternative that Christians of many different political persuasions may be able to unite and influence Washington policy. How would this work? It would begin by the US taking responsibility for its drug consumption problem and addressing the root of the drug issue rather than putting the blame for our problem on suppliers.

A demand-based policy would reallocate resources away from supply interdic-

tion towards monitoring of domestic drug use, stiff fines, and providing low-cost treatment.

Here is one way this could work: Every US resident over a certain age would receive a notice in the mail to report for a voluntary drug test to a nearby clinic within two weeks. Upon passing the test, the individual would receive a “clean card.” Without a clean card, a person would not be eligible to receive a welfare check, get a driver’s license, or receive other types of government benefits. Those who passed would be able to go longer intervals between tests. Those who failed would be admitted to drug counseling and treatment. Failure to report for treatment would bring hefty fines to drug users. Those willing to go get treatment would pay little. In short, drug users would pay through the nose (no pun intended, of course) if they refused to address their drug use.

The emphasis in such a strategy must lie in a genuine effort toward widespread

rehabilitation, not merely in punishment, for it is only in rehabilitation that the drug trade will ultimately be squelched. Accountability with compassion (“tough love”) should be the hallmark of a demand-side drug policy.

Critics complain that a demand-side policy will violate people’s civil rights. Yet in the development of all policies of this sort, the benefits of restricting certain types of individual “freedoms” have to be weighed against the immense cost of these behaviors to the greater society. We allow random sobriety tests to keep drunk drivers off the road. Is a demand-based narcotics policy really much different?

Christians can play a pivotal role in facilitating a dialogue toward a shift in our current policy. Defining a new approach to drugs in our country may become a movement that could unify Christians on the right and the left, for if there is one concept Christians of all stripes have generally grasped, it is the concept of personal accountability for sins. We understand that real change starts from within, not from placing the blame for our problems on others. The fundamental principles of most substance-abuse support groups derive from Christian principles. When was anyone at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting encouraged to blame the clerk who sold him the beer?

A demand-based drug policy has both economic and international relations benefits. It will not only reduce the demand for illegal drugs, it will also reduce the price of them, creating less incentive for the existence of the drug cartels and drug violence both here and in Latin America. The result will be fewer drug users and lower levels of violence—both in our own communities and in those of our southern neighbors.

Bruce Wydick is professor of economics at the University of San Francisco and a contributing editor to PRISM.

“May I Have a Word?” is a regular opinion column. Submit your thoughts for consideration to Kristyn@esaonline.org.

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The truth about payday lending and what some Christians are doing about It

by Amy L. Sherman

In Culture Making, author Andy Crouch reports that his kids don’t like his homemade chili.

They want to bring about reform in the household, he explains, but since he and his wife love chili, it’s on the dinner rotation; the kids can either eat it or go to bed hungry. Protest is insufficient. Change is possible, however, says Crouch; all the kids have to do is to prepare an alternative meal on chili night, and he’ll be delighted to eat whatever substitute they offer.

Crouch’s “Chili Principle” offers a vital guide for a contemporary struggle of far greater weight than dinner table discontent. Some 12 million Americans, many from the ranks of the working poor, are trapped in debt through payday lending. Around the country important, necessary policy battles are being waged against the $40-billion-plus industry. But shutting down the bad guys is only one step on the path towards justice for the poor. The bigger need is for widespread, viable alternatives to these short-term, high-cost loans.

For the past year my research assistant and I have been looking for such models—particularly alternatives offered by churches or Christian nonprofits. We have discovered that while there are currently very few, those few offer promising approaches that are worth imitating.

We’ll examine them in the following pages, but first it’s important to understand what payday lending is and who’s engaged in it.

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“Protest is not enough to end the vicious cycle of predatory lending to the working poor.”

How payday lending works

own may be maxed out. Other payday borrowers fear credit More payday lending stores exist in the US today than all Mc- card debt, not realizing that the APR on a cash advance is far Donalds and Burger King fastless than that of a payday loan. food outlets combined. The Many have been turned down Payday lenders put a Sisyphean burden on their clients. industry’s dizzying rise—just for a loan already—perhaps by since the 1990s—is explained their employer, their bank, or by both the high demand for their family and friends. Or they quick cash and the significant simply need the cash faster than profit to be made in offering it anyone in their social network via payday advance loans. The can provide it. typical payday loan has to be The ease of obtaining cash repaid in full within about two from payday lenders also plays weeks (at the recipient’s next a role in explaining their popupaycheck). Since most recipilarity. Payday stores are very ents cannot do so, the loan is accessible—drive through any extended multiple times, with economically distressed neighnew fees at each “flip.” (Several borhood in your city and you’ll studies indicate that two-thirds find plenty of them. Most offer or more of payday borrowers highly convenient hours, staying extend their loans; the average open on nights and weekends. number of “flips” annually is nine.1) Triple-digit interest rates are Moreover, customers report feeling less intimidated by payday the norm, with the national average at 419 percent APR. store staff than by bank personnel. Industry spokesmen delight “It’s like a sandpit,” says Teresa* from Richmond, Va. “You in extolling the high levels of customer satisfaction reported by keep trying to get a step up, but you’re falling down. You think borrowers about their experience in applying for and receiving a you’re making progress, but you’re not.” She and her husband loan. got into financial trouble when she had to quit her job due to a physical disability. Under the pressure of medical bills, one less Protest is not enough paycheck, and a car that died, she and her husband turned to a When I initially learned about payday lending, my first thought payday lender. was that it is no different from bonded slavery in India. Through Stories like Teresa’s are repeated daily. A single mom in my volunteer work with International Justice Mission (IJM.org), Arkansas working full time faces an unexpected car repair and I knew that much contemporary slavery is rooted in the poor’s needs $500 quick. Eight months later, she has paid $2,240 in indebtedness to moneylenders who will not accept repayment in interest and rollover fees to her payday lender. A grad student installments but only in a single lump sum. Since most peasants in North Carolina takes out a new payday loan to pay off an old cannot acquire such a sum, they are trapped in debt, weighed one. When he tries to work out a pay-by-installment plan, the down by exorbitant interest rates. The moneylender then relender threatens to send the sheriff over. Sandra Harris, a disc quires their labor in payment. I was horrified to learn that payday jockey profiled on CBS’ 60 Minutes, took out a $500 payday lending was such a similar injustice in America and eager to see loan to cover her car insurance bill when her husband was laid this predatory industry shut down. off and money was tight. Over two years, the couple borrowed This urge to get rid of the bad guys is very strong and has $2,510 from payday lenders—and paid $10,000 in fees. Accord- led to successful reforms in several places. Fifteen states and the ing to research from the Center for Responsible Lending, on District of Columbia have outlawed payday lenders or passed average a customer borrowing $300 will pay back $800, with regulations that dramatically decreased their numbers. North $500 going towards interest and fees.2 Carolina and New Hampshire have passed laws capping interest Individuals turn to such lenders for a variety of reasons. rates at 36 percent APR. Others have restricted the number of Researchers using data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of repeat loans, mandated “cooling off” periods in between loans, or Consumer Finances have found that “payday loans are taken out set loan amount caps based on borrowers’ income. primarily for convenience, to cover an emergency, and to pay Sometimes such policy reforms have caused payday lenders for basic consumption needs such as gas and food.”3 The same to pack up and move out of state. This was the story in North study showed that payday customers were more likely to have Carolina and Oregon, for example. Other times, as in Virginia, less income, lower wealth, and fewer assets than were Americans payday lenders have changed tactics, navigating around payday who don’t use payday lenders. Some customers don’t have a loan restrictions by offering different products such as car title credit card to turn to when they need money, or the cards they loans.

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LaTonya Reed, policy analyst for the Virginia Interfaith Cen- partnerships—in ways that do not victimize or entrap borrowter for Public Policy, sums it up: “Every time there is a legislative ers. The problem is that not many organizations are stepping in effort, there is also an attempt to circumvent that effort on to supply it. Consequently, until viable alternatives are available, the part of the industry.” Advocates the bad guys in the payday loan in Virginia have succeeded in passing “Short-term credit must be provided—through business retain a very persuasive piecemeal reforms, but a straightfor- creative thinking and community partnerships—in argument to policymakers about ward interest cap or outright ban on ways that do not victimize or entrap borrowers.” how they fulfill a much-needed payday lending has proven elusive. service. They also retain a host Legislators supportive of the industry, Reed explains, “claim that of high-paid lobbyists to help keep their exceedingly profitable if you get rid of payday lending and car title lending, folks will companies in business. In the face of this powerful, multi-billion have nowhere to go—that they’ll go to the ‘back alley’ dealers.” dollar behemoth, what’s to be done?

There’s no evidence that the working poor in states where payday loans are no longer available are turning to Guido the Another path Loan Shark, at the risk of both their wallets and kneecaps. Enter Grace Period, a nonprofit organization in Pittsburgh, Pa., However, studies have attempted to determine whether the ab- which, if replicated around the nation, could prove to be the best sence of payday lending has created financial stress for vulner- weapon in this fight for justice. There, customers can borrow up able households, and some show troubling results. Dartmouth to $500 for free—for up to 13 days. If they cannot repay in that economist Jonathan Zinman studied the situation in Oregon, time, they are enrolled in a yearlong repayment and emergencyone of the first states to be successful in kicking out payday fund-creation plan. lenders. He concluded that “the Oregon cap reduced the supply Grace Period’s storefront is situated smack in the battle of credit for payday borrowers, and that the financial condition zone, on the corner of E. Ohio Street in Pittsburgh’s Northof borrowers (as measured by employment status and subjective side neighborhood. If you stand outside the shop, you’ll spot a assessments) suffered as a result.” 4 Money Mart store to your right and to your left two Rent-aThat payday lending often victimizes vulnerable people is a Center stores and a Jackson Hewitt tax office offering “refund reality Christians must be concerned about. But so, too, is the anticipation loans” at exorbitant interest rates. less palatable reality that things don’t magically improve for the Grace Period grew out of some powerful preaching by working poor when the payday stores close down.

Rock Dillaman, senior pastor of Allegheny Center Alliance The takeaway from Zinman’s findings is not that preda- Church (ACAC). As he worked his way through the book of tory lenders should continue to exist but that short-term credit Matthew four years ago, Dillaman lamented several contempomust be provided—through creative thinking and community rary injustices in urban America and exhorted his parishioners

Duped by a Title Loan Company Pauline Charles is a community leader with Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development who has helped successfully address serious safety, recreation, and environmental needs in her neighborhood, one of the most violent districts in Baltimore City. But when Charles borrowed $1,000 against her house title from a company called Lomax, she became trapped in a spiral. The initial payment was $300 per month. When she fell behind, the payment went to $600. When she fell further behind, the payment ballooned to $2,000 per month. She ended up paying back a total of $11,000 on the $1,000 loan. That is not a misprint. $11,000.

When legislators make changes to the payday lending rules, many payday companies simply move into the title loan business, which is just as usurious.

“The stress was unbelievable,” says Charles. “The loan put tremendous stress on my family relationships. I remember the day that I brought to the Lomax office a $4,000 check to pay off the loan. I looked around. There were so many innocent people. Some were elderly. It made me so sad. I wish someone had stopped me. And now it is time for us to stop them.”

This story was adapted from the 10 Percent Is Enough Campaign (10PercentIsEnough.org) and appears by permission.

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Building a “rainy-day” account nership—like the fact that the credit to take action. This type of exhorkeeps the lenders at bay. union wanted to help moderate-income tation wasn’t anything new at the people in the Northside neighborhood vibrant, multi-ethnic church, which and that ACAC was ready to stand behas demonstrated love for its neighhind the fledging nonprofit. borhood through such practical ini“We were taking a risk on a newly tiatives as the Northside Christian formed business,” Dan Moon admits.

Health Center, educational and recBut when he visited ACAC and met reational programs for hundreds of the leadership and church members at inner-city youth, and its partnership an open house showcasing the Grace with Christian Legal Aid. Longtime Period initiative, “We saw this whole member Dan Krebs listened to church committed to this. They were Pastor Dillaman and decided the ready to back these loans up.” congregation should be able to do something about payday lending.

How Grace Period works Krebs and fellow ACAC memGrace Period operates as a cooperaber Tony Wiles, an ex-cop who tive. A typical club member (who is grew up in the Northside commuemployed and paid bi-weekly) will bornity, thought initially of launching row $350. She establishes an account a new, church-based credit union at Pittsburgh Central and agrees to that could provide affordable loans. have $60 dollars deducted from her After six months of spotty progress and significant frustrations, they changed tactics, seeking a paycheck each pay period for the next 12 months. Initially, most partnership with an existing credit union. Krebs knew something of that $60 transfer is applied to the principal balance owed. about financing, having worked in his family’s car dealership. He The other part goes toward club dues. (Loans can be paid back sketched out a model for a cooperative through which short- more quickly if desired.) When the loan principal is paid off (at term loans could be made to club members, with a workable about week 27), the transfers continue but now go into the club member’s “rainy-day” account. Additionally, Grace Period begins repayment schedule and built-in savings incentives.

Krebs and Wiles approached Dan Moon, then-CEO of the refunding the borrower the dues she paid earlier on the loan, at Pittsburgh Central Federal Credit Union, about a partnership. the rate of $8 per pay period. On paper, when the borrower hits They brought not only their creative model for Grace Period but week 52, she will have paid off the loan in full, begun recouping also a pledge of $850,000 in new deposits. Pastor Dillaman had dues she paid, and have several hundred dollars in her reserve led a membership drive at ACAC, explaining Krebs’ vision and fund. Grace Period’s model enables its members to avoid future encouraging parishioners to consider opening new accounts at predatory loans: They will have learned the discipline of regular the Credit Union. ACAC itself pledged to move $100,000 it had savings and accumulated assets to cover emergency needs.

In reality, most club members, like most payday loan cussitting in a bank account (funds earmarked for building renovatomers, end up borrowing additional funds beyond their initial tions) over to Pittsburgh Central.

Grace Period loan. But, unlike customers of payday lenders, “We were trying to say, ‘Everybody has got a couple hunGrace Period members are not sucked into a debt trap. For dred dollars sitting around for a rainy day, but let’s put your one thing, if customers’ adrainy day money where it ditional borrowing occurs afcould help somebody,’” Krebs ter the initial loan principal explains. ACAC’s flock rehas been repaid (i.e., late in sponded enthusiastically. the 12 months of their club Opening a new account was membership), they’re actuno big deal, and there was ally “borrowing” their own no financial risk, since credit funds from their reserve acunions ensure deposits up to counts. No interest or dues $100,000. are charged. What’s more, Since Pittsburgh Central Grace Period charges no rollis a modest-sized credit union, over fees, and the payments with total assets around $7 are kept manageable by admillion, ACAC’s ability to justing the term to keep the bring in another $850,000 in borrower on track. deposits was attractive. But The dues system proother factors were also im- Grace Period founders Tony Wiles (standing) and Dan Krebs. (Brian Kaldorf vides cash on hand to cover portant in generating the part- Photography)

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RECOMMENDED READING Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.—How the Working Poor Became Big Business (HarperBusiness, 2010) is lively, accessible, and often horrifying.

Journalist Gary Rivlin describes the world of marginal finance to which the 40 million working poor are prey. Through candid, probing interviews with industry insiders, consumer activists, and customers, he offers a penetrating look into what CNN Money calls “vulture finance”— subprime mortgage lending, payday advance stores, car title loans, check cashers, and pawn shops. This $150 billion “poverty industry” outweighs casino gambling ($60 billion) and cigarettes ($40 billion) and is equally or more deleterious to customers than casinos.

Payday industry defenders say they are there for people in emergencies who have nowhere else to turn. Their admittedly high-interest credit, they argue, saves people money (e.g., from hefty overdraft fees or utility reconnection charges). This might be defensible if most customers were one-timers, or if they had freedom to repay in installments. But Rivlin shows how payday’s business model is built on creating and serving repeat customers. For example, trainers urge store employees to call former customers who haven’t been in lately—and suggest this is no different than the reminder notices dentists send out! No wonder Obama is launching a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

—A.L.S. the operating expenses of Grace Period. New club members are constantly being added into the loan pool; meanwhile, older customers pay off their loans but remain in the club. The latter’s capital is then available to help out new members, turning previous debtors into creditors.

Since it launched three years ago, Grace Period has loaned (through its partnership with Pittsburgh Central Federal Credit Union) over $1.5 million to over 2,300 individuals. Patricia Morrissey, the current CEO at the credit union, is highly satisfied.

“What [we] were hoping to achieve was to help serve the underserved. And I think the partnership has worked so well with that.”

Changing the mindset

For the Grace Period team, the ultimate goal is getting borrowers to change their patterns. As Dan Krebs often says, “The whole [payday] industry wouldn’t even exist if everybody just had a couple of hundred dollars saved.” Grace Period’s model is structured to help members confront the folly of unrealistic optimism; Krebs continues: “A very large percentage of the people that walk in here believe that they have a payday problem—that it will be fixed by next payday. So all they need is just one loan.

That is why the industry is so insidious. It preys on those people saying, ‘Sure. Sure. Tomorrow will be better.’ And when it isn’t better, they just say, ‘Pay us. It’s okay. It will be better next week, and next week, and next week.’ And people get stuck in this rut.”

Grace Period offers borrowers 13 days to repay their loan in full, with no interest charges at all. “But only 5 percent of our members end up doing that,” Krebs reports. The other 95 percent can’t, which helps them recognize that their problem is bigger than they thought it was and requires a change in habits.

Grace Period staff point their customers beyond the crisis that brought them in for a loan, noting that the real issue wasn’t

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the unexpected medical bill or car repair but the fact that the customer wasn’t financially prepared. Krebs explains: “What we really concentrate on is saying: ‘The thing that you really need to do is have a systematic savings program, and we have a systematic savings program.’”

“This isn’t a sprint,” he tells them. “It’s a marathon. It is about getting in the savings habit and letting this habit work for you.”

Grace Period counselors show borrowers where they can trim expenses to make the $50 “forced savings” each paycheck manageable. Tony Wiles will review a customer’s bank statements, and show him where, for example, he’s spent $30 or more on ATM fees. Or he’ll talk to him about saving money by buying sodas in bulk rather than from the vending machines or taking a sandwich in to work rather than buying lunch at a fast food joint.

I sat with Grace Period associate Sam Yeboa as he walked Trina* through the application process. “I have issues saving,” she admitted. “I’m interested in the club because it will force me to save.” Yeboa was understanding—he himself had been a Grace Period member before he started working for the nonprofit.

Other alternatives

Grace Period is by far the largest and most mature faith-based alternative to payday lending that my researcher and I found in our lengthy investigation. A smaller scale program is underway in Richmond, Va. There, the Jubilee Assistance Fund partners with two United Methodist churches—Wesley UMC and Lakeside UMC—and the Virginia United Methodist Credit Union (VUMCU). Through this initiative, the credit union makes short-term loans available to church members, with those loans backed by collateral provided by the churches.

Rev. Charles Swadley of Lakeside Methodist has been in-

Preparing the Next Generation to Avoid Payday Lenders

by Amy L. Sherman

The delightful aroma of pancakes wafted through the air as I opened the doors at Brinkley Heights Urban Academy in northeast Memphis. Jennifer Combs’ first graders were serving up breakfast in the front hallway, and for $1.50 you could get coffee and a short stack. At lunchtime, the fourth graders were selling popsicles in the cafeteria, and after the final bell that afternoon, the fifth graders were hawking nachos.

It was “special projects week” at Brinkley, one of several “street schools”—Christian private schools reaching at-risk and high-risk youth—that have implemented “Infusionomics.” The three-year program engages urban schools in teaching economic and financial literacy and encouraging youth entrepreneurship. Principal Tim Cox chose to implement Infusionomics because his school aims to help students escape generational poverty. “ “When I heard how the kids would be able to start learning basic economic and financial literacy skills, I just thought it was a great idea,” he says. “It was exactly what we needed to be doing because I’ve seen families falling into the same things over and over. We were looking for ways to break the cycle.”

During my visit, Cox and I drove about the neighborhood. Within two miles of the school, there are 13 payday lenders, six car title loan stores, three rent-to-own stores, and four pawnshops. Just up the street from the school sits Mo’ Money Tax Services, which entices low-income parents with immediate tax returns but charges them exorbitant interest rates. “Close to 100 percent of our parents are negatively impacted by predatory lending practices,” Cox reports.

In the first year of Infusionomics, teachers learn basic economic principles like opportunity costs and scarcity and how to weave those ideas into their mainstream curriculum—math, science, language arts. The idea is not to teach economics as a stand-alone subject but to help youth recognize how economic principles show up in many aspects of life.

In the second year, participating schools teach several weeks of financial literacy mini-lessons and implement a school-wide virtual economy called “Economis.” The online program was developed by Central Ohio Youth for Christ for its CityLife Center in Columbus, Ohio. Through Economis, students earn virtual currency for attendance and good behavior and then can spend their “paychecks” in an online store—or save their earnings in an interest-bearing savings account or CD. Older students can invest in a virtual stock portfolio. In year three, teachers “infuse” entrepreneurship concepts into their lessons and implement special, handson projects that engage youth in product design, pricing, and marketing.

Rhonda Becerra has four kids enrolled at Brinkley Heights. She thinks it’s great for kids to learn basic finances at an early age and says the Economis program’s incentives have helped her sons and daughters learn the discipline of saving.

Infusionomics is a collaborative effort between the Street School Network, the Powell Center for Economic Literacy, and the Sagamore Institute’s Center on Faith in Communities. Its penultimate vision is for thousands of low-income youth to know and practice the essential life skill of making good choices—based on cost-benefit analysis, opportunity costs, risk assessment, and discernment of short- and long-term consequences. Its ultimate vision is to see low-income kids climb out of poverty by being empowered with knowledge and skills that help them integrate successfully into the mainstream economy.

Only seven schools are enrolled in the full three-year Infusionomics initiative at present, but earlier iterations of the program engaged several other street schools and over 30 Christian after-school programs reaching over 1,100 urban youth in five targeted cities. Preliminary assessments have shown a 26 percent increase in financial literacy among participating youth.

“We need to help the children to be the best prepared for society that we can,” Principal Cox stresses. “It’s great to give them an education, but if you’re not teaching them life skills, real world kind of stuff, then our children will have problems when they get out into that real world.”

Brinkley Heights first-graders sell breakfast and get a lesson in economics as part of the school’s Infusionomics program.

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to one year to repay.

LaTonya Reed of the Virginia Interfaith The ultimate goal is freedom—not just Center is thrilled with the fledging JAF but from payday lenders but also from one’s hopes to see many more congregations creown unhealthy financial habits. ate alternatives. “In addition to dealing with the policy issue,” she emphasizes, “there’s also a need to provide concrete resources to borrowers.”

We found two other Virginia churches involved in efforts to provide help to cashstrapped families.

St. James Episcopal Church in Richmond has recently partnered with Goodwill Industries and the Virginia Credit Union to offer the “GoodChoice” program. It is set up much like a payday loan, except that borrowers have 45 days (rather than the usual two weeks) to repay the loan. Only two rollovers are allowed and the fee is $12 per $100 borrowed. That’s much steeper than the loans offered by Grace Period or the JAF, but only about half the cost of a typical payday loan in Virginia. Borrowers are encouraged volved in social justice advocacy efforts for about 10 years. He to take free financial education classes provided by GoodChoice, was upset by the devastation he witnessed among payday loan and those who complete the course can receive a one-time inborrowers. He watched Teresa and her husband go bankrupt centive grant (which can be used to pay down their loan). The and saw a young disabled man he knew from a group home get program also offers borrowers one-on-one financial coaching. “swamped” in payday debt. “That raised my hackles,” he says.

Queen of Peace Arlington Federal Credit Union (an initiaSwadley’s friend Rodney Hunter from Wesley UMC shared tive of Our Lady Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Arlington, his concerns. Rev. Hunter argued that the churches needed to Va.) offers “Grace” alternative payday loans for members who find a way to help—beyond their policy advocacy efforts. Invigorated by the idea of debt relief from the Jubilee passage in are having trouble accessing needed credit. Members who have Leviticus 25, Hunter proposed a model of church-backed loans been at the credit union for at least four months can borrow up that could be administered by a credit union. He brought the to $600 for a $10 application fee and an APR of 16 percent. idea to Carol Mathis, CEO of VUMCU, who quickly embraced Under this program, borrowers have three months to repay.

Several more credit unions around the nation have designed it. She reports that it wasn’t a hard sell to her board. “The credit union philosophy is to help people help people,” she says loan products to compete with payday lenders. Alternatives simply. “We’ve always tried to develop programs for the needs Federal Credit Union in Ithaca, N.Y., for example, offers a “Payday Credit Plan.” This loan is structured like a line of credit and of our members.”

The Jubilee Assistance Fund (JAF) is capitalized by do- is available to members who’ve been at the credit union at least one year. It’s not cheap. nations solicited by the It carries a $40 annual church leaders. This fee and an 18 percent pool of money is then APR, but 5 percent available for loans of of each loan is deposup to $500 to persons ited into a savings acin need who have been count for the borrower active members of one to build funds to cover of the participating future emergencies. In churches for at least Appalachia, the Mounsix months. Six loans tain Association for have been made since Community Economic the program began in Development has partJuly 2007. Each loan nered with Appalachian is individually tailored. to right: Rev. Charles Swadley (LakeThe Jubilee Assistance Fund is the brainchild Federal Credit Union The interest rate hovers Left side UMC), LaTonya Reed (VA Interfaith of Rev. Rodney Hunter of Wesley UMC in to provide affordable around 6 percent, and a Center for Public Policy), and Dana WigRichmond, Va., who suggested the idea of gins (VA Poverty Law Center) church-backed loans.

“Save It!” loans. Ofborrower can have up

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“Congregations can participate in a positive solution by finding the right credit union with which to partner, getting behind the initiative by bringing in new deposits, and supporting visionary laity.” fered through participating employers, it is a 10-month loan with an automatic savings component. Loans are repaid through payroll deductions.

The National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions, whose membership serves low-income urban and rural communities, is very active in the campaign against payday lending. Over the years it has offered special grant programs and training seminars to help member CDCUs develop alternative loan products to compete with the unscrupulous lenders preying on their communities. The APPLe (Alternative Products to Payday Lending) loans that were developed by grant recipients are mostly installment loans, with some line-of-credit and single payment loans. Interest rates average 16 percent APR, and fees average $15. A dozen federation members participate in the PRIDE (Predatory Relief and Intervention Deposits) initiative. Under this initiative, the National Federation of CDCUs helps underwrite loans to credit union members who have been victims of predatory lending.

Dallas pastor takes twopronged approach to financial health Rev. Frederick Haynes of Friendship-West Baptist Church fights for financial as well as spiritual freedom for his congregants. He does this in two ways.

He partners with Faim Economic Development Corporation (FEDC) , a nonprofit that strives to economically emancipate, educate, and empower the community. Haynes opens the church’s doors to FEDC’s educational program during Money Madness Mondays, biweekly meetings that help participants eliminate debt and bad financial habits and instead develop habits that generate wealth and fiscal responsibility.

Haynes is also part of a group of Dallas pastors who are battling car title and payday loan businesses that target their low-income members. When a Texas Car Title and PayDay Loan Service store, one of 200 locations in the state, opened down the street from the church, Haynes went into action.

Haynes told the local NBC affiliate that “a payday loan store is just like weeds in the midst of a beautiful garden that we’re trying to create.” He says these types of businesses are “economic predators” that are “literally crippling our community.” Haynes and his associates are actively pressuring state lawmakers to impose greater regulation on usurious loan businesses.

Strange bedfellows

Shared concerns about usurious practices by predatory lenders have created unique religious coalitions. In Virginia, leaders from evangelical, mainline, and Catholic congregations are shoulderto-shoulder in advocacy efforts to pass an interest rate cap and tighten regulations on car title loans. In Utah, the Coalition of Religious Communities joins Buddhists, mainline Protestants, Mormons, Jews, and Baptists in efforts to fight payday lending. In Dallas, white and black ministers have banded together to protest car title and payday lenders that have targeted distressed neighborhoods. “They are preying on our community,” complained Rev. Frederick Haynes of Friendship West Baptist Church to the local NBC affiliate (see sidebar on this page).

These efforts and earlier ones in states like North Carolina and Oregon, where religious coalitions played key roles in closing down the industry, indicate that it’s possible to ignite the church to action in protesting this injustice.

Unfortunately, the Christian community currently lacks a similar level of passion, energy, and collaboration to create workable long-term solutions. Dan Krebs’ friend O’Dell Merryman has met with numerous church leaders to explain the Grace Period model and spur them to action, but most respond that they’re just “not interested in doing loans.”

That’s frustrating, since that’s not what the Grace Period model requires. As ACAC has shown, congregations can participate in a positive solution by finding the right credit union with which to partner, getting behind the initiative by bringing in new deposits, and supporting visionary laity.

The model takes effort and time, of course. Krebs and Wiles spent months setting up Grace Period as a formal nonprofit corporation, putting into place software systems for tracking loans, setting up a storefront, hiring and training personnel, and advertising their services. They’ve learned some lessons along the way and have identified potential ways to trim costs while deepening services. Partner congregations, they envision, could train budget counselors to work with their clients and provide free “branch locations” in an office on church property. They could also help spread the word by referring needy individuals who come to the church for benevolence aid.

So far, just one church + credit union team, from Fort Wayne, Ind., has begun the process of replicating the Grace Period model. Hundreds more are needed if the church is to imitate the righteousness of Job and “break the jaws of the wicked and snatch the prey from their teeth.”

Dr. Amy L. Sherman is a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute for Policy Research, where she directs the Center for Faith in Communities. Sagamore research assistant Rose Merritt contributed significantly to this article. * Names have been changed to protect individuals’ privacy.

(Editor’s note: due to space limitations, the endnotes for this article have been posted at EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org/PRISM-endnotes)

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Milk, Sugar & AIDS Activism From Sub-Saharan Africa to suburban America, confront a killer. Pass the cupcakes, please.

by Shayne Moore

“Do you think anyone will show up?” I ask my friend as I arrange cupcakes and tea cups on the serving table. “What if no one shows up?”

We are hosting a tea to honor Princess Kasune Zulu of Zambia. We invited Princess to come and tell her story to our friends. We chose a local community center—the Boathouse in Glen Ellyn, Ill.—with a large open room and a wall of windows looking out over a small lake.

I stare apprehensively over the expansive lawn, dotted with huge maple and oak trees, when I notice women starting to trickle down toward the Boathouse. My heart starts to pump a little faster. People are really coming.

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Glimpse into another world I first met Princess Kasune Zulu in 2002 through World Vision.

She is a wife and mother from Zambia, and a woman who is HIV-positive. Princess is one of the most beautiful people I have ever met—she simply owns her own skin. She speaks and moves with grace and confidence, and she has an intelligent and playful sense of humor that transcends any cultural barriers.

Princess is her given first name, but you’d be forgiven for thinking she is royalty. She wears the traditional Zambian attire: a full fabric skirt, blouse, and scarf all in a bright royal blue and gold matching pattern. She has a beautiful, joyful face, and her ebony skin is perfection. I was immediately comfortable with

Photo by Benjamin C. M. Backhouse, courtesy of The Hummingbird Bakery

two middle-class mothers

“HIV knows no boundaries.”

Princess, and our first conversation flowed effortlessly.

Princess makes it very clear that she has been released from the shame and stigma of being HIV-positive and that she considers it her calling to educate and share a message of hope to others living with HIV and AIDS. Her confidence in this is something one cannot fake, and I was quickly caught up by her accent, the lilt of her laugh, the engaging fire in her eyes, and the power of her story.

“When I found out I had the virus, I was filled with joy. I don’t know why—it was a death sentence,” said Princess.

“Growing up in Zambia, I lost my brother and my baby sister to AIDS. Then AIDS claimed my mother, then my father. At 17, I dropped out of school. I got pregnant. At 18, I married my boyfriend, a man 25 years older than me. He had already lost two wives suspected of having AIDS. I am now HIVpositive.”

As Princess shared her story, I was reminded that these are the facts of life in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 6,000 people die every day from AIDS. “I only realized that my parents died of AIDS much later on in my life,” Princess continued, “when I started reading books and magazines and watching shows on TV about AIDS.” Long into our conversation, Princess confessed, “When I found out I was HIV-positive and how it is spread, I started going along the highways, pretending to be a prostitute, in hopes a truck driver would pick me up and I could tell him about the disease.”

I was stunned. “You would be picked up because they thought you were a prostitute—and then what?”

“I would tell them it is not safe to drive the roads and have many sexual partners before returning home to their wives. I would educate them and tell them my status and tell them they need to stop this behavior.”

“Princess!” I was both stunned and impressed, but I said, “That is not safe!”

Chuckling, she responded, “Well, no one else is talking about it, and it must be talked about. Women need to be protected somehow. In Zambia it is hard for a woman to make her husband wear a condom if he refuses.”

The juxtaposition of being so comfortable with Princess, as if we had been lifelong friends, with the incredibly foreign story I was hearing was an emotional, wild ride. Yet what Princess shared next was so confrontational to my suburban life as a wife and mother that I have never been the same since.

Princess said, “When I first suspected I contracted the virus from my husband, I wanted to go get tested, but in Zambia a wife cannot get tested without the permission, without a signature from the husband. And so for a long while I could not find out my status or the status of my children, because my husband would not sign.”

“How is this possible that women around the world are still treated this way?” I wondered. “This could be me. This could be my life. But it’s not—and only because of where I happened to be born.”

Breaking out of the bubble When I met Princess in 2002, the global HIV/AIDS pandemic was just beginning to come to the forefront of awareness with governments and churches. It was not prominently discussed on the news, not at the national level or the multinational government level and certainly not in churches. Meeting Princess and getting to know her story did something to me. It knocked the suburban breath right out of me.

I’ve always been aware that I live in a bubble—junior high, high school, and college all in the same Midwestern town. So right after college, I moved to South Central Los Angeles to teach at an inner-city school. That experience expanded my understanding of things non-middle-America and gave me time to develop my compassion muscle. In the inner city, I had to come to terms with the messiness of poverty and all the complex issues and causes. I built relationships with people very different from me, and I grew in deep compassion as I journeyed with them and experienced the hard realities of life in the inner city.

But it had been years since my time in South Central LA. After getting married, I wanted to live in my hometown and raise my family here. I got a job teaching junior high in a neighboring town, and then I stayed home after the birth of my first son. I settled back into comfortable A billboard at the University of Zambia in Lusaka. (Photo by Philipp Hamedl) suburbia without much conflict. I was a young wife and mother, and I was building a life of security and safety for myself and my family. To be honest, there was no connection to my life in the inner city of Los Angeles in my life as a new stay-at-home mom. LA was on the other side of the country, and my babies, along with my other stay-at-home mom friends, my church, and Bible studies—these were the things in front of me.

My days filled up with the concerns of making sure my three children were fed, clean, and well behaved. My stresses were around things like strep throat that won’t go away, or finding those darn inserts for the sippy cups, or digging through the dirty clothes to find the least dirty onesie until I could get some laundry done. I spent non-naptime hours at the parks and tot lots with other stay-at-home moms and their kids.

I have a group of friends, some I have known since junior high, and we would meet every Wednesday to pray for one In many societies, women gain freedom from the wishes of their fathers only when power over them is handed to their husbands (see TheElders.org/ womens-initiatives).

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This billboard in Zambia addresses the myth that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. (Photo by Samantha Tam)

another. This time became a lifeline to me— sanity in the midst of the busyness and chaos of managing a family with small children. We shared our lives, our struggles, and our secrets for making this time a bit easier or more efficient. We were so desperate to connect and feel the support of other women that we still laugh about the day we met when, combined, we had 15 children under the age of 3. We had no babysitter that day, and children ran around the house, wiggled under our feet, crawled over us and the furniture while babies sprawled across laps—and we were all unfazed by it. We continued to talk and pray together in the din of total insanity.

Waking up to the realities of the AIDS situation in Subinfection is higher among girls and women than it is among Saharan Africa and building a relationship with Princess was men. In Africa virtually every infected woman contracts HIV unnervingly connecting my present life with my past life in the from a male partner with whom she cannot choose to abstain inner city. For years my compassion muscle had been busy from sex. Studies show that women, and particularly young caring for my own babies, but now God was growing something girls, are more vulnerable to contracting the HIV virus. The in me. My compassion was waking up and expanding, and I genital lining can easily be broken and increases chances of knew I could never go back to being neutral about things that infection. Not only are women biologically more vulnerable, break my heart. And even though I didn’t know what we were they are socially more vulnerable. Women are more likely to be doing, I knew we had to do coerced into sex or raped, and Each woman has come because she was invited. In this they have no say in condom use. something—I didn’t know where it was all going, but I moment, something clicks in me. I begin to understand Many young girls have sexual the power of grassroots organizing. had a deep sense that I was relations with much older men, simply to keep moving forward. I knew, or I longed to believe, who lure them with gifts and favors. that if other women heard this story and met this beautiful Women lack a voice, and the price of that silence is the sister, they too would never be the same. continuing spread of HIV and AIDS. UNAIDS reports that three-fourths of all the women living with HIV and AIDS live Learning about our African counterparts in the developing world. In many of these societies, women The women—church members, book club members, old have few rights in the sexual relationship and within the family coworkers, friends, and parents of friends—are filing through structure. Men come home and refuse to wear condoms. This the refreshment line, piling their plates with croissants, cookies, makes it difficult for a woman to protect herself against HIV and chocolates. Soon we sit down and begin. and to protect her children. Men make all major decisions Princess addresses the room—packed now with 80 within a household, including the decision to have more than women!—and begins by saying, “HIV knows no boundaries.” As one sexual partner.

I listen to Princess’ story for the third time, I am reminded of Patriarchal social structures can harm women of all ages. what made me fall in love with her: strength. Her strength does In a family where there are sick people, caring for the ill is the not come from a culture that went through social movements women’s job, often in addition to other work that can bring in like women’s suffrage or the civil rights movement; her strength money. When the mother and the father are sick, young girls flows simply from the depths of who God made her to be. become the main caregivers, which causes them to drop out of Princess gently teaches us while she shares her journey school. The disproportionate expectation placed on women and with HIV and AIDS. She tells us that the rate of HIV young girls increases risky sexual behavior, which is often seen as a way to make a living or simply survive. In Africa the rate of Statistics reveal that girls and young women remain far infection in teenage girls is six times higher than in women over more vulnerable to HIV infection than young men, with 35. About one in four teenage girls lives with HIV, compared two-thirds of the 5.5 million 15-24-year-olds with HIV with one in 25 teenage boys. worldwide being women. The majority of these young Princess is blessed that even though she is a woman, she people still lack comprehensive and correct information was able to be educated in Zambia. She explains that education about how to prevent HIV infection or do not have the is the most effective way to prevent HIV infection in women power to act on that knowledge (see UNICEF report and girls. If every child in the developing world received a basic at bit.ly/eNJXlU). primary education, about 700,000 new HIV infections would be prevented yearly, especially in girls. Schools can teach HIV

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At least 12.1 million African children have lost one or both parents to AIDS (see UNICEF report at bit.ly/fmA56V) prevention methods such as condom use, encouraging fewer (or no) sexual partners, and the importance of discussing HIV and AIDS openly. UNAIDS has stated that girls who attend school are more likely able to make sexual decisions for themselves, are more independent, and are more likely to earn an income.

Increased education will also help reduce the cultural stigma of HIV and AIDS. As Princess finishes her presentation, I glance out the window of the Boathouse and across the glinting surface of the lake. Couples are walking their dogs, and men are fishing. A woman pushes a stroller along the paved path. The ladies laugh as Princess tells an anecdote about cultures clashing. I turn from the window to look at her, and I am amazed. How did this happen? How is there a room full of Midwesterners anxious to hear a Zambian woman share her story?

The sun pours through the paned windows, dramatically lighting the room, and I realize I know the answer to my own question. Each woman has come because she was invited. In this moment, something clicks in me. I begin to understand the power of grassroots organizing. I acted in my sphere of influence to tell a story and to hope for change.

The power of doing something Princess’ words stirred the hearts of the women that day. Our tea party was only a drop in the bucket, but it was a step we took to follow God’s call in our lives instead of doing nothing.

Several months later, Princess found herself in the White House meeting President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Along with national leaders, she urged President Bush to pass the AIDS bill and PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). Since I first met Princess, she has met with senior leaders from the British and Irish parliaments, her own president of Zambia, Mrs. Mandela from South Africa, and ambassadors from many countries. She has been featured in USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and

An AIDS awareness sign in Simonga, Zambia. (Photo by JonRawlinson.com)

Christianity Today, and she wrote a book called Warrior Princess: Fighting for Life with Courage and Hope (IVP, 2009), about how she emerged an unexpected champion for those at risk and affected by AIDS. During the year following the tea, the women we’d assembled gave money through World Vision so Princess could return to Zambia and produce her own nationally syndicated radio series. Zambian women may not talk about issues of sex, fidelity, justice, and HIV/AIDS with one another, but everyone is thinking about them. Radio is the most effective way of getting the message out to women who feel trapped and scared. A woman can clean her home and cook her meals while hearing a message of hope. Princess’ program, Positive Living, was broadcast in English and seven other languages, and it received honors from the US embassy in Zambia for excellence in broadcasting on HIV and AIDS. I didn’t expect another mother to provide a model of grassroots global social advocacy—especially a mother from the other side of the world. Princess became a compelling guide on how to fight overwhelming odds with a brave, hopeful heart.

Princess is not an angry, militant, placard-waving activist; she is a smart, intentional, feisty activist who stands on an unmovable foundation of love, hope, and justice. Such a foundation cannot be shaken and is stronger than any oppressive forces that may try to come against it, even death.

Shayne Moore (GlobalSoccerMom.com) lives in Wheaton, Ill., and is an author, speaker, wife, mother of three, outspoken advocate in the fight against extreme poverty and global AIDS, and one of the original members of the ONE Campaign (One.org). Moore sits on the executive board of directors for Upendo Village (UpendoVillage.org), an HIV/AIDS clinic in Kenya, and on the board of directors for Growers First (GrowersFirst.org), which empowers rural farmers in the developing world. This article was adapted from Global Soccer Mom: Changing the World Is Easier Than You Think, just released from Zondervan, by Shayne Moore, © 2011. Used by permission of Zondervan (Zondervan.com).

As one of the founding members of the ONE Campaign, Moore has made several advocacy and educational trips to the African continent.

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Soccer Mom, Superhero

Shayne Moore unmasks the hidden power of church ladies across the nation. PRISM caught up with her between carpools and G8 summits.

PRISM: What is the greatest obstacle you’ve encountered in the fight against AIDS? Shayne Moore: The greatest obstacle as a full-time mom trying to get engaged and mobilize others is lack of education and understanding. We often hear about this in the developing world—about the importance of educating young men and women about the disease. Much stigma and misunderstanding is still rampant, but stigma and misunderstanding around the issues of HIV and AIDS are not limited to the developing world.

When I first woke up to the realities of HIV/AIDS and extreme poverty, I found myself talking about it all the time— to whomever would listen. In one conversation I was talking about the need to get ARVs (antiretroviral medication) to women in rural Africa. The woman I was talking with was an educated, everyday mother like me. Her response was, “Why? Aren’t they going to die anyway?”

She wasn’t being mean—she simply did not know that the science of ARVs has changed so much that if a mother who is HIVpositive can get on medication she will live a long, productive life. HIV-positive mothers in the developing world need medication so they can be healthy and raise their children and work. She also did not know that today we have the medical ability to have no child born with HIV. An inexpensive pill can enable an entire generation to be born HIV-free.

I truly believe people are compassionate, and when educated and informed they will act.

PRISM: What is the most effective tool you have personally available to you in the fight against AIDS? SM: My own voice.

In my experience as a lifelong churchgoer, women tend to sit in the pews quietly supporting the life of the church.

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Of course, I believe all church members should support this. But how many women, myself guilty, have remained silent about the things that break our hearts?

Is style of music important? Perhaps.

Is the gay issue and women in leadership important? Probably.

But I have come to believe that, if given a choice of what to fuss about in church, most women would choose to raise a ruckus over the fact that a 10-year-old girl is in a cage in Cambodia being used as a sex slave.

Our own voices and passions are our greatest tools. That is what I like about ONE (ONE.org). ONE is a nonpartisan, Shayne Moore addresses a crowd at a n o n d e n o m inati o nal ONE Campaign awareness-raising event. advocacy group.

They don’t want my money—they want my voice. By being a member of ONE I am immediately in the conversation, and I am informed.

PRISM: If you could hang a banner at the front of every church in America, what would it say?

SM: Do you know your status?

The fight against HIV and AIDS starts right where we are. How can we ask an entire continent of people to know their status when there are HIV-positive, untested people in our pews?

PRISM: What have you learned about yourself since stepping out of your comfort zone to address global needs?

SM: I have learned that I can make a difference. I have learned that my role as a full-time mother does not limit my influence. I have thrown off the “don’t rock the boat” messages, and I have learned that soccer moms have more power and influence in culture, in church, and in the world than we ever realized.

Warrior Princess, Woman of God

Princess Kasune Zulu puts a remarkable face on the AIDS crisis—God’s very own face. PRISM was fortunate to catch a healing glimpse.

PRISM: Has your HIV status been an obstacle in any way in your fight against AIDS? Princess Zulu: For me, HIV has been more of a blessing than an obstacle. I know that’s unique, since so many people have lost their jobs or marriages or lives due to HIV, but for me, because of my willingness to break the silence, my HIV status has been a blessing. Romans 8:28 tells us that God will use everything— even evil—for his glory. God is using HIV to take me, and other women like me, to places we would never go otherwise, to be advocates for others and for change. It is bigger than all of us; yet when we become obedient to what God is calling us to, we end up being blessed in return.

of our dependence on God. Don’t lose the quest for God and his love for the brokenhearted.

PRISM: What have you learned about yourself since stepping out to address global needs?

What have you learned about God?

PZ: I have learned that when we use the little that God has given us, he will multiply it beyond anything we could ever ask for. I am from a village in Africa, but I have spoken to a US president, which resulted in him and the people of America— PRISM: What is the most effective tool you have personally through the PEPFAR Fund—giving $15 billion (in April 2003) toward the fight against AIDS! The next time I testified, in available to you in the fight against AIDS? 2007 on Capitol Hill at a committee chaired by the late Senator PZ: Being vulnerable with people, telling my story as vulner- Ted Kennedy, the bill went from just $15 billion for AIDS to $51 ably as I can. This begins to break down the issue of HIV and billion for malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS. Never in my craziest AIDS from just numbers and statistics and make it real. They dreams could I have imagined this.

Our greatest struggles not only mold us into a different see that, Hey this is real, this could happen to my brother, my person than we would wife, my church mate. If we make it have been otherwise, personal we are more likely to make Princess Zulu testifies before the US Congress in 2007. (Photo by Geralbut they make us an headway in the fight against HIV. dine Ryerson-Cruz/World Vision) encouragement to Personalizing the problem is the others, and ministries greatest tool. When something beare born. comes personal we not only act but we act with urgency. And urgency is Princess Kasune Zulu a game changer.

(PrincessZulu.com) is the author of WarPRISM: If you could hang a banrior Princess: Fighting ner at the front of every church in for Life with CourAmerica or Africa, what would it age and Hope (IVP, say?

2009). Part of the proceeds of the book PZ: In Africa, my banner would goes to help children say: Hold on. The God we serve is affected by HIV/AIDS more than able to hear your cries and is administered and prayers. He gives hope where through Fountain of there is no hope, life where there is Life (FountainofLife-Africa.org), the nonprofit she founded to death.

Great suffering causes us to be desperate for God, but empower children in rural Africa through improved access to when we have much, we tend to lose that desperation for God. education and healthcare. Today Zulu is an internationally recSo in America, my banner would say: You have been spared ognized speaker and AIDS activist. She splits her time between the pain and suffering of people in developing countries who live Chicago, where she lives with her husband and two teenage with extreme poverty, HIV, and preventable diseases. But there daughters, and Zambia, where the family awaits visa processing is another sickness, and that is the sickness of not being aware for the five orphans they have adopted since 2007.

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Your perpetual ruins will be rebuilt; you will reestablish the ancient foundations. You will be called,

Repairing Broken Walls A walk through two Christian communities that are transforming their urban neighborhoods with creativity, courage, and commitment.

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PRISM Magazine

, ‘The one who repairs broken walls, the one who makes the streets inhabitable again.’ Isaiah 58:12

From Ramshackle to Shalom

An Indianapolis church turns a vortex of foreclosures into a neighborhood on the mend

by Zoe Sandvig Erler

A

large board covers the front door of 403 North Gray Street. Chunks of the white brick porch are missing, and brambles from a dead tree swallow up half of the front view. It’s difficult to tell how long the house has been vacant.

Just six doors down, Belinda Ellis’ front porch twinkles with icicle lights and a bold Christmas wreath. Inside, her cozy living room is lined with family photos, suede couches, and children’s bicycles. Ellis proudly shows off her home, pointing out pictures of her eight grandchildren. She flings open the back door onto a spacious red deck and even more spacious backyard. That yard is the main reason Ellis lives at 428 North Gray Street.

The house was under renovation when Ellis first saw it in 2007, right after she got out of prison. “I just fell in love with it,” she explains, “’cause I knew it had this huge backyard.” The yard has since become a staging ground for her grandkids’ football games.

It’s unusual for former felons returning to Indianapolis’ Near Eastside to find quality affordable housing, but Ellis’ home was made possible by Englewood Christian Church, and Englewood isn’t known for following the norm.

The fall of Near Eastside The church stands at the corner of Rural and Washington Streets, on the edge of Indianapolis’ Near Eastside and just half a mile from Brenda Ellis’ home. The 200-member congregation continues to work out the kinks in a 15-year project to live out the gospel of Jesus Christ in a community ravaged by crime, unemployment, and an overwhelming number of home foreclosures. Although it hasn’t been officially confirmed, most Near Eastsiders claim that their zip code—46201—led the nation in foreclosures in 2004. It wasn’t always so.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Near Eastside boasted a thriving business district, several prominent schools and churches, and a popular amusement park. Families started, grew, and left legacies. During this time, Englewood Christian Church exploded its population to more than 1,000 regulars, gaining a reputation as a cornerstone congregation in the city and in the nation. But despite its prestige, the church concealed its subtle horrors, including the hushed history that some members held Ku Klux Klan meetings in Englewood’s austere building. These wounds have now turned to scars that the church no longer tries to hide. After all, it has long since acquired a new identity and celebrates God’s desire to redeem our past and turn our scars into character.

Englewood persisted in its fashion of abundance and prominence until World War II, when Near Eastside suffered a dras-

Belinda Ellis is the proud owner of her house, which was renovated and financed by ECDC. (Photo by Beverly Saddler)

tic demographic shift as families began moving out to the suburbs to purchase newer homes. The exodus escalated in the 1960s and ’70s as houses were increasingly subdivided into rental duplexes for more transient tenants. Other homes were abandoned and eventually forced into foreclosure.

Suburban flight took with it important assets; neighborhood grocery stores and other retail operations closed, forcing the remaining residents to shop outside of the neighborhood.

According to the 2000 US Census, the population declined by 19 percent between 1980 and 2000. Crime climbed and schools suffered. As current Englewood pastor Mike Bowling recalls, Near Eastside had disintegrated into a “no man’s land.”

Many churches headed to the suburbs, too. But Englewood remained, now one-fifth the size of its original booming congregation.

When Bowling arrived at Englewood in 1993, he faced a congregation unsure of its identity and uncertain of its mission.

Within just a few years, Bowling, who had previously served in an urban ministry in Pittsburgh, teamed up with several other social-justice-minded members of the congregation to begin a new phase in Englewood’s story: transforming their struggling neighborhood by reversing the housing crisis.

It all started in 1995 with a single mother and a little house on the verge of collapse.

Translating social justice In 1995 Donna Spurling—a cancer survivor, single mother, and Englewood congregant—was looking for a new place to live, but she couldn’t pay much in rent. Meanwhile Englewood folks noticed that a house across the street from the church looked as if it was about to fall down.

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So Pastor Bowling and a few other Englewood leaders got creative. They pooled their money and bought the house at 212 Rural Street, a duplex, for $5,000 and began rebuilding it, employing the skills of a few handymen in the congregation.

Spurling contributed $350 a month in rent, $225 of which the church put into a savings account for her. Through that account, Spurling saved up enough to fully furnish her remodeled home.

After a few more impromptu rehab opportunities—including fixing up a house for a large family who had been evicted from their previous dwelling—Bowling and friends decided they needed a more organized way to tackle such projects. They filed for tax-exempt status with help from a local nonprofit law clinic, and in 1996 launched Englewood Community Development Corporation (ECDC).

To date, Englewood has rehabbed almost 50 properties within a mile of the church and provided affordable housing for approximately 150 people.

“If the world is going to understand what we’re up to and not just cast it as religion, we need to name this thing with language that they’re going to understand,” Bowling explains.

“And they understand community development corporations.”

Planting in urban soil One block over from Rural, on Oxford Street, Da- ECDC’s David Price stands outside the Care Center, vid Price, 41, rises which is being reborn as a 32-unit supportive housing complex. (Photo by Beverly Saddler) before 4 a.m. every day so he can fit his two jobs into a 70-hour work week: teaching in a homeschooling co-op, of which his two daughters are a part, while his wife works as a nurse, and overseeing ECDC. The executive directorship pays very little, and even that Price usually “loanates” back to the organization, something he says

many of Englewood’s members do to help cash flow at ECDC. “We’ll hopefully see these funds back,” says Price, “but we will see. At Englewood, we believe that the church is the transformative agent in culture and that God is redeeming all things through his people. We do not necessarily believe that the church is a conglomeration of employees or volunteers. We believe strongly in the reality of church as the body of Christ.

Our decisions about career, how we live, and how we spend our money are not private decisions but are submitted to the body.

While we are not a common-purse community, we value the submission of all that we have and all that we are to God and, by extension, the body. So my service here is part of my submission to our local body, since I have some of the skills and current availability to work for ECDC. My ‘paycheck’ is being a functioning part of the community of Christ in this location.”

Predominantly a corridor of rentals, Oxford was plagued with troublemaker tenants and vacancies when Price moved in. The first of Englewood’s members to buy and rehab a house, Price purchased his place 10 years ago for $20,000.

After clearing waist-deep trash out of the house, he sunk in $60,000 worth of improvements.

“It’s not a good investment,” Price admits, adding, “Most of us have put more into our houses than they’re worth, especially now with the downturn.”

But making money has never been the impetus behind Englewood’s actions. Around 1996 and the launch of ECDC, many Englewood members—in addition to Price and Bowling— made a choice to stay put in the neighborhood in order to focus on serving those around them. A few others decided to move from the suburbs back to Englewood. To date, threequarters of Englewood members live in the neighborhood, mostly within one square mile of the church, on Rural, Gray, Dearborn, and Oxford Streets.

“If you’re going to be in the neighborhood, then be in the neighborhood,” Price says.

Dwelling in close-knit community comes with benefits— accountability, friendship, safety. It also comes with its annoyances.

“We have a lot of generations living here,” Price explains.

“It’s so much easier to belong to a church that’s a new church plant and is a bunch of people who are a lot alike.” Some neighbors are very committed to Englewood’s vision of common life—others, less so.

Over the past 15 years, Englewood has started a publishing company, launched a top-notch daycare center, fed the hungry with vegetables from their community garden, and recently helped start the area’s first food co-op.

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Formerly homeless, today Candace Maximoff works in administration at Wheeler Mission Ministries (which helped her overcome her drug addiction) and owns an ECDCrenovated and financed home.

As a small church, personpower is always the most needed resource. With a congregation of barely 200, a few people carry the heavily loaded infrastructure that is ECDC. Sometimes suburban churches want to help by donating funds or sending work groups down.

However, Price notes that Englewood prefers people who are willing to relocate to the city and donate their everyday lives.

Plumbing and paperwork Of the 50 houses ECDC has revitalized, approximately 30 have been rental and contract sales and about 20 have been rehabbed and sold. Properties came from foreclosures, firedamaged houses, and the city’s land bank, where ECDC was able to purchase them for between $2,500 and $30,000 apiece.

Foreclosures come in bad shape—and worse. Many houses come stripped of appliances, electrical systems typically need an upgrade, and “plumbing usually needs to be redone,” Price says.

Most of these repairs demand professional attention where volunteer labor used to suit (not because Englewood requires it, but because the government does). After running a private operation for more than a decade, ECDC applied for and was awarded $6 million in Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) grant money from the state and city governments to fund many of their housing projects. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) created these grants in 2008 to help stabilize communities deemed “most needy,” particularly those suffering from tragic rates of abandoned and foreclosed homes.

Federal funding brings its red tape, particularly increased paperwork and long-term reporting obligations. ECDC is learning to be more structured, which is enabling it to complete its most recent and largest effort to date: a 32-unit supportive and affordable housing complex in a former Indianapolis public school adjacent to the church. Dubbed the CommonWealth and a part of a larger effort in Near Eastside known as the Quality of Life Plan, the complex will provide housing for the homeless and for those with mental illnesses, as well as higher functioning members of the community who want to live in

closer proximity to their neighbors. In partnership with Adult & Child Mental Health Services and the John H. Boner Center, a local social service provider, ECDC is crafting the CommonWealth in such a way that it can become a place where the aging, the young, the needy, and the more self-sufficient can experience life together.

Unlikely tenants Relationships and restored lives make up for what Englewood has given up financially. Over the past 14 years, ECDC has purposed to offer housing to the least “house-able,” those who need housing most desperately but have the most difficulty qualifying for it, like citizens returning from prison.

In 2001, after more than seven years of incarceration, Melissa Benton was released from Indiana Women’s Prison (IWP) and began attending Englewood with her grandparents.

Despite her support system, Benton soon discovered how difficult it was to rebuild her life.

“With the time I did in prison...you see the revolving door,” she says. “When I got out and found out how hard it was to get a job and get your life back together, I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be for someone who didn’t have a support system.”

In 2004 Benton purchased a house through ECDC. A year later, motivated by her personal experience, Benton helped launch Women in Motion—a joint effort between Englewood, ECDC, IWP, and the Boner Center—to help women exiting IWP get back on their feet. Boner provided job assistance.

ECDC supplied affordable housing. And the church matched returning citizens with Englewood neighbors who would serve as their mentors.

During the three years that Women in Motion was active, 30 women cycled through the program. Although the program has been discontinued, five of the women still reside in the neighborhood. Brenda Ellis is one of them.

Before she was released, Ellis knew that ECDC was preparing a home for her. Purchased by ECDC in a tax sale, 428 North Gray was under construction the day Ellis got a tour. She remembers that the floors were bare, since the carpet had not yet been laid. But after she saw the backyard, she was sold.

ECDC took care of all of the logistics, including furnishing the house. “I didn’t do nothing but move in,” she says. “Put up the blinds.”

Last year, Ellis suffered a severe health breakdown, but she had two families by her side throughout the ordeal: her relatives and Englewood. “That’s why I love Englewood,” she explains.

“They stood by me the whole time.”

Servant landlords Although she never went to prison, Candace Maximoff took her fair share of hard knocks before settling into her cozy cottage at 207 North Rural.

“I was addicted to drugs and alcohol before I ever left home,” she explains, perched on her couch across from a red brick fireplace decorated with a collection of figurines, fragrant

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candles, and framed pictures. This room—this house—she calls “her refuge.”

About eight years ago, she hit her lowest point: Her husband left her, she was evicted from her apartment, and she ended up homeless on the streets of Indianapolis. Welcomed into the Care Center—in the building where the CommonWealth will be—Maximoff surrendered her life to Christ, got clean, and found community. Three-and-a-half years later she was still living there and afraid to leave, until she learned that Englewood was renovating 207 North Rural.

Although Maximoff didn’t attend Englewood at the time, she knew the house well, having attended Saturday morning Bible studies in its living room when it was occupied by an acquaintance from a previous church. And then Englewood offered it to her, and she jumped at the opportunity. “I just thought it was the most darling house I had been in.”

These days, she admits that having her church as a landlord creates a closer dynamic than many would prefer to experience.

But she appreciates it.

“I have no doubt in my mind that if it became apparent to the people at Englewood that I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing, somebody would be calling me on it,” she said. “To me, having that accountability is a safety net. To me, it’s just one more layer of things that would keep me from going back to drinking.”

Since moving into her house, Englewood has never raised the rent and lets Maximoff reimburse them for utilities when she can.

When the church at large is doing what it was created to do, it will be responding to the great ills and desperations of its day with compassion, creativity, and action. In the 2nd century, Christians sacrificed their lives to tend to the sick during a plague in Rome. For Christians in 18th- and 19th-century England, this meant launching a full-scale attack on the British slave trade. In 21st-century America, where many neighborhoods have fallen into ruin over several decades of neglect, Christians—like those at Englewood—are repairing the walls, rebuilding and repopulating abandoned homes, and restoring shalom.

Maximoff concludes, “That’s part of what Christianity looks like today in this neighborhood—helping people find affordable places to live.”

Formerly a writer for Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, Zoe Sandvig Erler is currently director of communications for Sagamore Institute, a nonpartisan think tank where she researches and writes about community development and social justice. She lives with her husband in Indianapolis.

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On Earth as It Is in Heaven A ministry’s integrated approach to community building transforms inner-city Albuquerque

by Helen Lepp Friesen

A

lbuquerque’s International District at one time boasted thriving businesses and safe living conditions for its residents. But that all changed in the 1970s, when the construction of Interstate 40 through the heart of the city rerouted traffic from the neighborhood and when Kirtland Air Force Base housing was relocated. These two events brought with them the evacuation of businesses, a decline in home ownership, and a rise in absentee landlords.

Four decades later the International District still consists of highly transient and low-income neighborhoods, with the city’s highest rates of violent crimes, domestic violence, prostitution, and poverty. Although the multiplicity of languages and ethnic groups in the neighborhood can be an asset, it can also make communication difficult, and racial conflict complicates community progress.

Into this challenging scenario East Central Ministries (ECM) was born in 1999. ECM’s goal is to be “followers of Christ, committed to living out faith by partnering with vulnerable neighbors to cultivate solutions, development, and transformation in Albuquerque’s southeast International District.”

ECM was launched by John Bulten as an outreach of Fellowship Christian Reformed Church in Albuquerque, N. Mex., with the initial goal being to men-

tor families coming off welfare. Eventually the vision evolved into a more comprehensive neighborhood transformation approach. Today this holistic transformation vision has expanded to include an intentional community called Casa Shalom, a health clinic, food cooperative, two micro businesses, youth leadership development and tutoring, and a middle school.

ECM’s mission is to share “God’s good news of salvation through Jesus Christ to a hurting neighborhood, while addressing systematic neighborhood needs such as housing, employment, and family issues.” Here’s a quick look at how they are fullfilling their mission.

Escuela Luz del Mundo On a Monday morning a few days into the new school year, students at Escuela Luz del Mundo are already busy defining science, talking about social justice issues, and planning a Shakespeare unit complete with dramatization. Escuela Luz del Mundo is in its fourth year of operation in Albuquerque’s International District.

Dr. Rick Kitchen, longtime volunteer at ECM and full-time professor of math education leadership at University of New Mexico, manages the small Christian school. In conjunction with his research at UNM on effective schools that serve the poor, he worked for many years in public education. Escuela Luz del Mundo was born of the vision Kitchen developed during his research. Initially launched under the auspices of East Central Ministries, the school quickly became its own stand-alone entity. This year the school has 31 students in sixth through eigth grades.

Although the cost of education is $250 per month, the school charges only $50 per month, with the option of contributing sweat equity by taking on janitorial duties in those months when cash is especially short. School families are heavily involved in fundraising efforts. The absence of drug and gang activity and the presence of a Christ-centered and academically challenging program draws the parents, many of whom have no more than an elementary education themselves, to invest time and money in their children’s future. Both students and parents are responsible for the upkeep of the building.

One priority of the school is to instill interest in social justice issues, both globally—the students have been learning about the “invisible children” of Uganda)—and locally—students were recently part of a coalition that attended a hospital board of

regents meeting on the topic of budgetary decisions and policy that would impact healthcare for the poor.

Every Thursday the school hosts a community lunch featuring discussions on topics such as immigrant issues/ rights, healthcare access, and mental health issues (a professional counselor is available to help students cope with the challenging issues in their life). Because of these resources and opportunities to participate, students who might otherwise feel marginalized in their community realize they do have power to influence their situations.

“Escuela Luz del Mundo is not there to impose a better model of education,” explains Kitchen, “but to walk side by side with the students, recognizing that education is about more than just textbook learning.” Education is about connecting each student’s experience, sphere of influence, and responsibility to a wider community and world so that they become global citizens who contribute to the betterment of society.

The three current teachers at Escuela Luz del Mundo feel they’ve been called to the work. When funds are low they forego a paycheck until money comes in to cover salaries.

One Hope Centro de Vida Health Clinic Longtime ECM volunteer Azucena Molenar sees access to good healthcare as essential for many hardworking immigrant families who don’t qualify for healthcare benefits. It was her vision of a health clinic for the community that prompted ECM to organize its first health fair in 2003. That first fair led to others, which led to volunteer doctors seeing their first patients in a small room next to the food cooperative. Generous state and county monies led to the purchase of a building, and in 2006 ECM started the process of gutting and transforming the former jewelry store into a bright, welcoming space.

Today One Hope Centro de Vida consists of a clean, family-friendly reception area, three examining rooms, and two dental chairs. Its mission is to improve the total health of the community by partnering with neighbors to provide affordable healthcare, follow-up, education, and spiritual guidance. The clinic opened its doors to the community in January 2010 and

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now operates two days a week, with three doctors from area churches and University of New Mexico medical faculty who volunteer their time and expertise Based on capacity and volunteers, One Hope offers clinics on issues such as depression, asthma, diabetes, and weight loss.

Patients are charged a $10 copay for a doctor visit and, if they cannot afford that, are welcome to barter for the service by cleaning the clinic. In the clinic’s backyard, a shaded sitting area with comfortable cushioned deck chairs qualifies as the counseling room. In its first quarter of operation the clinic offered $40,000 worth of services to 80-90 patients per month. Word of mouth has been the sole marketing tool.

Food coop, micro businesses, an urban farm business The food coop opened in 2001. Using donations from around the city, 15 volunteer families organize the food, setting up the coop to resemble a farmers’ market where approximately 100 families come to select the food they need for the week, volunteering their time in exchange. Community members manage and operate the entire project. Excess or spoiled food is sent across the street to be composted at Growing Awareness Urban Farm, one of two micro businesses that ECM started to provide employment and much needed income to unemployed community residents.

Growing Awareness Urban Farm is run by Matt Wilson, a master gardener, entrepreneur, and community developer with a passion for kids. He and his employees grow 20,000 starter plants to sell to a local nursery or to church youth groups and schools for fundraisers. With a US Department of Agriculture grant, Wilson expanded the farm to include chickens, bees, and composting worms that turn food scraps and “gray water” into

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potassium- and nitrogen-rich gardening soil that is sold to gardening centers; the worms are also sold to fishermen. Urban Farm is considering organic certification next year. A donated greenhouse waits to be installed. Wilson recruits middle and high school students to assist in the projects.

Another ECM micro business is based on the ancient method of olla irrigation. At the cutting edge of urban gardening, olla irrigation uses water that passes through terracotta pots that are buried in the ground with just their opening exposed to allow for filling. Employees make the ceramic molds

for the ollas, or pots, from actual gourds and squash, firing them at extreme temperatures but This page, below: A community that prays together leaving them stays together! Food coop volunteers share a prayer before work. unglazed to maintain their Right: Creation Park, built entirely by volunteers, porous texfeatures a mural celebrating the resurrection of the neighborhood. ture so they will slowly leak water into the ground. The micro business currently sells the ollas wholesale to nurseries in southwestern states.

ECM recently received a combination of $55,000 in grants and donations to build a playground and paint a mural in the backyard adjacent to the food coop. Local politicians, along with 140 volunteers, transformed an asphalt parking lot into a child-friendly recreation area in one day. Local artist Richard Brandt chose images for the mural that celebrate the resurrection of a neighborhood.

Opposite page, clockwise from top: ECM makes terracotta pots and sells them wholesale to nurseries. Matt Wilson runs Growing Awareness Urban Farm, where he works with community children like Juan to raise plants, chickens, and bees. Students roll up their sleeves for the community garden project at Escuela Luz del Mondo.

Casa Shalom For many years John Bulten nurtured the dream of community living in the ECM neighborhood but did not know what that vision would entail practically or how it would look. But the dream began to take shape three years ago when a property became available, just around the corner from ECM’s headquarters, consisting of one bungalow and 22 apartments. The buildings were purchased with the sole funding of private investors, and 14 families—including Bulten’s—decided to explore community living in the heart of the International District. Many of the families were already renting in the neighborhood and were eager to move into home ownership.

The 22 small one-bedroom units were converted into 13 larger townhouses to accommodate families. After the renovations—and many discussions about common values—families began to move in. Casa Shalom Housing Cooperative was born and is now an affordable, intentional community where resi-

dents of mixed ages, race, culture, and socioeconomic status share common values and goals, resources and responsibilities.

Sunday worship services are held in the common courtyard, which features picnic tables and landscaped areas. Moises, the community-appointed pastor, leads the service.

Challenges of community living include economic, cultural, multilingual, and immigration issues, but overall satisfaction with the living situation is high.

“My life has been radically changed by living at Casa Shalom with my family and my neighbors,” says Bulten. “Loving my neighbors has new meaning and so much more transforming potential when my neighbors’ hardships become mine and my brokenness starts to be revealed to them. We make commitments to our community members, and this has a way of breaking down our internal defenses and all the games and pretending we tend to do. It can often be ugly and hurts, but it’s really the only way that I see God in his loving grace working to transform us into his unique people. This messy process is

when God’s kingdom starts to really look like some good news to me.”

Under the leadership of John Bulten, ECM is rebuilding the ancient foundations and repairing broken walls. ECM’s vision to partner in the transformation of the neighborhood so that “God’s peace is present and all of God’s children can flourish” is being actualized. It continues to build a sustainable, diverse community as it equips, empowers, and partners with its neighbors; disciples through word and work; and educates and inspires others to delve into Christian community development.

Helen Lepp Friesen is a freelance writer who enjoys traveling, photography, jogging, playing hockey with her kids, and baking bread.

Learn more at EastCentralMinistries.org, GrowingAwarenessUrbanFarm.com, and ELMabq.org.

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Help That Heals

by Kami L. Rice

Partnerships based on mutuality prove that joining hands with the poor is the only way to make a real difference. hen I landed in Bunia, Democratic Republic of Congo, for a brief visit in late 2007, after a period of horrible fighting and massacres in the region, UN cargo planes were the only others parked on the tarmac. Blue-hatted soldiers lounged against their roadside tanks as we traveled from the airport to the missionary pilot’s home.

It seemed that nearly every corner boasted a sign marking the offices of another humanitarian organization. I wondered what it was like to live in a place so saturated with foreigners there to help. How would it feel to know my community was so broken a place that it needed this much aid? What would I think if outsiders came to tell my com-

W

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munity how to solve its problems?

Fast-forward to mid-2010, when I was back in Nashville rushing to move belongings from my basement office before the slowly rising water could ruin them. Between trips downstairs, I watched news images of my city being submerged by a once-in-a-thousand-years flood.

In the days that followed, many people in Nashville needed help, and we grumbled that the media didn’t announce our tragedy to the world fast enough. But in spite of this, we had the resources—from government infrastructure to financial donations to personpower—in our community to do a lot of the helping ourselves. And we took

pride in that. “We are Nashville” became our rallying cry, one that still rings out as the one-year anniversary of our flood approaches.

In the aftermath of our natural disaster, one of the primary projects on my writing docket was an article about ongoing earthquake relief in Haiti. As I researched and interviewed and wrote from my flood-damaged office, waiting for FEMA to inspect it, I was viscerally struck by the contrasts between the internal resources available in my flooded city and the reported lack of resources available within Haiti.

In a more publicized way than ever, the world was pouring in to help Haiti, as it has been for a very long time. How would it feel if roles were reversed, and my city was the one unable to help itself? What messages would it make me believe about myself? And what do the answers to these questions indicate about how we should go about helping others?

Walk with me, please Irena Dragas Jansen knows what it’s like to live in a place that needs help and to watch foreigners rush in to do the helping. As Croatia became an independent country recovering from war in the 1990s, humanitarian aid groups and church groups from other countries arrived en masse to help.

Originally from Petrinja, Croatia, Jansen graduated from Biola University in California in 1997 and returned to Croatia to work for Youth for Christ Croatia, serving as national director for 12 years. She is a contributor to Global Youth Ministry: Reaching Adolescents around the World, which is being released this spring by Zondervan/Youth Specialties.

“We did need help, and we were happy that people were coming in to help,” she says of the war’s immediate aftermath, when she and other refugees didn’t “know which side was up.” They needed soap and clothes and basic supplies.

But, she says, as you start feeling like your old self, you stop wanting quite so much help from outsiders.

Jansen compares the feeling to that of a child leaning to walk. At first the child needs and wants help just to stand

Irena Jansen counsels young women attending Youth for Christ’s camp.

Irena Jansen works to preserve the stone walls at Youth for Christ’s Eco-Spiritual Camp on the island of Cres in Northern Croatia.

up, but as balance and confidence grow, the child wants to walk without holding anyone’s hand. “”I felt like a child, and then I felt like a rebellious teenager who just wanted all of the Americans and foreigners gone,” she recalls. “But then I grew out of that to a more nuanced, mature perspective that required me to communicate my needs and receive help in the right ways.”

Jansen says the danger is when people come into a country like Croatia thinking that Croatian systems and ways of doing things aren’t as good just because they are different from the way For more informathings are done elsewhere. This applies tion about the to both humanitarians and Christians, book Global Youth who all too often come in trying to Ministry: Reaching change the things that are different.

Adolescents around When people go into another country, the World, go to TerJansen says, they need to get to know ryLinhart.com/globalthe context, because there might be youth-ministry-book. good reasons for why things are done the way they are.

One way foreigners can care for people is by helping them figure out and articulate what they really need instead of accepting what they don’t need just because it’s from well-intentioned people. “Sometimes people don’t know what they need because they haven’t thought about it yet, and sometimes they’re afraid to say it,” explains Jansen. “When you’re so preoccupied with surviving, you don’t have time to think about why the handholding is bothering you.”

Despite the times Jansen wanted the foreigners “to get away unless they were there to encourage me and walk with me as peers instead of in a patronizing way,” she is grateful for the help her country received and for the American family who invited her to live with them during her college years in the US. She says she has learned from the American church about generosity and sensitivity to other people’s needs.

“I have been humbled by the attitude of the American church—that they can be so far away from the place experiencing the news-breaking moment and still help. I hope the American church doesn’t lose that ability to feel from afar.”

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Pastor Wilnord Pierre with his wife and children.

Yet she also cautions the church in America not to be carried away by their emotions and the desire to make themselves feel better by helping. What is actually most helpful may not always be what feels best to the helper.

Local resources, local contributions, local church Steve Corbett is co-author of When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor…and Yourself, assistant professor of community development at Covenant College, and community development specialist for the Chalmers Center for Economic Development. He affirms that what is sometimes most helpful for people in need may not give the helper the most personal satisfaction. For example, in Haiti “we don’t need Americans to rush down there and build houses. We need to find ways to pay Haitians to build houses.”

He says before we do what we think needs to be done to help, we need first to consider such questions as “Why would I go do something that would take away work from a local Haitian?” Bringing in outside resources can hurt the For additional resources and local economies of the very more information on When people we intend to help.

Helping Hurts, go to WhenCorbett notes that all too HelpingHurts.org often in development we lead with outside resources before considering local resources.

This trivializes local contributions. In contrast, for example, it was local resources that allowed Nashvillians to revel in community spirit and empowerment as they helped each other after their flood. Donations from businesses inside the community felt less like charity and more like neighbors helping neighbors. Outsiders came to help clean and restore flood-damaged homes, but they largely supported locally initiated relief efforts.

Corbett describes the difference between relief—which is immediate, temporary, and about “stopping the bleeding”—and development, which is walking with people instead of doing for them. While acting out of well-intended compassion, the church often doesn’t acknowledge these distinctions.

Unfortunately, short-term mission Learn about trips can harm local communities and the partnering with churches in them, Corbett explains, nota church in Haiti ing that our manner of involvement should reflect the theology that describes through Adventures in Missions at the importance of the local church. We Adventures. need to be asking ourselves, “How are we org/Haiti/ increasing the testimony of the local churchtochurch.asp church—wherever we go to help?”

The way we help people in need is often affected by our understanding of poverty, which Corbett describes as a set of broken relationships, rather than a simple lack of material things. Alleviating poverty must be about healing broken relationships with God, self, others, and the rest of creation.

When poverty keeps people perpetually on the receiver side of the provider-receiver dynamic, the shame of poverty is continually reinforced, as is the mesRVCC is partnering with Pastor Pierre’s Gospel Christian Church of Haiti to help them fund the school they run, sage that the poor are not as good as the nonwhich has been meeting under tarps since the earthquake. poor. The providers feel good about themselves for helping while unintentionally reinforcing the receivers’ low sense of self-worth.

Because it is harder to measure and report statistics on the process of empowerment, results-oriented North Americans are often impatient with it and with the relationship-building it requires. Development work that honors and empowers is slow and takes a lot of background work. But as Jansen says, “When locals feel they can give and receive too, it creates a much healthier atmosphere and a safer place for the exchange, a place for the relationship to grow.” In any good relationship, both parties have something to give.

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Pastor Edouard Clerhomme of the Church of God Mission by Faith has developed a close relationship with Pastor Ed Noble of Journey Community Church.

Mutual exchange in action Following Haiti’s devastating earthquake in January 2010, the parishioners at River Valley Community Church (RVCC) in Waverly, Ohio, wanted to help Haiti. But their pastor, Mike Lawrie, asked the church to pray, seeking what they could do to help long-term instead of jumping in and doing something immediately. After three months of prayer, they learned that Journey Community Church in La Mesa, Calif., was partnering with a church in Haiti through the interdenominational mission organization Adventures in Missions’ (AIM), a church-to-church partnership program.

While members of Journey Church were in Haiti last May, they blogged about some of the pastors they were meeting. Members of the RVCC prayer group back in Ohio read the blog posts and began to wonder if partnering with a church in Haiti was what God had for them, too. One pastor in particular, Wilnord Pierre of Gospel Christian Church of Haiti, captured their hearts via Journey’s blog stories.

By the last week of August, after eight months of prayer, RVCC was officially partnered with Pierre and his church in Carrefour, a poor community southwest of downtown Port-au-Prince. Since then Lawrie and members of the RVCC prayer group have communicated regularly with Pierre through AIM staff and directly through Facebook, email, and phone calls. Pierre previously worked as a translator, so his English is exceptionally good, allowing him and Lawrie to talk by phone about once a week.

“The thing about Wilnord that’s really amazing is that the guy is always in a fantastic mood,” says Eli Ruggles, a RVCC prayer group member and AIM’s point of contact at

Pastor Clerhomme prays over a patient who just arrived at the church’s health clinic, which opened on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake. Dr. Martin Kabongo of UC San Diego (left) was part of the Journey team that came to celebrate the opening in January.

RVCC. “He calls overjoyed about the things happening in his community and his church. He sounds like somebody’s just poured a cup of blessing over him.”

As AIM missionaries arrived to help with relief efforts immediately after the earthquake, they noticed that the Haitian church is providing some of the only infrastructure in the country, outside of what’s offered by non-Haitian NGO aid organizations and governmental groups. The resulting vision for one-to-one church partnerships affirms the local leadership of Haitian pastors, recognizing that partnering with them is a key element in any long-term strategy for seeing Haiti flourish. So far nearly 40 US and Haitian congregations have entered one-to-one partnerships through AIM. More than 120 Haitian churches await an American partner.

AIM’s church-to-church partnerships follow a general “pray-give-go” model. RVCC and Gospel Christian Church have been praying for each other since the beginning of their partnership. RVCC has also helped Pierre’s church rent property needed to expand the school they run and has assisted with paying the school’s teachers, who had been working without pay for months following the earthquake. Ruggles said RVCC is planning to send a group to visit Gospel Christian Church during the first quarter of 2011. They hope that eventually they will also Learn more about be able to bring Pierre to Ohio to visit and River Valley Community Church (RVCC. preach at their church. net); read Pastor Asked why his Wilnord Pierre’s church chose to parblog (PastorWilnord. ticipate in the partnerblogspot.com); and ship, Pierre replied by check out Journey email, “Many people might think that the Community Church’s Haiti partnership answer for that quesblog (JourneyinHaiti. tion is financial. In my wordpress.com). church, financial is not our main reason to connect with a church, so

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the main reason we have chosen to participate in the church-to-church partnership is to have friends that can help our church to grow spiritually and socially, to pray with us, to join us in faith to get ready for the day of our Lord Jesus.”

Ruggles says the similarities between the two churches have helped deepen their connection. Both churches are smallish bodies of believers in their contexts (RVCC’s Sunday attendance is around 300, and Gospel Christian Church has about 60 regularly). RVCC’s congregation is composed of many people who work in various capacities in southern Ohio school systems—as principals, teachers, aids, and bus drivers—so the fact that Pierre’s church runs a school really appeals to RVCC members.

“For us as a church, the partnership puts us in a really good place because Wilnord’s church doesn’t really have anything to offer us other than prayer, but knowing they’re there praying for us and that they see us as partners and not someone to lean on is a really cool thing,” says Ruggles.

We want to know you Journey Church’s partnership with Pastor Edouard Clerhomme and his Church of God Mission by Faith church in Carrefour, Haiti, is currently one of the most developed partnerships. Since an initial meeting in May between Journey’s pastor, Ed Noble, and Clerhomme, teams from Journey have traveled to Haiti four times, with a fifth trip cancelled in December when airlines temporarily suspended flights to Haiti.

One of the primary focuses of the Journey-Mission by Faith partnership has been opening the health clinic Clerhomme’s church had been trusting God to provide. They had rented a clinic building for three years but had never managed to raise the additional funds to stock and staff it.

So when Journey asked Clerhomme what they could help his church with, the clinic was one of the first things he

Journey team member Josh Lawson with one of the families from Mission

by Faith Church.

mentioned. The grand opening was held on January 12, the one-year anniversary of the earthquake.

“We can’t change the whole country, but we’re committed to changing life in that one little area that has this vibrant church in it, and we can work with that church,” says Noble. “The Haitian church becomes the hero, not the outsiders coming in.”

Andy Blank, the Journey point person accompanying each team to Haiti, says, “Pastor Edouard and his church are a focal point of where people in that neighborhood can go for basic needs.” Journey helps supply Clerhomme with the rice and beans people in his neighborhood need, equipping Mission by Faith church for the community impact they were already positioned for.

Through a translator, Clerhomme said he has seen revival in his community since the earthquake and unity that wasn’t present before, as people help each other. “One of the things we have to offer Journey is that we can pray that God will keep blessing Journey Church in everything they do. Nothing can be done without prayer, and we want to pray for Journey Church as much as we can.”

During a visit to Haiti last October, the 10 team members from Journey split into pairs. Each of the five pairs visited a different Mission by Faith parishioner’s home. “Part of the point of church-to-church is to make it more personal and have a relationship,” Blank explains, quoting what one of the Haitian hosts told her Journey guests: “A lot of missionaries come down and provide, but this is the first time anyone’s tried to be our friend.”

Kami Rice (kamirice.com) is a Nashville-based freelance writer who has traveled abroad to cover stories across Africa and in India, London, and Haiti. She relishes the chance to connect with Christ’s body around the world.

Journey members went out in pairs to visit the homes of Pastor Clerhomme’s congregation. Developing lasting friendships is one of the main goals of the partnership.

36 PRISM Magazine

The Chalmers Center for Economic Development (Chalmers.org) at Covenant College helps churches to help the poor help themselves.

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38 PRISM Magazine

12/7/10

2:45 PM

Harold Dean Trulear

Speaking Up for Recovery As I write this, I am celebrating another anniversary in my recovery from alcohol addiction. Each day, month, year represents an opportunity to celebrate the grace of God in my deliverance from this dreaded addiction.

I had help—first from God, who surrounded me with a loving family, a supportive church, and a solid 12-step program.

Additionally, I participate in an ongoing therapeutic treatment program.

Millions of Americans suffer the immediate pains of addiction. And each of them represents countless others—families, friends, employers, and co-workers— who are impacted by addiction’s collateral costs. Yet the voice of Christians has been strangely muted when it comes to treatment needs and intervention, public policy surrounding addiction, and the behavior of insurance companies in their reticence to support requisite care.

Despite numerous medical studies, Christians still struggle to accept that addiction is a disease. Moral failure dominates the language surrounding substance abuse, and while those in recovery understand the need to take responsibility for their lives in their post-addiction days, most are also clear that their participation in addictive behaviors seemed involuntary. What we now know about the brain and chemical makeup of addicts ought to help Christians accept the medical reality of addiction as a disease and respond to those trapped in addiction as sick people who need to get well.

Many Christians believe that conversion covers the necessary conditions for deliverance from addiction. “You don’t need 12 steps, just one step—Jesus,” I once heard from the pulpit, a variation on a consistent theme that argues for a purely spiritual response to addiction. Yet such sentiments fail to understand that the 12-step movement in general, and Alcoholics Anonymous in particular, began within the Christian tradition. Before the AA textbook ever existed, members read from 1 Corinthians 13 and the book of James or devotional literature such as Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest. Close examination of the 12

F aithful Citizenship Christians still struggle to accept that addiction is a disease. steps themselves reveals their Christian roots, from admitting powerlessness over alcohol (sin) to taking inventory (confession of sin), and from making amends (restorative justice) to carrying the message (outreach).

Arguments against 12-step programs often include their low rate of success and the antagonism of some participants to organized religion. If the former argument were applied to churches, we’d have to shut down a number of congregations that “don’t work” either—after all, people do sin after conversion. And when the hostility-to-religion argument is more carefully researched, we find in the meeting rooms of AA and other recovery programs many Christians who found the God of the Bible made more real to them through the 12 steps. Others, including my sponsor, Chris, found Christ for the first time by journeying through the steps.

Chris talks about his reluctance to embrace Christianity during his early recovery: “I had the Old Man, I figured I didn’t need the Kid,” he testifies. But when practicing step nine—”Make direct amends to [people I have harmed], wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others”—he found himself wondering how he could make amends to “the Old Man.” Suddenly, Jesus made sense to him; he placed his faith in the atoning work of the cross.

Additionally, Christian ministries such as Celebrate Recovery insist on the recovery as a process inextricable from faith in Christ.

It’s fascinating that it took Pat Robertson to put public policy and addiction back in play as an issue for the church. His call to revisit sentencing guidelines for marijuana use sparked a much-needed, if short-lived, debate on our policies of criminalization and drug use, part of a larger conversation necessary to shape fair and equitable policy that works to get people help with—rather than mere punishment for—their addictions. We need legislation that supports appropriations for wider substance abuse treatment both inside and outside jail/ prison walls, where such treatment should be readily available. This would include ap-

propriations for jails/prisons with dedicated programs and actual “recovery jails” such as the STOP (Secure Transitional Offenders Program) program in Montgomery County, Ohio. We also need a greater presence of volunteers with specific supports for addiction recovery.

Finally, the 2008 passage of the Wellstone/Domenici Parity Act—designed to get insurance companies to provide support for substance abuse treatment along with other basic coverages in their health plans— should pair with 2010’s healthcare reform bill to provide greater access to recovery. The jury is still out on whether insurance companies have gotten the message about their need to invest in treatment. It has been so difficult for many treatment centers to collect from insurance companies that many of the “elite” centers now require cash up front, with clients having to be reimbursed by carriers. How many people can afford such an arrangement? No wonder the centers with the highest success rates have the lowest numbers of black, brown, and poor people in their clientele.

Congregations can do more—they can create a welcoming climate for those in need of recovery. They can partner with 12-step groups to provide childcare for those who attend meetings in their basements. They can become educated about the disease of addiction and the pain experienced by family members. They can look seriously at public policies and the compliance of jails/prisons, insurance companies, and others whose way of doing business often negatively affects individuals’ chances at substance-free living.

“God as I understand him” requires that we provide for those suffering from addiction. I praise God that, through many channels, he has done just that for me.

Harold Dean Trulear is associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, DC, and director of the Healing Communities Prisoner Reentry Initiative at the Philadelphia Leadership Foundation (HealingCommunitiesUSA.org).

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W ashington Watch Corporate Political Giving In 2010, the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United v. FEC (referred to hereafter as CU).

The court held that, for the first time in a century, corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on independent expenditures. This decision will have an enormous effect on the money spent in US elections.

To get a sense of the enormity of the CU decision, one must first look at the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Austin v.

Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which was directly overturned by CU. In Austin, the court upheld a state law banning corporations from making independent expenditures from general treasury funds. The court found that even though the state laws burdened corporate speech, they were justified by a compelling state interest in preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption. According to the court, the laws were necessary because corporate treasury funds could be unfairly used to influence election outcomes, even though corporate funds are often amassed with the aid of state laws that have little to do with the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.

Subsequently, in 2002, Congress passed the McCain-Feingold Bill, which was officially called the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA). The law made it illegal for both for-profit and not-for-profit corporations to expressly advocate for the election or defeat of political candidates if the communication was paid for from the corporation’s general treasury.

Corporations were permitted to set up separate segregated funds (SSF) to finance communications, but BCRA restricted the amount of contributions that SSFs could collect.

In 2009, Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, created a documentary entitled Hillary: The Movie, which was critical of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The documentary had previously been distributed to movie theaters and through DVD, but Citizens United wanted to further distribute it to cable television subscribers through video on demand. The group planned to pay cable companies to provide

40 PRISM Magazine

access to the documentary, but BCRA’s restrictions against corporate independent expenditures prevented them from doing so. As a result, Citizens United sued the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the agency in charge of enforcing US campaign finance laws, to overturn BCRA’s ban on corporate independent expenditures.

From the start, the CU case was different from most other Supreme Court cases. The court heard oral arguments in March 2009, and most court watchers assumed a decision would be quickly issued.

However, in June 2009, in a rare move, the court ordered a rehearing before its fall 2009 term was to begin. The court also asked the parties to submit supplemental briefs on whether Austin should be overturned, an issue that had not been included in the litigants’ original briefs.

In January 2010, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in CU. The court held it unconstitutional for Congress to forbid corporations from spending money from general treasury funds on independent expenditures. While corporations are still not permitted to directly contribute money to federal candidates, the decision allows corporations to run advertisements supporting or opposing any federal candidate as long as the ad is not coordinated with the candidate’s campaign.

Because the CU decision was issued during the 2010 midterm election year, its effects were felt immediately. Reports indicate that outside spending (i.e., non-party and non-candidate spending) during the 2010 midterm elections surpassed all outside spending in 2008, a presidential election year that traditionally has much higher levels of outside spending. Further, outside spending during 2010 was four times higher than the 2006 midterms, and for the first time outside groups spent more than the Democratic or Republican parties.

While outside spending rose to record heights, many corporations were hesitant to enter the political arena for fear of unwanted publicity resulting from political donations. The perils of corporate giving were apparent when, in 2010, Target Corp. donated $150,000 to a business group that was supporting a Minnesota gubernatorial candidate. The candidate had previously supported a state amendment banning

Joshua B.Smith gay marriage and had proposed that sex offenders be chemically castrated. When Target’s contributions were revealed, the company’s employees and other activists responded with a boycott, and Target was forced to issue a public apology.

Corporations have some ability to shield themselves from the negative press inherent in making direct expenditures.

Corporations can contribute to political action committees that make expenditures, though these contributions must be reported to the FEC. Corporations can also contribute to so-called 501(c)(4) groups, organizations that are formed under the Internal Revenue Code. These groups are permitted to engage in political activity as long as this activity is not the organization’s primary purpose, but the groups do not have to reveal their donors.

For example, Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)(4) group formed by former presidential advisor Karl Rove, reportedly raised $43.2 million from contributors who do not have to be disclosed. Moreover, donations to 501(c)(4) groups spiked during 2010; according to a report by Public Citizen, a nonprofit watchdog group, only 53 percent of outside groups provided any information about the sources of their funding. The report also found that groups that made political expenditures but disclosed nothing spent roughly $135.6 million, 52 percent of the entire amount spent by outside groups during the 2010 election cycle.

As the 2012 presidential election approaches, corporate political giving is in a state of flux. While some corporations will continue to refrain from political spending, many others will contribute to political action committees and 501(c)(4) groups.

Regardless of the mode of corporate giving, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision will affect all Americans through substantial increases in election spending.

If you think you were inundated with television ads in 2010, just wait until 2012!

Joshua B. Smith is a political law attorney in Washington, DC. He enjoys traveling and sampling international cuisine with his wife and daughter.

A rt & Soul

Jo Kadlecek

Witness to Eternity In the last days of 1999, my husband and I traveled to Sydney, Australia, where, as elsewhere around the world, people were bracing for the chaos they feared the new millennium would bring.

One late afternoon, the sun setting, we walked from the Opera House as a series of lights switched on across the Sydney Harbor Bridge. With each light, it was as if an enormous hand was writing out a single word: “ETERNITY.” There was no mistaking the letters that had been shaped across the world’s largest steel arch bridge in Australia’s largest city. Nearly 160,000 vehicles cross the bridge daily, connecting commuters and tourists to the suburbs and beaches. The bridge is both the center and the symbol of Sydney, and as 1999 ended, city officials chose to display “eternity” across it.

Why “eternity”? Why not “Happy New Year” or, given Y2K fears, “Good Luck”? When the entire world would be watching the televised events from Sydney first because of its time zone, why had Aussie organizers chosen “eternity” to define their celebration?

My husband, who had once lived there, knew the answer. He told me that from the 1930s to the ’60s, a strange piece of graffiti, written in white or yellow chalk and always in the same perfect copperplate script, appeared on sidewalks throughout the city—the word “eternity.”

For years no one caught the messenger chalk-handed, but around every corner “eternity” greeted them. Hurrying to work, meandering home, people literally stepped on the word. Speculation fueled the urban legend until, some 25 years after the word first appeared on a sidewalk, the reverend of a small Baptist church walked early one morning towards his parish. He saw a slight, gray-haired man bending over, chalk in hand, and recognized him as his church’s janitor.

“Why, Arthur,” said the minister, “are you Mr. Eternity?”

Startled, the man looked up and answered, “Guilty, your honor.”

The newspaper sent a reporter out to cover the story, and Arthur Stace kept

writing his word. He’d rise early, before the crowds; he’d pray and go where he believed God directed him, writing “eternity” every hundred yards or so on the pavement. He saw his mission as evangelistic but never wanted publicity. In fact, he feared it.

In 1967—two years before Stace died at age 83—another reporter learned more of his story. Stace had grown up in cruel poverty, landed in jail as a teenager, and shipped off to France as a soldier during World War I. He returned to Sydney alcoholic, partially blind, and jobless.

Hungry and hopeless, he went to a Baptist church he’d heard was serving meals.

There, he heard a preacher talk about eternity. That single word—“eternity”— rang in his head. He broke down and sobbed. His life changed radically. He’d barely been able to write his own name and “couldn’t have spelled ‘eternity’ for a hundred quid,” he told the reporter, yet, he’d encountered the Person of Eternity and so spent the next 30 years writing the word at least 50 times a day. “I think ‘eternity’ gets the message across,” he said, “makes people stop and think.”

That it did, so much so that his word, and his story, stayed in the minds of local Aussies; a statue was erected in Stace’s honor, a documentary film made of his life, numerous poems written about his chalk ministry, and the National Museum of Australia named one of its galleries the Eternity Gallery.

Producers of Sydney’s 2000 New Year’s celebration wanted to honor his legacy, impressed that Arthur had “reinvented” himself by bringing meaning into people’s lives. Not only did the word symbolize a local story, but organizers also called it the ideal message for the New Year: “This celebration should be eternal in human life.”

We took a photograph of the Sydney Harbor Bridge that night, and today it hangs in our living room, where it reminds me of a broken man’s faithfulness and love for the Risen Jesus, literally written across the city where he lived.

When I think of Arthur Stace chalking his eternity “sermon,” I imagine him experiencing a mix of joy and fear—joy in his task, fear of being caught, yet

compelled to continue. According to the gospel of Matthew, the first witnesses at Christ’s empty tomb felt a similar mix of emotions: “...the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples” (28:8). Afterwards, the desperate men and women who had followed a young rabbi named Jesus, now slain, kept out of the public eye, gathering secretly behind closed doors, hoping no one would catch them as they grieved his death. They were guilty by association. If local authorities had murdered Jesus, what violence might await his followers?

So they hid. The last thing they expected was a message of hope, and certainly not from the most unlikely witnesses in Jerusalem—women, secondclass citizens who weren’t allowed to testify in court. No wonder the women were “afraid yet filled with joy”—they’d encountered an entirely new reality in the midst of tragic uncertainty.

Why did the Resurrected Jesus visit a handful of desperate women 2,000 years ago in a cemetery? To show them his eternal reality. To send them off with a new identity and purpose. To give them hope. He then did the same for his disciples, who in turn led the early church, who then told others throughout the world until the news eventually reached a far-off land called Australia.

Many, many years later, a hopeless drunk sitting in a church was given a new chance and a new mission because he met the Resurrected God-Man. And that made a difference for all eternity.

y t i n r e t E This essay was adapted from chapter two in A Desperate Faith: Lessons of Hope from the Resurrection (Baker Books, 2010).

Jo Kadlecek is the author of 10 books and a member of the communication arts faculty at Gordon College.

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O ff the Shelf

Book Reviews

Exodus from Hunger

by David Beckman Westminster John Knox Press

The Spirit of Food Edited by Leslie Leyland Fields Wipf & Stock Publishers

Reviewed by Christine Jeske

Reviewed by Stephanie S. Smith

David Beckman opens his book on world poverty not with a tear-jerking story about orphans scraping out survival in a dump nor with a mind-boggling assessment of how to reshape global trade. Instead he opens with a simple story of how US government policies are changing lives in remote Mtimbe, Mozambique. Exodus from Hunger: We Are Called to Change the Politics of Hunger presents an optimistic picture of how government policies have affected—and can continue to affect—the world for the better and how we can be involved. Beckman sincerely expects to see the number of hungry people in the world drop dramatically in his lifetime.

It’s so optimistic it’s almost unnerving. And yet it is believable. Beckman sees the enormity of the task before us, but he has also seen with his own eyes evidence that justifies his confidence. Beckman knows personally a whole train of people—from obscure Alabama moms to international rock stars, presidents, and billionaires—whose single-hearted efforts have profoundly improved the lives of millions of people in poverty both in the US and around the world. He writes with a humble, wisdom-seeking, and non-partisan stance, giving credit to a wide range of political figures rather than harping on what more could have been done. He draws on years of experience with the World Bank, working among people experiencing poverty in the US and abroad, and most recently as president for the Christian advocacy agency Bread for the World.

If we are concerned about justice in the world, every one of us can look at our own lives and find some strings to pull, starting right in our own neighborhoods. When we look at justice from a global picture, though, we see that many of the biggest strings, the real ropes that swing lives in and out of poverty en masse, are pulled in relatively small circles of government and international organizations.

Many of us look at those big ropes and throw up hands in defeat.

How could we possibly keep up with legislative decisions that affect people in poverty, much less influence those decisions?

But that’s what Bread for the World does, and it does it for us.

Bread works in Washington and around the world influencing major decisions on farm bills, heavily indebted poor countries, US nutritional programs, and more. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a part to play. Beckman insists that people who care about hunger and poverty will need to push ferociously for change. The book offers concrete steps, such as how to communicate with legislators, join networks, and influence our church and community.

As Beckman writes, “Some people end up doing very little for people in need because they know they don’t have the commitment of a Mother Theresa. Awareness of God’s forgiveness allows us to reflect God’s goodness in our own halting ways, and God uses even modest acts of faith and compassion to make big changes in the world. God invites us all—gently, patiently—to be part of the great exodus of our time.”

Christine Jeske wrote Into the Mud: Inspiration for Everyday Activists (Moody, 2009). She teaches economic development for Eastern University.

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The wedding party was dressed to the nines, and the photographer was telling us to wade into a swampy soybean field. Unfamiliar with protocol for North Dakota prairie weddings, we obeyed. The bridesmaids hoisted the sheer layer of our gowns above our heads as makeshift mosquito nets and forged through the waist-tall stalks. As the photographer posed the happy couple against the setting sun, I noticed a figure moving along the tree line. Here was the proverbial farmer and shotgun— minus the shotgun—walking deliberately toward us. He informed us not only that we were damaging expensive crops but also that agricultural trespassing is a major offense. His final comment convicted me the most: “This is sacred ground.”

This is the same kind of sacramental—and surprising—language that is threaded throughout The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting toward God. The contributors commonly find holy ground in the kitchen, pasture, or garden, and Anne Voskamp suggests that “the priest in the sacraments” and “the farmer in the soil” are the two vocations to whom God reveals his face. This creative compilation of essays focuses on the relationship between physicality and spirituality, life sprung from the earth and life cultivated in the soul. These writers bring diverse stories to the table, from organic beekeeping to church potlucks, from mobile relief kitchens to kosher cuisine. And all of them, from the gourmet chef to the backyard tomato gardener, write in the hushed, reverential tones of a priest about to enter the inner court.

Contributors such as Luci Shaw, Wendell Berry, and Suzanne Wolf know that they are not just rubbing a chicken with oil—they are baptizing it. Robert Farrar Capon is not fooled by the common onion—he knows it is a physical representation of the glory to come. Lauren Winner sees the calendar of the Farmer’s Almanac as a liturgical cycle, teaching us the significance of appointed times, both seasonal and spiritual.

The Spirit of Food is true to its title, eloquently integrating a theology of body and spirit and likewise dismantling the dualism that has sneaked into our evangelical tradition. The church has long taught that flesh and spirit are tiered in virtue, that our bodies are mere “earth-suits” that will be purged once we enter our heavenly state, yet the adverse side-effect of this perspective is often neglect of the physical life. According to Leslie Leyland Fields, however, paying attention to what goes into our bodies becomes a spiritual act as we learn to feed ourselves in both body and soul.

To anyone who has struggled to reconcile the flesh with the spirit, The Spirit of Food is a jubilant reawakening of the senses, inviting us as Christ did to taste and see, to take and eat, and to meet God at his table.

Stephanie S. Smith is a freelance book publicist and writer through (In) dialogue Communications (StephanieSSmith.com). She serves as editorial assistant for Relief Journal: A Christian Literary Expression.

Generous Justice

by Timothy Keller Dutton Reviewed by Tim Høiland If you have experienced the grace of God, Tim Keller argues convincingly in his latest book, Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just, it is inevitable that your life will be marked by a passion for doing justice among the poor and marginalized.

Keller, who for more than two decades has pastored Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, is well known for his bestselling work of apologetics, The Reason for God, and for his leadership of Redeemer City to City, an organization supporting church planters in New York City and elsewhere.

While Keller is a preacher and has devoted much of his vocational energy to evangelism and church planting, he considers justice an equally essential calling of the church. “The biblical idea of justice,” Keller writes, “is part and parcel of what God is doing in history. God is reconciling humanity to himself—and as a result of this great transaction, he is reconciling all things to himself.”

This argument is rooted in Keller’s well-articulated theology of shalom, which he defines as “complete reconciliation, a state of the fullest flourishing in every dimension—physical, emotional, social, and spiritual—because all relationships are right, perfect, and filled with joy.” He describes shalom as a tapestry in which thousands upon thousands of interwoven threads are perfectly arranged. Doing justice, then, is an essential part of how Christians begin to reweave that shalom in the world as a grateful response to the grace we have freely received from God. It is no secret that the theme of social justice has enjoyed a renaissance among evangelicals in recent years, but it is clear that Generous Justice isn’t a vain attempt by Keller to jump on an already loud and well-crowded bandwagon. Keller points to the genesis of his justice thinking by describing his experience as a conflicted college student 40 years ago, seeing that while his secular friends were active in the civil rights movement, the Christians he knew viewed Martin Luther King, Jr. with suspicion and fear. Through involvement with a small group of Christians intent on exploring the relationship between justice and the Christian faith, however, Keller came to see that the Bible provided the very basis for social justice in general and the civil rights movement in particular.

While pursuing a doctoral degree at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Keller studied the office of deacons and how it had evolved over the years. “Deacons,” Keller discovered, “had historically been designated to work with the poor and needy in the community, but over the years this legacy had been lost, and instead they had evolved into janitors and treasurers.” Shortly after completing these studies, Keller was asked by his denomination to start a church in metro New York, providing him an opportunity to test this newfound understanding in a context where injustice and need were in no short supply.

While Keller celebrates the trend of increased concern for the poor and oppressed, especially among young Christians, he notes that all too often it coexists paradoxically with an unquestioned consumerism that “undermines self-denial and delayed gratification.” This is why Keller so passionately points to our need for the gospel: It is the beauty of Christ—

not statistics, not guilt, not even flashy do-gooder social media campaigns—that will compel us joyfully and consistently toward justice and the denial of self for the greater good.

For churches, small groups, and individuals in search of a deeper, more generous, more theologically integrated practice of justice, this is a book long overdue.

Tim Høiland is an independent writer and international development professional. He blogs about the intersections of faith, justice, and peace in the Americas at TJHoiland.com.

Common Prayer

by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro Zondervan Reviewed by Amanda Kaminski “Some liturgical types smile when evangelicals discover the ‘miracle’ of liturgy,” write Wilson-Hartgrove, Claiborne, and Okoro in their new book, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. Christ followers possess varying levels of familiarity with the liturgical life, and this book purposes to serve people from all walks of the faith—from high church to no church. Common Prayer offers a compilation of morning, midday, and evening liturgies for families, communities, coworkers, dorm mates, and individuals. The liturgies are designed to be prayed in community but allow those outside of physical communion to know that their prayers are part of a canticle of praise being offered to God from around the world.

This guidebook leads disciples into a rhythm of daily prayer situated within weekly cycles that make up the larger annual series of biblical seasons: from Advent through Christmas, to Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost, and with “Ordinary Time” in between.

Intentional prayer, responsive reading, Scripture meditation, and song are the “heartbeat for the global church,” and the authors invite us to recenter the Christian life around God’s story, over and against schedules and lives dictated by pop culture, busyness, or even national calendars.

Participating in these timeless petitions, songs, and observances, the church finds herself swept up in the dance of God’s history and involved in God’s ongoing work. Liturgy interrupts our life and focuses us by reshaping “our perceptions and lives with new rhythms, new holy days, a whole new story.” These disciplined gatherings and exercises join us together with the saints, the persecuted church, and the global body.

The authors frame the liturgies with beautiful art, functional tips, reflections, and action ideas to stir the imaginations of participants and inspire faith in deed. Many of the morning prayers offer a glimpse of church history through quotes or vignettes. Each month also proposes a list of further readings, inviting readers to dive deeper and discover practical applications. An additional section offers special prayers for events—such as planting or harvest, healing, commissioning or dedication of the home or workplace—where through intentional liturgical ritual believers can invoke divine blessing or express gratitude for and grow in awareness of God’s active presence in the world. Want even more? A comprehensive database is available at CommonPrayer.net.

From Australia to Brazil, from India to Sierra Leone, and in 37 US

43

Book Reviews states so far, Christians have hosted about 150 gatherings of ordinary radicals to celebrate the launch of the book through candlelit services and multilingual worship, demonstrating the timely publication of this muchneeded guide into “life with common prayer at its center.”

Amanda Kaminski earned her M.Div. from Palmer Seminary and her masters in international economic development from the Campolo College of Graduate Studies, both at Eastern University.

The New Jim Crow

by Michelle Alexander New Press Reviewed by Samuel K. Atchison During my youth in the 1970s, it was common among some African Americans to refer knowingly to what was then termed the “master plan.” While the phrase was never clearly defined for the uninitiated, the context within which it was used suggested that “the white man” had a grand scheme to continually subvert, oppress, and ultimately destroy the black race. A typical expression of this mindset can be seen in the 1974 film Three the Hard Way, in which white supremacists release into the nation’s water supply a toxin that is deadly to blacks but has no effect on whites. Notwithstanding the chuckles such apparent silliness engenders, as attorney and scholar Michelle Alexander observes, “[T]he word on the street turned out to be right, at least to a point.”

44 PRISM Magazine

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander suggests, for example, that the CIA’s admission that it effectively permitted Nicaraguan rebels to smuggle drugs into the US during the Reagan years and distribute them in inner-city neighborhoods lends credence to urban conspiracy theorists who see a Nazi-like “final solution” in such actions. “Conspiracy theorists,” Alexander writes, “must surely be forgiven for their bold accusation of genocide, in light of the devastation wrought by crack cocaine and the drug war, and the odd coincidence that an illegal drug crisis suddenly appeared in the black community after—not before—a drug war had been declared.”

Thus does Alexander lay the foundation for her central thesis vis-àvis the nation’s criminal justice system: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

In point of fact, The New Jim Crow is but the latest in a series of books and papers attempting to grapple with the conundrum that is mass incarceration. In the main, these studies review the same basic research, cite many of the same sources, and reach the same broad conclusions: To wit, mass incarceration dehumanizes those labeled as felons (and, by extension, their families) by denying them basic citizenship rights such as the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and access to employment, public assistance, subsidized housing, and the like.

Moreover, though some come close, such studies tend to frame their conclusions in terms that fall short of accusing Uncle Sam of having a “master plan.” In other words, however harmful they deem the nation’s crime policies to be, the authors’ focus is chiefly on the policies’ effect, not on malicious intent.

Alexander, however, is different. In summarizing the impact of her experiences as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union on her

view of the criminal justice system, she writes, “Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.”

The leap from recognizing mass incarceration’s effect to alleging its intent is legally significant and, as a civil rights attorney, Alexander is well aware of its implications.

For more than a generation, the US Supreme Court has held that with respect to Fifth Amendment (due process) and employment discrimination claims, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff to establish that the actions of the defendant—in this case, the nation’s criminal justice system—were discriminatory in both effect and intent. Thus, Alexander’s statement that “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” is as provocative as it is damning.

The question is, does she prove her point?

To be sure, she makes a compelling argument. Alexander is particularly effective when recounting the pattern by which the subjugation of African Americans—through chattel slavery, the Jim Crow laws of the post-Reconstruction period, and, more recently, the so-called War on Crime—has, since the nation’s founding, served the political and economic needs of the power elite.

She maintains that the passage of civil rights legislation and the subsequent evolution of political correctness have rendered race-specific expressions of discrimination both illegal and culturally unpopular. Such expressions, she argues, have been replaced by (1) race-neutral language that achieves the same discriminatory ends; and (2) a series of court decisions designed to limit the impact of the legislation.

Such perniciousness, I fear, may likewise limit the impact of Alexander’s book. To be sure, her stated goal for writing it—“to stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United States”—has already been achieved.

Yet, in reading it, I was reminded of a statement from Justice Lewis F. Powell in the Supreme Court’s 1987 decision in McClesky v.

Kemp, a case which Alexander also cites. Writing for the majority, Powell determined that the overwhelming racial disparity of blacks versus whites on Georgia’s death row did not reflect unequal treatment under the law and was thus not unconstitutional. As Alexander notes, the effect of the decision was to render irrelevant clear statistical evidence of discrimination in application of the death penalty.

Broadly applied, the court’s don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts reasoning suggests that no matter how convincing her evidence—and it is persuasive—Alexander’s argument might ultimately be rejected. Thus, Powell’s conclusion in McClesky could also be applied to Alexander’s book: that her “claim, taken to its logical conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.”

Indeed it does.

Samuel K. Atchison has served as a welfare policy analyst, social services administrator, social policy consultant, and prison chaplain. He is the president of the Trenton Ecumenical Area Ministry and a community partnership manager with the Amachi Mentoring Coalition Project (AMCP), a program of the Philadelphia Leadership Foundation that provides mentoring to children impacted by incarceration.

The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor

by Mark Labberton InterVarsity Press Reviewed by Sam Van Eman Getting uninvolved citizens to recognize and respond to injustice in the world is like getting my trash collector to put the lid back on the can. Mark Labberton is asking nonetheless. In The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor: Seeing Others Through the Eyes of Jesus, this West Coast pastor-professor calls readers to perceive (“see and assess one another”), name (“frame and position one another”), and act (“engage one another”) in kingdom of God ways. All three are necessary for us to grow in love, and twice while reading I actually set the book on my lap and cried out to God for human justice. Yet with his pastoral experience, global travel, and work with the International Justice Mission, I believe Labberton could have elicited this response many more times, and I wish he had.

I was tempted to do more revising of this book than reviewing.

Frustrated with yet another cumbersome paragraph, I finally remembered what an editor once told me regarding pastors: They write the way they preach—they love lists of three and have trouble avoiding the cadence that makes them effective in the pulpit but awkward in print. So I read the paragraph again, this time out loud with my best preaching voice. Lo and behold, it worked. I even imagined enjoying the sermon.

But I had trouble elsewhere, too. I wanted more from many of his stories and less from what I read between them. Openers such as, “I remember a crossroads in my own self-perception” pricked my anticipation but left me dissatisfied when no details followed. Conversely, the first chapter would have been great at a quarter of its length.

Labberton’s introduction about the developing understanding that his street address was really part of a large and complex planet—and that he had, before this realization, been quite unable to see others in a just manner—was insightful, but it was one nutritious grain amidst too much chaff.

I’m being tough on Labberton because the library is packed with calls to love our neighbor. Adding another volume requires something extra special. I will give him this: While the section on perceiving felt too familiar, the section on naming was worth the price of the book.

Implications of this biblical concept had me referring to it the very next day. From naming animals to naming our children to naming those we disregard like trash can lids, names have a power that we underestimate and it is clear that God wants us to use this power well.

Small groups and patient readers may benefit from the reflection questions. The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor has potential as an education tool or possibly as a reminder for the lackadaisical among us.

Sam Van Eman is a staff specialist for the Coalition for Christian Outreach. He wrote On Earth As It Is in Advertising? Moving from Commercial Hype to Gospel Hope (Wipf & Stock, 2010) and serves as culture editor for TheHighCalling.org.

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M usic Notes Songcraft: Savoring Life by the Slice If you’re reading this article, chances are you have an interest in music. Maybe you like Bach or Beck, George Gershwin or George Thorogood, John Lennon or John Legend or even John Tesh? (Don’t laugh. I didn’t see you playing the piano at Red Rocks.) When a song comes on that you love, you might say things out loud, like “Here we go!” or “Are you kidding me?” Whatever your tastes, it’s difficult to be indifferent to music. Songs are the closest things we have to time machines; they’re able to take us back to a moment so clearly that we can often picture the scene down to the last detail. Everyone enjoys a good song, and a few of us are crazy enough to try to write one. I am still a happy amateur, but my hours leaning over the piano and guitar have led me to think about the craft in a deeper way.

Endless articles, books, and seminars dissect the art of songwriting: how to do it, pitfalls to avoid, the best songwriters of you-name-the-era and their methods. To most people, writing a song seems about as realistic as going to Saturn. But if you’ve ever tried it, it’s likely you’ve found yourself waking up in the middle of the night with words that must be put to music if you are ever to fall back to sleep. Being a songwriter can both thrill you and torture you on the same day.

My college writing professor described a story as a slice of life. I liked the sound of that. A slice is just enough— we can savor it, but we don’t expect it to sustain us. It’s a piece of something bigger, something that’s easy to share with others. While it takes time and skill to create, you’re not thinking about that when you take the first bite—you’re thinking about how good it is.

Some songs are stories put to music: Country, blues, and folk music were all born out of storytelling. Others are stories that couldn’t exist apart from

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Levi Gangi their music. The magic of an excellent song is how the music captures your attention before you’ve even heard the lyrics. Then it surrounds and lifts the lyrics into an emotional possession that feels as if it belongs to only you. There’s a truth in it that you recognize. How do you feel at the first riffs of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion”? I feel like driving fast. The symphonic intro to Etta James’ timeless rendition of “At Last”? I

want to fall in love. Norah Jones’ upbeat “Come Away With Me” can lull you to sleep, while Johnny Cash’s gloomy “Ring of Fire” gets your foot tapping.

When I first began to write songs, I knew it was going to be a rough road with lots of trial and error. I had ideas, but should I begin with lyrics or melody? Think of any timeless song: Reading the lyrics immediately triggers the melody in your head, and hearing the melody immediately brings the lyrics to mind. If I read you the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner,” your mind would quickly transform my monotone into the melody you’ve heard for years. A good song is not a sum of its parts.

In my first songwriting ventures, I wrote the music first and then added the lyrics. I came up with some good melodies but never felt able to say what I really wanted to express. Instead I ended up fitting words into a preformed musical grid rather than allowing the melody to emerge out of the experience I ended up singing about. I was unwilling

to sacrifice certain musical gimmicks to make room for an authentic lyric. The result was music that was out of step with my emotional life.

Now lyrics come to me with a melody attached. It’s not magic. It’s like anything else—when you put the work in, eventually it starts to give back to you. Usually it starts with a single line: “As you turn toward the light / you watch the shadows get longer ’til they’re reaching out of sight.” That one came to me while on a hike in Virginia one day, and I sang it all the way back to the car. I wanted to be hopeful amidst the daily tragedy I was going through, but I wanted to speak of both. The image of light and shadow said just what I wanted to say, and I immediately knew how to sing it.

With one true line to begin with, something you feel you can sing with abandon, the rest of the song is just waiting to be found.

You may not ever write a song, but you know what rings true for you. Some songs hand you an image you recognize from your own experience. They dance around truth, offering it to you from different perspectives, casting light on it from unique angles. They have highs and lows, depth and conflict, just as we do. They enter your heart and help you feel something that doesn’t need to be explained or analyzed. They reveal a movement and a rhythm that match the shape of your life, or maybe just this one moment in time.

Next time you hear a song you love, imagine the songwriter serving you a slice of something exquisite— sweet or tangy, spicy or rich—prepared just for you. Then savor it. It will be just enough.

Levi Gangi (pictured above) is a seminary student, musician, and US Army Reservist in Rochester, N.Y. His band, The Lonely Ones, recently released an album called Desire & the Aftermath. Find him at ReverbNation.com/ LeviGangi.

Malia Rodriguez

“Woman, Be Free!” *

M aking a Difference

eventually grew to 40 women, Session came to understand that the women thought of “The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, be- the Wednesday meetings as their church. cause he anointed me to preach the gospel Many of these women, having left the sex to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim industry in search of dignity and purpose in release to the captives and recovery of Christ, didn’t feel comfortable in the trasight to the blind, to set free those who are ditional church. So in 2006, Rev. Session planted New Life Christian Church to give oppressed...“(Luke 4:18-19).

Rev. Irie Session understands Jesus’ these 40 women a proper church home.

New Life held its Sunday services in the mission and every day shares his liberating grace with women on the margins of society. chapel at the Rosemont Christian Center, a After investing in countless lives as a multicultural church in Dallas, and after three senior parole officer for the Texas Depart- years Rosemont hired Session as the pasment of Criminal Justice, as an investigator tor for its Sunday morning English service. for Child Protective Services, and as a social With open arms the members of Rosemont worker at Bryan’s House, an organization in Christian Center embraced the women of Dallas that cares for kids and families im- New Life Christian Church, incorporating pacted by HIV/AIDS, Session sensed the them into the larger body. For the first time many of these women felt at home in a traditional congregation.

In addition to her preaching responsibilities, Session mentors seven women through New Friends New Life. She has also initiated a women’s c o n f erence Rev. Irie Session (front row, second from left) facilitates a weekly Bible study for women reaching out to who have found their way out of the sex trade and into the arms of the church. women leaving call to full-time ministry. Walking by faith the sex industry, which Rosemont Christian alone, she quit her job and enrolled in semi- Center hosts in April.

“Church people need to understand nary at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth.

In her second semester she started that most women who've lived lives of prosapplying for jobs. When a position at New titution were themselves abused as children,” Friends New Life, a ministry to women says Session. “In fact, statistics point out leaving the sex industry, opened up, she ac- that over 90 percent of women in prostitucepted it reluctantly, sensing the sacrifice it tion were sexually abused. Not only that, would demand of her. But she soon learned but many were runaways because of sexual that God would supply the grace and love and physical abuse in their homes. But they ran away only to run into the arms of trafthese precious women needed.

At New Friends New Life, Session dis- fickers, also known as pimps. Much of socicovered her God-ordained calling—to love, ety is under the false impression that women mentor, and help women who had aban- choose a life of prostitution. However, what doned lives of prostitution, trafficking, and they don’t realize is that, in most cases, prostitution is a survival strategy for women substance abuse.

Launching a weekly Bible study that with little or no education, family support,

or job skills, women whose self-worth is at rock bottom.”

One of Session’s protégés is Gwen, a loving mother of three who has experienced the transforming power of God’s grace through the love of the church. Negative experiences with men made it hard for Gwen to understand the God we refer to as “he.”

But through the pastoral care and biblical teaching of the church, Gwen is learning to trust God, love others, and to live as a woman of God, precious in his sight. She has served as the director of hospitality for New Friends Christian Church, started a Bible study at work, and teaches her children to trust God. When Session finishes her Doctor of Ministry at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, N.Y., she hopes to pass on her passion and calling to college and seminary students.

“Serving this special population of women has taught me that God does not count anyone out!” enthuses Session. “In fact, the marginalized are God’s target group. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners; he fellowshipped with prostitutes, women accused of adultery, and lepers—those considered the ‘untouchables’ of his day. The church has a responsibility to do the same. We must ask ourselves, ‘Who are the untouchables in our day?’ Once we've answered that question as a church, we can get down to the business of being the heart, hands, and feet of Christ.” Under Session’s leadership, Rosemont Christian Center (MyRosemont. org) has become a poignant embodiment of Christ’s passion for outcast women. *Luke 13:12

Malia Rodriguez is a recent graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and a freelance writer.

She lives with her husband in Dallas, Tex.

Making a Difference is a regular column that features churches with unique, cutting-edge, and/or highly effective approaches to holistic ministry. To nominate a church for this column, email the editor at Kristyn@esa-online.org.

47

R on Sider

Finishing Well Pete Hammond was a friend with a special word of wise counsel. We did not see each other often, and he went to be with the Lord about a year ago, but several times when we were together, Pete said to me, “Finish well, Ron.” Coming from Pete, it was an exhortation that I took seriously. He was a friend of many evangelical leaders.

For decades, he was a top executive with InterVarsity. He was a board member of Christianity Today. And he spearheaded several innovative, influential projects that helped Christians take Christ into the workplace. So when Pete Hammond urged me to finish well, I listened.

We both knew so many Christian leaders—often after decades of fruitful ministry—who fell into blatant sin, disgraced their families, devastated their ministries, and grieved their Lord.

It is so easy to fall into the devil’s trap. After years of very successful ministry, leaders sometimes come to feel that the normal rules do not apply to them. Under intense pressure, they rationalize disobedience. They betray spouse, family, congregation—all the people who trusted them. And the scandals undermine the gospel. Many turn away in disgust and scorn.

We all need someone to ask us, “Are you finishing well? Are you on track to finish the course and keep

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faith with Christ and his people?”

Nor is it just those who are in their 50s, 60s, or 70s who need to ponder this question. My worst time of struggle and temptation came before I was 40. The devil’s temptation to adultery was strongest just a couple years after my Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger came out. Thank God, I knew my Lord hated adultery. God’s holy commands protected me from destroying my family and a lifetime of ministry, almost before it got started. We need friends to ask us whether we are remaining faithful on the journey in every period of our life.

But at my age, the counsel feels especially relevant: “Finish well, Ron.” One line in my prayer diary that I use regularly urges me to ask for divine strength to do just that. I beg God to help me avoid disgracing the Lord I adore. I ask for strength to bring joy to my God. God has no need for tiny little me. But I do believe the awesome Creator of the galaxies is filled with joy when one infinitesimal, insignificant person on a tiny planet in a small solar system in a modest galaxy loves and obeys him.

I know I cannot do that in my own strength, so I pray for divine help. Recently that has taken the form of a homespun trinitarian prayer ritual.

For years, I have ended my prayer confession and request for forgiveness with a petition to Christ. I look into the face of Christ and ask him to transform

me daily more and more into his very image (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Somewhat later I added a second step. I have long been amazed by St. Paul’s teaching that the Holy Spirit prays for us with groans too deep for utterance (Romans 8:26). In our weakness, we do not always know how to pray. But the Spirit intercedes for us according to the will of God. What a wonderful promise. So right after asking the Risen Lord to make me more like him, I ask the Holy Spirit to pray for me—this day and always—with groans too deep for human understanding.

Only quite recently did I add a third part to this section of my private devotions. I now conclude with a prayer to the Father. My friend and New Testament scholar Craig Keener says that “leave me not in temptation”—rather than “lead me not into temptation”— is a proper translation of that part of the prayer Jesus taught us to address to the Father. I know I regularly face temptation, so I ask fervently that my Heavenly Father will not leave me in the midst of temptation but rather will deliver me from the evil one’s snares.

Regularly, I use that trinitarian ritual. I look into the face of my Lord Jesus and ask him to make me more like him. I plead with the Holy Spirit to speak with the Father and the Son on my behalf. And I beg the Father to stay with me and deliver me from temptation. In the power of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, it is possible to finish well. Please God, grant me that grace—today and every day until I see you face to face.

Ron Sider is the founder and president of Evangelicals for Social Action, author of dozens of books, and professor of theology/holistic ministry/public policy at Palmer Seminary of Eastern University.

PRISM Vol. 18, No. 2  March-April 2011

Editorial Board

Miriam Adeney Tony Campolo

Luis Cortés Richard Foster G. Gaebelein Hull

Karen Mains

Vinay Samuel

Tom Sine Harold DeanTrulear

George Barna Rodney Clapp Samuel Escobar William Frey Roberta Hestenes John Perkins Amy Sherman Vinson Synan Eldin Villafane

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