Been There, Done That

Today the Ikon folks met at Grape Day Park in Escondido to have a Thanksgiving meal with our friends who live in the Park. For the past six months Cory and Crissy Verner have spent every Saturday having coffee and donuts with these folks, making friendships and immersing themselves in the lives of people who are typically overlooked. Once a month a few of us join them, bring real food, get to know people, offer haircuts, etc. Today they wanted to share the holiday with their new friends in a meaningful way.

Several things surprised me about the gathering, but one thing didn’t.

I was surprised how many people turned out. There were probably over 100 folks there today, and at least 30 of them came to bring food for our friends in the park. Wow.

I was surprised at how peacefully the event unfolded. I’ve done a ton of feeding programs at churches and non-profit centers as a pastor, and it’s not uncommon for a large gathering like this to grow tense (or worse) with people cutting in line, jockeying for position and taking more than their share. There was none of that today. I think this is because our approach all along has been that we’re not feeding the homeless, we’re eating with our friends. Cory and Crissy embody this approach perfectly and did a great job of setting it up like a large family picnic. People chatted in line, piled their plates, and plopped onto blankets in small groups scattered around the area. Kids played football and stormed the playground. It was genuinely fun and restful.

I was surprised we didn’t get a ticket. The Verners have been progressively harassed by the Park Police over the past few months because it’s illegal to feed the homeless there. We do it anyway because we think that’s stupid, immoral, and discriminatory – but we’ve always been discreet about it and it’s always been much smaller than this. Today a Park cop showed up, saw all the people sitting on blankets laughing and eating together and said, “This is a good thing. I’m not going to call it in.” Then he stayed and chatted for awhile. Wow again.

I was surprised how many different churches were involved. As I walked around meeting people I counted 6 different churches from a variety of traditions represented. This wasn’t intentional. As word organically spread over the past few weeks other churches jumped on board, officially and unofficially. It was inspiring and humbling to see.

I wasn’t surprised when someone expressed disappointment that we weren’t sharing the gospel. I’ve come to expect this from Christians. We’ve been telling ourselves for a couple hundred years now that the gospel is an intellectual formula about Jesus and heaven, so it comes as no surprise to me when people expect a speech about that formula.

I was proud of my wife Jenell who replied, “These people already know about that, they don’t need to hear it again from us. Actually, I think most of them have more faith than we do. What they need now is relationships.”

Exactly.

Every Saturday around the time Cory and Crissy go to the park another man shows up with his bible and preaches a message. Every week he says the same thing: “You’re sinners; you’re filthy and depraved; your addictions are keeping you from God and you’re going to Hell; turn to God and be saved.” This means saying the sinners prayer so they’ll go to heaven when they die – because that’s what’s really important. Additionally, the natural, yet deeply superstitious implication is that if they do so, some of their immediate problems might start going away too.

Now – never mind for the moment that I don’t think this is the gospel – Jenell and I have taken an informal poll, and as near as we can tell they’ve all been there and done that already…multiple times in most cases. In fact, in 15 years of ministry in 3 different States we’ve never met a homeless person that didn’t profess Christ. They’re so desperate they’ll pray anything if it means getting some relief for their hunger, their illness, their woundedness, and their hopelessness. You would too.

But it doesn’t help.

Praying a sinner’s prayer won’t fill your belly. It doesn’t fix mental illness, it won’t get you a job and it won’t dry your addictions. I don’t even think it will get you into heaven when you die (but that’s another blog post).

Here’s what does help: people. God, yes…but God through people. What helps us is deeply committed, compassionate people who are willing to get to know us, suffer with our dysfunctions, love us in spite of our shit, help us re-build our lives, and include us in the little things. As John says,

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹²No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (1 John 4:7-12)

That’s where God resides. That’s where we “see” him – in the vacuum of human need, which then fills to overflowing with life as the abundance of God flows from person to another. This is a significant implication of the incarnation of Christ, and every time we do it we’re literally “sharing” the gospel.

Sadly, not may Christians I’ve met have been there and done that. It’s way too hard, too messy, and too frightening. But that is where salvation lies, for both the giver and the receiver. In my recent series on the Kingdom and Economy I quoted Bryant Myers, and he’s worth quoting here again:

“Poverty is a result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable.”

There’s an indispensable place for proclaiming the audaciously disruptive news of Christ’s Kingship, but for those who’ve already heard, our urgent task is to demonstrate the gospel as a life of deeply just and harmonious relationships that manifest redeeming love between people.

Technorati Tags: 1 John, Bryant Myers, Gospel, Grape Day Park, homeless, Ikon Community, Jesus Christ, poor, poverty, Salvation, Thanksgiving

Toward a Missional Economy, Part 6

This is the final installment in my series on moving churches toward a practice of missional economics: Part 1: Manna in the Desert, Part 2: Manna in the Postmodern Desert, Part 3: From Wealth Building to Gift Giving, Part 4: From Scarcity to Abundance, and Part 5: From Altruism to Reciprocity.

The Modern Doctrine of the Autonomous Self
Each of these three paradigm shifts lead us to another major dilemma rooted in our commons Modern concepts of the self and the life of virtue that only the cross of Christ can address. The common thread of all the dominant economic paradigms previously mentioned is the Modern doctrine of the autonomous self.

Concerning this, theologian Thomas Oden states, “The rhetoric of unrestrained, individual freedom is a prominent earmark of the spirit of modernity.” Westerners today simply assume that well-being means being free from dependencies on others. Likewise, Christopher Kaiser observes

“We painstakingly differentiate ourselves from our families, our upbringings, and our jobs. We affirm our freedom, even at the expense of the extreme psychological discomfort associated by a sense of homelessness.”

The church has played a powerful role in the development of this doctrine, principally through a particular theological stance of Martin Luther’s. Unwilling to impose the difficult scriptural prohibition on usury amid emerging mercantilism (particularly among of his financial benefactors), Luther declared that all life was divided between the “civil” and the “religious,” freeing the realm of civil affairs from the strictures of biblical paradigm (even for Christians) and effectively fragmenting society into a collection of isolated individuals. Lewis Hyde astutely remarks on the affect of this for every person: “Now each man is separated. The church and the state may be separate, but each man partakes of both.”

In other words, Luther blessed the Modern fragmentation of the individual self in the realm of economics allowing us to “believe” one ethic in our private lives yet live another ethic publicly.

This radically new and free sense of self created a wilderness of being, where everyone lives ultimately free, disconnected, and isolated lives even in the midst of a society. One result has been the lionization of self-sufficiency – a public virtue that creeps into even our compassion work. For example, even Christians in the West frequently judge the impoverished precisely because they haven’t achieved autonomous financial independence. It’s no wonder that Dallas Willard calls ours the, “culture of rejection,” and says that its roots in Modernity, “deeply affects the concrete forms Christian institutions take in our time.”

This doctrine is not without its Modern critics, who point out the sad consequences. Alexis de Tocqueville found American individualism frightening because it leads to the apathetic withdrawal of people from public life into a private sphere of isolation. Lewis Hyde agrees, saying,

“In the ego-of-one we speak of self gratification, and whether it’s forced or chosen, a virtue or a vice, the mark of self-gratification is its isolation.”

This is the essence of poverty; whatever possessions one might hold, isolation makes one impoverished. Miroslav Volf adds to this spiritual diagnosis: “All things are from God and through God, and yet we want to be independent of God, standing on our own two feet, claiming God’s gifts as our own achievement.” Relational detachment – principally from God – is the truest form of bankruptcy and naturally leads to all other forms of poverty.

The New Kingdom Self
Countering isolation must involve re-defining the self in terms that are relational rather than consumeristic. Bryant Myers agrees, “Development cannot be reduced to simply empowering individuals with new choices.” We must recognize that the solutions to economic inequality can’t be found in the building of new markets for the inundation of new consumer products aimed at the underdeveloped.

Not surprisingly, it is the Apostle Paul who is most radical in his terminology when he speaks of the death and rebirth of the human self in relation to Christ:

“It is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:19-20).

Paul is talking about nothing less than the re-definition of the self and Volf captures the implications of this for the act of gift-giving, saying,

“But now hasn’t our very self disappeared and been replaced by Christ? What else could the death of the self mean? In fact, however, it has not disappeared at all but has been reborn as a new self, as a self that has been returned to itself. Christ’s indwelling presence has freed us from exclusive orientation toward ourselves and opened us up in two directions: toward God, to receive the good things in faith, and toward our neighbor, to pass them on in love.”

So the new self of the Kingdom is subsumed into the person and work of Christ – a kind of self-death that recapitulates the cross in the life of the believer. This new self is radically open to giving because doing so does not violate any boundaries that need protecting. Rather – and perhaps most importantly to the three shifts outlined previously – being “in Christ” re-locates the boundaries of the self beyond the walls of the body, extending them throughout the sphere of Kingdom relationships, and rooted in one’s relationship with Christ himself. This is not an autonomous self, but a self dependent on Christ, interdependent with others, and intimately intertwined throughout; it is a Kingdom self.

Only by learning to live such a collectively cruciform life can the Church hope to embody a truly missional economy and appropriate the equality of the eschatological Kingdom in our time as a prophetic sign and foretaste.

Questions:

1. What do you see as the boundaries of the “Kingdom self” proposed above? Is every Christian our brother/sister, or is every “American” (or other compatriots), or is the Christians called to consider every human being a fellow child of God? What are the implications of these boundaries for a “missional economy?”
2. What do you think are some ways missional churches could put missional economics into practice?

Technorati Tags: Bryant Myers, Christopher Kaiser, Economics, economy, Kingdom of God, Martin Luther, Miroslav Volf, Paul, Self, Thomas Oden

Toward a Missional Economy, Part 5

This is part 5 in a 6 part series on moving churches toward a missional economic practice. You can check out the previous posts by clicking: Part 1: Manna in the Desert, Part 2: Manna in the Postmodern Desert, Part 3: From Wealth Building to Gift Giving, and Part 4: From Scarcity to Abundance.

From Altruism to Reciprocity
The third, and perhaps most difficult, shift is the move away from altruism and toward reciprocity. It has becomes clear in recent years that charity often exacerbates poverty by creating a one-directional patron/client relationship between those who give and those who receive. When we treat those with little money and material possessions as though they have nothing, we exclude them from their human vocation of work (i.e. “gathering” in Ex 16) and thereby debilitate their role in the community. Even worse, we create relationships of co-dependence that merely serve to perpetuate the modern hierarchies of power and control. In altruism, the patron remains powerful and the client remains weak. With altruism the implicit goal is not equality, it is relief. Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Altruism, Bryant Myers, charity, economy, Equality, Marcel Mauss, mission, Reciprocity, twoshirts.org

Toward a Missional Economy, Part 3

In his excellent book, Walking With the Poor, Bryant Myers proclaims,

“The incarnation smashes any argument that God is only concerned for the spiritual realm and that the material is somehow evil or unworthy of the church’s attention.”

As we saw yesterday, Postmodern cultures seem to have already demolished this dualism and are experimenting deeply with economic practices that are compassionate, generous, and inclusive – thereby joining the material realm of economics with the spiritual realm of communitarian well-being. I’m convinced what we’re seeing are the fingerprints of the Missio Dei on these subcultures, especially with their embrace of an economics that bears a strong resemblance to the “rules of the house” found in passages like Exodus Chapter 16 and 2 Corinthians Chapter 8.

If this what God is doing, the missional Church will have to embrace at least three major paradigm shifts in order to join Him on that mission. Today I’ll touch on the first.

From Wealth Building to Gift Giving
The first major paradigm shift is from wealth building to gift-giving. Perhaps what is most scandalous about Exodus 16 is the total absence of individual wealth building. As hard as it is to believe, nobody was terribly rich and nobody was terribly poor. God simply provided for everyone’s needs. Every morning each family gathered their “wealth” and every night (having consumed it) they returned to relative poverty. In his beautifully meandering book, The Gift, poet and cultural scholar Lewis Hyde comments on this ancient Hebrew practice, saying,

“This is the ‘poverty’ of the gift, in which each man, by his generosity becomes ‘poor’ so that the group may be wealthy.”

The “poverty of the gift,” as Hyde puts it, is the economy of faith. Thomas Merton once said, “The essence of the Christian faith is the beggars bowl.” To put it brutally, we Christians are merely beggars. Each day we extend our empty bowl in faith and God meets our needs. Yet the economics of God’s house don’t stop there because the first rule of any gift-economy is that the gift must always move – and this is the rule in Exodus 16 as well. Gifts that are hoarded soon rot and decay like day-old Manna. So like the ancient Hebrews, as we encounter the needs of our friends, neighbors – and yes, even our enemies – we empty our bowls to enrich others, making ourselves, at the end of each day, merely beggars once again.

Here in San Diego, our friends Jason and Brooke Evans have embraced this shift by starting Make Something Day. Every year on the day-after-Thanksgiving – the largest annual shopping day in the country, also known as Black Friday – they refuse to buy anything. Instead, they make homemade gifts using stuff they already have. As friends, neighbors, and even strangers from all over the country have joined them they’ve discovered a surprising abundance of multiplied gifts in return – including creativity, gratitude, and friendship.

Questions:

1. Why do you agree (or disagree) with the Thomas Merton quote, “The essence of the Christian faith is the beggar’s bowl.”
2. What makes the shift from wealth building to gift giving so difficult? Why does is challenge our sensibilities so much?

Technorati Tags: Black Friday, Brooke Evans, Bryant Myers, Church, Economics, economy, gifts, Jason Evans, Lewis Hyde, Make Something Day, missio dei, mission, Wealth