It should come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I’m a big fan of John Perkins. He’s one of my favorite go-to guys for all things community development, civil rights, racial reconciliation and urban ministry. Last week I read one of his more recent books, Welcoming Justice: God's Movement Toward Beloved Community, which he co-wrote with Charles Marsh, a religion professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Project on Lived Theology. By way of introduction, Perkins is black, Marsh is white, and the book is about “beloved community” -- the guiding vision for Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement in the American South where both Marsh and Perkins grew up. I’m not sure I’m entirely qualified to do that vision justice, but I understand it to be more or less the vision King articulates in his timeless “I Have A Dream” speech.
Marsh is a scholar of the Civil Rights movement, Perkins is a veteran of it, and their thesis is that what kept the Civil Rights movement grounded and creative and redemptive was its roots in the Christian faith. Marsh writes:
The Civil Rights movement teaches us that faith is authentic when it stays close to the ground. And it reminds us of faith’s essential affirmations: showing hospitality to strangers and outcasts; affirming the dignity of created life; reclaiming the ideals of love, honesty and truth; embracing the preferential option of nonviolence; and practicing justice and mercy... Only as long as the Civil Rights movement remained anchored in the church -- in the energies, convictions and images of the biblical narrative and the worshiping community -- did the movement have a vision.
At some point after the assassination of King, the movement lost touch with its roots, they say, and that’s when it splintered and degenerated. They want to call us back to the roots of the movement and consider what it can teach us about a twenty-first century embodiment of that vision of beloved community. A big part of that is understanding Christian discipleship through the lens of reconciliation -- reconciliation between people and God, and reconciliation among people across various boundaries, including race.
Perkins asserts that poverty and racism are interrelated, and are in fact part of a bigger web of social breakdown, with individual, family and community issues all at play. And the church, he says, needs to step up:
The issue we’re facing is the broken family and the broken community. It really is a single issue. The community is broken because families are broken, and families can’t get back together because the community is broken. This is why family values and social justice aren’t separate issues. The health of the community depends on the health of the family and the health of the family depends on the justice of the community. If the church is going to offer good news in our time, we have to give some alternative to the broken family and broken community that reflect the desperation of our culture... If the gospel of reconciliation is going to interrupt the brokenness in society, our churches are going to have to rethink their vocation... A community where men stand in the rain to beg is broken. There is no peace in that city. It’s that man’s problem, but it’s also our community’s problem. We’ve got to do something to make good work possible for healthy people like him. What does the church have to offer a community where healthy men beg on the street corner?
What indeed?
I wish churches spent more time thinking about how their members could love one another and share a common life by working together as a community. Part of the reason our churches are so individualistic is that we just accept the economic system of our culture without question. We assume that people who can get the good jobs should go wherever they have to and the people who can’t get the good jobs should just take what they can get. But churches that want to interrupt the brokenness of society ought to be about creating jobs in the community and giving neighbors an opportunity to work together. If we take our communities seriously as economic places, we’ll spend more time thinking about creating good work than we spend thinking about more relevant worship styles or bigger church buildings.
All in all, the book is a pretty quick read, but it's deep, because it gets at the very roots of that which stands in the way of reconciliation, and it’s cause for some soul searching among evangelicals, I think. I hope and pray that my tribe will become known as true ambassadors of reconciliation and that we’ll get to experience some of that beloved community too.
Can social justice tame our culture wars?
This is USA Today’s coverage of the recently launched “:58” campaign (which I blogged about here) and “the new evangelicals” movement, represented at the recent Q conference in Portland:
As the generational tides nudge this demographic closer to the front and center of American evangelicalism, it's time for a refiguring of the equations by the many non-evangelicals nursing grudges about those pushy Jesus nuts — especially the progressive secularists who share these new evangelicals' social justice commitments. Divided by religious belief, these groups are easily stereotyped as culture war enemies. They needn't be. If anything, they're common-good allies simply in need of an introduction.
Two reading lists on poverty and development
It’s not every day conservative Christian outlets provide suggested reading lists on economic development and holistic social action, so I want to share them here. One is from The Gospel Coalition and compiled by theologian Wayne Grudem. I added a comment on the post with a couple of thoughts. The second list is in WORLD Magazine and compiled by Amy Sherman, who I read in grad school. I’ve read some books on both lists, and while the lists are somewhat ideologically narrow and therefore incomplete, I’m glad these folks are encouraging Christians to begin understanding development and justice at a deeper level.
Colombian circus troupe
This fascinating audio slideshow from the BBC features Circocolombia, a circus troupe from Cali, a city notorious for its eponymous drug cartel. The troupe is touring Europe with a production called Urban, which combines music, dance and storytelling. I hope it makes its way to the US.
Latinos and the 2011 MLB All Star Game
The New York Times has an interesting piece on the upcoming baseball All Star Game to be held in Phoenix, and some of the concerns of Latino players in light of Arizona’s controversial immigration law:
Selig is putting his Latino players in the impossible position of having to choose between showing solidarity to their people or to the game that has enriched them even as they have enriched it.
Guatemala debuts women-only buses
I’ve known for a while that Cairo offers gender-specific mass transit options; now Guatemala City does too. They’ve been established because so many Guatemalans in the capital rely on mass transit, while there are a disturbingly high number of armed robberies and assaults of women on the normal buses.
Ex-Brazil president Lula on ending hunger
This op-ed in the Guardian from Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is more or less a pitch for the candidate he nominated to head up the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, but is noteworthy because Brazil really has made some impressive strides towards ending hunger, both at home and abroad. Lula writes:
Brazil has been working internationally for a more balanced and socially equitable global order. Our approach is based on the construction of equal partnerships with developing countries worldwide.
Christians issue handbook on evangelism
I didn’t see this one coming, but on second thought, it’s probably long overdue. Leaders representing the global mainline Protestant, evangelical and Catholic churches got together and released a rule book on the dos and don’ts of mission and evangelism called Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World: Recommendations for Conduct (pdf). The document asserts churches’ rights to evangelize, while denouncing “resorting to deception and coercive means.”
Ever since I first came here almost two years ago, I’ve been interested in Costa Rica’s neighbor to the north, Nicaragua. Costa Rica is fairly well off by regional standards, while Nicaragua is the second poorest country in all the Western Hemisphere. Because of this significant economic disparity, there’s a sizeable population of undocumented Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica who are working menial jobs, living in substandard housing, and getting blamed for all of Costa Rica’s problems. Sound familiar?
I remember watching Hotel Rwanda last winter for the third or fourth time, and I was struck by the power of words when used to dehumanize people who are different. Before decent law-abiding Hutus could begin systematically hacking Tutsis to pieces in broad daylight, the Tutsis had to be made to seem sub-human. You had radio personalities calling Tutsis ‘tall trees’ and ‘cockroaches’ rather than referring to them as people. When you hear this repeated often enough, and circumstances become desperate enough, it suddenly somehow becomes no problem to ‘cut down the tall trees’ and to ‘crush the cockroaches’.
I share that because I worry about the way we in the United States sometimes talk about Mexicans and Central Americans, and the way Costa Ricans talk about Nicaraguans. People in Rwanda never thought they were capable of what they did in 1994, but before they knew it 800,000 people had been slaughtered. I’m not saying the same thing is going to happen in the southwest U.S. or here in Costa Rica, and I certainly hope humanity has learned its lesson, but there’s something tragic about dehumanization in and of itself, long before it leads to genocide.
Ironically, in the memoir written by the real-life hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, he makes the point that it was the power of words that saved the lives of those 1268 people he harbored. Words can be powerful tools for good. Words can, in a sense, serve to humanize.
On Sunday I’m taking an early bus to Managua, where I’ll be staying for a few days, visiting different development projects and ministries for a writing project. My hope for this trip, when it’s all said and done, is that the words I put down on paper, in a magazine maybe, would be words that honor the dignity of those I meet. Words that serve as little instruments of peace, reweaving in some small way a bit of the shalom that God intends for the people made in his image.
