Archives For shalom

The flourishing of Phoenix

April 1, 2013 — Leave a comment

sunsetphx

If I were to ask you to name a handful of United States cities roughly synonymous with the word flourishing, Phoenix probably wouldn’t be at the top of your list. It’s really hot, after all, with a lot of sand. Points of interest tend to be really spread out. Between numerous unremarkable buildings you’ll find a great deal of concrete. People who move here tend to move on fairly quickly. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So it’s particularly audacious of us to talk about – much less work for – “the flourishing of our city.” But that’s precisely what we aim to do, in some small way, through Common Good PHX.

A word about that audacity: my generation wants to change the world, including a desire to revitalize our cities. One of our glaring problems, however, is that we live nearly entirely lost in the moment, with a fuzzy vision of our hoped-for future, and almost no concern whatsoever for the past.

If we want to understand the city in which we live, and if we want to help chart a better course forward, we need to understand what got us to where we are today. Jon Talton – aka “Rogue Columnist” – has written a fascinating three-part series called “Phoenix 101: What killed downtown.” It’s a grim title, I know, but the series serves as an important history lesson.

Part one begins with the founding of the township in 1870 and chronicles the city’s development up to 1940. Part two takes us through the ‘40s to the early ‘70s. And the series concludes by bringing us up to date.

“When you see downtown Phoenix today,” Talton advises, “Be kind. No other major city suffered the combination of bad luck, poor timing, lack of planning, vision and moneyed stewards, as well as outright civic vandalism.”

You’ll have to read the whole series to see what he means by that, but that quote paints a vivid picture in itself. While times and circumstances may change, Phoenix as we know it in 2013 is built on the foundation laid for us in generations past, for better and for worse.

At Common Good PHX, to be held at Christ Church Anglican on April 12-13, Andy Crouch will lead us through the story of culture, the work of culture, and the hope of culture, stirring our imaginations to consider how we can serve the common good of Phoenix through our vocations. We’ll grapple honestly with some of our city’s pressing challenges, but we’ll also celebrate the ways in which Christians from all walks of life are making “common-good decisions” in their daily lives.

The story of our city continues to unfold. As Talton puts it, “Bad fortune, worse policy, poor timing, civic vandalism and indifference did their best to kill [downtown Phoenix]. They failed.”

In other words, “the flourishing of our city” isn’t out of the question just yet. We hope you’ll join us for Common Good PHX as we consider what we can cultivate and create so that Phoenix might one day be known as a city that flourishes.

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Citizenship and public policy through a theological lens

March 6, 2012 — 1 Comment

What does it mean to be a good Christian citizen?

If we’re honest, it’s not a question many of us think that much about. We know whether we lean to the right or the left politically, whether we favor limited government or not, and we may feel strongly about a number of hot-button issues. But have we considered how our theology and our understanding of Scripture ought to shape the ways in which we practice citizenship? Have we thought theologically about citizenship?

Being a good Christian citizen means a lot more than going to the voting booth once every four years and forwarding emails to relatives in the time in between. But an election year is as good a time as any to give some thought to citizenship and what it might mean for us to be good Christian citizens.

Stephen Monsma, author of Healing for a Broken World: Christian Perspectives on Public Policy (Crossway) and former member of the Michigan state House and Senate, believes we need to start with the big story of the Bible. “Thinking about creation, sin and redemption,” he writes, “are crucial to right thinking about today’s public-policy issues.”

Creation. Sin. Redemption. Not where we usually start when thinking about public policy, is it?

Starting in Genesis, we see that when God created the world and put Adam and Eve in the garden, they experienced shalom. “Shalom,” Monsma writes, “is the peace one finds among people who delight in living, working, and achieving together.” That’s God’s design for life on earth. Obviously, that’s not life as we know it. Humanity disregarded God’s intentions and rebelled against him in sin. We see the collateral damage around us every day. But God didn’t give up on us. In Christ, he has brought about redemption —  restoring humanity’s relationship to God, and enabling us to be reconciled to each other and to the world in which we live. Shalom is a real possibility again. It won’t be fully realized until Christ returns and brings about the new heavens and the new earth, but there are bits and pieces of it everywhere, even in the places we’d least suspect.

Even in government.

Drawing on Abraham Kuyper’s “sphere sovereignty” teaching that there’s an important purpose in God’s design for every sphere of society, including family, church, state, business, art and academia, Monsma shows that despite what some Christians and pundits may lead us to believe, government does have an important role to play in the flourishing — yes, the shalom — of society.

In the first section of the book, Monsma lays out the biblical principles that are needed as a foundation before considering specific application in public policy terms. Building on the creation-sin-redemption motif, he argues that “acting as Christ’s agents of redemption in the political realm” we’re to support what is just. The Bible is clear in its condemnations of injustice, whether at the hands of his people, at the hands of unbelieving citizens, and at the hands of the government. Doing justice and working against injustice is a crucial part of what Christian citizens are to do in their own lives as they’re able, and they are right to ask the same of governing authorities. This is directly tied to the principle of solidarity, “the conviction that Christians cannot simply sit idly by when their fellow human beings are suffering and in need.”

While Monsma affirms the positive role the state can and must play, he also clearly understands its limits, and sees “civil society” (social institutions and organizations) playing a crucial part as well. Indeed, as Monsma says, some of the best work the government does to contribute to human flourishing is in partnership with nonprofits and social service providers, including many faith-based ones.

The second half of the book tackles specific issues: church and state; abortion and euthanasia; poverty; creation care; human rights; poverty in Africa; and war and terrorism. While Monsma wisely refrains from making pronouncements about the particular positions all Christians ought to take on each of these complex issues, he does explore them in detail and in light of the creation-sin-redemption story of the Bible, and carefully considering the implications of those central principles of justice and solidarity.

Thinking theologically about citizenship is an essential, ongoing process that will equip us to better participate in politics and civil society — not just once every four years, but as a regular part of following Christ and living in light of the implications of the good news, “far as the curse is found.”

Thinking theologically about citizenship should also give us a measure of humility, as we recognize the sheer complexity of the issues, and as we realize we’re not innocent bystanders in the undoing of shalom. May that humility serve us well as we in turn seek to love our neighbors as Christian citizens.

How might the biblical story of creation, sin and redemption change the way you consider citizenship and public policy? Are the principles of justice and solidarity central to your understanding of citizenship and public policy? If not, what principles are foundational for you, and how do they relate to the Christian story?

[Photo credit: latimes.com - a swearing in ceremony for 18,000 new U.S. citizens in Los Angeles in 2008.]

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Christian ministry on gang turf

January 11, 2012 — Leave a comment

By now, many have heard of Father Gregory Boyle, the Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries to create opportunities for gang members in Los Angeles to leave their lives of violence and to start doing something life-giving. I blogged about his excellent book Tattoos on the Heart in September and included it as one of my favorite books of the year last week. The work he has done to transform the lives of so many in LA is truly inspiring.

Unfortunately, LA isn’t the only place where gangs are rampant, and Father Gregory can’t be everywhere at once. The good news is that he apparently has a kindred spirit in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. He’s Father Antonio Lopez Tercero, or “Padre Toño”, and his parish happens to be one of the most violent neighborhoods in a terribly violent city. While he hasn’t quite matched Father Gregory in entrepreneurial terms, it seems that his ministry is one of the few things holding that neighborhood together and pointing young men to a better way.

Al Jazeera English’s Witness program featured Father Anthony on this recent episode.

If you’re a praying person, please say a prayer for Father Anthony and those he serves in San Salvador. And pray that many more will follow Jesus, the Prince of Peace, into the hard places as instruments of shalom.

[Photo credit: yoni via Photobucket.com]

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Until Justice & Peace Embrace (Part 3/3)

October 10, 2011 — Leave a comment

In the first part of this series, I introduced Wolterstorff’s ideas about world-formative Christianity and the vision of shalom. In part two, we looked at his ideas about how responding to poverty is a matter of rights not generosity, and how unchecked nationalism destroys shalom. Here now are some final thoughts from Until Justice and Peace Embrace.

Shalom in the city
Shalom is about having and enjoying right relationships, and nowhere is the need for this seen more clearly than in our cities. Wolterstorff writes that this extends beyond the considerations we might normally consider:

It is customary to view the city simply as a large collection of buildings in close proximity to one another, each more or less self-contained and possessed of its own degree of architectural distinction. I propose… to break away from that sort of atomistic way of thinking, however, and view the city instead as an integral entity in which the individual buildings are abstracted parts. Adopting the holistic perspective, we see the city as a unit orchestrating paths and partitions to establish gathering places for human beings on a given amount of the earth’s surface.

The city both expresses and shapes the lifestyles of its residents, for better or worse. Architecture and aesthetics, in other words, aren’t neutral — not if shalom has to do with delight. “Could it be,” he muses, “that living in a city devoid of sensory delight is itself a form of poverty?”

Justice and liturgy
“Amidst its intense activism,” Wolterstorff writes, “the Western world is starved for contemplation.” He continues:

I want to explore the possibility that a rhythmic alternation of work and worship, labor and liturgy is one of the significant distinguishing features of the Christian’s way of being-in-the-world.

Work and worship are connected, he says, and they both spring from grateful hearts, in step with the six-plus-one rhythm set into motion by our Creator:

This rhythm was given to be practiced as a remembrance, as a memorial of the pattern of God’s creative activity and of the pattern of Israel’s liberating experience: the very rhythm of everyday life was to be a liturgical practice.

Activists of all kinds would do well to practice this kind of liturgy.

Theory & praxis
Wolterstorff concludes, not surprisingly given his original audience, with a challenge to academics and scholars that applies just as well to each of us:

My call here is not for theorizing that emphasizes the theme of justice; it is for theorizing that places itself in the service of the cause of struggling for justice… The goal is not to describe the world but to change it.

Wolterstorff concludes with the book’s single most poignant sentence:

By listening to the cries of the oppressed and deprived we are enabled genuinely to hear the word of the prophets — and of him who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped at, but took the form of a servant, walking the path of humble obedience to the point of accepting execution as a despised criminal: the Prince of Shalom.

Justice and peace, you might say, find their embrace in Jesus.

What do you think of Wolterstorff’s ideas of justice and shalom? Does his understanding resonate with yours? Where do you part ways?

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Until Justice & Peace Embrace (Part 2/3)

October 6, 2011 — Leave a comment

Yesterday, in the first part of this series, I summarized Wolterstorff’s appropriation of the world-formative Reformed/neo-Calvinist tradition, how it is both similar to and different from the liberation theologies of Latin America, and how Scripture calls us to shalom — a world-formative vision related to, but beyond, both. Now for some of shalom’s ramifications, again in relatively bite-size chunks.

The rich & the poor
During the colonial era, Wolterstorff writes, it was the norm for Westerners to view poverty in other countries as “a natural condition for certain kinds of people.” After World War II, however, there was new-found excitement about the possibilities of development (the field of work, incidentally, to which I belong). Wolterstorff writes of that enthusiasm:

All that was needed was technology and capital; both of these could be painlessly supplied by us. A new self-serving explanation! But development has not occurred as we expected. The poor are with us in greater numbers than ever before. And now we can no longer ignore their existence.

So if not colonial feelings of superiority, nor naive enthusiasm about quick-fix solutions that don’t cost anyone anything, what does Wolterstorff propose? Well, first, he echoes the liberation theologians in saying that God has a special concern for the poor. To support this claim, he points to a series of passages from the Gospel of Luke (1:46-53; 4:16-21; 6:20-21; 7:18-23), and concludes with conviction but nuance:

If we consider Jesus to be God incarnate, and these teachings from the book of Luke to be God-authorized, as I certainly do, then we cannot but conclude that God has taken sides with the poor… On the other hand, the poor are not romaticized: they are not praised; they are blessed. And, yes, they can turn aside the blessing. Blessing is pronounced on those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Not all the poor do so.

God-given rights
Scripture teaches that every human being is made in the image of God, and that’s what forms the basis for Wolterstorff’s insistence on affirming the rights of the poor. “I want to say, as emphatically as I can,” he writes, “that our concern with poverty is not an issue of generosity but of rights.” Therefore, if we don’t care about the poor, “we are violating the God-given rights of the poor person.” He goes into more detail about the definition of rights, and the duties that correlate to them, but in the interest of both time and space I won’t spell that out in detail here.

Nations & nationalism
If one desires to be an instrument of shalom, one must be concerned about the power of nationalism. Nationalism, Wolterstorff says, is basically “a nation’s preoccupation with its own nationhood.” A sense of woundedness, of having been wronged, is often at the root of a rise in nationalism. And it’s not long before that kind of nationalism becomes, as he puts it, cancerous:

When a nation suffers from nationalism unchecked, the life of its members is twisted and distorted, and the nation becomes a menace among nations because it accepts no standards for international peace and justice. It acts solely in its own self-interest, breaking treaties when it sees fit, waging wars when it finds the advantage, thumbing its nose at international conventions and organizations. National self-assertion is the only goal. All that restrains it is a balance of terror… We in our century have seen, and continue to see, that there is nothing more destructive of shalom than such nationalism.

But for Christians, the alternative is clear — or it should be:

What unites us as bearers of the image of God is more important than what divides us as members of nations.

I’ll have a third and final post in this series, probably next week, taking a look at Wolterstorff’s thoughts on what shalom looks like in a city; the relationship between justice and liturgy; and his call for scholars and academics to embrace the world-formative vision.

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