Meet Charlie: from homeless to helping others

“I was tired of living under a tree.”

That’s the response you’ll get from Charlie if you ask how he first connected with Interfaith. He’s reluctant to go into details. What comes across is not so much embarrassment as a profound sense of humility; Charlie just doesn’t think his story is anything special.

An Army veteran, Charlie spent most of his adult life addicted to drugs and alcohol after returning from Vietnam, and over the years he weathered more than a few storms on the streets of Escondido. That is, until five years ago when someone told him Interfaith had programs for veterans. On that day, Charlie decided he wanted help.

Like everyone who comes to Interfaith, Charlie’s case workers took the time to find out exactly what his needs and skills were, and used this information to determined what kind of assistance would serve him best. These assessments are a vital part of the case management process because whether the problem is addiction, disability, mental illness, lack of food, or lack of housing, the goal isn’t merely provide relief – the goals is to build sustainability. Unlike many agencies, Interfaith can walk someone through a comprehensive continuum of care services that will enable them to eventually live truly healthy and sustainable lives one day.

Initially, Charlie became a resident of Interfaith’s Veteran’s bunk house where he was provided with the immediate shelter he had been lacking for so long. Eventually, however, he was identified as an excellent candidate for Interfaith’s Fairweather Lodge program. Charlie agreed and he became the third Lodge’s first resident. Now Charlie lives within an intentional community of adults with similar challenges who operate their own business together.

Charlie is quick to point out that this job gives him a sense of purpose and accomplishment that he had been missing in his life for a very long time. Perhaps most significantly, like many people who have come off the streets and learned to live healthier lives, Charlie’s biggest desire is to give back, so he’s eager to start helping out as soon as he’s eligible, saying, “Interfaith has given me so much.” There’s a gratitude in Charlie’s words, driving him to contribute, and a sense of pride that he actually can.

I’m telling Charlie’s story because it isn’t uncommon. Interfaith’s family tree is crowded with people who spent years living on the street, struggling with addiction, or marginalized physically and financially due to physical or mental disabilities, but who have now learned to be healthy, productive, self-sustaining, and even strong enough to give back to the community in some way.  I know the same is true for other social service agencies as well.

Unfortunately, we live in a time when people are hurting more than ever (last year alone Interfaith served 35,800 individuals), yet the political climate in America is again rapidly becoming hostile toward social help under the mantra that helping people is actually hurting our communities.

Balderdash.

People need more help, not less. Granted, it needs to be the right kind of help; the kind that builds capacity, not co-dependence. True help must walk people through a process that leads to healthy sustainability. But that kind of holisitc, capacity-building, wellness-producing work requires more time, more services, and more money – not less. It requires public money and private money. It requires federal and state grants, private foundation support, and individual household contributions. It requires lots and lots of people rolling up their sleeves and helping those who cannot yet help themselves (last year we utilized over 5,000 volunteers).

Like it or not, we all pay one way or another for people who are poor, homeless, mentally ill, or otherwise debilitated in some way. Why not commit, as a nation, to do so ethically? We can build strong systems of care that eventually lead people like Charlie to contribute to their communities, rather than relegate them to the streets – or to jail – where they simply tax our communities.

In short, the creation of a strong and healthy community requires the participation of the whole community; the rich, the poor, everyone.  Everyone has something to give.

Charlie gets that. I look forward to the day when everyone else does too.

Technorati Tags: Charlie, economy, Escondido, Homelessness, Interfaith Community Services, Politics, poverty

After SVS 2010: Jason Coker, The Begging Bowl, Toward a Kingdom Economy of Gifts, Power, and Justice

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Jason Coker: “The Begging Bowl: Toward a Kingdom Economy of Gifts, Power, and Justice”

Abstract
Western Christianity has leaned heavily on the coercive economics of Modern marketplaces in fiscal stewardship and distribution of power, but scripture prefers a gift economy. Paul interprets the manna narrative of Exodus 16 as a gift-economy for producing needs-based equality and establishes it as our normative economic paradigm (2 Cor 8). This gift-economy is demonstrated in Acts, eradicating poverty in the Church (Acts 2 and 4). Paul applies this economics of equality to the distribution of power through “gifts” of the Holy Spirit as well  (Rom 12 and 1 Cor 12). Hence, whether the resources are food, property, or power, the gift-economy of Exodus 16 is applied as the defining economic narrative of the Bible, challenging the Modern doctrine of the autonomous self and leading Christians to embrace the “poverty of the gift” whereby each person risks becoming poor through gift-giving so the group might become wealthy. This is the economy of faith, what Thomas Merton called, “the begging bowl.”

Similar practices are observed in ancient gift cultures through the ethnographic work of Marcel Mauss who showed that alms were a subversive redistribution of resources from those who hoard to those who lack, turning mercy into an expression of God’s just vengeance. Seen through this lens of re-distribution and mercy-vengeance, Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion are an act of subversive gift-power whereby he became poor so that we might become rich (2 Cor 8:7), conquering all through the gift of mercy-vengeance. Moreover, being “in Christ” re-locates the boundaries of the self beyond the the individualized body and into the sphere of Kingdom relationships grounded in Christ (Gal 2:19-20). This new Kingdom self can reciprocate gift-power through the transcendence of Christ and Kingdom  without the usual corruption of self-serving reciprocity (Matt 6:4,6,18).

This kind of Kingdom gift-economy requires three paradigm shifts:

• From individualized wealth-building to Kingdom gift-giving: The gift must always  move to the area of greatest need. This should challenge Modern ecclesial power-structures.
• From scarcity to limited abundance: Ex 16 teaches neither the total scarcity of Modern economics nor the radical abundance of naive economics, but the daily limited abundance that requires communal cooperation.
• From altruism to transcendent reciprocity: The Modern charity characterized by altruism is unilateral and often retains socio-economic boundaries, but the group reciprocity depicted in Ex 16 and 2 Cor 8 strives for equality.

Interview With Jason

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: I’ve always been intrigued by the economic practices depicted in Acts 2 and 4. In my early twenties, when I started taking the Bible seriously, I was shocked to discover communal practices in scripture, and, in my naiveté, equally distressed that we weren’t emulating those practices in our church. Whenever I pointed it out to pastors and elders I was given the standard “those were different times” speech, which never satisfied me. In the spring of 2007 I was the outreach and evangelism pastor at the Grove City Vineyard in Columbus, Ohio and we were planning a 40-day outreach campaign. The senior pastor challenged me to come up with something different, so I pitched the idea of creating an online expression of Acts 2, where people would freely give to each other out of their extra stuff. He loved the idea and Twoshirts.org was born. That experienced re-birthed this interest in me, and gave me an excuse to explore it deeper. But it wasn’t until I started reading the ethnographic data from archaic societies that I began to see scripture very differently. Sometime during that 40-day campaign someone dropped a copy of Mauss’ book “The Gift” in my office inbox. To this day, I have no idea who gave me that book, but I’m grateful. Reading it launched me into the rather deep world of gift-thinking, from Mauss to Levi-Strauss in sociology and anthropology, to Hyde in the realm of art and literature, to Derrida, Marion, and Caputo in philosophy and theology. It’s a rather deep, interdisciplinary well and I’m just scratching the surface. There are so many similarities to ancient Jewish economic practices that I became convinced that we tend to read these passages through the lens of Adam Smith and Modern economics, when so much of Jewish faith and practice reflects the reciprocal economic thinking of archaic agricultural gift-giving societies.

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: The Vineyard has always been conspicuously oriented toward expressions of mercy, and is currently coming through a period of significant wrestling with issues of equality in leadership practices, particularly concerning gender and race. Given those factors, I think the Vineyard is a perfect place for rethinking the theology behind our economic practices, whether that manifests in caring for the poor, living sustainably, or striving for equality in positions of power. I think the Church at large needs a theology of equality that is inter-testamental and holistic, which empowers an eschatologically-rooted embodiment of that equality now. The prevailing Christian approach to mercy and charity – while it does a great deal of good – is ultimately a dead-end because it doesn’t represent a sustainable equality, it only patches the holes in one direction, from rich to poor, or from majority to minority. What we see in Acts 2, Acts 4, and 2 Cor 8 is something that theoretically should be sustainable given a society of mutual (transcendent) reciprocity, and I think the Vineyard, because of it’s core value for mercy and commitment to Kingdom theology, is potentially a good incubator for experimenting with what a modern day “society of equality” could look like.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: It could be as simple as cultivating a community garden, starting a ride-sharing group, or having a church that shares common possessions like tools and equipment. Or it could be as complicated as a networked system of micro-lending and church-to-church budget-sharing networks where prospering churches make up for the struggling churches (which would be an exact duplication of 2 Cor 8). I think there’s tremendous room for experimentation, and I think virtually every church already does something along this kind of continuum, but, in my opinion, seeing these practices in terms of a gift-economy whose goal is needs-based equality versus mere “charity” changes the potential depth and scope of these practices dramatically, especially by deeply challenging our notions of individual autonomy and private wealth in a debt-based, consumer society. Personally, I can’t think of a more timely topic in America. What if, during the greatest economic crisis since the great depression, people could say of our churches that “there were no needy persons among them” (Acts 4:34) because our counter-cultural economic practices had simply eradicated poverty in our midst?

Jason will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments

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Jason Coker (www.pastoralia.org) is an M.A. student at Fuller Seminary where he studies intercultural leadership. He and his wife Jenell have been leaders in the Vineyard Community of Churches since 1996, spending thirteen years on staff with churches in Park City, Utah and Columbus, Ohio before returning to California in 2008 to finish his degree and plant a church in Oceanside. Jason and Jenell have four children, Chris, Savannah, Judah, and Alannah.

Technorati Tags: 2 Corinthians, Acts, economy, Equality, Exodus, Gift-Economy, gifts, Jason Coker, justice, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, The Cross, The Gift, Vineyard Churches

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 4

In Part 1 I proposed that the gift-economy in Exodus 16 (and by extension, 2 Cor 8) as the defining economic narrative of the bible. In Part 2 I suggested that Postmodern subcultures are already demonstrating a shift toward these economic “rules of the household,” providing a missional opportunity for the Church in Western Culture. And in Part 3 I said the first of three paradigm shifts required is “from wealth building to gift-giving.” Today, I’ll touch on the second shift.

From Scarcity to Abundance
The second shift we must experience in order to embody the economics of Exodus 16 is from scarcity to abundance. The modern science of Economics relies entirely on the concept of scarcity, assuming that there isn’t enough for everyone. Therefore we must compete in order to build our own wealth and hoard enough to provide for ourselves in an uncertain future. Yet the outrageous proposition of Exodus 16 is that God is able to meet our daily needs. Actually, it’s even more outrageous than that, for God’s intention is clearly that through His provision, and the economy of His people, everyone’s needs will actually be met. This is what biblical “equality” means.

This is what we see occurring in Exodus 16. There is an illusion of scarcity caused by the un-equal gathering of resources. Some families have incidentally gathered more than they actually need, while others have gathered too little. Even though there is enough for everyone, for the time being (that is, for each day), the supply is finite but not scarce. Therefore the temporary limitation on the total amount of provision results in the appearance of scarcity because of unequal gathering. The solution is simple, but requires cooperation; move the ample gift of God around in order to fill the void.

Paul applies this same perspective of limited abundance to the shifting needs of the early Church. There appears to be a scarcity of money to support needs within certain churches, but Paul recognizes that while there isn’t an unlimited supply of resources, there is more than enough to go around if only they will share. This is why Paul assures them that giving away their extra won’t result in hardship:

Our desire is not that others would be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality (2 Cor 8:13).

True scarcity would have resulted in genuine hardship for the givers. Unlimited abundance would mean nobody would ever have to give away their surplus, because everyone will always have more than they need. But, just as with Manna in the desert and also as with the spiritual gifts of the Church (1 Cor 12), God has given a limited abundance of resources in order to ensure communal interdependence – there is just enough to meet everyone’s needs as long as everyone pitches in.

Surprisingly, the sociologist Marcel Mauss claimed that all ancient gift-based cultures apparently had some such form of equality-ethic like this. In his landmark book, The Gift: The Form and Reason For Exchange in Archaic Societies, he observes that in various cultural religious practices,

“Alms are the fruits of a moral notion of the gift and of fortune, on the one hand, and of a notion of sacrifice on the other. Generosity is an obligation, because [God] avenges the poor [...] for the superabundance of happiness and wealth of certain people who should rid themselves of it. This is the ancient morality of the gift, which has become a principle of justice.”

Here Mauss is correlating the practice of gift-giving to our common human quest for justice. He’s saying that the religious practice of alms giving is a special form of gift that ensures justice for those who have been excluded from the interdependence of the community by the powerful who refused to share their surplus. In this way giving is a form of God’s vengeance. Mercy becomes justice by re-balancing the scales. Miroslav Volf seems to agree, stating in Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, that human gifts, like Christ’s,

“…should aim at establishing parity in the midst of drastic and pervasive inequality.”

In other words, communities of faith bring justice to society by redistributing the limited abundance of God, especially in cultures where greed and hoarding have created the illusion of scarcity and the very painful reality of inequality. This is the economic role of the Church in society: to publicly demonstrate a prophetic critique against the unjust power-structures of the world by redistributing the wealth of society with a prejudice toward the poor.

Questions:

1. Why is the shift from scarcity to abundance difficult for us?
2. Why is it that poverty generally isn’t seen as an issue of justice in the United States?

Technorati Tags: 2 Corinthians, economy, Equality, Exodus, Gift-Economy, gifts, justice, Marcel Mauss, Miroslav Volf, poor, poverty, Spiritual Gifts