This year at Wycliffe College has given me deeper insight into what it means for Christians to live out and work for social justice. Unfortunately the CBO I was assigned to work with, Prison Fellowship Canada (PFC), had little to do with this enlightenment, although I was blessed to be partnered with Rick and Ellie who I have deep respect for. The LEAP II training was valuable to an extent, as I learned how important it is for an organization to be able to articulate their goals in such a way that allow a particular vision to be realized. However, the only work I did with PFC afterwards involved mere editing and re-editing the PD MAP so it could meet the standards of World Vision, and this was slightly frustrating. Mere semantics, it seemed, was key for the donors to be aware of the precise aims (resiliency, hope, economic and relational ‘progress’) that would ‘most certainly’ be reached in a stated allotment of time, so the funding would keep rolling in to keep the project afloat. And I began questioning how exactly in is that one can rate, measure and assign a monetary value to such things as resiliency and hope, and if that is somehow an incredible adventure in missing the point. It is our mandate as followers of Christ to live and breathe compassion, mercy, and justice whether or not any “progress” is made for the people we are working with. As Paul said in 1 Cor. 3:6, we are to plant the seed and God alone makes it grow. Sometimes there will not be measurable ‘progress’, and this will most certainly be frustrating, but it won’t make our efforts any less valuable in the eyes of the Lord. As Oscar Romero once said
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own [emphasis mine]
I learned this semester that the Results Based Management style of development work is not a framework that I’m very comfortable working in. It’s too bad that it seems to be the only one that World Vision operates within, and thus too bad that they are the organization that is mostly responsible for teaching our only development class. If I had any suggestion for Wycliffe, it would be to recognize that there are other ways of seeking after social justice and we need to be hearing the voices of those operate from those perspectives (like Mary Jo Leddy or the folks at the Catholic Worker, Word Made Flesh, or even the Jeremiah Community).
For me, the paradigm-shifting education happened in my other classes, such as Theology of Culture, Towards a Christian Political Economy: The Writings of Bob Goudzwaard, and Postmodernity: Towards a Biblical Worldview, all taught by the brilliant and wonderful Brian Walsh, and Ethics of Wealth and Poverty taught by Reginald Stackhouse. In these classes my mind was opened to realize that Jesus did not come to earth to merely bring personal salvation to our individual little souls so that we could go to heaven when we die. While personal salvation is important, it is an incomplete picture of the whole Biblical Story, which is far more of an epic and sweeping narrative than this. Jesus came to restore shalom to a broken world.
Shalom – a beautiful Jewish concept that I have fallen in love with. It means ‘wholeness,’ ‘deep peace,’ or ‘complete harmony’. And this shalom is to cover all of creation – a restoration of justice, goodness, and light; a reversal of poverty, injustice, oppressive societal and global structures, damage to the earth, idolatrous economies, and all of our relationships – with God, with others, with our communities, and with the planet over 6.5 billion people call home.
Brian Walsh taught me, among many things, that Christianity is to be subversive – a threatening and radical opposition to the dominant economic, political, and cultural powers that are trying their hardest to squeeze all the shalom out of our world for their own selfish gains. We are to fight against the forces of materialism, consumerism, individualism, oppressive global capitalism, greed, the commodification of sex, unjust political policies and practices, violence, and the desire for economic progress at all costs, to the detriment of our global neighbours. In the words of Bruce Cockburn (who Brian taught me to have a deep appreciation for), we are to “kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.” And how are we to do this? Well, we must to more than critique or condemn the dominant culture. And it is not enough to try to be relevant to it by creating so called ‘Christian’ versions of the same stuff (aka Jesus-branded products, music, books, etc.) Andy Crouch says in his book Culture Making that we are to create new culture. We are to live in such a way that is a ‘city on a hill’ for the masses to see and be in awe of. We are to live holistic, shalom-inducing lifestyles that will “invoke and embody the alternative” in a wide range of human practices, as Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw prophetically wrote in their book Jesus for President. Meaning, as a litany from Wine Before Breakfast said,
If the powers render you homeless, build homes.
If the powers reduce sexuality to a commodity, enter into faithful covenant.
If the powers rob you of your children, then take them back.
If the powers create domination, then embrace sacrifice.
If the powers despoil creation, then plant a garden.
If the powers take away your wealth, then give away freely.
All of this is ‘kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.’
We are to infuse our lives with practices that restore shalom to every dark corner of our world. If we see the lack of shalom anywhere, be it loneliness, poverty, confusion, or a need of any kind (for a home, for a friend, for a new couch), it is our God-given mandate to restore shalom to that situation as best as we can – by having compassion, standing along side people in their struggles, and trying to find a way to meet their needs so that they can live the kind of life that God created them for – a life of flourishing and deep community that brings love, joy and peace. We must be faithful to our covenantal calling – to be God’s people by doing his will on earth – restoring shalom, bringing healing to places of brokenness, and thereby erecting signposts of the Kingdom as we do it with smiles on our faces and light in our eyes.
Yesterday I went to a conference on ‘Kingdom Economics’ at People’s Church and I bought a book by David Dark called The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. The title pretty much sums up what I’ve been told not to do my whole life because we are supposed to have faith. But questioning is not the opposite of faith, I’d say apathy is. Questioning can lead to a faith that is deeper, more raw, authentic, and passionate, a faith that has no choice but to spur us into action. Action that can bring comfort, healing, justice, hope and love to those who need it most. And as we do so, we begin to reflect the Imago Dei more and more with each step.
One thing that I’ve been questioning this semester is the word “development”. It started bugging me during Brian Walsh’s class, Towards a Christian Political Economy: The Writings of Bob Goudzwaard. Goudzwaard’s main thesis that he exposits in all of his writing is that the West has given itself over to the idolatry of ideology: the ideology of economic and technological progress at all costs. He begins his book Hope in Troubled Times with a parable:
In the eighteenth century, a European explorer happened upon an island in the South Pacific almost completely denuded of vegetation, trees, fresh water, and animal life. The island, named Rapa Nui by its inhabitants and Easter Island by the explorer, was populated by only a few unwell people and by hundreds of gigantic, spectacular stone-sculpture idols. Even now the best engineering minds have scarcely grasped how the islanders could have sculpted and positioned the colossal statues. According to the few survivors, though the island had been fertile and had supported thousands of inhabitants, the chiefs and priests had promised that stone gods would deliver prosperity the likes of which had not been seen before. The people had been seduced by a kind of progress that becomes a mania, an ‘ideological pathology,’ as some anthropologists call it. Caught up in that mania, the islanders gradually off-loaded their practice of caring for each other and the island to their stunning stone creations, the perceived source of their prosperity. But the stone idols, spectacular marvels of human engineering, exacted a punishing revenge instead. Chillingly, their insatiable demands for resources consumed their makers and the island’s once abundant life.
The book argues that in a vastly different environment, contemporary “ideological pathologies” not unlike the one that ravaged Easter Island lie at the foundation of some of today’s seemingly irresolvable global problems. The spectacular forces of Western progress today – unprecedented marvels of human achievement such as contemporary market forces, technological development, scientific progress, the state, and power unleashed – have become elevated to the status of position just like the stunning stone idols on Easter Island. We have allowed this idolatry of ideology to consume us so that we are willing to do anything to protect our economic interests, even though we are ignoring the needs of 2/3rds of the world’s population. It’s like we are about to sit down for dinner with our extended family, yet we tell 7 out of the 10 of us, those who are the most vulnerable, like the children under six and the aging elders, we tell them that they must go sit outside in the cold while we gorge ourselves on an abundant feast as they blankly watch us with hungry gazes. That is what our insatiable desire for more, for better, for richer, for stronger, is doing to the human family, and it is disgusting.
The word “development” implies a sort of “progress,” and the economic and political models we teach to the Majority World are ironically the ones that have gotten us into this idolatrous predicament in the first place. With sky high deficits, economic collapses happening all the more often, and billions of dollars spent on warfare to secure Western “interests”, just what do we think we have to teach the people of the Majority World? It is not feasible for the entire world to consume as much as we do – the Earth simply has not enough resources for everyone to overindulgence. Goudzwaard’s book Aid for the Overdeveloped West is a cry for the West to seek help – to see the world as it really exists, and that our overstepping our boundaries – our buying into a global economic structure that cyclically perpetuates the widening gap between the rich and the poor, that divides labor between the haves and the have nots, forcing the poor to sell us their resources and make stuff for us for cheap, and then charging them insane amounts of interest when they have to borrow American dollars in order to buy things on the global market – to the extent that the poor countries are transferring more money to the rich countries in debt payments than they are receiving in humanitarian aid and relief, the fact that we are overstepping God’s boundaries like this is disgusting. It’s unjust, and it has splintered bits of broken shalom mashed to pieces all over it. We are the ones that need help – to value people over profits, community over enterprises, and life over luxury.
One final image that Goudzwaard painted for us in Hope in Troubled Times was the difference between the two economies – the one of this world that is marked by ruthless competition, greed, ethno-centricity, and injustice, and the other economy, the one that is rooted in values of covenantal faithfulness, jubilee, taking care of the widows, orphans, aliens and marginalized, one that is content with our daily bread, and does not hoard treasures on this earth that are destroyed by moths and maggots. The first economy is represented by a circle, because it is cyclical, it perpetuates itself, it takes on a life of its own and possesses its makers with a force that seemingly cannot be stopped. The second economy is represented by the cross. This symbol illustrates that the only possible way to break out of the circle is to accept the reality of the cross. The cross represents the only genuinely anti-ideological stance. All efforts to survive and maintain overindulgent life at any cost must be crucified, following Christ’s example. Jesus died in complete poverty, in the renouncing of all earthly power, renouncing his own interests, and in the abandonment of his divine identity. In dying he became stronger than the powers of the kingdom of darkness, which seduce and imprison people and nations in their relentless search for wealth, power, and a sure identity built up with glimmering stuff.
Which brings me back to my first lesson, why Jesus came to earth. He came to restore shalom, to defeat the powers that are controlling our world and return creation to the state that it was breathed into existence to be – a world of justice, harmony, peace, and covered from East to West, North to South, Minority World to Majority World – in love. May we seek to show compassion, mercy, and love to those who need it most – regardless of the end results that we may never see, and regardless of whether or not people ever ‘develop’ according to our standards – but soley because as we do so, we reflect the Image of our Creator ever so brightly, becoming more human in the process.
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