Mark lives on a Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona, and is doing some wonderful work related to reconciliation, development, and contextualized worship. Among his many undertakings, he serves on the CCDA Board of Directors, the Christian Reformed Church Board of Trustees, and is a resource development strategist for indigenous worship with Calvin College's Institute of Christian Worship.

Here’s part of his presentation at that conference in Tucson, addressed to James Anaya, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples:

Being Native American and living in the United States feels like our indigenous peoples are an old grandmother who lives in a very large house. It is a beautiful house with plenty of rooms and comfortable furniture. But, years ago, some people came into our house and locked us upstairs in the bedroom. Today our house is full of people. They are sitting on our furniture. They are eating our food. They are having a party in our house. They have since unlocked the door to our bedroom but now it is much later and we are tired, old, weak and sick; so we can't or don't come out. But the part that is the most hurtful and that causes us the most pain, is that virtually no one from this party ever comes upstairs to find us in the bedroom, sits down next to us on the bed, looks us in the eye, and simply says, “Thank you. Thank you for letting us be in your house.”

I encourage you to read the full text of the presentation.

If you’re interested in learning more about the “conversation for reconciliation” Mark mentions later in the presentation, the best way to do so is to like the Facebook page he created for the reading of the government’s apology in Washington, DC on December 19.

I’m grateful for thoughtful, articulate Native leaders like Mark. We non-Natives have much to learn from our hosts, if only we’ll listen.

YKR45DVHN7VG

1. Chuck Colson on common grace
Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship and former Watergate “hatchet man,” passed away this week. He was at times controversial in some circles, but in this podcast from a few years ago, Gabe Lyons and Andy Crouch discuss his positive legacy and share part of an interview with him, including his understanding of common grace:

The term "common grace" has fallen at a disuse in modern times. However, the Reformers understood it be God's grace spilled out in life for the benefit of non-believers, as well as, believers. Saving grace is the grace that transforms us. Common grace is what the just and unjust alike experience when God's people work to restore things back to God's original design.

2. “Saudade”
Those of us who grew up between cultures -- as missionary kids, business kids, embassy kids, and the like -- are often lumped together as third culture kids. My mom sent me this blog post on the Portuguese word “saudade,” which more or less means “a longing, a melancholy, a desire for what was.” It’s something TCKs commonly experience:

Third culture kids often struggle to give voice to their longing. Well aware that they are not from the country(ies) where they were raised, they still have all the connections and feelings that represent home. When trying to voice these, others look on with glazed eyes. Just recently someone said to me “But you’re not an immigrant! You’re American!” The tone was accusing and it was meant to be. What was unsaid was “Give it a rest! We know you grew up overseas. Big deal. You’re American and you’re living in America…” Ah yes….but I have “Saudade” I have that longing for something that “does not and cannot exist” and I know that. On my good days it is well hidden under the culture and costume of which I am now living. But on my more difficult days it struggles to find voice only to realize that explaining is too difficult.

3. Leymah Gbowee on peacemaking and prayer
Sarah Pulliam Bailey has an interview in Christianity Today with Leymah Gbowee, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Here’s Gbowee’s perspective on the connection between prayer and reconciliation:

There's something special about prayer itself that changes things. It consoles you in your faith and open doors. Reconciliation is often a spiritual process. If someone offends you deeply, it's too difficult for any man to heal you, so you have to encounter a higher power to receive that forgiveness. If you are the offender, even if the person you affected forgives you, you have to encounter something else to be able to forgive yourself. In order for reconciliation to take place, you have to be reconciled with God, yourself, and those who offended you.

4. When the world is suffering, what good do artists do?
William Dyrness, professor of theology and culture at Fuller Seminary, reflects on the purpose of art and the vocation of the artist when the world is suffering. Here’s how he begins:

Artists perform a strange alchemy, turning colors, nouns, and notes into landscapes, sonnets, and string quartets. Sometimes they perform an even greater magic by shaping images that keep us going, even in the darkness. As St. Augustine said, they provide the means of transport to move us along our journey. Our life, the Bishop of Hippo wrote, is a journey of the affections, which is meant to bring us to our true homeland in God. Many things attract our affections and move us, but they only take us forward when they are loved for the sake of God...

5. Online resources from Miroslav Volf
A blogger by the name of Andrew Goddard has compiled an impressive list of articles and lectures from Miroslav Volf that are available online. If my review of A Public Faith piqued your interest, this would be a great place to learn more about Volf’s work.

6. Ten companies that own what we eat
This fascinating chart shows the ten companies that own most of the food products we buy. Did you know the food industry was arranged this way? Click the image below to enlarge.

Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!

[Photo credit: Christianity Today]

It’s a good practice, I think, to read books about inspiring people who have lived remarkable lives. It’s a way of learning to see the world through the eyes of those who have most profoundly shaped it. For my part, I’ve made it a point to learn what I can from Nobel Peace Prize winners - folks like Martin Luther King, Jr., Wangari Maathai, Elie Wiesel, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Mother Teresa.

Another remarkably inspiring Nobel laureate for me is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who led the nonviolent anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and served as chair of  the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He just turned 80, and a new biography was published for the occasion: Tutu: Authorized (HarperOne), by South African journalist Allister Sparks and Tutu’s daughter, Mpho Tutu. The book also includes anecdotes and memories from a great variety of people who have known Tutu or have been impacted by him in different ways, and these perspectives give the book its intimate feel. I’d already read two of Tutu’s books, and did some research on him while I was at Eastern, but reading this new biography was a real treat.

While Tutu holds some theological views I fundamentally disagree with, he’s still someone I look to with tremendous gratitude and respect for all he has done to work for peace and reconciliation as a church leader. I hope he has paved the way for many who will follow in his footsteps. Most of us won’t shape history quite the way Tutu has, but I think all of us can learn from his example and consider the implications for our own spheres of influence, however great or small they may be.

Here are five things about Tutu that jumped out while reading the new biography.

1. Spiritual disciplines: time after time, those reflecting on Tutu’s life referred to the impact of his practice of spending hours every day in silence and prayer. While it could come across as snobbish or holier-than-thou for Tutu to leave a meeting or party or to sit silently in a car ride with a reporter and spend that time praying, no one seems to think he’s a spiritual snob. Rather, they see the rest of his life -- the calm, the joy, the perseverance, the humility - and they’re impressed. And many of them, for what it’s worth, don’t share Tutu’s faith.

2. Being fully present: Tutu recognizes that to give to others as he does so deeply and consistently, he needs to be nourished. The flip side of spending so much time alone and in prayer, then, is that when he’s with people, he’s with them fully. And he’s the same person, it seems, whether he’s with long-time friends, with a world leader for the first time, or with an ordinary person like you or me. He seems to have a humanizing effect on people even -- or perhaps especially -- in dehumanizing situations. This plays out in his belief in ubuntu, which roughly translates into “a person is a person through other people.”

3. Humor: an immensely important but largely overlooked quality among his fellow activists is Tutu’s sense of humor. He never seems to take himself too seriously, and his humor is often self-deprecating. It’s evident that his sense of humor had a lot to do with dispelling a number of quite tense situations during the apartheid era when there wasn’t much to laugh about. By putting his audiences at ease, it made his costly message of peace and reconciliation a lot easier to swallow.

4. Humility: one never gets the sense that Tutu considers himself better than anyone else. He was constantly present with poor, angry black South Africans when it would have been much safer to champion their cause from a distance. He didn't allow his international fame to go to his head or to distract him from the reality on the ground. Also, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Tutu quietly stepped away from his temporary role as political leader of the movement, happy to see someone else take the lead. This kind of humility is beautiful because it is rare.

5. Civility: at a time when pressure was mounting among black South Africans to take up arms against the apartheid government, Tutu did what he could to seek nonviolent alternatives and to urge restraint on both sides. Rather than pitting himself against white South Africans or demonizing them, he sought to show that everyone desperately needed a new way forward. In a world of terrifying religious extremism, Tutu’s civility is a breath of fresh air. While his vision for a “rainbow people of God” and his affirmation of the equal goodness of all religions leads him, in my estimation, into theological relativism and universalism, he has nonetheless led one of the most remarkable nonviolent movements in history -- and for that example and legacy we can all be grateful.

What are your thoughts on Desmond Tutu? What have you learned from him? In your own sphere of influence, how have you been able to put into practice what you’ve learned?

[Photo credit: Getty Images via TIME.com]

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.

It’s not charity. Charity is rooted in good intentions, but as Perkins writes in the book, “acts of charity can be dangerous because givers can feel good about actions that actually accomplish very little, or even create dependency.” While charity has its place, it’s best seen as a starting point and never the finish line.

It’s not welfare. Too often, Perkins and others argue, government welfare programs are counterproductive by disincentivizing a healthy work ethic and family cohesiveness. While most would agree that there ought to be a safety net for those who truly come on hard times, it does seem clear that welfare-as-usual isn’t getting the job done.

It’s not a quick fix. There’s a big difference between organizing a clean-up day in a rough part of town and actually addressing the root causes that made it a rough part of town in need of cleaning up. Long term change requires trusting relationships to be established, which requires a lot of time.

So if CCD isn’t charity, welfare, or a quick fix scheme, what is it? Well, it has eight core components, which are articulated quite well here. But of those eight, the big three are these:

Relocation. This means “moving into a needy community so that its needs become our own needs.” It’s essentially saying that the city is not a lost cause and it means becoming actual neighbors to the urban poor. It’s rooted in the example of Jesus in the Incarnation, not loving us from a safe distance but becoming flesh and blood like us and moving into the neighborhood.

Reconciliation. There are all kinds of barriers in our world, but as Christians we are to be ambassadors of reconciliation. “The power of authentic reconciliation between us and God, and between people of every culture and race is an essential component of effective ministry in our hurting world.”

Redistribution. This is about far more than dollars. It’s about joyfully sharing all of who we are and all we have, recognizing that we are primarily stewards -- not owners -- of the gifts God has given us. When you think about it, this is the natural next step once we have relocated to a place of need and been reconciled with God and neighbor.

I hope you see the contrast between these two sets of three. Though all too often we act as if good intentions or massive top-down programs or quick fixes will work to bring people out of poverty, reality seldom supports such a view. Rather, it's going to take a lot of time, a lot of love, and in a lot of cases, relocation, reconciliation and redistribution. And if it is to be Christian, it requires not only a certain kind of person, but a certain kind of church. We’ll take a look at that next time.

Tweet