Education

PRISM on earth as it is in heaven: radical love made visible

Education Lifeline

How churches can power up our public schools

In praise of the comfort zone Finding Jesus in the profane

SPRING 2014

Also: Harmony on a Native American farm | Gender imbalance in the church Head over heels for Over the Rhine | Unpacking the Transition movement prismmagazine.org

The

LimiTs of

ideoLogy

YOU CAN CHANGE

A LIFE

oPlin M a r y d aPl l a s w il l a r d F or ew or

i

d by

ar? l u c e s y F s realit ns o suMPtio s a e h t ews testing worldvi l a b o l Four g

PRISM Vol. 21, No. 2 Spring 2014

Editor Creative Director Copy Editor Deputy Director Publishers Operations Manager

Kristyn Komarnicki Rhian Tomassetti Leslie Hammond Sarah Withrow King Al Tizon & Paul Alexander Josh Cradic

Contributing Editors Christine Aroney-Sine

Clive Calver

Rudy Carrasco

Andy Crouch

Gloria Gaither David P. Gushee

Jan Johnson

Craig S. Keener Peter Larson

Richard Mouw

Philip Olson Jenell Williams Paris

Christine Pohl

James Skillen

James Edwards

Jim Wallis

Myron Augsburger Issac Canales M. Daniel Carroll R. J. James DeConto Perry Glanzer Ben Hartley Stanley Hauerwas Jo Kadlecek Marcie Macolino Mary Naber Earl Palmer Derek Perkins Elizabeth D. Rios Lisa Thompson Heidi Rolland Unruh Bruce Wydick

Editorial Board

Miriam Adeney Tony Campolo Luis Cortés Richard Foster G. Gaebelein Hull Karen Mains Vinay Samuel Tom Sine Eldin Villafane

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

Ron Sider

Subscription Information

Renewing your subscription? Visit EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org/PRISMRenew Regular PRISM Subscription Only $24 a year.

Type: US/Canada via air mail

Help End Hunger Every Month of the Year.

Start your monthly gift at bread.org/go/monthlygift

Web Version (PDF) Receive the same PRISM as everyone else but in your email box. Now free!

“Mary Poplin has lived out many of the ideologies of the past fifty years—secular humanism, ivorytower Marxism, radical feminism,

For every dollar you donate, Bread helps win more than $100 in poverty-focused assistance that is directed to hungry and poor people in the U.S. and around the world.

New Age spirituality, you name it.

[This] is her penetrating analysis

Library Subscription Order PRISM for your library! Only $45 a year.

PRISMmagazine.org P.O. Box 367 Wayne, PA 19087 484-384-2990/PRISM@eastern.edu

of these ideologies and a brilliant

Note: Standard A mail is not forwarded; please contact us if your address changes.

exposition of the profound truths

Editorial/Advertising Information

of the Christian faith.”

James W. Sire, author of The Universe Next Door

www.bread.org

International Subscription Receive PRISM via PDF only. Now free!

800.843.9487

ivpress.com

PRISM Magazine offers affordable ad placement for organizations and businesses. To receive our ad placement form or to submit your ad art please contact us via email.

Ads email: PRISM@eastern.edu Editor email: KKomarni@eastern.edu Unsolicited submissions will not be returned unless they include an SASE. A Publication of Evangelicals for Social Action The Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University

All contents © 2014 ESA/PRISM magazine.

Contents SPRING 2014

2 Reflections The Power of Fleas 3 Talk Back WHOLE 4 Why Shouldn’t We GiveDirectly?

5 Good in the ’Hood; Street Children Score at World Cup

6 A Place at the Table 7 Modeling the Harmony Way 8 Not the End of the Story

9 Living Into Vulnerability; Connecting for Good

PROTESTIMONY 10 Ban the Box 11 Holy Disruptions 12 Media Watchdogs, Rejoice! Rights for Rapists? Laps, not Apps!

COUNTERCULTURE 46 Compassion on the Labor Ward 47 Is Reality Secular?

48 Transitioning to a Positive Future 49 Tackling the Empathy Deficit; Real Hope for the Homeless; Radical Forgiveness

14 School Equality as a Matter of Faith

People of faith have the opportunity—and the responsibility—to help close the achievement gap and open the doors of possibility for our nation’s poorest schoolchildren.

19 Church/School Partnerships = Win/Win

A growing number of churches and faith-based organizations are joining hands with principals, teachers, and students to fortify public education and build beloved community.

22 The World Is Our Classroom

When neighbors share life, children learn valuable lessons about what it means to be human.

24 A Safe Place to Grow

Society’s young cast-offs find a nurturing home and God’s

love at Children’s Garden in Manila.

28 Revelation at the Ping-Pong Emporium

Even sacrilege has something to say about the sacred: Jonathan Merritt plumbs the profane for signs of God.

32 Christianity: Now in 3D and Living Color

What if Christians were comfortable with mystery, honest about brokenness, and known for our vibrant, authentic faith?

34 Confronting the Oppressor with Humanity

CONSUME

Meet Palestinian activists who offer tea and kindness to the Israeli soldiers who make their lives so difficult.

50 Meet Me at the Edge of the World;

40 Because Stones Can Speak

Bringing C.S. Lewis to the Stage A look at what is lost—and who loses—when places of 51 From the Couch Commando: Commercials African American historical importance are destroyed.

52 Book reviews 54 New books and films to check out 42 What’s Wrong with Being Comfortable?

55 esXaton Practicing ESA in India 56 The Last Word Easter Morning by Qi He

Rather than producing spiritual maturity, discomfort for its own sake can squander the gifts of the Spirit.

[So that people] may know wisdom and instruction, understand words of insight, receive instruction in wise dealing, righteousness, justice, and equity; that prudence may be given to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth…

Proverbs 1:2-4

Reflections The Power of Fleas I consider myself an educator at heart, but I have never attended a PTO or school board meeting in my city of Philadelphia, which is dealing with more budget and institutional crises than ever before.

(Facing a $304 million shortfall, the city closed 23 public schools last year. Ouch.) Beyond signing some petitions and marching once in a schoolsnot-prisons protest (the city also launched a $400 million new prison project last year), I have never personally enlisted in the fight for educational equity. Why? Because it is demanding and time-consuming work, that’s why! I’m spending all my hours figuring out the best education for my own three boys and trying to keep things together at home and work. Who has the time or energy to fight for other people’s kids?

But we would do well to consider what we hope for our children’s future. As Marian Wright Edelman has said, “The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be shaped by our fairness to other people’s children.” Ouch again. Yet my question about what we have time for is still valid.

Most of us work too much and play too little as it is.

Playing with our children—and modeling lifelong play for all the children in our lives—is essential to their education as whole persons. Do we really need to add one more giant cause to our lives?

This is why our cover story for this issue is so compelling. It shows us that we don’t have to take on this cause all by ourselves. Rather it urges the church—individuals working together as the body of Christ—to stand in the gap for our nation’s failing schools. Together, myriad small acts will function as a tidal wave of support for students, teachers, staff, and principals. “You just need to be a flea against injustice,” says Edelman. “Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.”

When the local church takes up the cause of the local school (or one in a not-so-privileged zip code), it becomes a community effort each of us can plug into according to our gifts and availability. And there is truly something for everyone here—from praying for a specific teacher, grade, or school to organizing donations for school supplies. From playground clean-up days to providing snacks and encouragement for a teachers’ meeting. From reading with a kid for an hour a week to

2

providing an annual award to acknowledge a student who excels at scholarship, art, or citizenship. The possibilities are limited only by our creativity.

In these pages you’ll meet Dallas-area believers who are discovering that when they partner with schools to help kids get the education they deserve, they themselves learn more than they bargained for—hearts expand, community deepens, faith surges. You’ll tour a Denver neighborhood where folks are rediscovering the lost art of education via the sharing of stories, wisdom, and skills in the garden, in the kitchen, and on the front porch. You’ll meet the boys at Children’s Garden in Manila, for whom education starts with finding a safe home and learning to trust others, love God, and respect themselves.

Close your eyes for a few minutes and think about those moments when you learned something life-changing and positive, when you gained a sense of who you were made to be, what you were capable of, and how your mind, body, or spirit works. They weren’t always (or even often) in a classroom perhaps, but they always came at the hands of someone—author, teacher, mentor, friend—who led you into an experience you would not otherwise have had.

At 16 I read C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, at my father’s suggestion, and tumbled headlong into a foreign world that was strangely familiar. I remember standing outside my bedroom with the book in my hand, groping for words. “This book is about something, but it’s also about lots of other things at the same time,” I said. Dad just smiled, sensing that I had discovered the joys of subtext, myth, and deep meaning in literature. In college I scrambled behind a friend to the top of several towering stone “needles” in South Dakota’s Black Hills and descended a changed person, with new respect for (even awe for) my body and its capabilities. My father and my friend were just two among the many who have opened educational doors for me throughout my life.

“You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.”

- Marian Wright Edelman

Imagine the accumulated wisdom of an entire church being accessible to a disadvantaged school.

Think of how many young lives would be transformed if we shared our collective education with these children. How would even our own children’s futures be forever altered?

This month we celebrate the resurrection of the greatest teacher who ever lived. Although fully divine, he needed others to help him grow in wisdom even as he grew in stature. His parents, Uncle Zechariah, his neighbors, the local rabbi, the Scriptures. Let us walk in their beautiful footsteps, leaving enlivened minds and hearts behind us wherever we go. Together, with our strategically placed flea bites, we can provide a good education to all God’s children.

As a kid, Kristyn Komarnicki (pictured here in 7th grade) was privileged to attend good public schools. Her three sons didn't really have that option, so she has spent the last 15 years begging, borrowing, and bartering an education for them through a combination of home, public, and private education.

Talk Back Re: the Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait series featured in the Winter issue—I pray that once this project is completed it will be housed with an organization that will get it into the schools, to inspire our young people in knowing that change is possible and that as individuals they have the power to make a difference.

I love PRISM and the ePistle. I’m so inspired and blessed every time I read them. Thanks for becoming the voice that needs to be heard. I’m a United Church of Canada minister in Etobicoke, a West Toronto neighborhood, and I pray to see the passion I read in your articles in my people—the “social gospel” descendants.

The Winter issue had many wonderful articles, but a relatively simple thing stood out in Rebekah Bell’s “Which Way Does Your Faith Point?” Rebekah says about a lady that criticized her halter-top dress, “This girl had never once initiated a friendship with me, never asked how I was or even knew if I was a Christian. Instead, the solitary time she communicated with me was when my standard of modesty didn’t mesh with hers.” This apparently Christian lady did not see the significance of having a relationship with someone before criticizing her clothing.

As Christians we need to remember what Rebekah says: “It is one thing for a friend to gently and lovingly speak truth into a situation, but quite another for a stranger to tell you how to live your life.” Let us build relationships before we critique others.

D’Thea Webster Toronto, Ont.

@ Email the editor: kkomarni@eastern.edu f @Facebook.com/evansocaction t @twitter.com/PRISMMagazine1 e EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org/ePistle

The litany of lame excuses, self-pity, and contrived rationalizations presented in “Wonderfully Made” in the Winter issue simply strengthened my resolve to lose my spare tire and to help my older son do the same.

The entire gist of the article is that being overweight (a) is beyond one’s control, (b) is perfectly healthy, and (c) ought not be considered aesthetically unappealing. Given the dramatic rise in American obesity rates in recent decades, I find all three notions ludicrous. I personally struggle to stay fit and to have our sons eat healthier and get more exercise instead of playing video games, watching TV, or screwing around on the internet.

If our family took the author’s advice, we’d just throw in the towel, get comfortable on the couch, and happily watch our waistlines expand. No thanks.

Mike Nacrelli Portland, Ore.

Clay Singleton

Caitlin Ng

Ryan Rodrick Beiler

Jonathan Merritt

Whitney Bauck

Nicole Baker Fulgham

Aria Kirkland-Harris David Schmidt

Emily Dause

Nita Thomason

Len Schmidt

Keep on sending the magazine, please, for PRISM, as the Sri Lankan preacher D.T. Niles famously said about evangelism, “is just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” That starving beggar is me!

Richard S. Schechter Monroe, Ohio

Anthony Grimes

This issue’s contributors include:

Randy Gabrielse Grand Rapids, Mich.

3

Photos: Coe Burchfield, The Simple Way

Good in the ’Hood When Jesus called Nathanael to join his growing team of disciples, Nathanael was doubtful as soon as he heard where Jesus was from. “Nazareth!” he scoffed. “Can anything good come from there?”

(John 1:46) The answer was, of course, “Yes. Jesus.”

A lot of us make the same mistake about our cities’ poorest neighborhoods. “Can anything good come from there?” we ask, and we conclude that, no, we must take the goodness to the ghetto instead. That’s what I thought when I left a comfortable life in rural Oklahoma to do inner-city ministry.

But I discovered that, like in Nazareth, Jesus was already there. The ghetto is his home turf, and all we need to do is partner with him when we get there.

My team had been assigned to walk through the neighborhood and talk to people about hope; we asked whether they felt their neighborhood was hopeless, temporarily stuck, or moving forward. I heard many different perspectives that day, from those who wouldn’t admit to any problems (despite shootings and drug deals going down on a daily basis) to those who said the situation was desperate and they could do nothing to change it. But talking to one man, who turned out to be a minister at one of our partner ministries, changed my perspective on the inner city forever.

When we stopped to interview this man, whom I’ll call Sam, on a frankly frightening corner of the city, I had no idea I was stepping into one of the best sermons I would ever hear. Sam started off by telling us a little bit of his story, that he had been addicted to drugs and caught up in the problems of inner-city life before coming to Christ and getting clean. He now runs a ministry for recovering drug addicts in the same neighborhood he grew up in.

Sam compared his story with that of the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5. Jesus exorcised a legion of demons from this man who had been liv-

4

Every fall The Simple Way hands out hundreds of bags stuffed with school supplies to friends and neighbors as they celebrate the kids in their Kensington neighborhood. Check out www.thesimpleway.org to learn more.

ing in the tombs, a tortured soul beyond human help. As Jesus turned to leave him, the now sane man “begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him, but said, ’Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how he has had mercy on you’” (Mark 5:18b-19).

Like the man freed from demons, Sam tried to find a way to leave the ghetto behind and build a new life for himself elsewhere, but Jesus told him, “Naw, man. Go back to your crib, to your neighborhood. You got work to do there.” It is essential, said Sam, that the people living in the ’hood, in the brokenness, be healed and remain there in order to heal the community as a whole, from within. Even if many individuals are saved, brought out of drug addictions, prostitution, or doubt, if they don’t remain in the community, the community remains unchanged.

This was an eye-opener for me, since I have often been taught that our ultimate goal in ministering to the inner cities is to “rescue” or “release” the people we serve from their bondage there, allowing them to go off and find a better life elsewhere. But what if God’s will is not to give people an escape from the broken community but to change the community itself? That is a much bigger, more God-sized goal than anything I could have dreamed of on my own. It changed the way I looked at inner-city ministry, especially the local church, built and maintained by members of the community, not by outsiders like me.

To conclude his mini-sermon, Sam called one of his friends over, to ask him whether he saw hope for the inner city. The friend looked at me and said, “Did anything good ever come out of Nazareth? There is good in the ’hood.”

From the most unlikely community in Israel came the Son of God. From the ’hood comes a crop of ministers who have experienced all the problems in their community and yet are still able to stay and change lives there. There is hope in the inner city, because there are people who, like the Gerasene demoniac, like Sam, stay where they are and create a strong local church where we, as outsiders, could never be as effective.

There is overwhelming good in the ’hood. All we

have to do is partner with it and marvel at what God is doing.

Kayla Castleberry studies nutrition and dietetics at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Okla. She has spent time in various inner cities each summer since the age of 12.

She hopes to use her career as a dietitian to benefit food banks or low-income health clinics.

STREET CHILDREN SCORE AT WORLD CUP This summer 32 teams from around the world will gather to represent their countries in the 2014 FIFA World Cup. And while that event is one of the world’s biggest sporting events, another significant but lesser known world soccer event is taking place right now.

On March 28, the Street Child World Cup kicked off its 10-day tournament in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Ahead of each FIFA World Cup, organizers unite street children from across five continents to play soccer and join a unique international conference. The event seeks to both empower and raise awareness of children whose life circumstances have forced them to live on the streets. This year children from 20 countries (a number that’s doubled since the event debuted in 2010) have the opportunity to represent their country on a global stage, interact and share their experiences with others, and advocate for the rights of street children.

Established in response to the rounding up of street children in Durban, South Africa, as a city-wide “clean-up” before the 2010 FIFA World Cup, this event seeks to give a voice to children who have typically been silenced in their own cities. The 2010 Street Child World Cup allowed the children to partner with local

A Place at the Table When I began as a volunteer at the Center for AIDS Services, I knew little about it except that it had been started by Mother Teresa’s Missions of Charity community on a visit to Oakland, Calif.—a part of her North American mission to care for the dying. This was several years before retroviral medications were available; a diagnosis of full-blown AIDS meant you could measure your life in days and weeks instead of years. I was assigned to the kitchen, putting food on plates for the guests eating lunch at the center.

Having just come through a season of con-

artists to express the plight of street children around the world, and they also had a chance to dialogue with a group of police officers about the conditions they endure and the factors that led to their living on the streets.

As a result of the last conference, two documents—“The Durban Declaration” (presented to the UN Committee on Human Rights) and “The Street Girls’ Manifesto”—were produced to

6

advocate on behalf of street children.

Many of the 2010 teams received huge receptions upon arriving back in their home countries, and local efforts have been launched to begin to address care for street children.

Garnering support from a variety of sources, including soccer star David Beckham and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Street Child World Cup appears to be gaining momentum and scoring big for the poorest of children around the world.

flict as an associate pastor, I was content with this simple task and glad to spend the day away from other concerns.

After I had volunteered for a few weeks, Sister Jacinta, the center’s director, looked at me curiously and asked, “Why are you staying in the kitchen?” At her urging, I began to not just serve the meal but also enjoy it with those gathered around the table, talking, eating, and laughing with them and listening to them.

At first I felt awkward. After all, I was healthy, while all the people at the center were HIV-positive or had AIDS. I was straight, while many of the people at the center were gay. I was white and middle-class, while many of the people at the center were members of minority groups and poor. The communities of gay people in the Bay Area were and are remarkable at caring for their own. But these men and women had mostly been rejected by their communities because they were transgendered or from ethnic-minority communities and both gay and sick, sometimes homeless.

Here I was the other. But the community also felt other to me.

It wasn’t long before I realized that the awkwardness belonged to me; it was not shared by the community of people there. They simply made a place for me at the table.

We ate together and told our stories. I was only there once a week, but every Thursday I was both welcomed and remembered at the table.

Sister Jacinta had attended more wakes and funeral masses and memorial services than she could number. But she never forgot anyone she met, and she carried their stories within her. Even though there was grief and loss, Sister Jacinta’s stories kept the dead alive and remembered. And these people within her and around her were her joy. I’m sure she felt sadness, but what I noticed most about her is the way she celebrated the life of everyone around her, those who had died and those still living—including me. As director of the center, she trained her mostly volunteer staff by telling these stories. As I listened, I remembered reading about the desert mothers and fathers who instructed their followers with stories and aphorisms.

Sister Jacinta was an amma, a desert mother instructing her disciples. Her desert was not a landscape of sand and rock but a landscape of people and the wilderness of the AIDS epidemic. Hers was a radical hospitality that reached out to anyone who came across her path, including me. Sometimes she would take the train from the East Bay to San Francisco where she found a place to sit on the steps of the Civic Center with a sandwich cut in half, waiting to see who would sit beside her. Whoever took that sandwich half became her honored companion for the afternoon, and she their listening friend.

The clients at the Center for AIDS Services offered to me just what Sister Jacinta offered to the person who sat next to her on the steps of the Civic Center. They cut their sandwiches in half and gave me a share, and I had a place at their table—the center’s guests were my hosts. I knew

I belonged when one day during a rummage sale a transgendered woman and I ended up bickering over the same skirt. Finally she threw up her hands and gave it to me. “You want it that bad, girl, you take it home,” she said.

As I returned each week, I recognized that I experienced at the center a truer sense of belonging than I found in my own faith community. These men and women knew how to receive one another without judgment. The sick, sometimes dying community of outsiders at the center knew about welcoming; they understood hospitality. They knew about celebrating one another’s stories even when that story was one of illness and death.

What I wanted was a break from my own conflicted community. What I found was a doorway into welcome and sharing in this richer life lived among those who were poor—in health, in finances, in family. What I found was a place at the table. An encounter with “the other” in the Scriptures is also surprisingly often a place of meeting God’s Spirit, the presence of the holy.

Helen Cepero trains spiritual directors at the C. John Weborg Center for Spiritual Direction at North Park Seminary and is executive director of the Spiritual Direction Formation Program at the Journey Center in Santa Rosa, Calif.

This article is an excerpt from Christ-Shaped Character by Helen Cepero (InterVarsity Press, 2014).

It appears here by kind permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515 (IVPress.com).

5

whole

Healing a fractured world.

Why Shouldn’t We Give Directly?

One of the most exciting new ways for people to give to the poor in developing countries is through transferring cash directly to them—yes, that’s right— simply giving money to the poor. The new nonprofit GiveDirectly collects funds from internet donors and then zaps them into the cellphone-based e-money accounts of rural East Africans.

GiveDirectly was founded in 2008 by Paul Niehaus, an evangelical Christian and assistant professor in the economics department of the University of California at San Diego, with colleagues from his graduate school days at Harvard. GiveDirectly has taken the development world by storm and has been the subject of significant media attention for its novel approach to helping the poor lift themselves

havior, such as keeping children in school.

It is this second novelty that has produced the controversy. What if the poor spend the money on liquor, gambling, and cigarettes? That is one question Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro of MIT asked in carrying out a randomized controlled trial of the GiveDirectly program, a study whose results were released last October. In fact, in their study involving over 1,000 households, they found no

fers in productive ways rather than on booze and cigarettes mirrors the results of other studies, such as that on the conditional cash transfer program, Progresa, in Mexico.

We can learn several things from the research on this innovative new approach to development. One is that perhaps we should learn to trust the poor more with resources. Sometimes we pretend to know what impoverished people need (or want) without listening to them or trusting their instincts.

Secondly, the technology offers innovative new ways of coming alongside the poor to help break poverty traps. We should make use of this new technology to become better givers, to be looser with our wallets when it comes to the needs of others. Now it’s as easy to give to the poor as to buy something for ourselves—there goes at least one excuse for being tight-fisted with our money.

What the results of this study also mean is that we now have the beginnings of a benchmark that other faith-based and secular development organizations working in the area of in-kind goods donation must measure themselves against. Given that about 92 percent of the internet donations transferred to GiveDirectly go right into the bank accounts of recipients, the burden of proof has now shifted to other development organizations to show that their approach does as much good as simply giving the poor cash. Moreover, it emphasizes the need for more serious research about what we can do to alleviate poverty in the developing world.

GiveDirectly also serves as an example of what a heart for the poor, advanced training in economics, and new technology are capable of when working together.

Sometimes we pretend to know what impoverished people need (or want) without listening to them or trusting their instincts. out of poverty.

The GiveDirectly approach is novel for two reasons. First, it uses new technology creatively, operating through the M-Pesa system, the mobilephone-based money transfer service for telecommunication firms Safaricom and Vodacom in Tanzania and Kenya. Many places in East Africa have leapfrogged our own paper currency system, where people now make purchases routinely through electronic transfers via their cellphones. GiveDirectly harnesses this new technology to provide help to the poor through a series of e-injections of cash into these phone-based bank accounts. Transfers typically peak at about $1,000 over the course of a year, when they terminate.

GiveDirectly is also a novel approach because it begins with trusting the poor to spend donated money in the way they view as best for themselves.

This contrasts with the traditional approach, which only trusts the poor with in-kind goods, such as an animal donation, a new stove, a microfinance loan, education, or even a “conditional” cash transfer in which the transfer is contingent upon a required be-

6

increase in expenditures in the treated households on “temptation” goods: cigarettes, alcohol, or gambling.

So how do the recipients of these East African transfers spend the money? It turns out they spend it mostly on food for their families and building up the size of their animal herds. Specifically, in the year after the initial transfer, Haushofer and Shapiro found that households that received transfers increased food consumption by 20 percent. This brought about a 30 percent reduction in the likelihood of a family member going to bed hungry during the week preceding the follow-up survey. A 42 percent reduction was also recorded in the number of days children in transfer-recipient households went without food. These are significant impacts on hunger.

The researchers also found that the unconditional cash transfers led to a 58 percent increase in productive assets, in this context mainly a greater investment in herd animals: cattle, sheep, and goats.

Revenue from animal husbandry increased by nearly 50 percent.

That the poor tend to spend the cash trans-

Bruce Wydick is professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, a writer for Christianity Today, and a contributing editor to PRISM. His novel on the lives of coffee growers in Guatemala, The Taste of Many Mountains, is forthcoming in July 2014 from Thomas Nelson (HarperCollins).

Modeling the Harmony Way Eagle’s Wings Ministry, Inc. was founded in 1999 by Randy Woodley and his wife, Edith. The ministry is a largely Native American community in Newberg, Ore., where the Woodleys reach out with the good news of Christ while respecting indigenous cultures.

Based on the Native American “harmony way” (shalom) tradition of spiritual and emotional health, social and environmental balance, and economic prosperity, Eagle’s Wings seeks to model and promote the wellbeing of Native American and other communities in ways that are culturally contextual, holistic, and community-based. Central to the ministry is a commitment to leadership training appropriate for traditional indigenous cultures. This work is advanced through the Eloheh Village for Indigenous Leadership and Ministry Development, which is a mentoring school, and Eloheh Farm, which is a demonstrational community where new life skills are acquired through direct experience.

We asked Woodley to walk us through his ministry’s holistic approach to community transformation.

Tell us how Eloheh Farm came into being and what it means to you.

God helped us see that we not only needed to be culturally contextual but also holistic. That’s when we really began to develop a theology of the land and knew we needed to find a place of ministry. We had in mind sort of an indigenous L’Abri, but we also came to understand that what we were teaching our indigenous people was needed and desired by nonindigenous folks as well. In other words, we are going to need to heal together.

Indigenous spirituality, culture, and education must begin with the land. You know the old saying “Give a person a fish and they eat for a day, but teach a person to fish and they eat every day.”

Traditionally, our indigenous people have always

“It is from our place on the land that we derive our identity.”

possessed the skills to survive in even the harshest of environments. We have known “how to fish.” But what if someone poisons the river? Then no one can fish. What if someone sells the river? Then only the one who owns the river gets to eat.

Life is much more complex today than in the past, and simply learning how to fish isn’t enough anymore. In order to develop young leaders we need to be concerned with the whole person and the whole community living in the whole world. This means that we must understand our world as it is but always remain grounded in the indigenous spirituality and values that have allowed our people to survive for millennia.

We’ve found that education must be done in the context of land. It is from our place on the land that we derive our identity. Can we really learn when we don’t know who we are? Where will this learning go? How will we understand unless we have the land to teach us? Living with the land—and our covenant on the land and with Creator and all creation—is the lived experience and accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and understanding that distinguishes us from other ministries, schools, and communities. In such a model of community we tangibly witness for Christ and bring much needed hope to others.

What specific kinds of things can people learn in your community?

The work of shalom is advanced through both Eloheh Village and Eloheh Farm. Some of the areas we address while mentoring others include culturally appropriate theology, mission, and ministry; traditional indigenous values, ethics, and ceremony; economic development opportunities through

small-scale, culturally appropriate business models; sustainable living skills; regenerative farming methods; whole physical and emotional health; marriage and parenting skills; abuse and intervention training; educational and career assistance and development; and community building and organizing.

Our goal is to heal and mentor the whole person who can then, in turn, offer healing to and help others create more whole communities.

At the farm we are seeking to be a wholehealth regenerative food circle of heirloom and native food varieties. We are nonprofit, chemical-free, and in a relationship of harmony with the land. Eloheh (pronounced Ay-luh-hay) is a Cherokee word describing a physical place where the Cherokee harmony way is practiced. We began Eloheh Village as a model, permaculture venture in rural Kentucky in 2004 on 50 acres. Eventually, we were “run out” by a white supremacist paramilitary group, which caused us to lose our life’s savings.

But in 2010 we purchased a small, 3.75-acre, 96-year-old farmstead that needed lots of work. We are still working on it but are well on our way to a good relationship with the land once again. Why? We can eat healthier. We can eat for less. We can live greener. We can share with friends and sell excess food. Our food tastes better. Our bodies respond in better health. We can live more independently from corporate greed and poisons. We can give freely to those in need. And we can show others how to do all of the above.

What is the greatest challenge to your work?

There are many. But I think the greatest problem is that American culture is rooted in a dualistic worldview, which resists a holistic way of life. I hope that eventually it will sink in for people that our relationship with God has everything to do with our relationship with our neighbor, which is related to our relationship with the earth, which is related to how we obtain our food, which is related to the political views we support, etc. Salvation or “healing” is a grand construct, and Jesus is grand enough and good enough to help us understand all the implications of our healing.

In what ways do you encounter Christ in the people you serve?

Well, I find Christ in the most unlikely places. I think Jesus occupies the whole earth and beyond. So I not only encounter him in other people but also in all of creation. It seems to me that God is always interested in my conversion, not just in the conversion of those I encounter. This means be-

7

ing changed into Christ’s likeness by his truth. I find truth of Christ in a tree, a butterfly, and even in the soil itself. I find Christ in the people who are like me but even more in those different from me.

I encountered Christ in an amazing way the other day through three homeless young men. As they sat and shared, I thought about the wise men in the birth narrative of Christ. Their wisdom was simple and yet so profound. I especially sense God’s presence in community when all people have a voice. It seems to me that the Spirit especially creates new ways for us to think and find new options when the dignity of everyone’s voice is heard.

How would you define success in holistic ministry?

I think success has to do with how we go about doing what we do. I want to ask myself many questions before thinking about success. Are all voices being heard, especially the ones that disagree or are least likely to be heard? Have we considered how this will affect everything else and also future generations? Is it honoring of others and the Creator? Will this effort give whole life to others or just a temporary fix?

And then there’s the true litmus test, for me: What does my wife think about it? She’s the one who really knows me and can help me figure out how much is personal stuff working itself out in my life and how much is God’s leading. Often it is a mixture of both.

Money never really matters (much) to us, because we never seem to have it. We just learn to do what we need to do with very little funds, so things are never looking very successful according to worldly standards.

What scripture has guided you most through the years, and why?

Luke 15. I pretty much live there. Jesus is not just telling the Pharisees (and us) in these parables to find the lost; the point of each story is to always be extending the ever-expanding invitation to join the community or party to others, especially those most unlike us. I especially love the image of the father in the story who has been humiliated and dishonored by his son, who seems to be daily watching for the son to return, and when “he is a long way off” the father runs to the son. The son has a standard speech prepared, but the father doesn’t even hear him. It’s not about our grand schemes and plans for the kingdom. It’s just about accepting the love of the Father. Jesus portrays God as the most vulnerable being existing. And that’s what real power is about. It is love!

8

Not the End of the Story I grew up on a Midwestern farm surrounded by golden fields of wheat and pastures dotted with cattle. In the summer I picked warm cherries from the orchard, and in the winter I built snowmen with my siblings. It was an idyllic and carefree childhood. I approached the world with a sense of childlike wonder and awe. I believed that God was great and that the world was good.

Today, the world doesn’t look quite as good as it did when I was a child. I know more now, and it hurts to know more. I often wish I could go back to the innocence of my childhood, even for a day. But that innocence is gone, undermined by every atrocity I hear about—school shootings, child soldiers, rape as a weapon of war. Surrounded by daily reminders of evil and injustice, I am tempted to believe that the world is a lost cause and people are past the point of redemption.

While we necessarily lose our childhood naïveté, as Christians we are admonished not to lose heart (2 Corinthians 4:16). Yet how do we remain hopeful in a world that threatens to overwhelm us with disease, despair, and death? How do we retain hope when each nightly news segment seems worst than the last?

The story of Lazarus in John 11 provides a clue. Devastated by the death of her brother, Martha greets Jesus with this heart-wrenching refrain: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

I often think that way. Lord, if you had been here, the drunk driver wouldn’t have run into her.

If you had been here, the cancer wouldn’t have killed him. Lord, if you had been here, the gunman wouldn’t have gotten into that school. You are the life-giver, storm-calmer, the death-reverser. If only you had been here… I guess you weren’t here after all.

Martha’s remark makes perfect sense to me, and yet biblical commentators insist that her response reveals her failure to grasp who Jesus truly was. She was right to assume that Jesus could have prevented Lazarus’ death, but she didn’t understand that even if he did not prevent it Jesus was

still more powerful than death. This is what I so often forget—that the end of the story is never really the end of the story when Jesus is involved.

When I was 13, I began experiencing severe neurological problems. My parents took me to countless doctors and neurologists, but none could discern what was causing the problems or how to cure them. I cried out to God, begging him to heal me, and heard nothing but silence.

But one day, in the midst of it, I reread the resurrection story. While the Bible details the horror of Jesus’ crucifixion on Friday and the jubilee of his resurrection on Sunday, it is strangely silent about Saturday. From my vantage point 2,000 years after the cross, I know that this violent historical moment was redeemed when a good God overturned death itself to give us hope for life beyond this world. I take for granted that Sunday morning will reveal a risen Lord, forgetting what that first Easter weekend would have been like for disciples who were not expecting their beloved teacher to be resurrected. On that Saturday, the disciples didn’t know that the following day would be a game changer for human history. Saturday was to them what many moments of life are like for us: soul-oppressive and dark, with no light in sight. Saturday is the middle of the story.

Jesus responded to Martha’s “Lord-if-you-hadbeen-here" lament with a succinct but earth-shattering statement: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Even when God is silent, we have this to hold on to—the knowledge that the story isn’t over yet, the promise of life in the presence of death. This is not a naïve, look-on-the-bright-side hope that ignores reality or trivializes tragedy. This is a hard-fought, white-knuckled hope.

This is a deep and difficult hope, one that clings to a good God despite circumstances that will never make sense this side of heaven. This is a hope that rejects Christian clichés in favor of the deeper reality. This is a hope that remembers, as Tony Campolo reminds us, that “it’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!”

Rebekah Bell is a writer and speaker who enjoys encouraging young people to embrace God’s goodness amidst a life of transition.

decisions. The process of discernment that the Quakers have developed over the years is known today as a clearness committee.

The clearness committee is a two-hour session where three to four people discern on behalf of a friend who is in need of direction. Three elements emerge that can be helpful in any circumstance as those in the church seek to help one another.

Living into Vulnerability Asking for help is bold, even courageous. Asking for help requires a confession of neediness. It involves great vulnerability.

Perhaps this is why, when faced with a complex decision such as a marriage partner, a career, or even a calling, the easiest response is to internalize the process. Choosing vulnerability seems too risky. What brave soul would announce, even to his most trusted friends, that he cannot see clearly?

In recent times, it has become fashionable in certain circles to draw attention to vulnerability as a key attribute of godliness. This impulse to focus on authenticity, honesty, and transparency has deep roots in the church.

This is true even if it has been a long-forgotten virtue.

Where past generations focused on truth as objective reality, the current trend is to focus on truth as an inward reality. This, again, is an impulse to return to that which is thoroughly according to the way of Jesus. Still, there is much work to be done in the incarnation of vulnerability in the Christian community.

While there may be several starting places on the road to (re)discovering what it means to be truly vulnerable in the context of community, the church as a whole could benefit from a practice that has been quietly taking place for centuries. Since the 17th century, the Quakers have actively sought out the counsel of one another on life’s most pressing

1. Resisting the urge to fix When a friend comes with a dilemma, it is only natural to offer well-meaning advice intended to alleviate their angst. But offering quick solutions to difficult problems can be damaging. People need to wrestle with questions that will shape the course of their lives, and giving friends support and enabling them to reach their own conclusions can be an invaluable gift.

Connecting for Good “Digital inclusion is one of the most important social justice and economic development issues of our day,” says Michael Liimatta, president of Connecting for Good in Kansas City, Mo. He calls the unconnected “a growing underclass” who are unable to apply for jobs online, connect with family and friends, or access educational resources or health information. “They are shut out

2. Asking open and honest questions Reflecting on the need for honest questions in the clearness committee, Quaker author and spiritual director Parker Palmer wrote, “The best single mark of an honest, open question is that the questioner could not possibly anticipate the answer to it...” This practice, of asking questions that do not anticipate an answer, allows space for the one being asked to mirror back openness to the one asking. If the church is after meaningful conversation, then beginning to ask open and honest questions of one another is a great place to begin.

3. Total Attentiveness Each person in the clearness committee accepts the responsibility to be fully present throughout the process.

With innumerable distractions available at a moment’s notice, imagine the gift that total attentiveness could bring into the lives of friends, family, spouse, children, and coworkers! This community vulnerability requires sacrifice, discipline, and focus.

The work of incarnating vulnerability takes intentionality, time, and practice. But by resisting the urge to fix, by asking open and honest questions, and by bringing total attentiveness to honor the vulnerability of others we can change the culture of the church.

The question then becomes: Will the church honor the boldness and courage that is required in asking for help, in admitting neediness, and living into vulnerability?

Casey Hobbs is the author of Trembling Love: Fear, Freedom, and the God Who Is for Us (Wipf & Stock, 2013).

Refurbishing workshop manager Karita Matlock at work

of the benefits of connectivity that most of us take for granted.”

But since 2011, Liimatta has been changing all that. Last year alone, Connecting for Good trained over 1,000 people from under-resourced urban neighborhoods in its free digital life skills classes, brought free in-home Wi-Fi internet to about 500 families in three low-income housing projects, and refurbished and sold 600 donated computers at low cost to qualifying students.

It has built and continues to expand an innovative network of interconnected microwave dishes for increased access, both in people’s homes and via free hotspots in strategic locations. The organization also offers tech support to cash-strapped nonprofits.

Learn more at ConnectingforGood.org.

9

protestimony Ban the Box

Following Jesus in the public square.

Nor does it create jobs.

We need more than ban-the-box laws. We need to ask ourselves as a society: Are the odds stacked so high against returning citizens that we increase the likelihood that they re-offend? We need to ask ourselves as Christians: Can we influence the culture and legislation by changing our own hearts and attitudes toward the formerly incarcerated? Are we willing to put our faith into action by welcoming and, whenever possible, hiring exoffenders?

In a recent conversation among evangelical leaders in correctional ministries, several of us talked about the need for Christians to develop a biblically informed awareness of just who the incarcerated are. First, they are all created in the image of God, a theological affirmation that should mitigate against the objectifying and dehumanization of the incarcerated— and the 95 percent of them who come home. Many were raised in our congregations. We knew them as children and youth; their parents and grandparents attend worship every Sunday, burdened by the unspoken fact that the hopes they had for their family member seem dashed and that “the

In a growing movement around the country, advocates for formerly incarcerated persons are pressing for “ban-the-box” legislation that would eliminate questions concerning a person’s criminal history from an initial job application. Many applications require an applicant to check a box if he or she has ever been arrested for or convicted of a felony. The job market is already difficult for the nation as a whole in the current economy; the challenges are exacerbated for those who are poor, less skilled, and undereducated, so you can imagine the obstacle that disclosing a criminal past adds to entering (or reentering) the job market.

Ban-the-box legislation comes in various forms. At its most basic level, it prohibits employers from asking questions about applicants’ criminal past on the initial application. In this mode, applicants can still be queried, and even be subject to criminal background checks, once they come in for an interview. If you picture employment as a house, this form of legislation will get applicants onto the porch but no further. In its strictest form, such as the legislation enacted last summer in Richmond, Calif., employers in certain categories are not permitted to ask about criminal backgrounds at all.

What is the just position?

Last year the British ad agency Leo Burnett created an interactive message called First, no legislation currently exists (proposed or passed) “Second Chance” for the nonprofit Business in the Community’s ban-the-box campaign. that completely eliminates questions concerning criminal past The short film puts the viewer in the position of an employer interviewing for a job nor that requires employers to hire people with criminal records. opening. Will you listen to the applicant for even 30 seconds? Or will you click on the Some positions carry a legal and common sense prohibition “Skip Ad” button and move on? against hiring people who have committed certain offenses. It For insight into the discrimination returning citizens face, check out this clever makes sense that a person convicted of an offense against a and poignant message at BitC.org.uk/banthebox. child would be barred from teaching kindergarten or that a person with a history of retail theft (or embezzlement) would face post-incarceration sanctions concerning employment in jobs that require handling money and/or merchandise.

Second, many ban-the-box provisions require employers to consider both the nature of the crime and the amount of time that has passed since an individual’s conviction. The law in Newark, N.J., considers both, where employers are only allowed to consider offenses within the past five to eight years (depending on the type of crime). This excludes such offenses as murder, voluntary manslaughter, and sex offenses (the last of which requires registry).

Third, once applicants arrive “on the porch” for an interview, many employers can still perform a background check. circle has been broken” by walls and wire.

Federal guidelines dictate, however, that a check cannot go forward without Second, most returning citizens do not have violent convictions but the candidate’s permission. What happens if an applicant refuses to give rather have drug offenses that would be better served by treatment than consent to a background check? Put this in the common sense column. incarceration. The growth of drug courts in our nation recognizes such.

Fourth, those opposing ban-the-box legislation consistently point Why can’t the church? to issues of public safety. Retailers voice concern about legal liability to Third, our efforts to reclaim the offender must be matched with comcustomers and coworkers. Others point to character issues they say are passion and healing for victims. Much of the opposition to assisting the forrevealed in a criminal past. merly incarcerated comes from persons whose own victimization by crime In the end, each attempt at reform concerning the job application goes unaddressed in our pastoral care, counseling, and fellowship. Indeed, process must be measured against all of these issues. The variety of banmany inmates, especially women (studies place women’s numbers between the-box measures, from Richmond to Newark, make each attempt worth 50 and 90 percent), were victims of violence prior to developing the beconsidering on its own merits and a realistic appraisal of what it can achaviors that led to their incarceration. Restorative justice models provide a complish. One thing the legislation does not do is guarantee employment.

Second Chance?

10

context for healing past hurts and preventing further damage.

Ban-the-box legislation rightly addresses the issue of justice in access to employment. Its various forms require that each proposal and enactment be considered individually. But in the end, it is our hearts—Christian hearts, including those of legislators, employers, and the public—that must find room for people to justly pursue gainful employment consistent with the fulfillment of human dignity.

Holy Disruptions DONOR-ACTIVIST EMILY NIELSEN JONES WORKS FOR GENDER JUSTICE There are some things Emily Nielsen Jones just can’t accept. Girls should not be born into a world that values them less than boys. Women should not bear the brunt of crushing economic inequalities. And our religious traditions should not in any way validate patriarchal gender norms that attempt to “keep women in their place.”

“In this moment in time, when we see how enslaving the world is, with so many human rights violations,” says Nielsen Jones, “we need to work harder to enlist our religious traditions in ameliorating these structural inequalities, not exacerbating them, by bringing out the deeper essence of our spiritual ideals which support human equality. We can do better. We have to connect the dots so that we move forward, not backward.”

For Nielsen Jones, cofounder and president of the Imago Dei Fund in Boston, Mass., that means partnering with “change agents, locally and around the world, to build bridges of peace and create a world where girls and women can thrive and achieve their full human potential.”

As a donor-activist in the women-led philanthropy movement, Nielsen Jones started the Imago Dei Fund in 2009 with her husband, Ross Jones, and Executive Director Debra Veth. Their early research and development took them to Cambodia, where they saw anti-trafficking efforts firsthand and became partners with the faith-based anti-trafficking collaborative

Harold Dean Trulear is director of the Healing Communities Prison Ministry and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice.

He speaks and writes extensively on issues related to incarceration and is the coeditor of Ministry with Prisoners & Families: The Way Forward (Judson Press, 2011).

Chab Dai. As they engaged there, they gradually found a niche helping these organizations establish a clearer framework for gender equality by translating Christians for Biblical Equality materials into Khmer and cosponsoring forums around women’s leadership. The more they learned, the more focused their goal became: to invest their resources to further God’s kingdom by affirming the unique creation of every person’s calling in the world.

Today the Imago Dei Fund supports unique educational and microenterprising efforts in Uganda, Cambodia, Haiti, and the United States so as to “co-create” a world that respects and enhances the freedom and dignity of all. Using a “gender lens,” they strategically partner with organizations to make sure all of their policies and efforts in the world are working to increase gender balance and thus send out empowering ripples of change into what are still highly patriarchal cultural contexts.

Motivated by how few Christian organizations have women on their boards, the Imago Dei Fund helped initiate a national academic study on women in evangelical leadership by partnering with Gordon College, and it has been instrumental in helping some seminaries create more opportunities for women.

The granddaughter of immigrants from Sweden and Norway, Nielsen Jones was raised in upstate New York in a family where she and her two sisters learned early on “not to drink the Kool-Aid” of gender messages in their evangelical community. Her parents and grandmother instilled an empowering ethic, and along the way she learned to tune out disempowering religious messages and to “listen to my own heart.” When she came home from church one afternoon complaining that only the boys in Sunday school at her Southern Baptist church were asked to pray, the response was along the lines of “This is not okay, and we need to go complain!”

11

Thus began her journey of faith-based gender activism!

“I might get into evangelical hot waters by saying this, but I have always believed in my own equality as a woman— and women’s equality—without needing a biblical argument or exegesis to say so,” she says. “Of course, it’s important to find a clear biblical explanation for gender equality; however, sometimes I wonder if we set ourselves up for an ongoing debate and disagreement, as if burying our heads in the Bible is the only way we can arrive at truth rather than listening to our own hearts. Both are important.”

That gender lens is what has shaped both her personal vision and the direction of the Imago Dei Fund. Now, as more ministries and churches combat human trafficking, Nielsen Jones hopes they will also begin to look more deeply at the religious messages that prop up male power over women and legitimize male-only leadership models. These factor into the “dangerous humanitarian mix” that continues to devalue the dignity and worth of females, making them vulnerable to a host of violence and discrimination at a time when women and NGOs all over the world are working so hard to empower girls and women.

“The best trafficking ’prevention’ the church can be engaged in is establishing a very clear, very solid spiritual framework of human equality for men and women alike and working toward gender balancing our own organizations.” The irony of advocating for girls around the globe while preserving all (or mostly) male leadership structures at home and within our churches and organizations is obvious, she says, and another reason we need what she refers to as “holy disruptions.”

“We have more economic inequalities in today’s world than when American slavery was an institution,” she says, “and that weighs on me.

Something’s wrong when people are in such duress that they sell our own bodies and dignity in order to survive.”

As long as these injustices exist, Nielsen Jones will be looking for ways to address them. “As a donor-activist, I don’t always get to see the work, but I can help connect the dots between religious ideas around gender and their humanitarian implications. I find great joy in doing my part in the global movement for gender balance that we see across so many sectors of society, including our faith traditions. But things are still tenuous, so a good first step for Christians here and around the globe is to look within and make sure we are not part of the problem!”

Learn more at ImagoDeiFund.org.

“The best trafficking ‘prevention’ the church can be engaged in is establishing a solid spiritual framework of equality for men and women alike and working toward gender balancing our own organizations.”

Jo Kadlecek is the senior writer and journalist-in-residence at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. She is the author of almost a dozen books, including Desperate Women of the Bible (Baker Books, 2006).

12

Media Watchdogs, Rejoice!

For the past three years, The Representation Project has used #NotBuyingIt on Twitter to call out sexism in the media and hold brands accountable. Tens of thousands have tweeted, successfully pushing companies like Amazon and Go Daddy to change sexist products or practices, and making media sexism a trending topic around the world.

Now you can download the #NotBuyingIt app, the world’s first app dedicated to fighting media sexism. Go to bit.ly/KIeocl to access this organizing tool, designed to put the power of social change at your fingertips. Use it to upload images of sexism in the media or larger culture, tag offending brands, and spread the word about the campaign.

Rights for Rapists?

Every year in the US more than 25,000 pregnancies result from rape. As shocking as it sounds, 31 states allow those responsible for the horrific violence to sue for custodial or visitation rights over the children they conceive.

Last July, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz [D-FL] introduced HR 2772: The Rape Survivor Child Custody Act. Florida is one of only six states that provide rape victims with the legal action needed to avoid custody battles with their perpetrator, and Schultz wants to see more states follow suit.

The organization 31 States is working hard to raise awareness of the issue. Go to 31States.com to learn more and to watch an interview with a brave teenager caught in a maddening web of legal gaps, blame-the-victim politics, and legislative absurdity.

Laps, not Apps!

That’s what babies need, say the good folks at the Campaign for a Commercial-free Childhood.

They are targeting Fisher-Price for its Newbornto-Toddler Apptivity™ Seat for iPad®, a bouncy seat for infants that features a holder for an iPad directly above the baby’s face. Talk about a captive audience.

The ultimate electronic babysitter, the Apptivity Seat encourages parents to plug babies into the entertainment world from day one, in spite of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ warnings that kids under 2 should live screen-free.

To learn more about how the manufacturer is marketing this product (as educational, of course), go to CommercialfreeChildhood.org/actions, where you can also send a message to Fisher-Price asking them to pull the plug immediately on this appalling product.

What does it mean to follow Jesus in the 21st century?

The same that it always has: radically and faithfully.

Ronald J. Sider and Evangelicals for Social Action are most respected for their pioneering work in the area of evangelical social concern. However, Sider’s great contribution to social justice is but a part of a larger vision – namely, biblical discipleship. His works, which span more than four decades, have guided the faithful to be authentic gospel-bearers in ecclesial, cultural, and political arenas. This book honors Ron Sider by bringing together a group of scholar-activists, old and young, to reflect upon the gospel and its radical implications for the 21st century. Contributors include Craig Keener, Vinay Samuel, Melba Maggay, John Perkins, and Heid Unruh.

15

16

School EquaL= ity as a Matter of Faith How Christians can do justice to public education

by Nicole Baker Fulgham and Aria Kirkland-Harris “I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one.” Ezekiel 22:30

Illustration by Linda Frichtel (LindaFrichtel.com)

D

espite the fact that our nation officially ended racial segregation in public education nearly 60 years ago with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, we still have two very separate and unequal school systems in our nation.

The authors of this article are two examples of public school done right.

We are both African American women of faith who grew up in stable, two-parent households. Our parents were able to pursue higher education, and those values were instilled in us from an early age. We had teachers who warned our parents about underperforming neighborhood schools, and our parents figured out how to navigate the system and got us into stronger schools in other neighborhoods.

We went to magnet middle and high schools with competitive AP courses, STEM, and International Baccalaureate programs. With the help, love, and support of our parents, teachers, and church families, we were able to parlay our public school educations into Ivy League educations and doctoral degrees.

But the cold truth is that the educational opportunities that were afforded us

are neither typical nor characteristic of the experiences that most African American and Latino children have in our nation’s public schools, especially if they are living in low-income communities.

When we became public school teachers (in Southern California and DC), we were hit hard by the reality that common race does not necessarily mean common experience. We had race in common with our students, but we had had educational opportunities that set us apart, and that realization was a big awakening. Our students were schooled in substandard facilities—broken windows that were never repaired, rotten floorboards that had been chewed up by mice and termites, restroom facilities that prompted parents to call the health department, torn and tattered textbooks, food that was sometimes spoiled and moldy, and the list goes on. Those are the hurdles that we faced as teachers coming out of the gate, before we even started to think about instruction or the challenges that our students faced outside of the school walls.

Many hardworking, dedicated teachers and leaders in our school buildings have learned how to make do with less, but 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, they shouldn’t have to.

Income and outcomes Now, before we go any further, we want to make it clear that we stand firm on the position that we cannot allow poverty to lower our expectations for students, but at the same time we cannot ignore the impact that it has on educational outcomes. By the time they reach fourth grade, students from low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their wealthier peers. That means that there are 10-year-olds reading on a first-grade level. And while their wealthier peers are working with complex fractions, these same kids are still learning to count and struggling with basic addition. This disparity only worsens over time. Half of students living in poverty will not graduate from high school, and the ones that do make it are graduating with eighth-grade skills. Out of that 50 percent who do graduate from high school, only one in 10 will go on to graduate from a four-year college or university.

We cannot afford to ignore these issues.

The set of statistics and inequalities that we just laid out are collectively referred to as “the achievement gap” or “educational inequity.” In its most technical sense, the achievement gap refers to the persistent disparity in educational outcomes (or test scores) between different subgroups of students, particularly those defined by gender, race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. But the inequalities go much deeper than standardized test

15

Five Things Every Christian Can Do—Right Now—to Help Close the Achievement Gap ① Volunteer as a tutor, mentor, or reading partner.

School-based and off-site tutoring and mentoring programs are always in need of volunteers. Their lessons are typically scripted, and they provide training for people who may need to brush up on those old elementary school skills. National service organizations like Boys and Girls Clubs of America and The United Way will facilitate the volunteer placement process for you as they specialize in connecting volunteers with direct reading, tutoring, and mentoring opportunities. ② Support public school partnerships through your church.

Many congregations are already supporting schools and families through book drives or school clean-up days and by sponsoring field trips or offering after-school and summer programs for neighborhood students. Find out what your church is doing and volunteer. Many of these ministries need administrative and logistical support, so even people with unpredictable work schedules can still help. For more ideas, check out the terrific resources in the “More than Paper and Pencils” on page 18, and read about the many exciting things happening in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area in “Church/School Partnerships = Win/Win” on page 19. ③ Advocate for early childhood education and other important reforms in your state.

This can be done through the traditional routes of civic engagement by contacting your congressperson or state legislature. You can also educate yourself and others on pressing educational issues by researching the following organizations: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC.org), The Children’s Defense Fund (ChildrensDefense.org), Stand for Children (Stand.org), and The Education Trust (EdTrust.org). ④ Make financial contributions to effective organizations.

Most educational equity organizations are nonprofits that rely on the gracious financial stewardship of individuals. In addition to offering our time and talents, financial contributions are yet another way that we all can support organizations that are working tirelessly to make educational equity a reality for all children. Most organizations also accept online donations through their websites. (See “More that Paper and Pencils” on page 18.) ⑤ Become an “Ambassador” for The Expectations Project in your region.

TEP Ambassadors are a huge asset to us as they help form grassroots coalitions of churches in regions where TEP does not have a permanent office. TEP staff will provide training and support materials for those interested in educating others about the achievement gap, forming small groups around the book Educating All God’s Children, committing committing to praying for our children and schools, as well as a host of other opportunities. For more information, go to TheExpectationsProject.org > Get involved.

Race Equity Equality by Clayton Singleton(ClaytonSingleton.com)

scores. Some describe it as an “opportunity gap,” bringing attention to the difference between a child’s potential and her actual achievement. Others describe the gap in terms of having “low expectations” for students in poverty and believe that there is widespread acceptance of mediocrity in how we value our nation’s most vulnerable children.

However you choose to define the achievement gap, these gross educational disparities are at the core of our nation’s struggle to provide pathways out of poverty, and we must do something to change them.

Since a quality education helps open the doors of opportunity for children to engage fully in a civic, academic, and purposefilled life, what is our role and responsibility as people of faith in eliminating educational inequity? How can we close the achievement gap to ensure that all God’s children receive a high quality education?

This is the lifeblood of our work at The Expectations Project, and, more importantly, it is the hope of the gospel. We believe that the same God who specializes in making old things new, the One whose strength is made perfect in our weakness (and our lack of answers), the God who loves justice and commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, can and will heal our broken education system.

We believe that if more faith-motivated people will commit to this work of closing the achievement gap, we can shift the paradigm and transform the way the education community thinks about reform.

The challenge of privilege As is often true with social challenges, the decision makers in the education reform space who influence policy do not

18

overwhelmingly reflect the backgrounds of the individuals most in need of transformational change and equality. At first glance, it may seem as though most of us do not fit the description of education leaders and influencers.

After all, only a few privileged individuals possess that level of power. But if we dig a little bit deeper, we will find that these decision-making privileges also exist in the day-to-day interactions between those who exercise an ability to influence systems, to whatever degree possible, and those who do not. Within the context of education, privilege boils down to opportunity and choice. That means that if you had the advantage of attending a high-performing school, based on zip code, rather than an underperforming school, then you are privileged. If your child has the option to enroll in honors, AP, or gifted classes, when plenty of schools do not offer these options, you are privileged. These are wonderful options that all children should have, and parents should not feel guilty about doing whatever they can to make these opportunities a reality for their children. But as Christians, we are commanded to love our neighbors (and their children) as ourselves, so shouldn’t we be fighting for all children to have these opportunities?

This question seems like a no-brainer, but navigating these challenges of limited opportunity and choice has proven to be a momentous challenge for everyone involved—privileged or not. However, if the group of education decision makers in the room is made up exclusively of those who have educational, racial, or economic privilege, can we really expect to come up with solutions that will be acceptable and fair for all?

If we are going to do this work right, we must reflect on our own experiences with privilege and be honest about how those experiences affect the ways in which we engage others.

We must acknowledge our privileged educational circumstances, be truthful about our desire to have what’s best for own children, and then humbly and fearlessly use our power, privilege, and influence to extend the same opportunities to others.

Every faith tradition argues for working on behalf of the disenfranchised, and as Christians we are called to “speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute” (Prov.

31:8). Scriptures like this one, along with the opening passage, from Ezekiel 22:30, remind us that our God is looking for intercessors. The education sector calls it advocacy, but when you look closely, advocacy and intercession are really the same thing. We hope to settle disagreements between opposing sides. We defend those who cannot, for whatever reason, defend themselves. We have all been called to stand in this gap.

Educational advocacy organizations are constantly trying to figure out how to authentically and respectfully engage members of communities that have been failed by the public education system. If we want to fix this broken education system, the voices and perspectives of those who are impacted by poverty must be included in the policy- and decision-making processes.

It’s one thing to reach out to a group of low-income families and tell them about our idea for change, but it will largely remain at the surface level. A more effective and sincere approach would be to truly seek out ideas from those same families and be willing to change our own perspectives based on what we hear and learn from them. That mindset and action will help us dismantle our own privilege and will more likely yield true community

support for sustainable solutions. Consensus building may be messy and take longer, but we believe it’s a more authentic, faith-filled approach that genuinely values everyone. This is no easy task, so it must be done with a spirit of humility, civility, and desire for reconciliation.

Christian civility in the debate The question about civility’s role in the education space is complex, but it doesn’t have to be. It has proven to be one of the biggest challenges in education reform. At its best, civility helps newcomers feel welcomed in unknown spaces, something that is desperately needed by our disenfran-

The same God whose strength is made perfect in our weakness, the God who loves justice and commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, can and will heal our broken education system. If more faithmotivated people will commit to closing the achievement gap, we can shift the paradigm and transform the way the education community thinks about reform. chised families. Feeling at ease in a new place is a blessing and helps us to open up and share our thoughts and ideas with others, and that is what authentic community engagement requires. But at its worst, civility can lack respect and the sincerity of heart that true collaboration and open dialogue require. Far too often, “being civil” is used to describe how we behave with people we don’t care for and prefer not to spend time with; we use empty courtesies that mask disdain or disapproval. Unfortunately, the latter is often seen in public education debates. This work is hard, even painstaking at times, and progress requires strong commitment, conviction, and a willingness to compromise. Christians have a tremendous opportunity to make an impact in this space of need.

Once individual participants in the education reform space have achieved genuine civility, we must open a new dialogue and invest the time and care that it takes to develop authentic relationships. If we can forgive past hurts, put disagreements aside, and focus on our shared belief that all children deserve the best education that our world has to offer them, then we will have a real shot at fixing this broken system.

Putting faith into action The Expectations Project has as its sole mission to mobilize and equip people of faith to help eliminate inequity in public education. We wrestle every day with the notions of privilege and authentic community engagement, and we are deeply committed to operating in a way that will help children in our most disenfranchised communities—and to holding ourselves accountable to doing the work in a way that reflects our faith.

17

More than Paper and Pencils These national organizations help Christians partner with their public schools through mentoring programs, community revitalization, and more. ✎ America’s Promise (AmericasPromise.org) helps mobilize Americans to act via their 400+ national partner organizations and local affiliates. Its top priority: ensuring that all young people graduate from high school ready for college, work, and life through its Grad Nation movement to end the nation’s dropout crisis. Their work involves raising awareness, creating connections, and sharing knowledge to provide children these five key supports: caring adults, safe places, a healthy start, an effective education, and opportunities to help others. ✎ BeUndivided (BeUndivided.com) helps churches that want to invest time and effort year-round in students and schools—whatever the need and without agenda or strings attached. Their resource-rich website will walk you throughout the steps needed to initiate and establish your own church-school partnership. ✎ Communities in Schools (CommunitiesinSchools.org) began in the 1970s when founder Bill Milliken, then a youth advocate in New York City, came up with the idea of bringing community resources inside a public school building where they are accessible, coordinated, and accountable. Since then it has become the nation’s leading dropout prevention organization, with a unique model that positions a coordinator inside schools to assess needs and deliver necessary resources that remove barriers to success. ✎ DonorsChoose (DonorsChoose.org) engages the “public” in public schools by giving people a simple, accountable, and personal way to address educational inequity. Teachers post classroom project requests—“ranging from pencils for poetry to microscopes for mitochondria”—and donors can give as little or as much as they want. Requested items are then purchased and shipped to a classroom in need. ✎ Faith for Change (FaithforChange.org) is a growing coalition of houses of faith across the country united by a desire and calling to improve academic outcomes for underperforming and high-needs public school students, from pre-K to 12th grade.

Through the Community School Model, educational reform, and programming resources, the coalition works to bring about academic success for all students. Faith for Change is a community foundation operating under the Institute for Educational Leadership. ✎ Kids Hope USA (KidsHopeUSA.org) offers churches and schools a proven, award-winning model to meet the emotional, social, and academic needs of children.

Its programs create one-on-one mentoring relationships between adult church members who are willing to give a little time and a lot of love and at-risk elementary school children in their community who desperately need loving, caring adults in their lives. ✎ National Church Adopt-a-School Initiative (ChurchAdoptaSchool.org) was formed to both train and equip churches to replicate Dr. Tony Evans’s proven model of social outreach in their area. NCAASI promotes community revitalization through church-based social services by leveraging the existing structures of both churches and schools.

18

We have been given amazing opportunities to support faith leaders and congregations who want to help our nation’s public schools. We are partnering with national denominations and faith-based organizations to educate their members about the massive inequities in public schools, and we are encouraging them to get involved at the local level. In Indianapolis, our faith leaders are working with area superintendents and parents to ensure that all of their city’s children have access to exceptional early childhood education.

In Washington, DC, we have a growing network of clergy who are partnering with neighborhood schools and are supporting efforts to educate and empower parents to advocate for educational equity. Growing networks of local pastors want to ensure that teachers in their local schools are trained and supported so they can do the herculean work of closing achievement gaps.

It’s an exciting time to be involved in this work! It can be hard, messy, and complex, but we learn as we go, and it is glorious. There is much work to be done, and we need your help. Consider getting involved in educational change. Get started today by checking out “Five Things Every Christian Can Do—Right Now—to Help Close the Achievement Gap” on page 16.

As people of faith, we serve a God who will help us reflect on our own privilege, reconcile caustic debates, and operate in a way that truly engages communities and changes the game for kids. Together, we can help change educational outcomes for this generation and for many more to come.

The Expectations Project partners with faith-motivated individuals, leaders, congregations, and organizations to develop local and national campaigns that help enact transformational change for low-income public schools. They strategize with, equip, and support their faith community partners by developing media campaigns, influencing local and national decision makers, and mobilizing people of faith to take action on key education issues. Learn more at TheExpectationsProject.org.

Nicole Baker Fulgham is the founder and president of The Expectations Project and is the author of Educating All God’s Children: What Christians Can–and Should–Do to Improve Public Education for Low-Income Kids (Brazos Press, April 2013).

Aria Kirkland-Harris is a child advocate, educator, and intercessor. As a former elementary school teacher in Washington, DC, she came face-to-face with the achievement gap and eventually decided to explore and implement community-based approaches to school turnaround.

Church/School Partnerships= Win/Win

A church that wants to impact the community needs look no further than the public school

Linda Frichtel (LindaFrichtel.com)

By Nita Thomason “I was driving through West Dallas recently and barely recognized it,� a woman said at a recent gathering of Christian leaders. A few weeks earlier, similar sentiments were expressed among a group of friends discussing tutoring in a Title I school in the Dallas-Ft. Worth suburbs. At a meeting of culturally diverse church leaders in Dallas, there was increasing enthusiasm for church collaboration, and an attitude of hope prevailed.

As the largest recipient of refugees of any US metropolitan area, DFW is home to a population of which 44 percent are first- or secondgeneration immigrants. The Dallas schools are nearly 70 percent Hispanic and over 20 percent African American. Rebecca Walls is executive director of Unite, a network of DFW churches joining forces to engage and transform the community. She sees these changes as an unprecedented opportunity for churches to mobilize collaboratively in externally focused community transformation.

Last year Christians from across Dallas joined together at Park Cities Baptist Church to launch a Christ-centered network called A Prayed For City (AP4C.org) and began covering the metroplex in united prayer 365 days a year.

Churches, private citizens, and government officials are joining together to work for, among other things, improved schools with effective principals leading them and skilled teachers in every classroom.

Walls believes that the single most impactful thing a church can do to positively change a

19

Hopefully one day soon, every Title I school will have at least one church partner coming alongside it to provide quality education and care for every child. community is to partner with a public school. Unite has already identified 175 church-school partnerships in Dallas and Collin Counties.

“We’re in the process of determining what each partnership involves,” says Walls,“so that together we can increase effectiveness, build capacity, and encourage more churches to build these kinds of relationships.” She hopes that one day soon, every Title I school will have at least one church partner coming alongside it to provide quality education and care for every child.

Schools frequently welcome church engagement. The TurnAround Agenda (TTA) of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship Church has become a model for church and public school partnerships as it seeks to rebuild communities from the inside out by addressing moral and spiritual foundations. Utilizing public schools as a primary vehicle for delivering social services, the TTA model incorporates technology and education programs, a family care pregnancy center, human needs assistance, and school-based after-school and summer programs.

TTA began as a crisis intervention when a local high school principal asked Pastor Tony Evans for assistance in dealing with gang activity and other disruptive behavior among students. Today their volunteers partner in 61 schools in the Dallas area and offer services as varied as one-on-one mentoring, literacy and computer instruction, sports leagues, and abstinence education facilitators.

Larry James, author of The Wealth of the Poor: How Valuing Every Neighbor Restores Hope in Our Cities, started his urban ministry decades ago when he left his suburban church in response to an invitation to start a food pantry for some of the poorest residents of Dallas. Now with a ministry called CitySquare, James lobbies hard for fair immigration policy. Why? His friendships with many young people who are undocumented have led him to ask, “Why would we want to waste the investment we’ve already made in these young lives in the form of public education?” James understands that advocacy for the poor frequently involves challenging the systemic forces that contribute to poverty. Certainly the complex issue of educational equity is frequently entangled in the political arena, and partisan roadblocks hinder positive change.

Change is reverberating west of the Trinity River where Mercy Street Ministry leads the charge for community transformation, committed relationships, and catalytic leadership development. They be-

20

lieve that true and lasting change will be brought about by the residents of their community but that sometimes an infusion of hope is needed from the outside. Garrett Smith, Mercy Street’s director of mentoring, reports that while many of their staff live in the West Dallas community, their pool of 400 mentors comes from churches both inside and outside the West Dallas area, with many coming from Watermark Church in North Dallas and Park Cities Presbyterian Church.

Trey Hill, executive director of Mercy Street, says, “We believe that community transformation happens primarily through relationship and not through programs. So what we ask people to do is get engaged in the life of a child and walk with the children from 4th to 12th grade, believing it is the long-term relationship where the real impact is made, not just in the student’s life but in the mentor’s life as well.”

Watermark Church and the Village Church are two of a number of Dallas churches becoming known for community engagement through relational ministry. A younger generation of evangelicals is picking up the tempo for change. With less interest in making money and more interest in making a difference, many young people in their 20s are choosing service among the poor as a way of life.

Lindsey Boatman is a single young adult who teaches “at-risk” high school students ages 16-21 at Cornerstone Crossroads Academy (CCA), exposing them to the hope and abundant life found in Jesus. Boatman lives in the Fair Park community where she teaches and attends the Village Church, where many young adults have seriously engaged troubled youth in Dallas through mentoring programs and by living in impoverished neighborhoods and developing relationships with the young people there.

Located directly across from the local middle school, Village Church also sponsors clean-up days at the middle and high schools, hosts faculty/staff breakfasts, and invites students over to the church for basketball games and barbeques. “I wouldn’t want to be [here] without that kind of support,” Thomas Jefferson High School Principal Sandi Massey told the Dallas News. “The outside force of the community coming in gives us this hope and courage to not stop doing what we are doing and not give up on our kids.”

Woodcreek Church in a northern suburb of Dallas has developed a vibrant ministry with a Title I school, Forman Elementary in Plano, over the past seven years. Strong friendships grew from the start between school personnel and church members. The partnership includes a classroom academic tutoring program staffed by church volunteers. Principal Tramy Tran explains, “The Woodcreek mentors are what we think of when we think of academic mentors.” The church also collects and donates thousands of dollars of school supplies to Forman each year.

The evolution of the church’s holiday gift program for the students shows how the hearts and attitudes of the church members have matured through the relationship with the school. Initially Woodcreek members adopted Forman families identified by the school as particularly needy, and church members offered huge bags of gifts chosen specifically for them. Donors enjoyed sharing their abundance, but the Woodcreek team felt unsettled by the charity aspect of the process, which robbed parents of the joy and dignity of selecting their own gifts. Instead the church began hosting a big party for the families each year, where Christmas stories, holiday food, and festive songs created a climate of celebration that all could share in, and gifts were provided in a more discreet manner.

Still, church leaders recognized the chasm between the givers and the receivers.

So following the suggestion of Principal Tran, the church moved away from the family gift-giving to providing “parent gifts” for the Forman “store.” Each year thousands of dollars’ worth of note cards, body lotions, tool kits, picture frames, etc., are donated and displayed so that children can shop for their parents for the holidays. The school uses an incentive program, awarding students with “Falcon Bucks” for positive behaviors such as turning in homework and demonstrating admirable character. Students exchange their bucks for goods in the school store or other rewards.

The “parent gifts” are hot items during the Christmas season. The program encourages generosity in the children, promotes self-initiative, and helps students learn important lessons about the free enterprise system as they “spend” their own earnings on gifts

for their parents. Last December three other churches—Legacy Church, Plano Bible Chapel, and North Dallas Community Church—helped provide gifts, and all four churches worked together to sponsor Forman Game Night for the students so parents could go Christmas shopping.

Another way that Woodcreek supports Forman is through the Pine Cove Base Camp sponsored by the Forman PTA. Church members provide scholarships so Forman students can attend this upscale summer day camp experience. Woodcreek also sponsors a vibrant ESL ministry, a strong component of which is the program provided for the children while

EDUCATE YOURSELF Resources to explore and share Educating All God's Children: What Christians Can—and Should—Do to Improve Public Education for Low-Income Kids

by Nicole Baker Fulgham (Brazos, 2013) This book provides concrete action steps for working to ensure that every kid gets the quality public education she deserves. Personal narratives from Christian public school teachers demonstrate how the achievement gap can be solved.

"Experiencing Public Schools: A Process of Immersion and Discernment" is a short online guide from the United Church of Christ to help a congregation set up, carry out, and reflect on an immersion trip to a local public schools. Access it at bit.ly/1mZl7jX.

Give Me Strength: Personal Prayers for School Teachers

by Sharon Harris-Ewing (Pilgrim Press, 2013) This book not only makes a great gift for the school teachers you know but also sensitizes non-teachers to the challenges those in education face.

How It's Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools

by Karin Chenoweth (Harvard Education Press, 2009) This book provides detailed accounts of the ways in schools with high-poverty and high-minority student populations have dramatically boosted student achievement and diminished (and often eliminated) achievement gaps.

The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

by Amanda Ripley (Simon & Schuster, 2013) In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they’ve never seen before. This book is about building resilience in a new world, as told by the young Americans who have the most at stake.

Unfinished Business: Closing the Racial Achievement Gap in Our Schools

by Pedro Noguera and Jean Yonemura Wing (Jossey-Bass, 2008) This book investigates the dynamics of race and achievement at Berkeley High School, where cultural attitudes, academic tracking, curricular access, and after-school activities serve as sorting mechanisms that set students on paths of success or failure.

TEACHED (from Loudspeaker Films) is a series of short documentary films that candidly address the causes and consequences of our nation's race-based achievement gap, looking at continuing inequality in our public school system and taking viewers into those communities where its effects are most severe. Learn more at Teached.org.

the adults attend English classes.

Program Director Kay Hurley says, “A high-quality preschool environment, geared to teaching toddlers and preschoolers the English language through a rich experiential learning environment, enhances the development of the children’s ability to understand and speak English. So when they enter a more formal program, such as Head Start or public kindergarten, they will already have a better grasp of English.”

The Stewpot of First Presbyterian Church of Dallas started serving the hungry in the inner city in 1975, but now it provides a wide range of social services, including a program for children. Suzanne Erickson, director of children and youth at the Stewpot, understands that poverty doesn’t need to be the future of the children they serve.

“Our program for middle school and high school students includes homework tutoring,” says Erickson,“but it also provides enrichment activities such as engineering and art projects that promote higher thinking skills. We incorporate career and college exploration into our programming with trips to Texas universities. We then provide $2,000 in college scholarship money per year for students up to a $10,000 total.”

Many challenges remain in the DFW schools, but an invigorating wave of progress is moving through the area in the form of collaborative partnerships between churches and schools, with efforts moving away from charity and toward empowerment. When community sectors such as schools, churches, nonprofits, and government work together, everyone wins.

Nita Thomason teaches future teachers in the education department of Collin College. She leads the Community Impact Ministry of Woodcreek Church.

21

The World Is Our Classroom:

These neighborhood girls love to roam the block and check in on

Recovering the humanity of education

by Anthony Grimes

T

he form of education should follow its function. That is to say that once we agree upon the purpose of education, dialogue about which pedagogies best accomplish this end becomes more meaningful. We may even dare to raise the question, “Does compulsory schooling as currently constructed actually educate kids?” By “educate” I don’t necessarily mean help them to become more obedient or more assimilated to white American culture––schools do these things quite well.

By “educate” I mean help kids to become more human.

Does school encourage kids to think more critically both about the world and all the profound, life-giving possibilities that they themselves embody? The great American crisis is that for all too many precious, pliable, and eager children riding the assembly line of schooling from preschool to a college degree, while sitting through thousands of hours of lectures and evaluations, the answer is “no.” The greater crisis is that some fall off this conveyor belt prematurely, robbing them of even the mediocre status quo. Both realities should cause us to pause and grieve.

Selah. As my wise uncle and teacher Dr. Vincent Harding often repeats, “We’ve got work to do!”

Of course, we have the important work of innovating curriculum.

Of course, under-resourced schools need more funding and better policy.

(I recently worked for months in Colorado on a failed campaign attempt to pass an innovative school funding act called Amendment 66, because, as a former teacher, I recognize the economic restrictions that handicap urban and rural public schools.) Yet the much more important and often neglected work lies outside of the classroom––in the people themselves.

We must find ways to shrink the ever-widening gap between schooling and education.

22

We do this by reorienting society to better value the informal and far less tangible ways that kids everywhere are becoming more human. Let’s celebrate much more a kid’s effort to think critically and compassionately about the world and far less one who can simply regurgitate the disembodied names of continents. What our country needs now more than ever is an awakening of ordinary citizens to take on the task of rehumanizing education right in the magnificently complicated neighborhoods where children live. School starts on the block––the world is a classroom.

Let’s summon our inner Moses to tell Pharaoh-like institutions “Let my children go!” Don’t disown them, but set them loose; let them create; encourage them to follow their naturally curious selves into awe-ful discoveries that we adults often overlook for the sake of expediency. Let them be a little less predictable and manicured and far more dangerous. After all, it was children who eventually led the Birmingham Campaign of 1963 that toppled the cities’ discrimination laws—children showing up by the hundreds, skipping entire days of school, enduring high-pressure water hoses at the hands of racist police officers, and, yes, being locked up in paddy wagons and then school buses on their way to jail. Maybe we underestimate the revolutionary potential of our little ones. Or maybe it’s that the very design of schooling makes it difficult for these kinds of expressions of democratic creativity to take place today. Instead, the next standardized test looms.

Creative education gets stifled in a market-driven society. The privatization and professionalization of schooling has influenced more and more academic institutions to elevate job placement as their crowning achievement.

This is evidenced not only by more job-centric advertising methods at major universities but also by increasingly sparse enrollment rates in humanities

neighbors.

departments. Consider, for example, a recent Wall Street Journal article, which revealed that the number of humanities degrees at Harvard University has dropped by more than half since the 1960s.1 Likewise, it’s become rare to find subjects such as physical education or music offered in primary or secondary schools. When the financial future of students (or teachers) becomes the supreme end, school gets reduced to its most expedited form. The street hustler and student alike have the same goal––get paper at all costs. Such a process, void of passion for discovery and true character, would be utterly foreign to the ancient Greeks, who viewed education (paideia) as the means to becoming a more humane and involved member of community.2 We are seeing glimpses of a reorienting, rehumanizing educational movement in Northeast Park Hill, an urban neighborhood in Denver, Colo., where I was raised and to which I recently returned, along with my wife, Erika. Northeast Park Hill is home to some of the most vulnerable youth in Denver. Roughly 56 percent of the kids in my neighborhood were born to teen mothers, mothers without a high school education, or born at or below the poverty line. What’s more, Holly Square, situated a few blocks away from us, has an infamous reputation for its long history of gang violence. A $5 million Boys and Girls Club was recently built there, but the area still evokes a debilitating aura of fear for some. A young street kid once sadly explained to me why he desperately wants to escape the neighborhood: “Everyone gets shot in Park Hill.”

One day, I curiously walked across the street to talk with Mrs. Jones–– our 85-year-old Caribbean neighbor who has lived in her house since before I was born––and asked her, amidst the noise of sirens in the distance, what she felt our neighborhood needed most. Her response was simply that she wished people would unglue themselves from the TV and talk to each other more. Our block was missing that intangible quality of togetherness that I enjoyed as a boy and that makes a place a neighborhood instead of just a ’hood.

In response to Mrs. Jones’s wish, we launched a backyard community garden on our street to provide a safe place for kids to learn the life skills contained in farming and, more importantly, for them to rub shoulders with the gray hairs of the block. Our crops won’t win any farmer’s market awards anytime soon, but the vision caught. People are coming out of their mini fortresses––kids are outside painting Zechariah’s vision with the skid-marks of their scooters: “And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing” (Zech. 8:5). They’re beginning to plumb the deep wells of wisdom and knowledge all around them. The world is a wondrous classroom, filled with gifts. In this classroom there are no expert teachers, because everyone has lessons to teach, even them. And this process of eliminating the teacher-student contradiction is, as Paulo Freire describes, the starting point of education.3 I often look across the street, right next to Mrs. Jones’ house, and see kids huddling around Mrs. Cici’s steps as she tends her front yard. Mrs. Cici’s imposing 6’2” frame houses the spirit of a hilarious Southern monarch.

There’s always a funny joke imbedded in her riveting stories about characters she once met in Europe or deep inside Latin American jungles. Like a migrat-

ing herd, the children scurry along to whomever welcomes them–– sometimes traversing in and out of our front door––always picking up valuable nuggets wherever they go: a recipe here, a history lesson there, family training everywhere, the spirituals of their African ancestors, social critique by Joel-the-Conspiracy-Theorist. This is learning undomesticated by a discombobulated series of bells and analysis. They are becoming, in the words of Freire, “people educat[ing] each other through the mediation of the world.”4 Jesus himself taught like this–– like a person who realized the infinite potential of the world around him to illustrate the mysteries of his kingdom.

I know, I know. “This kind of ’education’ is wildly unpredictable, irreproducible, and intangible,” the critics will be quick to respond.

Indeed, and that’s exactly why I would never claim that the experience on our block can replace formal schooling. Still, I wonder: What would happen if we took the best of what is happening on Eudora Street and in renewed pockets of poverty-riddled communities all across the US and, somehow, someway merged it into more formal classroom spaces, and vice versa? I think it would be revolutionary. Because although the education served by this ragtag roster of eclectic resident-teachers may not formally prepare these kids for the next standardized test, it does what education is supposed to do: It makes us all a little more human.

And it’s about time we celebrated that.

Writer and activist Anthony Grimes (AnthonyGrimes.com) has a vision to see empowered neighbors building beloved community. He is the founder of UrbanMuse Media. As a leader within the Christian Community Development Association, he locally and nationally engages the social issues of education and mass incarceration.

(Editor’s note: endnotes for this article are posted at PRISMmagazine. org/endnotes.)

The author and his son tend the backyard community garden.

23

A Safe Place to At Children’s Garden in Manila, young lives reach for the light Story and photos by Whitney Bauck

T

oday’s young people have sometimes been referred to as “Generation Me,” and their use of social media to fill the world with endless updates about everything from their breakfast fare to the ever-popular “selfie” seems to justify the label. However, even amongst a demographic often chastised for their self-centeredness, pockets of young people are doing God’s will in innovative, sacrificial, and redemptive ways.

In 2004, in the crowded capital of the Philippines, one such group was forming. A young Filipino pastor named “Buddy” Gallo, along with a handful of 20-somethings from his church, had begun hanging out every Thursday evening in an area called Antipolo, getting to know the teenage street boys who would show up on the curb after the police had vacated the area. The informal ministry

was entirely funded out of the volunteers’ own pockets. Regardless, the young volunteers loved what they were doing so much that the project quickly snowballed. One of the original volunteers, Sharon Gersava, recalls, “We did it once a week, then twice a week, and then we were just kinda like, ’Okay, who’s going there today? Who’s going there tomorrow?’” For about two years, the young people continued to spend their evenings playing with the boys, feeding them, getting to know their stories, and building friendships with them.

Though the volunteers didn’t yet know it, the seed for the ministry that would become Children’s Garden had been planted. It was becoming clear that “we needed to do something more,” says Gersava. As they prayed about their next step, the volunteers concluded that they needed to shelter their new friends.

But as young people either still in college or having just entered the workforce,

Thanks to God’s provision to date, Children’s Garden cofounder Sharon Gersava is optimistic about the ministry’s ambitious plans.

24

Grow coming up with the money necessary for such an endeavor appeared impossible.

However, as the volunteers continued to pray faithfully, an answer popped up seemingly from nowhere when Pastor Gallo bumped into a woman who was willing to let the group use a property in Antipolo, free of charge. Before they knew it, the team was meeting with the board members of a waning organization called Children’s Garden, which had served as an orphanage, feeding program, and preschool at different stages since its founding in 1955. After countless legal discussions, the new group decided to carry on the legacy of Children’s Garden by adopting the name for their own endeavor.

As a new board of directors was assembled and all the necessary permits renewed, “CG part II, the new beginning,” as Gersava calls it, came into being in 2007.

In its current manifestation, Children’s Garden provides residential care for former street boys aged 10-18. The program provides the Alternative Learning System (ALS), the Filipino equivalent of a GED, to help older boys who dropped out of school at an early age to earn their high school diplomas; younger boys are enrolled in regular public school. The boys can also enroll in TESDA, a technical/vocational education program instituted by the government, where they can learn practical skills like carpentry or welding to help render them employable in the future. CG’s five full-time staff members also disciple the boys through informal mentoring, Bible studies, and worship. CG feeds into another program called After Care, which caters to young men who have passed through Children’s Garden but are not yet living independently.

CG’s ministries don’t stop with the boys: The staff also runs numerous outreaches to the community throughout the week, including service to neighborhood squatters, Bible studies with prostituted women and in the nearby women’s prison, and of course the Thursday evenings with the street kids of Antipolo that date back to the early days of the ministry. The boys accompany the staff to many of these street outreaches, where they are “very good at

serving, because they’re ministering to people who come from their same background,” according to Gersava.

Now CG’s administrative head, Gersava declares that “Whenever I talk about Children’s Garden I always say, ’It’s all God’s thing, from day one.’” The staff’s conviction that God “orchestrated everything” certainly doesn’t stem from a lack of setbacks, however. Despite the early volunteers’ full-time commitment to the ministry, they essentially worked for free.

“These were passionate people who knew this was their calling,” explains Gersava. “You don’t really earn money [working] here. They don’t care. They just have the heart to help these people.”

For the first year or two that volunteers lived fulltime at CG, their only tangible compensation came in the form of free room and board and enough money to cover toiletries. Even now, staff salaries are almost always late, and the administration is often uncertain about how it will provide for their needs.

But Gersava’s attitude towards the perpetually tight budget remains doggedly optimistic.

She describes one situation when CG had no food for the next meal and no money to buy any as “one of the highlights of working here.”

“We gathered and were like, ’God, we don’t have food anymore.’ We had 20 boys and 10 staff. We were praying, ’Just provide for us. You called us to do this, and you will sustain us, we know that.’ The moment right after that prayer, the phone rings.

The man on the other end was asking where CG was—but we

“Now I have this hope, and I know that God has given me great talent to use.”

My name is Francis Kim. I grew up without parents. My brother and I were taken care of by an uncle, but I was really hurt by what had happened with my parents. My attitude soured, and I screwed up my studies.

At 13, they transferred me to my other tita [aunt], and my life got worse. I started smoking, drinking, doing marijuana, drugs. And if I didn’t have money, I had sex with men. I was very rebellious, and I was asking myself, “Why is my life like this?”

Then I had a friend who was talking about skills training, and I asked if I could join him, because I wanted to earn money. So we attended this camp, and I’m very thankful—if it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have this relationship with Jesus! During the camp, one of the staff asked if I wanted to continue studying. So I filled out a form, and I was thinking, Why not try CG? I was brought to Children’s Garden in January 2010, and I had this fire in my heart to know God more. If I hadn’t known him I wouldn’t have experienced all these things; he brings me to places I don’t know, to situations where I can only trust and rely upon him. Now I have this hope, and I know that God has given me great talent to use.

I am now involved in the ministry. I am in charge of maintaining this building—I started with a mop, sweeping the floor, arranging the chairs.

Now I’m in charge of the audio system, and I’m part of the worship team.

I really thank God, because if he hadn’t taken me from the dark part of my life, I wouldn’t be like this. I know how to have a good relationship with other people; God has changed me. The most important thing is that the fear of the Lord is in me.

25

were very careful about giving out information, for safety reasons.

We didn’t give the man CG’s location. But a few minutes later, a car parked at the garage, and he got out with bags of groceries, rice, and toiletries that would last us for several weeks. We still don’t really know who he was.”

Gersava notes that this is just one of the many incredible acts of provision that have helped sustain CG since the beginning. This strong sense of God’s presence, as well as the undeniable impact of the ministry, is what keeps the staff going.

“To see lives transformed really warms our hearts,” says Gersava. “These were delinquent boys, most of them. They were pickpocketing, using rugby [glue to get high] and other drugs; they even sold their bodies back in the street just to survive—all these messy, ugly things... But to see them now, living their lives with meaning by the grace of God—there’s really hope, you know? They can dream.

They’re not perfect, they still have struggles, but to see God change them is awesome.”

Although constant funding issues would be a deterrent to many, Gersava refuses to stop dreaming about the future of CG. “I think God has told me not to worry anymore,” she says, claiming that she’s seen enough unexpected provision that she’s “excited for how God will show himself, because he always does.”

The staff’s current hope is to be able to open a safe house for the women in prostitution that CG has begun to reach out to. She relates the story of 17- and 21-year-old sisters who never finished elementary school and are now in prostitution, a reality for many girls and young women due to lack of alternatives.

“They say to me, ’I know this is really wrong. But I don’t have an option, I have to do this. I have a kid who has to go to school.”

Others end up selling themselves out of emotional desperation, as demonstrated by the tragic story of a 12-year-old who used to attend CG’s Bible study. Gersava recalls, “She just longed for the love, you know? And she’s like, ’These guys need me. I don’t have to try for their attention; they want me.’”

“What we’re praying for now is to have a drop-in center,” Gersava continues. “And then people can come there, and we can talk to them, mentor them, counsel them, disciple them, tell them about Jesus. A place where they can be safe, a place where they can learn.”

She notes that such a safe house might serve as an intermediary step towards the ultimate founding of a girls’ home, similar to what is in place for boys now.

Regardless of what possible expansions the ministry might make in the future, Gersava and the other staff members keep moving forward in the belief that “we must be blinded in our own physical eyes to see how God’s going to work.” The staff continue to be grateful for the ways they see God using them, and the testimonies of changed lives continue to propel them forward.

Gersava sums up the Children’s Garden mindset simply, asking, “If you can do something now, why not do it?”

Learn more at ChildrensGarden.ph.

A missionary kid who grew up in the Philippines, Whitney Bauck is a photographer and art student at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.

26

“Before I wanted to be a soldier, but God changed that to dreams of becoming a missionary.”

My name is Michael, and I’m 21 years old. When I was 5, I lived on the streets of Manila. I picked pockets just to survive. As I grew up, I began using drugs, and I learned to rob.

At age 12, my friend and I were so high on solvent that we beat a guy and left him for dead.

After that, we robbed a jeepney [a public transportation vehicle], but the operation didn’t work and I got caught.

They couldn’t put me in jail, because I was a minor, so they put me in rehab. I stayed there for three and a half years while attending court hearings, and I kept asking why God allowed these things to happen, if there’s really a God that cares.

I was truly angry. I wanted to be a soldier someday—not to help people but to have revenge on the relatives who hurt my family; all five of my sisters were sexually abused by my relatives. So when I received my dismissal, I thought that maybe it was the right time to take my revenge.

But they sent me to Children’s Garden. The people here told me how to know God. I didn’t really care, but I paid attention to what they said. Then they said how to forgive people who sin against you.

Forgiveness was very hard for me—how could I forgive people who were supposed to care for us but instead did something bad? But after a few years, God worked in my heart. He used the staff here, and I decided to forgive, because God had forgiven me.

I was lucky I made it here. I was blessed. I was a grade 2 student when I came, around 15 or 16 years old. What’s amazing is that I can thank God for everything in my life, even if it was awful—it’s all God’s plan, and he has a purpose for me, like he said in Jeremiah 29:11. He gave me opportunities that not all people have. Right now I have a good job at CG. I’m on junior staff, helping the other staff relate to the boys, because I’ve experienced what the boys are facing.

Before I wanted to be a soldier, but God changed that to dreams of becoming a missionary someday. And I’m looking forward. I don’t know where God will put me, but I just keep on asking and praying. If he wants me somewhere, I will go.

Is the GOD who created us better than the GOD we’ve created?

I n h is n ew b ook , a ccl ai m e d w r i t e r J O N AT H A N M E R R I T T tells never-before-shared stories of how he learned to encounter Jesus in unexpected ways, and invites us to discover the messy mercy and crazy grace of a sometimes startling savior.

“He shows you the Jesus who challenges the chosen, includes the excluded, assaults closed minds, opens hard hearts, and defies all the boxes, categories, and camps.”

—Shane Claiborne, activist and bestselling author of The Irresistible Revolution and Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers

“Brutally honest and stubbornly hopeful. Grace permeates every page.”

—Rachel Held Evans, New York Times bestselling author of A Year of Biblical Womanhood and Evolving in Monkey Town

Available in hardcover and e-book

jonathanmerritt.com www.faithwords.com 29 FAITHWORDS IS A DIVISION OF HACHETTE BOOK GROUP

Revelation at the Ping-Pong Emporium

by Jonathan Merritt “There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.”

Madeleine L’Engle

T

30

The emperor is naked The word “sacrilege” originates from the Latin sacer (“sacred”) and legere (“to steal”). In Roman times, it referred to the plundering of temples and graves. Sacrilege is an attack on religious places, people, and ideas. But what I’ve noticed is that often the people and places labeled “sacrilegious” aren’t stealing the sacred after all; they are mocking the thin shell of pseu-

Photos courtesy of Sister Louisa’s

hree decades ago, Grant Henry was a God-fearing churchgoer who wanted nothing more than to please the Almighty. So zealous was his religious fervor that he pursued a master’s in pastoral care from Princeton Theological Seminary. But after working in churchland for several years, he found himself standing in a chasm between the American church and the sort of faith he believed Jesus promoted. Rather than work at reforming the institution, he left Christianity altogether.

Grant Henry shepherds a different kind of congregation today. He’s the owner of Sister Louisa’s Church of the Living Room and Ping-Pong Emporium (nicknamed “CHURCH”). Nestled in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward, a gentrifying district in the heart of the city, this bar has become a hipster hangout, a gathering place for the de-churched, and a regular happy hour stop for the obscenely beautiful casts of Drop Dead Diva and Vampire Diaries. The website says the doors open for worship daily at 5 p.m., but you’d better come early if you want to snag a barstool and partake of cheap beer and Hebrew National chili dogs.

More than anything, Sister Louisa’s is a place to hang out, a social club of sorts. As Atlanta magazine observed, Sister Louisa’s “is more about fellowship than sacrilege.”1 The bar is full of broken people, many of whom seem to pretend to have everything together. Patrons cock their heads back to belly laugh, keeping conversation light and others at arm’s length.

My first visit to CHURCH plunged me into a sea of conflicting emotions—curiosity, amusement, annoyance, and displeasure by turns. A bouncer greeted me at the front door from behind a scarred pulpit positioned next to a sign that said, “Come on in, precious.” Once I was inside, a hodgepodge of tacky religious décor assaulted me. A statuette of the Virgin Mary stood conspicuously behind the liquor bottles. Choir robes hung on the coatrack to my left.

“Welcome to CHURCH, brother,” the bartender shouted. “Can I get you some spiritual sangria?”

I stepped up to the bar and ordered a hot dog with all the fixin’s— called “The Church Picnic”—because, as the menu boasts, “Jesus loves our coleslaw.” Rather than wait for my food to arrive, I toured the two-story facility. A vintage 1700s Yugoslavian confessional rested in the corner. (Grant planned to transform the confessional into a photo booth, the bartender later informed me, but feared too many people would “relive their childhood abuse experiences.”) Upstairs, crosses fashioned from neon lights hung on the walls. A ping-pong table stood proudly in the center, encircled by oak pews where patrons can cheer on players. No televisions hang in Sister Louisa’s, but I was promised that church organ karaoke would soon begin.

How can such a place thrive in a Bible Belt town like Atlanta? Why doesn’t the community protest this sacrilegious establishment and put it out of business?

My hot dog arrived, and I pushed through the anger-induced nausea to choke it down.

do-righteousness often painted over those things. They are pointing to the holy emperor and telling the crowds the truth about his nakedness.

Those in Sister Louisa’s seem to understand what many modern Christians have forgotten: What we call religion is often a malformation of true faith, one that’s calcified and crystallized and hardened. Rather than a vibrant adventure of knowing and loving God, it is a rigid, formalized, powerseeking, oppressive way of trying to be good or look good or feel good.2 Sister Louisa’s is an irreverent place that pokes fun at faith as if it were a competition; but more than that, it’s a commentary on American Christianity by someone who once waded in chest-deep. In some ways, the critique is quite accurate.

A vintage rendering of a woman with an updo chides, “The higher the hair, the closer to God,” exposing the pretentiousness of modern-day churchgoers. Riffing on the feelgood, self-helpy gospel preached in many congregations, one art piece declares, “It is our duty to catapult each other into greatness.” As a knock on the corporate elements of the institutional church, a baby doll climbs a cross with the phrase LADDER OF SUCCESS scribbled across the horizontal beam. Block letters nailed next to the bar spell out OH R U GOD? as a face-slapping annotation about Christians’ judgmentalism. Numbered rules outline the laws that one must follow to get in good with God. The difference between this church, however, and many real ones is that no one here pretends to obey them.

I couldn’t help noticing the analysis of Christian partisanship. A yard sign near the front entrance says, CHRIST FOR STATE SENATE, while another art piece simply states, JESUS LOVES DICK CHENEY. These pieces remind me that “religion” attempts to build a box in which God lives. It ties down the Almighty with the constraints of routines and rules and limitations and political affiliations. Religion says that God does only certain things in certain ways, no more and no less. That God is who we think God is and nothing else. But faith knows better. Faith knows that God’s calling card is surprise and that what many label as Christianity is just baggage we’re forcing true faith to lug.

Keeping the rules

Sister Louisa’s was about the most unexpected place to find Jesus that I could have imagined, but I believe that God inhabits every cubic inch of this spinning ball of dirt we call Earth, so I knew he must be somewhere.

Sometimes I rush around trying to squeeze God into my life whenever I have a spare moment. I make it to church on Sundays—because I know I should—and say a quick prayer before meals. I try to avoid “bad” activities and “bad” people and “bad” places as much as possible. But when I call to God in the hushed moments, I hear only the sound of my voice.

A life committed to God requires me to do things I don’t always want to do. I feel the nudge to help others, and I groan at the inconvenience. When I’m rude or selfish or unkind, I wrestle with the aftermath. When I know I should share the good news of Jesus with someone, I let my fear and insecurity get the best of me. The process of refinement is painful, and this road called faith has never been a cakewalk for me.

When my spiritual pursuits grow difficult, I have a tendency to try to shake God off my back or convince him to scram and give me some space. I usually attempt to do this by either breaking or keeping all the “rules.”

The Israelites took the latter approach. They had been obeying God’s every command—fasting and praying and cleansing themselves. When it was time to make atonement, they trekked to the temple and slayed lambs and doves. But when they listened for God’s voice, all they heard was the sound of tumbleweeds. In their religious pursuits, they failed to love their neighbors and missed God.3 No wonder Jesus found himself at bitter odds with the most “righteous” and “religious” people while he was on earth. He frequently disregarded the law and the religious establishment with such boldness that reading the Gospels often offends our Pharisee hearts as much as it did our religious ancestors two millennia ago. In the short time he was on earth, Jesus ate with every kind of terrible person you could imagine. He touched a leper and a corpse. And he failed to honor the Sabbath—one of the Ten Commandments—without a second’s struggle. Jesus was a rule breaker, and so were his disciples. Worse still, Jesus talked about a narrow gate into God’s kingdom and told the rule followers they may not make it through.

Why? He was making the statement that what ultimately counts is not how many rules I follow or winning every theological debate or being well regarded

29

by influencers and power brokers. What matters is how I love God and others.

These are the two greatest commandments of all time. Put these first, and I’ll demonstrate I understand the rest.

What we often call religion pursues God for the wrong reasons (out of guilt and fear rather than joy), and it is driven by the wrong compulsions (to be right above all rather than to be loving at any expense). But perhaps most devastating, it is focused on the wrong person (the worshiper rather than the worshiped). When I follow religion, I look inward and outward, rather than upward.4 Sister Louisa’s was about the most unexpected place to find Jesus that I could have imagined, but I believe that God inhabits every cubic inch of this spinning ball of dirt we call Earth, so I knew he must be somewhere.

“What did you make of all the images in this place when you first encountered them?” I asked the bartender.

“Like most people, I initially mistook all this for simple sacrilege,” he replied. “But now I get it. Grant’s artwork forces people to examine their beliefs by using shock to expose the hypocrisy and judgmentalism that he experienced when he was a part of the Christian religion.”

“Unholy” places When Jesus selected his friends and those who would inhabit his inner circle, he looked outside of the religious aristocracy. He picked outsiders and rebels, zealots and tax collectors, sinners and scandalous women. Jesus loved

30

Those in Sister Louisa’s seem to understand what many modern Christians have forgotten: What we call religion is often a malformation of true faith, one that’s calcified and crystallized and hardened. Rather than a vibrant adventure of knowing and loving God, it is a rigid, formalized, power-seeking, oppressive way of trying to be good or look good or feel good. everyone, I am sure, but he didn’t seem to like the Pharisees.

The Pharisees, like many of their modern descendants, sequestered themselves from nonbelievers, lawbreakers, and the lower classes. The priests even possessed a private bridge linking their homes to the temple so they wouldn’t have to mingle with the common people. But Jesus’ ministry shatters this paradigm and rankles the religious elites in the process.

But not only did Jesus hang out with “unholy” people, he hung out in “unholy” places: the dinner tables of tax collectors, parties thrown by immoral socialites, and, perhaps most reprehensible, wells in Samaria. But Jesus enters the places most people didn’t think were fit for God, much less a rabbi from Nazareth.

Jesus demonstrated what a Godward life looks like by avoiding sin but never avoiding sinful people or “unholy places.” The Pharisees couldn’t comprehend such a posture because they served a God who dwelled on the mountaintop and confined himself to the holy of holies. He couldn’t even look on dirty people and places.

But we forfeit our illusions of social separateness when we meet Emmanuel—“God with us.” Jesus is the one who seeks out people we may find repugnant or unclean or unfit for friendship. Jesus signals an in-breaking of divine presence, a removal of barriers we place between sacred and secular or even sinful.5 Jesus shatters my strivings for sterility with a radical invitation to live free. Free from sinful patterns, but also free from moralism, free from legalism, and free from condemnation. Free to love the unlovable, to use your gifts to serve those in need, to share the great story of redemption through Christ with others. Jesus liberates me from the ball and chain of religion and releases me from a cold life of moralistic perfectionism.

This kind of God is almost too incredible to accept, and yet there he stands nonetheless.

Places like CHURCH expose the dangerous habits in my own life. They reveal where I’ve neurotically worked my religious fingers to the bone and robbed myself of the joy of knowing Jesus in the process.

As I reconsidered all I’d seen that night, I could feel the disgruntled ex-minister’s frustration and heartache. The disdain for the Christian religious establishment was unmistakable, but the cry for a real encounter with God was deafening—ringing in every brushstroke and religious icon. In this way, the irreverent sacrilege draped on the walls sounded more like echoes of my heart’s cry for Jesus, pure and simple.

If Jesus lived in Atlanta, I think he’d probably be friends with Grant Henry. If he were hankering for a hot dog while driving through the Old Fourth Ward, he might even stop by

Jesus seeks out people we may find repugnant or unclean or unfit for friendship.

Jesus signals an inbreaking of divine presence, a removal of barriers we place between sacred and secular or even sinful.

CHURCH. In fact, I think Jesus would have felt right at home in that corner bar because, like Grant, Jesus would have been saddened by the hypocrisy and judgmentalism and oppressive religiosity of those who bear Christ’s name. The only difference is that Jesus would offer a better path to God: himself.

At my core, I crave wholeness. I know I need something, even though I don’t always recognize that what I’m looking for is standing right beside me. The hunger for wholeness is often felt greatest in places like Sister Louisa’s, where people have given up all pretense of being perfect.

While I don’t seek out or create sacrilege, I realize that encountering it is unavoidable. In films and music and paintings and relationships. In a snarky article online, a cutting joke on a television show, or a passing comment from a neighbor or friend, I encounter reactions and affronts to God and Jesus and all the malformations of both.

Often, I dismiss it as the anger of a faith hater, but a nugget of truth is usually buried somewhere in the criticism. This can be an opportunity for sanctification if I refuse to react, get offended, or turn and run. Rather than be repulsed, maybe I should reflect. What does this expose in my heart? Where have I missed the mark?

Ever since my first visit to CHURCH, I’ve been learning to pause and consider what God might be up to in sacrilegious spaces. Rather than focusing on how much those who offend me need to repent of their sin, I’m discovering occasions to repent of my self-righteousness.

Now when I encounter sacrilege, I don’t bolt for the door. I run toward what God wants to reveal in the stubborn chambers of my heart.

(Editor’s note: endnotes for this article are posted at PRISMmagazine.org/endnotes.)

Jonathan Merritt is a faith and culture writer whose work has appeared in such publications as the Atlantic, USA Today, National Journal, the Washington Post, and CNN.com. He is senior columnist for Religion News Service, and is a popular speaker. His previous books include A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars (2012) and Green Like God: Unlocking the Divine Plan for Our Planet (2010), both from FaithWords. This article was adapted from chapter 8 of his latest book, Jesus Is Better than You Imagined, released this month from FaithWords, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. It appears here by kind permission of the publisher (© 2014, all rights reserved).

31

Christianity:

Instead it is a faith that simply seeks to see and hear the people and stories around us and help where we can. It is a faith that communicates at its heart, in the words of Over the Rhine, All my favorite people are broken Believe me, my heart should know Some prayers are better left unspoken I just want to hold you and let the rest go All my friends are part saint and part sinner We lean on each other, try to rise above We are not afraid to admit we are all still beginners We are all late bloomers when it comes to love

by Emily A. Dause

L

ife’s reality is very different from what I was taught to expect growing up as a middle-class American Christian. In that context, church meant traditional families brushed and smiling, all members present. Religious activities meant coloring books of a clean-cut Jesus and his disciples and Bible stories as two-dimensional as the flannel board on which they were played out.

Testimonies meant point-by-point speeches that described hardship and sin in the past tense—and dramatic and permanent change suddenly materializing to save the day. Christianity meant a clearly defined right and wrong for every situation—and absolute judgment for those who did not abide by our standards.

As a young adult, I know Christians who live and share lives that are threedimensional and colorful, lives of depth and experience-reflecting truth that look beyond false absolutes and black-and-white thinking. This kind of living involves a faith that does not worry as much about hardline “shoulds” and “should nots” and lists of “rights” and “wrongs” as difficult to prove as they are polarizing.

32

This type of colorful, multidimensional faith requires honesty about ourselves as weak, broken people. It also requires a humility regarding the uncertainty tied up in belief. Paradoxically, our lack of completeness and surety is one fact in which we can be confident. Instead of hiding behind a false and uninteresting image, we can emerge as complicated and insecure people to truly engage with God and others around us.

I am blessed to have the people in my church help me to move beyond a two-dimensional, uniform faith to one that acknowledges life’s hardship and uncertainty as inevitable and even good. In my church, there are people who are married, single, divorced, and widowed. People who have no family and attend church alone, people who have family yet attend church alone, and families.

People who are younger and older, both in terms of actual age and in terms of the experiences life has thrown at them. People who feel confident in their faith and people who doubt more often than not. People who struggle with depression and people who cannot understand its pull. People who have found relief from a difficult situation and people who seem so valiant in their efforts to climb out of a situation, though a reprieve seems nowhere in sight. People who find common ground despite disagreeing with one another about theology, politics, and even the ins and outs of everyday morality. People who, despite all these differences, are equally welcome and, as my pastor has said, all “completely and

Illustration by Caitlin Ng

Now in 3D and Living Color

utterly dependent on God’s grace and kindness.”

Going through the process of counseling has similarly challenged my perceptions about what it means to be a Christian. Prior to counseling, while I was aware to a certain extent of my flaws and maladjustments, my knowledge of my own depravity was also paired with an uncompromised belief that I was still “okay” and, however subconsciously, that I was somehow better off than others.

Through counseling I have come to a more honest assessment of my own state, one that is strangely more aware of my own brokenness and unknowing while much less disturbed by it. It is in increasingly fuller knowledge of my own bereft and fragmented state that I have begun to realize I am no less weak and destitute than anyone else.

And yet, although we all have it in common, it seems we would rather hide our weakness and destitution. Since Adam and Eve and their useless fig leaves, we have been trying ineffectively to hide. We don’t use fig leaves anymore, but we wear masks and labels, such as “Christian,” that we use to thank God that we “are not like other people,” like the Pharisee in Luke 18. Whatever sins we have committed, whatever situations we find ourselves in, however flawed our theology, at least (we believe) there is someone out there who is worse than we are or who knows less than we do. We are not willing, like the tax collector, to beg for mercy or acknowledge the depth of our inadequacy.

It is only in seeing and sharing our brokenness that we can truly realize and share the power of Christ’s redemption, even redemption not yet realized.

Christ’s redemptive power is more vast than we can comprehend, especially given the physical comfort and less visible sins and trials that define most of our lives. Most of us do not have stories like that of Cambodian Kang Kek Iew, or “Comrade Duch,” of the Communist Khmer Rouge base. He oversaw the torturing and execution of tens of thousands of people during the late 1970s.

Between fleeing Cambodia because of Vietnamese invasion and eventually being discovered and arrested in the late 1990s, Kek Iew converted to Christianity and spent time working for refugee and relief organizations, including World Vision.

During his trial in the late 2000s, Kek Iew fully confessed to his crimes and begged for forgiveness, despite other leading members’ refusal to acknowledge their part. This kind of radical transformation—from unspeakably horrific actions to remorse and full cooperation—is one we are unlikely to witness or experience in a concrete fashion.

In the context of our relatively protected First World lives, our wounds (both inflicted and received) are less dramatic and less noticeable, as are the redemptive patterns that may coincide with those wounds. All the more need to identify and communicate both our wounds and our healing, regardless of whether either line up neatly with the way we want or expect life to happen.

If we are to present ourselves to each other and to unbelievers in this authentic manner, we must let go of our need to command and wield the Scriptures for our own purposes. “To take the Scriptures seriously is not to take them literally,” writes Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation. “Literalism is invariably the lowest and least level of meaning.” Instead, when we read the Bible for its transformative message rather than a historical or utilitarian text, it becomes “true on many levels, instead of trying to prove it is true on just the one simple, factual level.” We can become so concerned with proving our faith that we forget that the nature of faith is that it cannot be proven. A faith ironed flat to avoid any hint of ambiguity is not much of a faith at all. We should never stop trying to learn and understand, but at the same time, we live in the mystery of a peace that passes understanding.

When we let go of the desire to feel secure in our own knowing, we can truly listen to others. In The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction, Peter Rollins terms this practice “literalistic listening.” As Rollins

explains, when we approach someone with a differing view, we typically come from a place where we consider our own views and experiences above theirs.

We automatically assume we need to make a decision about whether we agree or disagree or give some kind of biblical advice. When engaging in literalistic listening, however, we allow the other person’s views to “challenge and unsettle our own.” Instead of assuming we know what they are trying to say or that we need to make a judgment, we consciously monitor our own experience-based filters and try to imagine the other person’s position as they see it. This is not an attempt to understand someone’s perspective in a way we cannot or to assess their position so as to persuade them otherwise, but to genuinely consider their position with more weight than we give our own.

What if Christians were comfortable with mystery, honest about our brokenness, and known for our vibrant, authentic faith? Wouldn’t people be drawn to the person of Christ rather than repulsed by a religion that is static, flat, and so easily caricatured?

I am not suggesting we glorify our brokenness or that we abandon our sense of absolute truth. We do not need to start introducing ourselves with our name and a description of our issues and ask others to do the same. We also do not need to begin and end every explanation of a particular conviction with the qualifier, “but I really have no idea what is and is not true.” However, there is a demeanor of grace and humility with which we can present ourselves and engage others, a demeanor that will encourage authentic interactions that acknowledge our weakness in order to point towards our hope of redemption.

The past few years of my own life have been tumultuous, and I have increasingly found myself seeking out people who are open about experiencing hardship, wanderings, and doubt. These are people with whom I can be in true relationship, because I can relate to them and they to me. They live in the reality that we have no guarantees about how earthly life will unfold and the realization that there is much about life we do not know or understand.

The reason movies in color and 3D are exciting is because they seem more real. What if Christians were comfortable with mystery, honest about our brokenness, and known for our vibrant, authentic faith? Wouldn’t people be drawn to the person of Christ rather than repulsed by a religion that is static, flat, and so easily caricatured? What would happen if, as Christians, we could communicate the words of Over the Rhine to the world around us?

All [our] favorite people are broken Believe [us], [our] heart[s] should know Awful believers, skeptical dreamers, you’re welcome Yeah, you’re safe right here, you don’t have to go.

Emily A. Dause is a public school teacher and freelance writer. She blogs at sliversofhope.blogspot.com and is @EmilyADause on Twitter.

33

Confronting the with Humanity Mahmoud Al'aa Elddin confronts heavily armed Israeli soldiers in a weekly nonviolent demonstration against the Israeli separation wall in Al-Masara, West Bank.

If the route of the separation barrier is completed as planned, it will cut off the village of Al-Masara from agricultural lands belonging to village residents.

36

Oppressor Peaceful protesters get up-close and personal with Israeli soldiers Story and photography by Ryan Rodrick Beiler

M

ahmoud Al’aa Elddin spends most Friday afternoons in “dialogue” with the Israeli soldiers who invade his West Bank village of Al-Masara. Each week since 2006, Palestinian, international, and Israeli activists have attempted to march from Al-Masara to agricultural lands that will be cut off by the Israeli separation barrier if extended as planned. Armed only with a Palestinian flag, Al’aa Elddin faces a row of gun-toting, riot-shielded conscripts blocking the road.

Here, as with 85 percent of its route, the barrier would take more Palestinian land for Israeli settlements instead of separating the West Bank from Israel on the internationally recognized border, or Green Line.

Both the barrier and the settlements are illegal under international law because Israel is building them on occupied Palestinian territory.

Many believe the barrier that is in place has stopped Palestinian suicide bombings, which ended in 2008. Between October 2000 and February 2008, these and other acts of violence killed 1,012 Israelis. During the same period Israelis killed 4,536 Palestinians. Most victims on both sides were noncombatant civilians. But even now, only two-thirds of the barrier’s planned route is complete. Large gaps, which could easily be infiltrated by would-be attackers, allow tens of thousands of unauthor-

35

Al'aa Elddin offers a cup of tea to unreceptive Israeli soldiers during a weekly demonstration against the separation wall.

ized Palestinians1 to enter Jerusalem or Israel on a daily basis to find work. Even former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens told an Israeli newspaper, “It’s clear there is no connection between the wall and the cessation of attacks.”2 “Some people think that this wall is just to protect the Israeli people for security,” says Al’aa Elddin. “But they don’t know at the same time this wall is dividing the land and separating families.”

To protest the barrier, several Palestinian villages started weekly demonstrations, including those documented in the films Budrus and the Oscar-nominated Five Broken Cameras. In these two cases, activism succeeded in moving the barrier closer to the Green Line, leaving more village land accessible for cultivation.

Most of the organized protests are peaceful. But unaffiliated youth some-

according to a leaked US State Department cable.5 The same document describes how the military will “be more assertive in how it deals with these demonstrations, even demonstrations that appear peaceful.”

While the army has used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse the AlMasara demonstration, most weeks the marchers get very up-close and personal with the soldiers blocking the road. The ensuing “dialogue” embodies the problem often ignored by would-be peacemakers who recommend reconciliation without acknowledging the power disparity between Palestinians and their military occupiers. Those with greater power have little motivation to risk genuine conversation, or to change anything as a result.

“We just want to put some keys in their mind just to open it and to think more as a person,” says activist Moath Al Lahham of Bethlehem. “Sometimes

“Just put your guns on the ground and come to our side if you want peace,” Al’aa Elddin tells one soldier. “We will welcome you, and we will drink coffee. We will discuss it, and we will find a solution.” times throw stones at the wall, jeeps, or soldiers. At the Al-Masara demonstration, there is almost never stone-throwing. “Peaceful resistance is important because there is no reason for the Israeli army to shoot,” says Al’aa Elddin. “And this will show who uses violence.”

The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has reported on the army’s systematic “dispersal of demonstrations using force, even when demonstrators were not violent in any way.”3 In the last decade, the military has killed 15 protesters4 and injured scores more through unlawful use of tear gas projectiles, rubbercoated steel bullets, and live ammunition.

“We don’t do Gandhi very well,” admits Israeli Major-General Amos Gilad,

36

they don’t want to speak, they just want to stand and block the road. Some of them said, ’I don’t like it, but this is an order. I want to leave, but I don’t have the chance.’ And some of them said these words like a machine: ’It’s our land. God promised. You as a Palestinian, you shouldn’t be here. It’s just for Jews.”

Though none of these activists are Christians, their actions often embody the kind of radical reign-of-God subversion that Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount. What some dismiss as passivism in Christ’s commands to turn the other cheek, offer the cloak as well as the coat, and go the second mile (Matthew 5:29-31), others interpret as confronting the oppressor with one’s humanity. Activists have even offered the soldiers cups of tea, bites of birthday cake, and

plates of pasta. Each gesture asserts the dignity of the host, while heaping hot coals (Romans 12) on the heads of uninvited guests.

“Just put your guns on the ground and come to our side if you want peace,” Al’aa Elddin tells one soldier. “We will welcome you, and we will drink coffee. We will discuss it, and we will find a solution.”

When asked about his response to this invitation, the soldier says in unaccented English, “I didn’t understand him.” When reminded that Al’aa Elddin was speaking English, the soldier says, “I didn’t listen.”

But these activists know their main audience lies beyond the row of riot shields. Even if a few soldiers’ hearts and minds are opened, a just peace will only come through pressure on an Israeli society content with the status quo. “I think in this peaceful demonstration, the important and the first thing is to make a change in the thinking of many people around the world,” says Al’aa Elddin. “I have the hope and I have the power inside me to continue. But in the same time I don’t have power like the Israeli occupation. They have the power; they have all the guns. But for me, my weapons and my power are more and more the international people and the Israeli people who come and stand by my side.”

“Our problem is not with the Israeli people,” says Al’aa Elddin.

“Israeli people come, and they participate with us in our demonstration. The problem is with the Israeli army and the settlers who occupy the land, build the settlements, and use violence against Palestinians.”

According to Israeli activist Sahar Vardi, her main role is “simply to show solidarity, to convey the message that Palestinians are not alone in resisting the occupation.”

Other Jewish activists express a religious motivation. “The most important teaching in the To-

37

“For Jews, it is a profound challenge for us," says Rabbi Brant Rosen, an activist with the US group Jewish Voice for Peace, "because we need to look inside ourselves and understand the ways that we have become oppressors ourselves.” rah is that God stands with the oppressed and that God demands that we stand with the oppressed,” said Rabbi Brant Rosen, an activist with the US group Jewish Voice for Peace, at one week’s protest. “For Jews, it is a profound challenge for us because we need to look inside ourselves and understand the ways that we have become oppressors ourselves.”

Solidarity activists also leverage their presence and privilege against unjust structures. “The cost of getting arrested for an Israeli activist is much smaller than for a Palestinian activist for the same action,” says Vardi, who once physically blocked soldiers attempting to arrest a Palestinian boy.6 While Israelis live under civil law, Palestinians like Al’aa Elddin live under the military rule of occupation. “Palestinian residents have no vested freedom of protest,” reports B’Tselem.7 “Even nonviolent resistance and civil protest involving peaceful assembly are forbidden.”

Many Palestinian activists have been imprisoned under false accusations of violence or charges of organizing “illegal demonstrations.” Al’aa Elddin once Palestinian activists wrapped in chains in solidarity with prisoners in Israeli jails.

38

spent a week in Israeli prison, charged with assaulting an Israeli officer. Despite video evidence proving his innocence, the military court ordered him to pay 3,000 shekels for his release—more than five months’ wages for the average Palestinian.

Yet despite such risks, Mahmoud Al’aa Elddin remains committed to nonviolent activism: “I think that peace will not come by using violence. Peace will come by the nonviolent way, because violence never brings peace or freedom to any people.”

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is a service worker with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Palestine and Israel. He blogs at MCCPalestine.wordpress.com.

(Editor’s note: endnotes for this article are posted at PRISMmagazine.org/endnotes.)

41

Because Stones Can Speak Doing justice to African American historic places

by Andi Cumbo-Floyd

John Robinson

40

I

tect these sacred sites. I have spent over a decade trying to locate, research, n Charlottesville, Va., a small graveyard sits quietly amongst a grove of and protect historic African American cemeteries. I have come to view this work trees behind a two-story farmhouse. Here the bodies of at least six promias an opportunity to bring the past lives of ordinary and extraordinary African nent African Americans lay at rest near the area they knew best—the HyAmericans into the light.” draulic Mills Neighborhood, a once thriving community of free people of color.

And light is needed. So much of African American history is marginalized Jesse Scott Sammons and his family have been interred in this cemetery or unknown. Because enslaved African Americans in the United States were not for over 100 years, but in 2013, their peaceful rest was nearly destroyed when often allowed to learn to read and write, and because Jim Crow laws in the South a proposed highway bypass called for their bodies to be exhumed and moved to kept many African Americans from receiving a full education for many decades, another location. While the moving of any grave is a troubling, disruptive experithe accomplishments, stories, and daily experiences of many black people in ence, this removal was particularly disquieting since it was planned without the the United States went unrecorded. Thus, the places in which these people permission—or even the knowledge of—the Sammons family descendants. lived, worked, and were buried sometimes provide the only information we have As Erica Caple James, a Sammons descendant and professor of anthroto learn from and understand a crucial segment of our American history. pology at MIT, said about the news that the bypass had been rerouted around Further, the lack of care shown to the Sammons Cemetery and other hisa pet cemetery but not around her own family’s graves, “It’s tremendously torical places associated with the lives and accomplishments of African Ameridisturbing and makes one wonder about the politics involved.” cans indicates a larger societal disregard for these people and their stories.

Fortunately someone informed a Sammons family member and told a As Cinder Stanton, former historian at Monticello said, “You already have to group of local historians, the Central Virginia History Researchers (CVHR), be written into history to some degree to have your properties or your person about the planned exhumation, and they informed other members of the Samor your social status to be considered significant.” Yet, in the case of African mons family, who leapt to action and garnered media coverage and political Americans, American history has largely written them out. Thus, the places aswill to stall the removal. At this moment it seems that the bypass will have to sociated with their stories are even more important as we try to build a society take another route, but the Sammons family and the members of CVHR are still where equality is a fact and not just a myth. vigilant to be sure that the highway doesn’t disturb the graves of these people.

Sadly the near destruction of the Sammons Cemetery and the nearby Jesse Scott Sammons house Americans in Central Virginia. Their work has led Once a month, the Central Virginia History Researchis just one example of the countless to the creation of the African American Families ers (CVHR), a group of professional and independent places of African American historidatabase, a public space where people can trace historians, meet to share their own research endeavors, cal importance that have been deAfrican American genealogies in Virginia. For genealogical traces, books—and sometimes they hear stroyed through ignorance, apathy, more information, visit their website at from people who want to trace their ancestry. The speor occasional malevolence. In Charcialty of this group is the history and genealogy of African CentralVirginiaHistory.org. lottesville, the Hydraulic Mills neighborhood was flooded when the local reservoir was built in 1966. At plantations all over the South, slave cemeteries As Christians, we are called to be agents of justice, or mishpat. In an are paved over or bulldozed through. At the plantation where I was raised, my August 2013 article in Relevant magazine, Tim Keller explains the most basic father accidentally mined the stone foundations and hearths from slave cabins meaning of the word justice: “to treat people equitably. Mishpat, then, is giving when building walls around the estate, a decision he rues to this day. With every people what they are due, whether punishment or protection or care. ... It also destruction a segment of our important history as a country is erased. means giving people their rights.”

Shelley Murphy, president of the Central Virginia Afro-American GeneaIn our culture, which values story and place and family as core features logical and Historical Society, explained to me just why these places are so of our identity, one way we can bring justice is to work and preserve the places important to the African American community and the American culture at large. of historical import for everyone in our community. If we couple that call to jus“It is important for children today to understand who was here and how that tice with the biblical mandate to serve those who are oppressed and silenced, person connects to them. I believe it is critical to the family as well as the then we find ourselves with a clarion call to be sure African American history is community to be able to identify and honor those that came before us. Burial preserved—be it in story, archival document, or place. grounds are a way to show who was here and their contributions as a family or Perhaps if we, as followers of Christ, will begin to learn about these community member. It is another way of ’telling the story.’” places that are so important to the African American members of our family I spoke about this with Lynn Rainville, author of Hidden History: African and our nation, if we will begin to appreciate them and treasure them like we do other great places often associated only with European American history— American Cemeteries in Central Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2014) Monticello and Mt. Vernon, for example—perhaps then we will move one step and professor of anthropological archaeology. “In the case of African Americloser to building a nation that is truly just and equal. can history,” said Rainville, “not only is this subject sometimes overlooked in the history books—like ignoring the role of Maggie L. Walker, the first black woman to form a bank in America—but the sites associated with black families Andi Cumbo-Floyd (AndiLit.com) is a writer, editor, and writing teacher whose (the farm where Booker T. Washington grew up), their contributions (the first book The Slaves Have Names tells the story of the people enslaved on the safety hood for protecting firefighters from smoke inhalation, invented by Garplantation where she was raised. She and her husband live on God’s Whisper rett Morgan), and their burial sites (the New York African Burial Ground that Farm in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. was almost destroyed by a federal building project in the early 1990s) are sometimes forgotten and/or destroyed. It is an important shared duty to pro-

41

44

What’s Wrong with Being Comfortable?

In praise of the much-maligned “comfort zone”

by Len and David Schmidt

N

Illustration by Caitlin Ng

o matter where we turn these days, we seem to run into a preacher telling us that we need to “get out of our comfort zone.” The exhortation is often couched in positive terms: “You can do it! God wants you to move out of your comfort zone and into your faith zone!” Sometimes, however, the message contains darker undertones and nearly threatening implications: If you’re in your comfort zone, if you’re using your natural talents and gifts and feel fulfilled doing so, watch out…God just might take it all away from you.

To be sure, at certain times in life we definitely need to move beyond our personal comforts. The “comfort zone” becomes a problem when we fall into complacency and laziness, when we trust in our material abundance as if it were eternal, when we assume our spiritual life no longer has any room for improvement. We must stretch ourselves to pursue worthwhile goals, to help others in need, and to answer even the most delightful calls on our lives—a marriage, for example, or a cross-country move for a new job. Most importantly, getting out of our unhealthy comfort zones is an integral part of spiritual growth. When we move beyond our customary patterns, ruts, addictions, habits, and dysfunctional relationships, it almost always feels uncomfortable—but it is always worth it in the end. As C. S. Lewis once said, “The blows of [God’s] chisel which hurt us so much are what make us perfect.”

If all we meant by the “comfort zone” were a state of indifferent complacency, it would make sense to always set our sights beyond it. Many preachers cast a broader net with the term, however, suggesting that we should make a conscious effort to be uncomfortable for the sake of being uncomfortable—that discomfort is a desirable state to inhabit.

The theology of turmoil

A pastor once described how he and his wife ended up on the mission field in India. The couple had been happily serving a church in the US for years, using their talents, abilities, and natural inclinations to bless the lives of their congregation. Suddenly and without warning, however, the pastor felt that God was unhappy with this situation. He began to experience guilt that he and his wife felt happy and fulfilled, and he drew the conclusion that God was calling them to be missionaries. With no knowledge of the

language or culture, the Midwestern couple relocated to Mumbai to live in misery for six unproductive years.

No Hollywood-esque happy ending awaited them, no victorious accomplishment that made all the sacrifice worth it. In the end, the pastor and his wife anticlimactically decided that their calling was over and moved back to the States. Rather than redeeming the experience or impregnating it with any sort of meaning, he simply (and ominously) concluded: “Sometimes God will take you out of your comfort zone and send you somewhere you don’t want to go.”

The implication of this sermon, and others like it, seems to be that there is something inherently holy about unhappiness and discomfort.

Unpredictability and chaos are canonized and beatified ad absurdum, baptized as “the place where God wants us.”

But is this really something we should be striving for? And should we feel inadequate as Christians if we stay inside the comfort zone?

The blessings of the comfort zone

God often uses people’s personal comfort zones to do divine work. When a person goes under the knife for major surgery, the patient is put at ease by the knowledge that the doctor is working within his or her area of comfortable expertise. The last thing the patient wants to hear from the surgeon is, “I’m really much better at driving a tractor than performing surgery, but I feel God wants me to challenge myself to work outside of my comfort zone.” When we entrust trained professionals with the wellbeing of our bodies, children, and cars, we are rightfully consoled by the knowledge that these people are operating within their respective comfort zones.

In addition to the service we can provide to others from within our comfort zone, there are plenty of other reasons why this can be a blessing.

Productivity: While Germanic efficiency isn’t everything, the fact remains that we are at our most productive when we’re doing those things that are within the scope of our interest, training, experience, and competence.

Joy: If you’re working in a field you enjoy, living in a place that suits

43

you, and are happy about the people who populate your life, this type of comfort can be a source of great fulfillment. Rejoice and be glad.

Comforting others: When you are in your own comfort zone, this can itself become a tremendous source of comfort to those who desperately need it. Without even realizing it, you may be providing them with stability and security by virtue of the simple fact that you are not, yourself, distressed or destabilized.

In addition, when we are in a grounded place in life, this makes it much easier for us to look beyond ourselves and expend attention, emotion, and energy on others.

So if the comfort zone can serve as a place of refuge, a source of strength for ourselves and others, and a resource that God can use to bless others, this begs the question: Why the obsession with getting out of it for the mere sake of discomfort itself? Why the guilt-induced encouragements to leave the comfort zone?

Part of the answer may lay in the theology that one might call “deism-lite.”

The myth of the “supernatural”

Whether or not they articulate it as such, many contemporary Christians unconsciously hold to the false notion that two separate realms exist: the natural and the supernatural. While the deists of the 18th century believed that the natural world functioned on its own accord, without any interference from the Creator, many in the church today adhere to a watered-down version of this philosophy, believing that the world usually follows natural laws and every now and then God intervenes in the natural world with what we would call a “miracle.”

To be sure, God often works in extraordinary ways, with what the biblical authors referred to as “signs and wonders.” The Passover, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection—these are wondrous occurrences that fall outside of ordinary human experience.

The mistake committed by many believers, however, is when we describe these occurrences as “divine intervention”—as if God were not already present and active in the ordinary and the mundane.

The myth of supernatural intervention is a mainstay for dramatic personal stories of faith. Deism-lite is common in testimonies of faith across the globe. In the case of Americans who have overcome a terminal ill-

44

ness, former members of the Russian mafia, and recovering drug addicts in Mexico, the statements are nearly identical: “The counselors couldn’t help me, doctors couldn’t help me, psychologists couldn’t help me…

God was the one who helped me.”

We don’t doubt that God often helps people in astounding ways. The implication of these testimonies, however, is that God is especially present in occurrences that seem out of the ordinary, abnormal, illogical, or unnatural—in those that seem supernatural. Whereas Augustine defined evil as the absentia boni, the “absence of good,” many contemporary Christians seem to believe that there is an inherent absentia Dei in the natural world.

This view of God’s intervention is what one college professor coined the “jelly donut” model. If the natural world is the dry, baked cake—devoid of God’s activity—God’s supernatural intrusion is the jelly being injected into it. If we adhere to this worldview, it can be easy to relegate our comfort zone of inclinations and abilities to the dry sterility of the natural world. Many assume that a vocation can only be of God (or, at least, is more God-ordained) if it lies entirely outside of our own proclivities and talents. The proof verses commonly invoked to back up this view are myriad: “…His power is made perfect in our weakness…”, “…not by might, not by power, but by the Spirit of God…”, “…if God is for us, who can be against us?”

Of course, the Scriptures are full of stories in which God used people in ways that went beyond what we would call their own natural abilities. All of us have heard how Moses suffered from a speech impediment, David was dwarfed in size by Goliath, Abraham seemed too old to have children—but God used them anyway.

When we focus only on these stories of wonders and marvels, however, we run the risk of implying that God is less present when humans exercise their natural inclinations and abilities. As such, God is left to prove God’s presence by superseding our talents, leaving a divine calling card by using us in ways that are unequivocally supernatural. Inspirational stories abound that tell of a ministry that prospered in spite of all the rules of logic. The tale of the mission outpost, parachurch ministry, or

new congregation that was run by unqualified, inexperienced people but somehow succeeded has an unfortunate subtext: The more it sounds like a bad idea, the more God’s hand must be in it.

The infatuation with supernatural experiences can take turns farcical—and sometimes deeply tragic. Shortly after the horrific earthquake struck Haiti, one church from Temecula, Calif., sent a team of 10 men to Port-au-Prince on a mission trip, beyond the bounds of their comfort zone. The trip leader emphasized that participants would “see how God can use people in spite of their own abilities.”

The American volunteers were set to work building crude wooden benches and performing other menial tasks for a Haitian church. Regarding the inspirational experience, many of the mission-trippers repeated variations of this statement: “This is amazing. I’m not a carpenter, I’ve never picked up a hammer, but God used me to build these benches for a church in Haiti!”

The tragedy, of course, is that the Haitian believers could have built their own benches for a fraction of the cost.

More significantly, the thousands of dollars that were spent for the volunteers to have this beyond-the-comfort-zone experience could have been used to save Haitian lives had the money been donated to Haitian groups operating within their comfort zone. A qualified Haitian ministry or NGO could have provided desperately needed food, shelter, or medical care to an entire camp of earthquake survivors with the same funds. But for many people, when humans bless other humans in a logical, orderly fashion, it “just feels less supernatural.”

Where is God?

According to an old anecdote, the pastor of a country parish discovered a couple of local boys stealing from the collection plate. Hoping to instill in them some respect for the church, he sat one of the youngsters down in his office and stared at the boy in silence for several minutes.

The pastor eventually leaned across his desk and asked in a stern voice, “Young man, where is God? Where is God?!”

The boy ran out of the office and met up with his friend. “Man, are we in trouble,” he gasped. “I don’t know what happened, but I think they’ve lost God, and they’re trying to blame us for it!”

The pastor’s question has been

asked by humans since time immemorial: “Where is God?” The answer usually given has been that God is “someplace else.” (To this day, most human languages use the same word for “the sky” and “Heaven.”) If God is “out there” or “up there,” it stands to reason that most of the time, in most places, and in most circumstances, God is not here, making interventions all the more extraordinary and unusual.

In order to cling to belief in this supernatural/natural dichotomy, however, we must ignore all the biblical figures that God used by way of their talents and abilities.

The apostle Paul used his brilliant rhetorical clarity to exhort the early church; Solomon instructed through his wisdom; Esther used her privileged position to prevent genocide. These people were not acting on their own in the natural world, an enclosed biosphere devoid of God’s activity. They were active participants in God’s work on earth, an earth in which every good and perfect gift is from God, where all of us live and move and have our being in God. In a universe whose very existence is constantly sustained by God, there is no such thing as the “natural” world—every second we are alive is a miracle.

Of course, sometimes God does use people in remarkable ways. Sometimes God’s presence is revealed in an unexpected manner despite horrific conditions, sometimes doing great things with projects, churches, and ministries that were poorly planned from day one. But to canonize the mythical land of supernatural miracles as especially holy is tantamount to ignoring God’s presence inside the comfort zone.

To be sure, challenging yourself and moving beyond what you are comfortable with can bring spiritual growth. But more often than not, feeling neurotically guilty about being in the comfort zone can, in fact, stifle spiritual growth. In addition, it can blind us from seeing the everyday miracles that take place inside our comfort zone—the place where we are content and fulfilled, doing what we do best.

When a skilled surgeon relieves a man’s suffering, a well-trained counselor brings a woman back from the brink of suicide, or a persistent human rights attorney rescues a child from prostitution, God is very much present and active.

Len Schmidt has spent 25 years in the ministry as a pastor, associate pastor, youth minister, and US Air Force chaplain. David Schmidt, Len’s son, has experience in cross-cultural ministry in Latin America and Russia and is a freelance writer, author, and translator who speaks eight languages fluently.

If all we meant by the “comfort zone” were a state of indifferent complacency, it would make sense to always set our sights beyond it. Many preachers cast a broader net with the term, however, suggesting that we should make a conscious effort to be uncomfortable for the sake of being uncomfortable—that discomfort is a desirable state to inhabit.

45

CounterCulture

Swimming upstream.

by Rachel Marie Stone The first time I walked into the hospital here in Malawi, I felt awkward and useless. I’m a volunteer doula, trained to give physical and emotional support to a woman as she labors, but clinical duties like measuring blood pressure or listening for fetal heart tones lie outside my scope. In a place with such grave material needs—and shortages of trained staff—why should I take up space in a crowded maternity ward?

Empathetic connection with a person suffering from pain undoes that world-contracting isolation that is pain’s essence.

Inexplicably, the hospital where I volunteer allows no one—not even the baby’s father— to accompany a woman to the labor ward, but, inexplicably again, I’ve been granted permission to volunteer there. I sit by the women as they labor, wiping brows, rubbing backs, whispering encouragement.

The midwives, who have been trained to manage the medical side of delivery, tend not to see much purpose in sitting by a laboring woman until the baby actually emerges and there are tangible medical tasks—cord clamping, suctioning, suturing—for them to do. Even if they did see value in just sitting by and waiting, they might not be able to do so: Wards are routinely so overcrowded that some women deliver lying on the floor.

Once, I was alone with a woman when she delivered. I caught the baby and handed her to her mother, feeling keenly my lack of medical training. Later, the woman whose baby I caught gave me a high-five and a broad smile, then grabbed both my hands and held them to her.

Other women whose backs I’ve rubbed and brows I’ve wiped during their labors have done the same.

“In biblical traditions,” writes biblical scholar Phyllis Trible, the womb, “an organ unique to the female, becomes a vehicle pointing to the compassion of God.” The meaning of “womb,”

46

Rachel Marie Stone is the author of Eat with Joy: Redeeming God’s Gift of Food (InterVarsity Press, 2013) and The Unexpected Way, a forthcoming children’s book about Jesus (Olive Branch Books).

She is a regular contributor to both PRISM and Her. meneutics, Christianity Today’s blog for women.

Doula by Gioia Albano (AlbanoGioia.com/index_uk.html)

Compassion on the Labor Ward

she argues, is compassion. Biblical writers, Trible says, saw the womb as the seat of a love that “protects and nourishes but does not possess and control,” though it does not restrict this quality to women alone. God is also said to be rahum: merciful. Womb-like.

Perhaps not incidentally, for millennia—and, indeed, among many traditional cultures to this day—compassion was considered the most important qualification for a midwife. It is ironic that as medical technology has advanced, the very quality once considered most essential is now regarded as luxurious if not useless.

Neighbors and friends here in Malawi acknowledge the necessity of modernizing maternity care—their mothers may have delivered them in grass-roofed, mud-floored huts, but they make sure to get to the hospital or clinic for their own deliveries—but they also regret the sensitivity that is often lacking, and they express appreciation for even the smallest human kindnesses. “I had a difficult labor with my third-born,” said my neighbor, “and the nurse came and put her hands on my shoulder.” It was a tiny gesture of sympathy, but she remembered it with gratitude more than five years later.

So why, in countries like Malawi, which are striving to meet the Millennium Development Goals for improvements in maternal health, should compassion be considered an unnecessary extra? I have been told of a hospital several miles away from here where women are slapped if they cry out during labor, and the Washington Post recently reported that nurses in a hospital in nearby Zimbabwe had taken to charging women the equivalent of $5—nearly 5 percent of the average annual income—for each scream. It’s a dynamic that sometimes occurs when traditional birth cultures are displaced by contemporary Western practices, according to anthropologist Brigitte Jordan.

Maternal health improves—and it is improving in Malawi as elsewhere in Africa—but “useless” amenities like hand-holding and back-rubbing often become relics. Studies in some countries—such as India—have suggested that incorporating traditional birth attendants into modernized medical contexts (performing much the same role as doulas) can have tremendous benefits. Here in Malawi, the mothers of the women giving birth wait nervously outside the labor ward even as their daughters cry for them. Their presence could so easily be made more useful than either they or any of the medical professionals might suspect.

Philosopher Elaine Scarry suggested that an empathetic connection with a person suffering from pain undoes that world-contracting isolation that is pain’s essence. Reading this a few months ago and reflecting upon my time in the labor ward and my conversations with my neighbor, it occurred to me that compassionate presence in times of great suffering—even, or perhaps especially, when there’s nothing more to be done except to be—may be as far from useless as birth is from death.

Is Reality Secular?

My father faithfully took us to church each Sunday. With its towering stone structure, dark wooden beams, and intricate stained glass windows, the church felt holy. I remember weeping at Good Friday services, as if at the funeral of a dear friend whom I did not really know, yet experiencing great joy when we sang the Hallelujah Chorus on Easter morning. Beyond this, I didn’t really understand the gospel; church was something we did on Sundays.

After teaching elementary school for several years, I left my hometown for graduate school, where I became intellectually awakened. The world opened up to me, and I enjoyed walking through doors where the enticements were not only intellectually engaging but also sometimes personally dangerous. There I shed the last vestiges of Christianity. The intellectuals in my circle considered Christianity irrelevant to serious scholarship at best and oppressive at worst. The world and our work had to be secular because secularism was considered more objective, neutral, pluralistic, and safe.

By the late 1980s I was work of her Missionaries of Charity. teaching radical feminism, After two months of working primarily with social constructivism, critical sick and handicapped babies in the spring of theory, and postmodernism; 1996, I returned from sabbatical. Groups began I tried much of what the New to ask me to share about my experience. Aware Age movement had to offer. I A few weeks later I found mythought of myself as smart, self at a communion rail, muropen-minded, and happy, re- muring, “If you are real, please gardless of the fact that I was come and get me.” taking antidepressants, was serially mothat many of these were primarily secular groups, nogamous, and was instructI found myself explaining Mother Teresa without ing students that they could describing her relationship with Jesus. I was lying use any book except the to make her more acceptable to intellectuals who Bible in their written work. had long ago given up the idea that ChristianI called myself “spiritual ity has any unique knowledge. We see the same but not religious,” meaning secularization of the religious motivations of I did not need a religion to Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson be “good.” I had excluded Mandela, Elie Wiesel, César Chávez, Alexander Christianity altogether from Solzhenitsyn, Simone Weil, Dorothy Day, Sojournany real consideration, and er Truth, and Lech Walesa. From the worldviews no rational apologetic could I was teaching and had been taught, the real have convinced me otherwise.

Mother Teresa was completely incomprehensible.

But in 1992 I had a profound dream unlike Right before I left India, Mother Teresa told any I had had before; I remembered every deme that God does not call everyone to work with tail—thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, and the poor or to live like the poor, as she and the color (a first for me). Christ figured prominently Missionaries of Charity had been called. Then in the dream, and I was able to see clearly the she exclaimed emphatically, shaking her finger at deplorable condition of my soul. When I woke, I me, “But God does call everyone to a Calcutta; realized the dream’s gravity and shared it with you have to find yours!” a colleague from a different university whom I I discovered my Calcutta in a profound believed was spiritually attuned, although I did intellectual crisis that forced me to define and not know of what order. My colleague suggested reexamine the worldviews dominant in the elite I begin to read the Psalms, Proverbs, and New intellectual culture: material-naturalism, secular Testament, a suggestion I found shocking even humanism, and pantheism. The dominance of though Jesus himself had appeared in the dream. secularism, especially in the last century, has A few weeks later I found myself at a communion convinced many in the world, including many rail, murmuring, “If you are real, please come Christians, that reality is secular and religion just and get me.” At that very moment I felt the same a feel-good option. indescribable peace I had experienced at the end What is your Calcutta? What is it that drives of the dream, and I tentatively began seeking to you to allow, as Dallas Willard puts it, “the reality follow Christ. Only three months had passed since of God to stand in the midst of your life”? the dream.

A year later, I saw Ann and Jeanette PetMary Poplin is a professor of rie’s documentary on Mother Teresa, in which education at Claremont Graduate she said that her work was not social work but University and the author of the religious work. I found the film strangely moving new book Is Reality Secular? and sensed that if I was going to understand how Testing the Assumptions of Four my newfound faith related to my work—research Global Worldviews (2014) and Finding Calcutta: on the best ways to educate the poor—I would What Mother Teresa Taught Me (2008); both are need to go to Calcutta and immerse myself in the published by InterVarsity Press.

47

Transitioning to a Positive Future Circulating under the radar, in the hands of community organizers, victory gardeners, slow food advocates, social justice workers, climate activists, locavores, and do-it-yourselfers, is a book—rather a couple of books—written by a Brit who is subverting not only the dominant narrative of globalization and runaway economic growth but also the gloom-anddoom of much of Western environmentalism. The Transition Handbook (2008) and the newer Transition Companion (2011) receive little public press but have captured the imagination of thousands of people concerned with restoring the integrity of local communities and the resilience they display in the face of disaster and shock. Beginning in the United Kingdom but rapidly becoming a worldwide phenomenon, the Transition movement is taking root in the US as well.

Emergency preparedness as it is typically understood is about getting communities back to where they were before the crisis hit—whether that is a tornado, hurricane, flood, or fire. The Transition movement purports to prepare communities for the deeper crises that will come with the inevitable disappearance of cheap oil, the disruption that will accompany climate change, and the collapse and retrenchment of the global economic system.

How is this to be done? In the dominant industrial-environmental complex, the indicated responses to energy crises, global warming, and economic instability are about national and international policy: treaties, agreements, laws, and regulations that constrain behavior and restrict freedom.

Innovation, when it is sought, is believed to emerge from investment in “research and development” with an optimism that technology can and will save us. Individual households are fed messages about green purchasing and recycling but encouraged to stay on the treadmill of resource consumption. Little attention is given to the communities and institutions that could generate true novelty and that sustain changes in lifestyles.

In the Transition movement framework, new ideas come from “unleashing” (a favorite word) local people to think about local solutions to their problems, reconnecting in ways that counter the modern deconstruction of social relations, and reorganiz-

48

ing to buffer cities, towns, and villages from outside shocks.

Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out the value of “intermediate institutions” in the 1830s America he described—book clubs, volunteer fire departments, social clubs, burial societies—and described their functional value for social stability, political organizing, and local problem-solving in response to difficulty. Social scientists like Robert Putnam and cultural commentators like Chuck Colson have lamented the decline in “social capital” that comes with the loss of these institutions. Transition movement advocates agree, and they put forward a host of ideas for replenishing that social capital.

In Berea, Ky., one of the first US municipalities to declare itself a “Transition Town,” residents banded together to create a “50 x 25” goal in response to external threats, including the loss of electricity from ice storms, the loss of jobs due to

Interested in learning more about the Transition Movement?

Check out these resources: •British Christians Andy Mellen and Neil Hollow have written an entire book about the concept of peak oil (No Oil in the Lamp: Fuel, Faith, and the Energy Crisis, 2012), and their chapter on Transition Towns is particularly helpful. The book was reviewed in the Fall 2013 issue of PRISM. •The foundational books for the movement are by Rob Hopkins: The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (2008) and The Transition Companion: Making Your Community Resilient in Uncertain Times (with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, 2011).

•Several feature films are available online; the most recent is the one-hour In Transition 2.0 (bit.ly/1aWdgfz). For those who are limiting their screen time (as we all should be!), try a dose of Rob Hopkins via his TED talk at bit. ly/1e16xn9. regional economic shifts, and the threat of climate change. By 2025 they aim to be using 50 percent less energy, sourcing 50 percent of food locally, and generating half of their income through locally owned, independent businesses. Like other Transition Towns, they also address the “great forgetting” induced by our integration into global markets, whereby we lose the ability to grow and preserve

our own food, mend our own clothes and houses, and repair our own machines; re-skilling workshops involve residents helping other residents recover that knowledge.

Failure to pass meaningful climate legislation or economic reforms after the financial crisis has left many despairing for the future. But that’s putting all our eggs in the political basket. Fans of the Transition movement suggest that reforming communities and municipalities first will pave the way for meaningful change. For Sherry Maddock, a missionary who lives with her family in an intentional community in inner-city Lexington, Ky., seeing the work in Berea and reading the Transition books enlivened her thinking about what working for shalom in her neighborhood meant. “The things I had been reading were pretty bleak. But the Transition movement seemed completely, extraordinarily positive.” She has found the books to be relentlessly practical—and highly applicable to her urban experience of working for the common good.

Peak oil was the original impetus for Transition initiatives as they emerged in the UK, and that theme continues to be woven into most Transition conversations, but the current fossil fuel boomlet has taken the edge off that perceived crisis, according to Maddock. She also cautions that the movement has yet to attract significant interest among poor and minority populations, but she says that may be changing as people discover the virtues of self-reliance.

Andy Mellen and Neil Hollow are British Christians who see the pros and cons of the Transition movement in the UK, and they encourage Christians to engage, noting an interesting convergence: Both Transition and Christianity invoke a powerful and positive vision of the future. “With Transition, the future is a sustainable, resilient, vibrant community; for Christians, the future is the full appearance of the kingdom of God.” There’s no reason to doubt that the hopes and energy behind the Transition movement are God-given desires for shalom, and that Christians could find a happy partnership there.

A natural resource economist, Rusty Pritchard is the CEO of Flourish (FlourishOnline.org), an environmental ministry.

Radical Forgiveness Tackling the Empathy Deficit “We live in a culture that discourages empathy,” then-Senator Barack Obama told college students in 2006. “A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. A culture where those in power too often encourage these selfish impulses.”

The Stand in My Shoes Project seeks to change that. Billed as a “global empathy moviement,” it is a film-driven campaign that advocates for empathy as one of the most powerful tools for social change. The team is filming around the world, raising awareness, and developing empathy-training programs for schools and businesses. With the film set to release at the end of 2014, there’s still plenty of time to get in on the ground floor action at StandinMyShoes.com.

Real Hope for the Homeless + A program of Mobile Loaves & Fishes, Community First! Village is a 27-acre master-planned community poised to provide affordable, sustainable housing and a supportive community to about 200 disabled, chronically homeless people in Central Texas. A collection of miniature houses, mobile homes, teepees, and refurbished RVs will come with a low monthly rent, and the village will include a three-acre community garden, chapel, medical facility, and outdoor movie theater.

According to Alan Graham, who has been helping homeless folks find jobs and get off the streets for 14 years, the cost to taxpayers of not housing these people amounts to about $10 million a year. Mobile Loaves & Fishes’ capital campaign is two-thirds of the way to its $6 million goal. Learn more at MLF.org/community-first.

+ The state of Utah is taking a novel—and radically respectful—approach to dealing with homelessness. Over the past eight years, Utah has moved over 2,000 people into apartments—no strings attached, no questions asked. Why? When decision makers added up the average annual cost of emergency room visits and jail stays for the homeless, they realized that providing a free apartment and a social worker to the homeless represented an almost $6,000 savings—per year, per person! With the help of a caseworker, participants work toward self-sufficiency, but even if they fail, the apartment is still theirs. Learn more at HousingWorks.Utah.gov. + A few years ago, Doniece Sandoval, a successful marketing exec in San Francisco, overheard a homeless woman sobbing desperately, “I’ll never be clean!” Sandoval started to imagine what it would be like to be without the possibility of showering or doing laundry, and something inside her shifted. “There was something about that moment, in that place, that made me realize what I had

Ronnie Smith of Austin, Tex., was shot dead in Benghazi last December. He had moved to Libya with his wife and their infant son to teach at an international high school, incarnate peace, and be a good neighbor to the people of Benghazi.

When asked by CBS News if she thought she and her husband were naïve to move to such a dangerous part of the world, Anita Smith’s replied, "Not at all. We knew before going into Libya that there was risk. We were doing this because we wanted to follow what God has for us, and that’s to show the Libyan people his love and his forgiveness."

Within days of the murder, Smith wrote an open letter to all Libyans: "I hear people speaking with hate, anger, and blame over Ronnie’s death, but that’s not what Ronnie would want. Ronnie would want his death to be an opportunity for us to show one another love and forgiveness, because that’s what God has shown to us." To his killers, she writes, “I love them. And I forgive them, and I have nothing against them."

been doing wasn’t enough,” she says.

That moment led to her researching the situation for her city’s approximately 6,500 homeless people, half of whom live outside of shelters—and she learned that only 16 public showers are available.

Long story short: She quit her job, raised $75,000 through a crowdfunding campaign, and launched the nonprofit Lava Mae (a play on lava me, Spanish for “wash me”). The result: retrofitted municipal busses that hook up to public fire hydrants, heat the water with propane tanks, and deliver it through stainless steel showerheads. Changing rooms, toilets, and sinks are also on board.

“Delivering dignity one shower at a time,” Lava Mae launches officially this month in San Francisco. Learn more at LavaMae.org.

49

Consume

I

It’s not all bad out there.

n a camp in Southern Indiana, the air mattress lies on the linoleum floor of a rec hall. While dense and warm outside, it’s too cold in here; someone turned the air-conditioner on high. Earphones in, I am collapsed upon the flocked, inflated plastic, taking a much-needed rest from the week’s activities as leader of a five-day intensive men’s retreat. Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler sing to me, "All I wanna be is a thousand black birds / Bursting from a tree into the blue / Love—let it be not just a feeling / But the broken beauty / Of what we choose to do." The piano, the sleepy electric guitar, and Karin’s tender voice are a comfort as I doze and, later, waking up, mark how long I’ve slept by noting which songs I’ve missed.

Over the Rhine’s new double-disk album Meet Me At the Edge of the World has been grounded into a place and time for me, as any good album should be.

You buy a CD, and a new relationship is formed. The music speaks and marks where you are in this time and place, and you listen to it until it’s stuck in your internal iPod. More people relate personally to Karin and Linford’s music than to the music of any other artists I know. We take ownership of their lyrics as if they’re ours. My friends remark that having a new OTR album is like having a wonderful hour-long phone call with a dear friend they haven’t heard from in a while. They play back the conversation again and again, each time finding new insights and nuances. Friends see their lives in the poetic reflection of these two very sincere musician/songwriters. Anyone who is alive and awake to this world’s care and cruelty can’t help being caught in the authenticity of Linford and Karin’s songs of love or absence.

Faithfully making music since the mid-’90s, OTR is now in their mid-20s of album-making. With that volume of creativity as a bulwark around them, there is clarity of vision and maturity to their writing that clearly can come only with time and experience. Karin sings, “The newness of uncovered skin / Your messy hair your goofy grin / Your shattered places deep within / All of it was music.” And the next verse: “To those I’ve wronged, Please forgive me / I hope this song, helps you believe me / The holding on the letting go / It all gets buried soft and low / But even then a song might grow / All of it was music.” There is wisdom of seeing both love and pain as part of the bigger melody. There is maturity in seeing that forgiveness of what we have done and what we have left undone may be used as a part of beauty and wonder.

Over the Rhine’s music is made up of grounded musings of their surroundings: a tupelo tree, ironweed, goldenrod, barren fields, a blue heron, a highway shoulder, red-winged blackbirds, starlings, the Cuyahoga River, a chain-link fence, and dishes left in a sink. They are not artists who look for grace, hope, and life in the teeming streets of Paris or on an exotic beach. Instead they find wonder in

50

taking the time to be rooted in the locale of their home in Highland County, Ohio.

On this soil or concrete and within the relationships they have called their own, they clearly have found a reverence for this world.

OTR’s songs wander into your ears like a familiar dog into your home— the plunking of keys, the gentle and methodical strumming, Karin’s longing and plaintiff voice, and the smoky meandering of an electric guitar—these are welcome guests. This familiarity plays out with the traditional instruments they use: an upright piano and bass, harmonium, chamberlin, autoharp, accordion, and mandolin. And this down-to-earth philosophy is manifest in the authors from whom they draw inspiration: Annie Dillard and Anne Lamott, two writers who, like OTR, while grounded in this world clearly point to and long for the next.

Driving away from the camp through Jackson County’s sleepy landscape of rolling corn fields and leafy trees with a scattering of high clouds above, I listen to Karin and Linford sing, “Just the whisper of a breeze / Rollin’ up these threadbare shirtsleeves / Love makes me want to bruise my knees / Sweet Jesus can you come release me / Underneath a blue jean sky / Underneath a blue jean sky / Open up your love and lay it on me / Underneath a blue jean sky / It’s just a faded blue jean sky / Gimme a swig of a little kick ass beauty / Gimme a swig of a little kick ass beauty.” And I’m seeing what they are saying a little clearer after the week, and I can’t help but be thankful to have them along for this ride.

Tim Timmerman is a visual artist (TimTimmerman.com) and professor of art at George Fox University in Newberg, Oreg.

Bringing C. S. Lewis to the Stage After the New Testament, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis was the second Christian book that literary and theatrical artist Max McLean read while in his early 20s. New to both Christianity and theater, McLean was fascinated with Lewis because of “his ability and will to organize the world under a Christian framework.” He had no idea at the time just how big a role the book would one day play in his life, career, and ministry.

As an undergraduate at the University of Texas in Austin in the early 1970s, McLean struggled with social phobia, the fear of doing common things in front of others. In an effort to overcome the phobia, he enrolled in a theater class, which proved to be the perfect antidote. According to McLean, “acting is about borrowing from yourself and applying that to the text you’re working with.” He graduated with a BA in history and, smitten with the stage, continued his theater education at a drama school in London, England.

Attracted to the idea of combining his theater skills with the Scriptures, McLean began a theater ministry in partnership with the Christian and Ministry

From the Couch Commando: Commercials Alliance, performing oral presentations of the Bible across the US during the '80s. In 1992 McLean founded his own arts ministry, Fellowship for the Performing Arts, based in Manhattan since 2010.

McLean’s reconnection with the book that had fascinated him as a new Christian began after Drew University Professor Jeff Fiske saw him in a performance of Genesis and emailed him to suggest that he would make a great Screwtape.

McLean and Fiske acquired the rights to Lewis’ book in 2005 and began adapting it for the stage. The play enjoyed a 309-performance run in New York City in 2010 and has since been performed in more than 40 additional cities. Along the way it has garnered reviews like this one by Don Aucoin in the Boston Globe: “A none-too-subtle allegory on behalf of Christianity ... manages to be both engrossing and entertaining largely due to McLean’s silky, viperish performance ... loaded with clever commentary on human foibles.”

One of Lewis’ most famous and influential books, The Screwtape Letters addresses Christianity from an intelligent and persuasive demon’s point of view. It centers on a series of letters between a senior demon named Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood as the younger demon seeks the damnation of a man referred to only as “the Patient.”

The book is both satirical and apologetic, and McLean and Fiske used those elements to create a play that is funny yet poignant.

In his role as artistic director of the Fellowship for the Performing Arts, McLean has three guiding principles: (1) carefully select and produce work that captures Christianity’s intellectual integrity and dramatic power, (2) execute work at a level worthy to be produced in mainstream cultural venues where a diverse audience will see it, and (3) ask the Christian community to support it. The health of the Fellowship is evidenced by a second successful play—McLean’s recent adaptation of Lewis’ brilliant allegory The Great Divorce. Adapted for the stage by McLean and Brian Watkins, the play opened last September at the Kaye Playhouse in New York.

The Great Divorce, whose title refers to the separation between heaven and hell, centers around a bus ride from hell to paradise with some fascinating passengers. “This collection of self-satisfied day trippers,” reads the promotional material, “includes a belligerent bully who only wants his rights, an old woman who can’t stop grumbling long enough to question whether she has anything to grumble about, a bishop too ’wise’ to actually believe, and a famous artist more focused on his reputation than his art.” (Learn more at GreatDivorceonstage. com.)

The idea of Christian theater, according to McLean, is that if Christianity is true, a well-written—and enjoyable—play about faith and God can reach a lot of people. “The power of theatre and storytelling is that it flies ‘under the radar’ and hits us in our imagination—the place where a knowledge of God (Romans 1:19) already exists. Art draws people in. After a while they begin to wonder if the ideas that inspired the work are really true.”

Kara Lofton is a senior communications major at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va.

As much as I love television, I really hate television advertising: the volume (both auditory and quantitative), the predictability, the messaging. Though there are a few commercials that are clever, most every part of the vast majority of television advertising makes me feel sad to be human.

So, at great personal sacrifice, I sifted through a few “Best and Worst Commercials of 2013” lists just to see what was panned and praised. Skipping the commercials that rely on the same old schtick (sex, envy, cheap laughs), here are a few notables: Actually Kind of Cool Goldieblox “Girls” (bit.ly/1d7peDC) shows a trio of elementary-school-aged girls, uninspired by pink-princess-themed toys, who create a Rube Goldberg machine in this entertaining commercial for a company that encourages girls to engineer, invent, and innovate.

Skype “Stay Together” (bit.ly/1gHAbfD) tells the story of two young women, each born with one partial arm, who develop a friendship over e-mail and Skype, despite never meeting face-to-face. Warning: this commercial will make you feel all the feelings. But it’s quite a beautiful testament to the power of friendship.

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing Dove “Real Beauty Sketches” (bit.ly/1bizaoP) The marketers over at Dove, owned by Unilever, maker of Axe body spray (the best at scummy adverts preying on body insecurity), must think consumers are pretty shallow and stupid. Sadly, given that the YouTube version of this commercial has been viewed well over 61 million times, they might be right. The ad’s message is insidious and racist.

Out of more than six minutes of video, women of color are on the screen a scant few seconds. The ad strongly implies that “beautiful” means thin, young, and pale, and it outright says that beauty is critically important to happiness. It’s the worst kind of damaging message, masquerading itself as a public service for women.

Chipotle “Scarecrow” (bit.ly/1kwCzWt) It really gets my goat when big companies try to pass themselves off as the mom-andpop-shop-next-door. The Funny or Die parody (bit.ly/LN6LlA) of Chipotle’s original ad does a nice job pointing out the underlying messages of Scarecrow, and Mother Jones’ “Behind the Burrito” article (bit.ly/LZUVpb) expands the critique. Bottom line: if you want healthy food, and if you want to advocate for healthy foods in your community, you’re not going to find an ally in a national fast food chain.

Sarah Withrow King is the deputy director of ESA.

51

OUR HARSH LOGIC

by Breaking the Silence Picador

Christians in an Age of Wealth

Reviewed by Rebecca Hall

by Craig L. Blomberg Zondervan

Every nation living in the midst of conflict creates its own master narrative, which serves to idealize its cause and excuse any collateral damage.

In the case of Israel, that narrative is extremely pronounced—one last outpost of “civilization” in the midst of a chaotic Middle East, a beacon of Western civilization threatened by terrorism and barbarity. This narrative is extremely popular in the West, and the United States in particular.

Unfortunately, it completely disregards the lived experiences of Palestinians residing in Occupied Territories, whose lives and resources are so often appropriated and exploited by both settlers and members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Thankfully, the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence is living up to its name by educating Israel and the world about the realities of the Occupation. Their book, Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 20002010, is unflinchingly honest in its portrayal of the IDF, its operations, and its intentional disruption of the lives of Palestinian citizens.

The book is a compilation of close to 150 Israeli soldiers’ stories about their experiences serving at different bases. Some unapologetically recount instances of harassment against Palestinians, naming terrorist attacks and the murder of friends as excuse for their own violence. Others, however, even those who participated in violence, recognize the injustice of the situation. Some even recount instances of trying to protect Palestinians or their property, only to find that they had no support from their superiors. Many mentioned the total disconnect between life as a citizen in Israel and their experiences as soldiers, participating in actions that they knew folks back home would never understand.

The book is divided into four sections meant to mirror the four aspects of Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories: prevention (of terrorism), separation (from Palestinians), “preserving the Palestinian “fabric of life,” and “enforcing the law.”

Each aspect reveals not only specific policies that disrupt Palestinian life but also actions taken by soldiers on the ground. Soldiers recount how, in the name of prevention, they would enter Palestinian neighborhoods in the middle of the night, throwing stun grenades to announce their presence. They also recall shooting Palestinian children and secretly occupying Palestinian homes, in effect holding the occupants hostage.

Our Harsh Logic is a book every American Christian should read. Through the testimonies of ordinary soldiers, it presents a compelling image of the dehumanization both of Palestinians and of Israeli soldiers themselves, trapped in systems that compel them to engage in senseless and reactionary violence. The format of short testimonies and interviews adds to the sense of chaos and senselessness and may prove emotionally exhausting to the reader, who is repeatedly confronted with stories of abuse and violence. The geography and IDF terminology may also prove confusing to the average US reader, but the relevancy and poignancy of the testimonies themselves remain.

Our Harsh Logic was originally compiled to enlighten Israelis about actions carried out in their name and for their “protection.” Would to God that it would also enlighten US Christians to the violent actions we endorse when we give our unwavering, unquestioning support to the state of Israel.

Rebecca Hall is an ESA Sider Scholar and MDiv student at Palmer Theological Seminary.

52

Reviewed by Shayna L. Lear In his new book, Christians in an Age of Wealth: A Biblical Theology of Stewardship, Craig Blomberg offers a biblically sound resource for Christians seeking to apply their faith to their financial lives. He begins by establishing the need to address stewardship, calling attention to the poor giving patterns of the church and the abundance of advertising and propaganda that we are faced with on a daily basis. He then poses several questions that he attempts to answer in the subsequent chapters, being careful not to raise any questions “that the Bible does not address,” and concludes with reflection.

Blomberg begins by examining the goodness of wealth as revealed in the Bible, with an eye to avoiding not only the idolizing of it (as does the prosperity theology that has taken hold of so many Christians) but also the demonizing of it. He then examines the seductive power of wealth—to which we are vulnerable when we view it apart from God as owner of all—and invites readers to see that generous giving is not only a biblical precedent but also a safeguard against the idolatry of wealth.

Tackling the topics of tithing and taxes and their place in the life of a Christian, he carefully argues for the “graduated tithe” while cautioning against giving with manipulative intentions. He concludes by outlining the urgency of the church’s need to deal with stewardship as a matter of Christian maturity.

The reflection section, which focuses on the relevance and application of each topic, offers a welcome relief from the more academically heavy parts of the book by presenting anecdotal case studies. Blomberg relates the theology of stewardship to the individual, government/business, and the church, while demonstrating how these principles can lead to transformation. The chapter on government and business merits its own book-length treatment, as space prohibited the author from delving into the complexities of systemic sin and its implications on wealth.

Seminarians and those in ministry will most likely find this book to be a valuable resource to help them work through their thoughts and feelings regarding wealth and how it will be communicated in both the words and deeds of their churches. Laypersons may struggle with the academic nature of the book, but they may benefit by using it for a group Bible study on stewardship. Stewardship issues specific to certain subcultures of Western Christianity are not overtly addressed and, therefore, ministers of diverse populations should refrain from presenting the book as an across-the-board standard for all Christians.

Shayna L. Lear is a financial planner and financial literacy educator in Philadelphia, Pa. She assists with the Urban Affairs Coalition and the City of Philadelphia’s Anti-Predatory Lending Initiative, helping low- to moderate-income families find suitable home repair loans. Her book, Money on Purpose (Judson Press, 2012), gives insight into how to live a financially balanced life.

Bonhoeffer the Assassin?

The Locust Effect

by Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony Siegrist, and Daniel Umbel Baker Academic

by Gary Haugen Oxford University Press Reviewed by Tim Høiland

Reviewed by Bryan Stafford The overarching narrative on the theological life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer has remained essentially the same since the day he was martyred: He started his adult life as a nationalist Christian from a proud German family, became an antinationalist Christian pacifist, and ended his life as an antinationalist Christian realist who was involved in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler. Calling into doubt the last of these assumptions is the goal of the authors of Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking.

The question mark in the title is well chosen, since the whole book interrogates the broadly held belief that Bonhoeffer was involved in certain attempts on Hitler’s life and therefore had reneged on the pacifist views expressed so clearly in his book The Cost of Discipleship. The authors do this through a multipronged approach that utilizes their comprehensive knowledge of the theologian’s life and works.

Two ideas are central to the authors’ approach. One is that they challenge several common historical misconceptions regarding Bonhoeffer, writing, for example, that he was neither arrested nor executed for involvement in a failed attempt on Hitler’s life, as is commonly thought. The other is their belief that Bonhoeffer’s pacifist theology was so well established and essential to his being that he was incapable of being involved in any assassination attempts, even if the target was Hitler.

It is hard to imagine any Christian pacifist not wanting Nation, Siegrist, and Umbel to succeed in their quest to reclaim Bonhoeffer’s pacifist identity.

After all, as Stanley Hauerwas says in the book’s forward, Bonhoeffer has long served as the case in point to the idea that pacifism is not a viable option in the face of extraordinary evils. But do the authors prove that Bonhoeffer died a pacifist?

Not quite. The authors do manage to create reasonable doubt around the previous model, which stated that Bonhoeffer was no longer a pacifist during the final years of his life. However, they do this mostly through circumstantial evidence. Unfortunately, the book suffers from a dearth of direct evidence and deals unconvincingly with several of the major arguments that have traditionally pointed to Bonhoeffer’s eventual acceptance of violence.

Bonhoeffer the Assassin? is a well-researched and well-written book that never quite fulfills its promise of reclaiming Bonhoeffer’s “call to peacemaking.” Hopefully, it will serve as a springboard for further scholarship into Bonhoeffer’s life as a pacifist. If nothing else, it should garner quite a response from several of the more traditional Bonhoeffer scholars.

Bryan Stafford is Master of Divinity student at Palmer Theological Seminary.

King of Prussia, Pa.

In this game-changing new book, Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission and Victor Boutros of the US Department of Justice argue that the experience of being poor nearly always includes vulnerability to violence, which in turn fuels the cycle of poverty. “It turns out that you can provide all manner of goods and services to the poor,” they write, “as good people have been doing for decades, but if you are not restraining the bullies in the community from violence and theft—as we have been failing to do for decades—then we are going to find the outcomes of our efforts quite disappointing.”

This book doesn’t make for easy bedtime reading. No one who reads it will forget the story of Yuri, an 8-year-old victim of rape and murder in a remote Peruvian village, or the countless other stories of violent crime committed against people living in poverty throughout the world. Moreover, while the authors’ thorough documentation of studies related to violence and poverty will give the book credence among those whose decisions can truly affect the lives of billions, this intellectual seriousness makes for a heavy read.

Haugen and Boutros avoid offering “silver bullet” solutions to poverty or recommendations for any particular type of intervention. Rather than diminishing the importance of traditional approaches to development, they say such efforts should be redoubled. The authors’ aim, however, is “to make sure that we are safeguarding the fruits of those efforts from being laid waste by the locusts of predatory violence.” Making a forceful and convincing case for one thing does not require pretending that nothing else matters; others who write about poverty and development should take note.

Published by the prestigious Oxford University Press, The Locust Effect is not an overtly Christian book. Nonetheless, anyone familiar with the work of Haugen and his IJM colleagues knows they are unquestionably motivated by deep Christian faith. Further, it seems to me that this book outlines a distinctly Christian way of doing human rights work, however subtly it is presented. Whereas activists often pit themselves antagonistically against corrupt systems and public figures, Haugen and Boutros call for a different approach. They recognize the corruption for what it is, to be sure, but they also understand that true flourishing requires the transformation of unjust systems and people—not the eradication of them.

Therefore, IJM isn’t content to shame corrupt or inadequate governments and law enforcement personnel into changing their ways. Rather, the goal is to establish trust and, ideally, one day become authentic partners in defending the vulnerable and ensuring justice for all. “This can be a longer process than the approach of the dramatic, damning exposé,” they write, “but the truth is, it’s simply naïve to believe that meaningful transformation of a dysfunctional criminal justice system can ever occur without champions taking up the fight from the inside.”

With great moral urgency, The Locust Effect calls for courageous action on behalf of the vulnerable poor. The sobering news is that the plague of hidden, everyday violence is real. The good news is that it is not inevitable.

Tim Høiland is a writer, editor, and co-director of communications for Lemonade International, which supports locally initiated community development in an urban slum in Guatemala. He tweets about faith, culture, and justice @tjhoiland.

53

LET’S GRAB THE TABLE BY THE WINDOW! Soak up the spring sunshine and savor these new books about mission at home and abroad.

Learning from the Least

by Andrew F. Bush Cascade

Wild and Wonderful

by Stan L. LeQuire and Chantelle du Plessis Resource Publications

Come on a journey with Palestinian Jesus followers, whose radical servanthood out of weakness is a prophetic challenge to Western Christians, a call to put aside the prerogatives of power and wealth, to question triumphal theologies, and to discover the vulnerability of the way of the cross.

From Times Square to Timbuktu

by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson Eerdmans The post-Christian West meets the non-Western church in this noble effort to discover bridges that can cross vast cultural, theological, and geographical distances. “As global shifts create new local realities,” writes the author, “the church can discover fresh pathways for fashioning a vital missional presence within the culture.”

Letters from “Apartheid Street”

by Michael T. McRay Cascade Suffering matters. Justice matters. Hope matters.

Stories matter. This book by a Christian peacemaker in occupied Palestine matters because it has real stories that show true suffering, hope, and longing for justice and peace—borne from the depths of experience and reflection. It will serve us well to listen closely.

-Paul Alexander

Who’s making the popcorn?

Movies we think you should watch, too.

It’s Better to Jump Directed by Patrick Alexander Stewart, Gina M. Angelone, and Mouna B. Stewart Cinema Libre Studio For centuries the ancient city of Akka, along the northern coast of Israel, has protected its citizens with a 40-foot sea wall. But as the city endures harsh economic pressures and social changes, Palestinian families who have called Akka home for generations are being pressured to leave. This film captures the spirit of the town’s Arab citizens and their leap of faith towards a better future.

Learn more at ItsBettertoJump.com.

54

It sounds too good to be true: economic development to reduce poverty in a way that protects the environment and respects indigenous cultures while offering stunning experiences and spectacular sights for ecotourists. But it is happening. This delightful, carefully researched book tells encouraging stories and offers helpful analysis on how to expand and improve this exciting, important development.

-Ron Sider

Incarnate

by Michael Frost IVP Books Written by an Australian missiologist, this book examines the church in an age of unprecedented rootlessness, addiction, ambiguity, and disengagement—an age of “excarnation.” Frost digs deep into the manure and mulch of contemporary culture to extract a living, breathing body of believers.

Not My Life Directed by Bob Bilheimer Worldwide Documentaries Available in both 30-minute and 70-minute versions, Not My Life reveals the brutalizing practices endemic to the multibillion dollar trade in human beings around the world. Filmed on five continents, the film provides a tour through the exploitative world of modern slavery, focusing specifically on the most vulnerable of all—children in forced labor, domestic servitude, begging, sex tourism, and soldiering. Learn more at NotMyLife.org.

Ravi Zacharias 58

Easter Morning by Qi He

"Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive."Â

ESSENTIAL RESOURCES FROM

BAKER ACADEMIC

978-0-8010-4881-4 978 0 8010 4881 4 • 240 pp. • $22 $22.99p 99

978-0-8010-3973-7 • 192 pp. • $19.99p 97

978-0-8010-4933-0 • 256 pp. • $ $22.99p

“Skillen has made an important contribution to the growing body of serious evangelical political thought. This book is a masterful articulation of a profoundly Christian political philosophy— one developed in a sophisticated conversation with a broad range of the most important shapers of Western culture.”—Ronald J. Sider, Eastern University

“Smith takes a beautiful risk, boldly and successfully making a case for the relevance of pragmatism for contemporary Christian self-understanding. In this remarkable book, he not only succeeds in making the difficult and enigmatic work of complicated thinkers like Wittgenstein, Rorty, and Brandom accessible to the uninitiated . . . but also argues convincingly that the pragmatist emphases on contingency and fallibility should play a key role in a Christian understanding of humans as dependent creatures.”

—Ronald A. Kuipers, author of Richard Rorty

“[A] timely and important reminder that doctrines are not merely ideas to be debated but truths to be done. Jones’s evangelical and ecumenical approach to each doctrine is also most welcome. . . . Practicing Christian Doctrine joins the short list of one-volume introductions to Christian theology that I am happy to recommend.”

—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Evangelical Divinity School

u

Available in bookstores or by calling 800.877.2665 | Visit our blog: blog.bakeracademic.com Subscribe to E-Notes, our enewsletter, at bakeracademic.com

59

THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION IN A DIVIDED WORLD

The Duke DiviniTy School Summer inSTiTuTe presented by

the Center for Reconciliation Rooted in a Christian vision, this intensive five-day institute nourishes, renews, and deepens the capacities of Christian leaders in the ministry of reconciliation, justice, and peace.

ju n e 2- 7, 20 14

www.dukesummerinstitute.org

The International Christian Alliance on Prostitution (ICAP) unites, equips and empowers practitioners and advocates who compassionately challenge injustice and offer freedom to people exploited by prostitution, including sex trafficking.

Join us for the upcoming ICAP Global Conference at Green Lake Conference Center in Green Lake, Wisconsin, May 18-23, 2014.

Go to ICAPGlobal.org to learn more.