Faithful Citizenship

Faithful Citizenship H arold D ean T r u lear

Relational Restoration

the chest with an accompanying, “Now sit down — 13 more years and you’re going to get the hell out of my house!”

The mother then rehearsed for a matronly seatmate the difficulty of rising each morning at 5 a.m., feeding and dressing her children, taking them to school on It was a gray winter morning, but the public transit, going to work on the families — mostly women and young same, working, then repeating the cycle children — braved the chill and assem- in reverse. It was clear that she needed bled dutifully for another Sunday service the support of a network like the one at Praise and Glory Tabernacle (PGT), at PGT. located at the end of an alley of garages In their rush to “fix folk,” many conin Southwest Philadelphia. gregations offer specialized ministries for Children of all ages are expected to children, singles, couples, etc. that too sit through the service, as opposed to often consist of classroom sessions of bibbeing ushered out for children’s church lical information poured into the head/ or Sunday school.While the church does heart of needy individuals. Then, after have special programs for children as several verses of singing “I need you, you well as a dedicated Sunday for them to need me, we’re all a part of God’s body,” lead worship, Rev. Philip Whiteside we go our separate ways to rehearse the believes that Christian education is the stressful situations that can lead to punchresponsibility of the parents.“It’s impor- ing and cursing out a 5-year-old. tant for children to learn the same things Single mothers under duress don’t as their parents,” he explains, “and that need another class; they need another set means they learn to do what their par- of arms, ears, feet, and anything else that ents do in church. And then the parents’ serious Christian fellowship can provide role is to go home and reinforce what to ease the burden. With 70 percent of they all learned in church.” births to young African American women Sunday after Sunday, those children occurring out of wedlock, the challenge offer testimonials during the regular of building strong relationships heightservice alongside their mothers, often ens, because the children themselves are thanking God for their mothers’ guid- products of a relational malaise. ance or that of another woman in the Freda Robinson specializes in helping church who is “like another mother to women build the right kinds of relationme.” The women call each other, visit ships through making sound decisions. each other, and provide a network of A single mother herself, she once told her support for one another both in and son, “You are not living in my house beyond church. They text each other selling drugs.” But after his arrest, she words of encouragement, open their was charged with being a co-conspirator homes for collect calls from incarcer- in his drug trade for making a phone ated relatives, and provide an extended call to collect a debt for him to pay his family culture for each other and their bail. Her 10 years in the federal prison children. system brought her face to face with a I thought about those women last number of young women whose relamonth when I saw a 5-year-old riding the tional “errors” had landed them in a bus with his mother. He was defiantly situation far worse than sitting with an fidgety, ignoring her admonitions to sit obstinate kindergartner on a crowded quietly. Finally she punched him flush in city bus.

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Now released from federal prison, Robinson operates the Baltimore-based National Women’s Prison Project (NWPP),which mentors younger women returning from incarceration, teaching them spiritual principles and identifying and helping with tangible needs.

NWPP’s work is relationally based because, says Robinson, “I learned how the company you keep is so important. That’s what I tell the young girls who want to be known as a ‘drug dealer’s girl.’ I met many of them in prison — and they weren’t getting visits from the boyfriends either.”

Robinson’s ministry also coordinates a congregation-based reentry program for several churches in the Baltimore area on behalf of the Christian Association for Prisoner Aftercare, a national network of prisoner reentry ministries. In all of her work, building and strengthening relationships is critical. “Mothers are still mothers behind prison walls. They still love and worry about their children.They want to know what kind of grades they are making, how they are growing up, how their day went.” Robinson runs support groups for these women, both during and after incarceration, because she knows that the stresses they face can be handled through proper support. She wants congregations to offer the same support to these women, and she helps churches to do just that.

I think of her when I see the mothers and children at my church — not split up into “age sensitive” ministries but worshipping, learning, and loving together. They are relationships that extend beyond the Sunday service and offer a needed challenge to the informationbased culture that seeks to fix everything with a “word.” n Harold Dean Trulear teaches at Howard University School of Divinity and consults for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Faith and Families Portfolio.

Faithful Citizenship H arold D ean T r u lear

A Historic Partnership

denomination dedicated to social justice, joined forces to certify hundreds of individuals and congregations in prison ministry through a series of training events that culminated at the PNBC’s national convention in August.

There both PF and PNBC staff equipped When I team-taught the prison ministry attendees for a fully orbed engagement course at then Eastern Baptist (now Palmer) with the criminal justice system.

Theological Seminary in 1994, the course In his May 8, 2009, “BreakPoint” met in alternate weeks in the Holmesburg commentary, Chuck Colson called our Prison in Philadelphia, Pa. My co-instruc- times “the perfect storm” for new coltor, Dr. Leah Gaskin Fitchue (now president laborations and partnerships, and he of Payne Theological Seminary in Ohio), included this new partnership in his list had arranged for inmates in that facility of examples. It took such a perfect to take the course along with the semi- storm to bring together a politically connarians enrolled in the class. The mix servative evangelical organization and made for some interesting discussions. the denomination cofounded by Martin One such discussion concerned Luther King, Jr. It reminded me of the the relationship between Muslims and cooperation between evangelical and Christians incarcerated in the facility. Roman Catholic traditions around the The inmates enrolled in the course issue of abortion, and the discussion included members of the Islamic faith, between King and Billy Graham in the and they were eager participants in the 1960s concerning the possibility of doing discussion. But their presence caused joint crusades — imagine if they had some discomfort for the more theologi- been able to pull that off! cally orthodox students from the seminary, especially as the inmates discussed their efforts to “work together” to help “Religious differences take a mentor some of the younger inmates. back seat to saving lives.”

This discomfort prompted one inmate, Bible in hand, to respond, “In here, religious differences take a backseat to saving Some in PNBC’s leadership had deep lives.” Chimed in a Muslim inmate, “We misgivings about working with PF, citaffirm our common belief in God and ing significant political differences. PF, go from there. Under the intense con- for its part, has admitted its struggles in ditions of the prison, we don’t have developing true partnerships with contime to argue theology.” gregations, particularly in the African I think of this partnership bred of American community. But in a historic urgency when I consider the historic meeting between PNBC leadership and partnership recently forged by two dis- PF executives last fall, they decided to similar groups of Christians to address join forces to engage and equip the conour nation’s rise in prison population gregations of the PNBC in a national and the record numbers of inmates now effort to develop strong ministries to the returning to society. Prison Fellowship incarcerated, those returning from pris(PF), the most visible national orga- on, and their families. PNBC leadership nization invested in prison ministry, included Revs. DeeDee Coleman and and the Progressive National Baptist Owen Cardwell of the denomination’s Convention (PNBC), the nation’s Social Justice and Prison Ministry preeminent African American Baptist Commission. PF Director for Training PRISM 2009

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Dave Heffington agreed to bring his organization’s training material to supplement the curriculum PNBC had developed in consultation with the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Titled “What Shall We Then Do? A Family Freedom Kit,” the PNBC curriculum focuses on ministry to men and women returning from incarceration as well as their families. Research shows that keeping families connected during incarceration greatly increases the likelihood of successful reentry, and PNBC had already begun using their curriculum in Detroit, Richmond, Gary, and other cities, serving hundreds of inmates and their families.The curriculum stresses the need for churches to begin by working with families from within their own congregations, drawing on the existing pastoral and community care functions of the church.The PF component of the training consists of strategies for volunteer and leadership development for prison ministries.

I don’t minimize the importance of theological or political difference, but want to point to the urgency of criminal justice issues, which are sadly waning in the current political ethos.The politics of the PNBC and PF differ, as did the theology of the inmates at Holmesburg.

But the difficulties of the hour have created a “perfect storm” where the limited resources created by a tough economy have combined with a sense of urgency around crime, criminal justice, and incarceration to motivate persons of faith to pool their efforts and save lives. It is tempting to imagine what other unlikely collaborative efforts could emerge if people of faith concentrated and combined their efforts to seek truth and justice for those on the margins of society. n Harold Dean Trulear is associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, DC, and a consultant for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Faith and Families Portfolio.

Faithful Citizenship H arold D ean T r u lear

From Fire to Frying Pan The door to the parsonage closed behind me with a heavy thud. Startled, I asked the host pastor about the sound. “We reinforced the door with steel,” he explained, “because of the drug trafficking in the neighborhood. We don’t want bullets coming through the door.” He had a good relationship with members of the “underground economy” in his community, he said, but someone might shoot at his house by mistake. Not that he’s intimidated — compared to the violence of the civil conflicts back in his native country in Central America, American drug dealers aren’t so tough.

I heard similar sentiments from a street youth worker in a major American city, who came to the US from his native Israel. He had been trained in the Israeli military and had faced mortal combat in the Middle East. He found the taunts of urban thug life to be a pale comparison.

Both of these adults had survived a level of community violence that relativized what they saw here. I admire their ability not only to survive that kind of violence but also to emerge from it with such a mature and courageous attitude toward bettering the neighborhoods which are home to their ministries.

Their ability to turn trauma to triumph has escaped another set of immigrants who have struggled with life in their new American neighborhood.

Liberian youth began coming to Southwest Philadelphia with their families in the 1990s.Those families came fleeing the terror of a civil war that displaced, maimed, and killed countless numbers of people. Southwest Philadelphia promised a better life for these families, and their numbers grew exponentially.

The upheaval of a transplant would

be stressful in and of itself for young people, but many Liberian youth came with their spiritual suitcases overflowing with the trauma they’d experienced prior to their move. America offered a promise of hope and change.The results, however, added insult to injury.

Interviews with Liberian American youth and their advocates in Southwest Philadelphia reveal tough treatment from those already dwelling there.The neighborhood itself had begun changing from white to African American in the ’70s and ’80s. Black families from extremely poor neighborhoods saw moving to Southwest Philly as a “step up,” and lenders were only too happy to capitalize on white flight and profit from those moving in, even if mortgages were barely affordable. Large numbers of African American youth from these families mixed with growing numbers of Liberian American youth, and the volatility of the neighborhood increased.

African Americans had already experienced a tense landing in the neighborhood, including the introduction of something called “Kill a N****r Day” in the summer of 1978 (thankfully both black and white churches stepped up to defuse much of the potential for violence). Now they settled in to try to build new community, but there wasn’t much time for that when people had to work two or three jobs to afford to live there. Consequently, folks retained stronger ties with their old neighborhoods than they created in the new one.

So the Liberians entered into an already tense situation.

In the schools, these Liberian youth heard taunts about their dark color and their funny accents. Fights between African American and Liberian youths became a daily occurrence. Teachers found themselves unprepared for the tensions and unequipped to provide proper context and instruction for the new immigrants.

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emerged that began to lower the levels of conflict. First, organizations such as the Children’s Crisis Treatment Center and the African Cultural Alliance of North America began intentional work in the community.

The former provided additional training, including conflict resolution and cultural sensitivity, for teachers and other professionals working in the neighborhood. The latter developed programs for Liberian immigrant youth, providing both a safe space and supplemental activities for them. Pastors of local churches serving the Liberian communities began providing counseling, mediation, and support.

The second development has been challenging. Sensing that adults could not guarantee their safety, Liberian American youth formed their own “protection” group: Liberians in Blood (LIB). Some call it a street gang; others deem it a legitimate society ensuring that Liberian youth won’t have to add the tension and violence of their new neighborhood to the historic trauma of their old nation.

The jury is still out.

The jury is also out on a proper faithbased response to the situations that exist in neighborhoods like Southwest Philadelphia, where the racial tensions of the ’60s have given way to ethnic battles in the last 20 years. There have been heroic church interventions throughout the years, but too few. Clear to this observer is the complicated life of a neighborhood that regularly appears on the nightly news. What would justice look like — for Liberian immigrants, African American working families who survived the neighborhood’s transition, seniors and merchants still in the mix, and for Southwest Philadelphia as a community? n Harold Dean Trulear is associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, DC, and a consultant for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Faith and Families Portfolio.

Faithful Citizenship H arold D ean T r u lear

Pro-Life Civics “They are anti-abortion inside the womb, and pro-abortion after birth,” pronounced the late Dr.William Augustus Jones, then pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Brooklyn, N.Y., and past president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention.

Jones offered this characterization of prolife advocates who stand against the murder of an unborn child but offer no support to them after their birth.

Jones considered the failure to provide adequate healthcare, education, and other assistance to poor children to be “abortion by default”—a “slow death” to the civic life promised by our nation and the abundant life proffered by our Savior. He decried the attitudes of those who call for carrying pregnancies to term and then abandon the struggling mothers and families postnatal.

Ron Sider has dealt with the policy dimensions of such a tragic bifurcation in Completely Pro-Life (InterVarsity, 1987).

But those of us who claim to be “pro-life” must also ask if there are civic duties as well as policy issues raised in our commitment to babies and their families before and after birth. Our failure to do so reflects the lament of one civic official who proclaimed,“If it takes a whole village to raise a child, who’s going to raise the village?”

There are villagers at work—people who see that new mothers need communities to wrap themselves around their families and assist in the regular work of child rearing. If they are single mothers, they often carry fears, stigmas, and shame or are just not prepared for the responsibility. If they are married, they may be carrying heavy financial burdens that make it difficult to raise a child. If the church stands against abortion, then the church cannot leave these women hanging and their children unsupported if they make the decision to bring the pregnancy to term.

Some churches, like Refuge Evangelical Baptist Church in Philadelphia, have support systems, training, and “big sisters” for women who have children out of wedlock.They are offered counseling and accountability sessions, but most importantly they are given the love and support they need for a good start in their journey as mother. The pastor, Wilbert Richardson,wrote hisWestminster Seminary master’s thesis on the program, developing it after noting how his attitude toward women with out-of-wedlock pregnancies changed after several women he respected in his church became pregnant.

Other organizations have emerged to come alongside women at the pregnancy crossroads, bringing their strength of commitment to the life of the unborn child, along with help for mothers and babies after birth. Many of these organizations are part of the “pregnancy center” movement, agencies with professional and volunteer staff who administer pregnancy tests, ultrasound imaging, and counseling.

In addition, many of the centers have prenatal classes, health seminars, mothering courses of study, and other supportive services, often led by people of faith who volunteer their time to come alongside struggling pregnant women.

The Delaware County Pregnancy Center in Chester, Pa., offers material assistance to women through vouchers for maternity and baby clothing, carriages, and cribs. Successful completion of a course in nutrition, for example, earns a participant a certain amount of “Baby Bucks” to spend at the center’s thrift store.They also offer teen mothers the opportunity to attend college on a full scholarship if they remain abstinent after the birth of their first child.

Pregnancy centers find support and sponsorship from a variety of Christian churches, with Roman Catholic and evangelical congregations contributing much of the vision, finance, and energy to the work.The ministry is not glamorous; indeed, it is ministry created by the PRISM 2009

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void in other local congregations—congregations that shun women with unwanted or out-of-wedlock pregnancies and send them de facto to prochoice forces where they may find the only persons willing to have a nonjudgmental conversation with them about their options.

Adding to the challenge is the higher rate of abortion among the poor and disadvantaged, especially in black and Latino communities.According to an article published in the September/October 2002 issue of Perspective on Sexual Reproduction and Health,“Women who are aged 18–29, unmarried, black or Hispanic, or economically disadvantaged—including those on Medicaid—have higher abortion rates.”

The article reports that although the overall abortion rate decreased by 11 percent between 1994 and 2000, “abortion rates for women with incomes below 200 percent of poverty and for women with Medicaid coverage increased between 1994 and 2000.” Furthermore, according to the article, the “rate of decline in abortion among black and Hispanic adolescents was lower than that among white adolescents, and the abortion rate among poor teenagers increased substantially.”1 The truth remains that pregnancy centers exist because many congregations have skirted not the issue but rather the women and children involved in the issue. It is easy to be “anti-abortion” when it doesn’t hit home, family, or congregation. It is far more difficult to embrace women and children affected by the difficulties involved in building a family in the face of policies that hurt the poor— and people of faith who ignore them.

By simply being the church, in all its hospitality, we can show the world a truly “pro-life” civic community. n Harold Dean Trulear is associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, DC, and a consultant for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Faith and Families Portfolio.

Excerpted on the Guttmacher Institute website (www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3422602.html).

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Faithful Citizenship H arold D ean T r u lear

Worship Wars Oh, Master, from the mountainside / Make haste to heal these hearts of pain. / Among these restless throngs abide / And tread the city’s streets again.

I have not heard these words sung in church lately, and it’s likely you haven’t either.They are from the hymn “Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life,” penned

by Frank Mason North in 1903 and sung lustily by women and men of the social gospel era, desirous to see the clear connection between worship and social justice.

The era of the Civil Rights movement saw similar strains ring out before, during, and after acts of protest, as Christians committed to God’s justice sang “We Shall Overcome” and “I Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom.”Today the music of our worship contains little if any reference to justice—or any dimension of civic and community life for that matter. Many of us sought to bring together faith and public life in new and invigorating ways in the recently concluded campaign and election.We just couldn’t sing it.

In the ongoing battles waged as part of “worship wars,” combatants struggle along front lines such as “contemporary” and “traditional,” not recognizing that social justice—God’s justice—is often part of the collateral damage.The battles seem to be over what type of relevance sustains personal integrity in the postmodern era.

One side claims that contemporary worship meets the needs of hurting people, while the other argues that traditional worship roots us in historic Christian faith. Neither side rehearses the relationship between the gospel and social transformation; rather they focus on forms that heal and strengthen the individual, while ignoring the claims of Christ on our community, social, and civic life.

The contemporary crowd cries “relevance” without developing a critique of the culture it seeks to engage. Members of this crowd seem content to capitulate to a worldview captivated by a pseudopsychological hermeneutic that considers the solutions to all our ills to be contained in a therapeutic model. Their sermons consist of practical instruction for daily living rooted in a problem-solving framework that emphasizes what works in our lives.The God of this crowd is a “loving God” who doles out love and acceptance to a hurting world. But this God has no time for the poor and marginalized—he is too busy playing psychotherapist to a disoriented middle class seeking meaning in a culture of anomie.

The traditional tribe combs the shores of Christian history and diametrically declares that relevance is irrelevant to a God who stands above culture.The weak theology of contemporary worship betrays a shallowness of Christian life and witness that can only be retrieved by rehearsing the great doctrinal themes of the church in preaching, music, and prayer.

However, the traditionalists miss the fact that the golden age of Christendom that produced their forms of worship also bred slavery, colonialism, and oppression of the poor in manners that strain its credibility. The God of this worship presents himself concerned with doctrine only so much as it establishes an individual relationship with Jesus and not for any form of Christian service.

In spite of heightened interest in things “spiritual” and things “political,” the twain never meet on Sunday.Why is that?

One reason might reside in the self-centeredness of our culture that seeks space for validation over sacrifice for vindication. Space for validation requires that we feel good about ourselves, whether by latching on to doctrinal tradition or connecting to the latest fads. In a press toward personal fulfillment, we reduce worship to a commodity to be chosen, to “what works for me.” The menu outside the PRISM 2008

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church tells us if it’s traditional or contemporary, so we can make our personal selection.

Tragically, it renders our faith politically irrelevant, except where policies touch the issues that affect our sense of well-being and wholeness. We have just witnessed a presidential campaign in which both sides appealed to such selfinterest. Even when the poor were mentioned, they found visibility as objects for the largesse of the middle classes: Doesn’t helping some poor single mother on the South Side of Chicago feel good? Doesn’t rearranging the energy of our institutions to include the poor (as long as the middle class gets theirs) feel generous? Doesn’t affirming family values as the panacea of the impoverished validate me as an upstanding orthodox Christian?

All of the above issues came before us this election. We went to the polls and voted in ways dominated by self-interest and validation, not by a sense of God’s justice. Our worship experiences—the sacred space in which we affirm our identity as believers and declare in praise whom we believe God to be—still ring empty when the God of the poor is sought. We have a new “trickle down” theory, only this time it’s not just from big business to the larger society. Now we make Middle America happy, and it will trickle down to the poor.Whether it’s “Jesus loves me this I know,” or “What God has for me it is for me,” the common thread is me.

That’s a far cry from Frank Mason North’s focus, as recorded in other verses of his hymn: From tender childhood’s helplessness, / From woman’s grief, man’s burdened toil, / From famished souls, from sorrow’s stress, / Your heart has never known recoil. / The cup of water given for You, / Still holds the freshness of Your grace; / Yet long these multitudes to view / The sweet compassion of Your face. n Rev. Trulear teaches applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Jena 6 Surprise

response. Despite our growing awareness of social issues and our increased influence in the public square, we have not paid much attention to issues of racial justice in the past decade. If we feel that The events that have unfolded in the racial justice has already been achieved, small Louisiana town of Jena over the we are merely engaging in head-burypast two years should give pause for care- ing and will be impotent to work toward ful reflection among people of good any justice, for any cause. will, especially evangelical Christians of No, the problem lies in the smallness social conscience. In the fall of 2006, six of our hearts. Most of our political presblack teenagers from Jena were charged ence coincides with the interests of our with the attempted murder of a white own communities—we are most engaged student in a fight born of long-standing when we see the direct consequences racial tension. Prior to the fight, tensions for ourselves.What could be more natuhad been exacerbated when three white ral, you might ask? But “natural” is not students hung a noose from a tree out- what we are asked by our Savior to be side their school—and exacerbated fur- —Christ calls us to be new creations, actther when school authorities failed to ing not out of natural instincts but from respond to the “prank” with the seri- a renewed and spiritual mind. ousness it merited.

As Jacques Ellul warned us a genJena has since joined other pivotal eration ago in False Presence of the Kingdom towns in American history—places like (Seabury Press, 1963), Christians have Scottsboro, Ala., and Philadelphia, Miss. allowed the media to determine what —as an iconic reminder of historic con- social issues we respond to rather than flicts that scar our nation’s landscape. If engage in a process of discernment and Martin Luther King was correct in his research to root out injustice in our assertion that to be human is to be “caught midst, even when those involved do not in an inescapable web of mutuality,” then look like us. We failed to be proactive in there is a lesson in the events that have addressing issues of race and culture in the transpired in this tiny timber town. public square: Where were we when the For American race relations, the events 2004 presidential campaign was silent on remind us of a not-so-distant past that race issues, the first to be so since 1944? still lingers with us today. According to The Jena 6 events temporarily roused CNN, the “noose” incident has been black churches from their preoccupation repeated in a number of places, including with personal-destiny fulfillment; but an office at the Coast Guard Academy after gathering for a ’60s-style protest, in Connecticut, a suburban New York those churches returned immediately to police station locker room, a North business as usual in the aftermath. The Carolina high school, a Home Depot in dominant voices of the black church again New Jersey, and on the campus of the preach self-interested versions of the University of Maryland. Though some gospel that leave little room for social may want to dismiss these as isolated justice. I am still waiting for someone to incidents or foolish pranks, they point preach a sermon on TV that identifies a to something far more serious, some- believer’s destiny as living among the thing between gross insensitivity to a poor and alongside the oppressed, or to tragic/evil past and a tragic/evil desire prophesy “Let justice roll down like waters, to regain that past. and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

The events place evangelical Christians Black churches used to be places where in a defensive posture that calls for a people went to meet God (emphasis on PRISM 2008

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God’s presence)—now people go to “get fed” (emphasis on my needs).

Meanwhile, our justice system continues to reflect our nation’s punitive ethos, supported by a consensus of fear among ordinary Americans. We want revenge, not healing, and the system is willing to oblige. Thus black youth and their families are left to wrestle with the competing pressures to take a strong stand against racism and to abide by the laws of a system that is often strongly biased against them, without the benefit of a biblically based worldview from which to act prophetically.

On the whole, the Jena 6 case caught us off guard. Surely this is because, contrary to popular wisdom, racism— even of the systemic variety—has not been eradicated from the United States.

Instead of holding on to Martin Luther King’s dream of racial reconciliation, nurturing and fighting for it as the valuable yet fragile vision that it is, we have instead domesticated it through the celebration of his birthday, a “holiday” that sends us out into avenues of service.

Twenty years ago Dr. Charles Adams, a Detroit-based pastor, warned us that the best way to kill King’s dream of justice was to honor King with a holiday, romanticizing his prophetic edge and dulling his prophetic witness. “Often it is easier to honor a dead hero than to wrestle with a living presence,” he said.

So while we honor a subdued Civil Rights leader, we in fact stifle the very vision that would confront the systemic racism so ubiquitous in our society that most of us are quite literally blind to it (what color are calamine lotion and Band Aids, anyway, and why?). The dream of a justice system based on facts/deeds rather than bias/color remains elusive.

The many sides of the Jena 6 story include none that should take us by surprise. It is a real tragedy that they did. ■ Dr. Trulear teaches theology at Howard University School of Divinity.

Faithful Citizenship H arold D ean T r u lear

Where’s the Beef?

“Would you like fries with that?”

I half expect to hear that at the end of each political ad or news report concerning the upcoming presidential election.

No matter how substantive a candidate’s position may be, we never hear the whole.

Rather the candidate’s words are served up in sound bites—just enough to give us a tantalizing taste or bring on a hint of indigestion. Either way, thoughtful Christians are frustrated by the intentional tease. When it comes to contemporary politics, without serious research, prayer, and reflection, we never get to enjoy a full meal.

Neil Postman warned Americans some 25 years ago about the impact of television on the nation’s attention span.

In his groundbreaking 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he cited the boob tube’s ability to capture and focus attention in short bursts, but without depth. He saw the danger in reducing complex ideas to simple sound bites for easy viewer consumption. He even fretted over the church’s growing dependence on televangelism, not out of concern for prosperity theology, but rather for the desanctification of truth through an entertainment medium.

Postman pressed the example of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 as proof of the decrease of the American appetite for true deliberation and exchange of ideas. Those multi-hour affairs would not fly in Postman’s 1980s America. We have not been socialized to listen that long, follow a reasoned argument, and make an informed judgment. (Incidentally, Postman also doubted that many modern Christians would be able to sit through a Jonathan Edwards sermon.) No, this is

the era of the hard-hitting verbal morsel—shock and awe in the negative, pacify and placate in the positive.

And that is why 99 percent of those who heard Dr. Jeremiah’s Wright’s sermon snippets this past spring never bothered to listen to the entire sermon, check the context in which they were made, or reflect on his reasoning. Playing sermon excerpts fed right into America’s current capacity to digest ideas—small, pungent, fast-food politics, with no time for discussion. Were Wright’s words offensive?

I prefer a different question: Is being offensive a sin? If so, Jesus paid dearly for it, as he was one of the most offensive preachers the world has ever seen.Wright deserved to be heard in full context with rigorous debate on his full ideas, a referendum on his corpus of work that includes his church’s prophetic stands on issues as diverse as the war in Iraq and domestic violence.

But that won’t do in contemporary America, where public figures are judged more for 20-second phrases than for 20 years of hard work in the public sphere— just ask Obama, whose off-the-cuff comment about economically depressed, small-town Pennsylvanians being “bitter” and clinging “to guns or religion” effectively eclipsed his decades of community organizing around the very issues that plague those folks—job loss. Public debate today has become a hate-seeking missile in our adolescent cultural food fights.

We may live in a “Supersize Me” culture, but in politics, no one wants a big meal— it’s speed and barb-trading that count when appealing to a crass self-interest that has been nurtured in a TV culture designed to make the viewer the center of the universe.

Christians should beware any attempt to reduce ideas to sound bites and debates to one-liners. Essentially this means that Christians should be resistant to the use of contemporary media as a means to understand the positions espoused by

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today’s candidates, whether they run for president or for recorder of deeds.

When the media control the debate, the audience is captive to a for-profit market institution that cannot survive apart from the commoditization of ideas. This requires the ability to microwave complex arguments into instant ideas for ready consumption.Would you like fries with that?

I mentioned in an earlier column Jacque Ellul’s warning about Christians trusting media to bring them ideas rather than doing their homework to see what issues are truly at stake. Similar depth is required to understand a candidate’s platforms, policy initiatives, and the statecraft requisite to turn ideas into policy. The Bible warns against being carried to and fro with every wave of doctrine. Just as theological truth suffers in a sound-bite era, political reality groans under the weight of our insatiable appetite for the small. An appeal to self-interest here, a fear-inducing commercial there, a news report with clipped dialogue to boot, and we are supposed to have enough information to make an intelligent decision.

This does not project to an informed citizenry.

As Christians, our civic participation should not be formed by McNuggets of information. Rather we should read carefully, pray diligently, and apply our values to the vast number of positions within a candidate’s platform. We should recognize that character counts. And, of great importance, we should avoid voting the base self-interest to which much of politicking appeals and ask the question “How does this affect my neighbor?”

(If you have to ask, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus has a story for you…) n Harold Dean Trulear is associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, DC, and consultant for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Faith and Families Portfolio.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Ministering to Imprisoned Families

home. While professional help in some of these areas is invaluable, lay people can make a significant difference simply by being understanding and available.

Third, congregations can help families visit their loved ones, something that can be extremely difficult for those with loved ones incarcerated at a distance. The church can offer (or pay for) For some time, I have been using this transportation to the prison; benevolence space to talk about prisoner reentry and support for an overnight stay near the the role of churches. What Progressive prison is another way to bless those National Baptist Convention (PNBC) whose loved ones are imprisoned far Vice President Dr. James Perkins calls from home. Another option is “video “the civil rights issue of the 21st century” visitation,” which New Canaan is also a family issue. Most congregations International Church of Richmond,Va., in America have members whose lives provides area residents whose family are affected by the incarceration of a members are incarcerated a seven-hour loved one. With record numbers of men drive away at Wallens Ridge State Prison. and women returning from incarcera- Every Saturday, families come to the tion, it is essential that every church be church, where video conferencing equipcommitted to serving these citizens and ment allows them to have a conversation their families.While some services, such in real time with their loved ones. “It’s as providing housing or employment for about keeping families together,” says returning citizens, require a certain capac- New Canaan pastor Dr. Owen Cardwell, ity for program development, others can who works in conjunction with the state be provided by any congregation with department of corrections.

Fourth, congregations can supply vola heart for ministry and mission.

Congregations can start by identi- unteers for life-skill development profying those among them (both in the grams behind bars. “I have a waiting list church and in the local community) with of churches that want to do worship an incarcerated family member. While services,” declares one longtime prison some will be reluctant to admit to such chaplain in Ohio, “but what I need are a situation, others will welcome the volunteers to help with life skills—how church’s understanding of their special to balance a checkbook, get a driver’s needs and concerns.These include finan- license, read a bus schedule. I need tutors cial stresses, anger towards the incarcer- to help with reading and writing, and ated individual over the shame and mentors for good parenting skills. Church changes imposed on the family, and people can do this—and when an inmate deep trauma among children who are asks why they keep coming to help, then forced to deal with the sudden absence they can share Jesus.”

Fifth, congregations can familiarize of their parent (especially if their mother goes to prison). In a very real sense, themselves with resources available for when a person goes to prison, his or returning citizens, identifying which local organizations provide housing, employher family is imprisoned, too.

Second, congregations can provide ment and/or training, and healthcare emotional/spiritual support for families, assistance, for example, if they want to such as counseling, support groups, and facilitate successful reentry.

Finally, congregations should familpreparation for the inevitable shift in family dynamics when a prisoner comes iarize themselves with the Second Chance PRISM 2007

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Act of 2007, a major federal legislative initiative that enjoys significant bipartisan support. Cosponsored by Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.), the act would provide federal money for implementation of prisoner reentry programs at the state level. States would apply for funds after submitting a plan for reentry programs constructed by a task force including representation from community and nonprofit organizations. Congregations should make their voices heard and fight to see their communities’ interests reflected.

Prison ministry and prisoner reentry programs are really part of a continuum of care. Good prison ministry always helps prepare inmates to return to society. Good prisoner reentry programs begin at sentencing—building relationships with prisoners and their families.

The PNBC is working with the Annie E. Casey Foundation in their prison ministry initiative. The country’s leading foundation for supporting “kids in disadvantaged communities,” Casey has developed an initiative known as “Healing Communities,” mining the capacity of the faith community to provide networks of support for the formerly incarcerated and their families and to advocate in their communities for a more welcoming response to returning citizens.

“When we preach on Matthew 25,” the PNBC’s Dr. Perkins points out, “we always talk about ministering to the sick but never about ministering to the prisoner. This is a mandate from Christ.

Prison ministry should be as natural to us as ministering to the sick. Those are our family members. They are us. ■ Harold Dean Trulear is associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, D.C.; convener of Prison Ministry and Theological Education at Payne Theological Seminary in Wilberforce, Ohio; and consultant for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Faith and Families Portfolio.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Labor Day Travails When Americans began to celebrate Labor Day in the late 1800s, they focused on the virtue of work, the productivity of workers, and the development of social advances directly attributed to labor and the labor movement. But such noble sentiments can only ring false for the men and women returning from American prisons today. For this segment of the population, the lack of job opportunities gives an ironic twist to any celebration of the virtue of work.

Persons returning from incarceration often lack what business calls “hard” and “soft” skills. Hard skills are those required to actually perform a job. Job training programs—offered in some, but not nearly enough, prisons—focus on these hard skills, preparing men and women for meaningful employment after incarceration.

Soft skills include basic issues of deportment, life skills, and other components that are addressed by job readiness programs. In a job readiness program, persons learn grooming and dress, punctuality and perseverance, and things as fundamental (if one has been so raised) as reading a map or bus schedule, and owning and operating a bank checking account.

Sometimes things as simple as math and reading tutoring can help them better prepare for the job market.

People of faith are beginning to develop ministries that provide access to both sets of skills. Ministries such as Jobs for Life, a North Carolina-based nonprofit, provide training for churches that want to provide both sets of skills for the incarcerated, persons returning from incarceration, and others who need entry to the workplace. Some churches have expanded their “prison ministry” work from simply offering a Sunday service in prisons to providing weekday-evening volunteer

programs to help incarcerated people develop soft skills. “These are the things I need prison ministry volunteers to do,” laments one jail chaplain. “Inmates are much more prepared to hear you preach or teach the Bible if you first help them with these other skills they need.”

A second problem facing persons attempting to move from prison to productivity is what the government calls “collateral sanctions.” These sanctions, usually set by state policy, determine what consequences the formerly incarcerated must endure beyond imprisonment. For example, many states do not permit them to vote in state, county, and municipal elections (the federal government already prohibits them from voting in federal elections). But this policy can be challenged and changed. In Maryland, Senator Ulysses Currie—himself an active church member and husband of an ordained Methodist minister—led a group of some 400 church people to Annapolis to challenge state policy and subsequently saw the right to vote returned to Maryland’s formerly incarcerated population.

In labor, collateral sanctions bar the formerly incarcerated from certain jobs.

Again, states have discretion in setting policy in this area. Some make basic sense.

For example, a person who was convicted of child molestation should be barred from becoming a daycare worker. But other prohibitions are unnecessarily punitive. State policy keeps formerly incarcerated persons out of such professions as cosmetology and barbering in many states. When I asked one criminal justice professional for the reasons behind such a seemingly preposterous stance, he replied that states license those professions, and they don’t want to be liable if one of their “licensees” commits a crime (presumably a shear stabbing) at work. Now that I think about it, it’s still preposterous!

A third challenge for these “returning citizens” is the stigma associated with their incarceration. Indeed, even using a phrase like “returning citizens” instead of “exPRISM 2007

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offenders” makes a difference, because it speaks of who these people are rather than defining them by what they were.

In August of this year the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the denomination of Martin Luther King, Jr., became the first national denomination to announce a national reentry project that includes this important dimension of “stigma reduction” through using congregations to provide informal social networks for support and community advocacy for their welcome return.

Those support networks are critical for developing the proper attitude toward work and productive citizenship.

Jobs for Life tackles the “stigma” issue by providing mentors from the workforce for each man or woman in its programs. Not only does this provide personal support for the returning person, but it also helps employers overcome their own stereotypes and fear of the incarcerated and returning population. Both Jobs for Life (jobsforlife.com) and the Progressive National Baptist Convention (pnbc.org/) ministries view reducing stigma among employers as a critical task.

With the implementation of the federal Reducing Recidivism and Second Chance Act of 2007 on the horizon, there will be more federal dollars available to states to improve the workforce chances of returning citizens. It will be up to the states to fulfill the mandates necessary to access available funds. People of faith can familiarize themselves with the legislation, and hold their states accountable for proper use of these funds.

Additionally, we can examine our own attitudes and ministries to see how we welcome returning citizens and support them in their quest for meaningful work.

Maybe next year they’ll have a happier Labor Day. ■ H.D. Trulear teaches applied theology at Howard University Divinity School and is a fellow at the Center for Public Justice.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

A Time to Mourn “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”These words of assurance came to mind a few months ago when thousands across the country joined the Virginia Tech community in mourning the loss of 33 precious lives.

Our nation remembered these tragic losses in a variety of ways—vigils and services, phone calls and flowers, memorial sites and flags at half mast. Pictures of the dead graced every form of newsprint, and we were struck by the images, not only of students, but faculty as well, including the engineering professor who, having placed his life on the line against Nazi genocide during World War II, found history repeating itself as he sought to protect his students from the threat of death in his classroom.

Bells tolled, organs lamented, guitars echoed, “Amazing Grace” wafted from voices solo and choral as the nation entered into a period of mourning just shy of the eight-year anniversary of a similar tragedy at Colorado’s Columbine High School. But mourning is no automatic response. It often requires prodding and pressing—some event that pushes us, for a time, past the reach of a culture that numbs us to the loss of both the life around us and the life within us.

Jeremiah knew that mourning must sometimes be induced. In the ninth chapter of the book which bears his name, he looks at a culture anesthetized to the death around it and calls for “the weeping women,” those trained to cry at Hebrew funerals in order to put family and friends in touch with their grief and create a safe space in which to grieve.

Jesus knew that mourning could be misdirected. Turning to those who wept for him on the Via Dolorosa, he offered, “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but for your children, and your

children’s children.”

Solomon told us there is a time to mourn. Do we know what time it is?

Memorial Day has morphed from a day of mourning and remembrance into the long weekend that kicks off summer as a season of recreation. Save for the faces of a few somber veterans, there are few places in our society for tears of mourning on that final Monday in May. Good Friday services, most notably in the Protestant church, rush quickly past the passion of Christ to announce the resurrection in a way that keeps us from seeing the awful suffering and death of the Savior. Families and friends of loved ones attend funerals reconfigured as “Services of Triumph,” burying the vision of their grief under the soil of corporate denial of pain and death.

Jeremiah knew that mourning must sometimes be induced.

Do we really know how to mourn?

Do we really know whom to mourn?

With rising rates of violent crime, cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Milwaukee lose on a monthly basis approximately the same number of people as Virginia Tech did on a single day, but do we mourn? Or is our capacity to mourn lessened by our profane suspicion that low-income, inner-city lives are less valuable than college-campus lives?

The shooter in the Virginia Tech killings was given appropriately sensitive treatment in those April remembrances.

Many asked hard questions about systemic errors that failed to properly care for his emotional illness: Do not the victims of our nation’s workaday violence in city neighborhoods deserve the same? We wept with the family of this disturbed young man: Do not the families of others deserve similar sym-

pathy? Pundits and policy makers quickly moved to the question of what we can do to minimize the likelihood of this happening again: Do parallel policy considerations exist for those who mourn in poor neighborhoods? Our political leadership vowed to put all of the resources at their disposal to offer comfort to mourners and structures for prevention: What resources have been mobilized for those whose lives are under siege daily?

A presidential candidate glibly jokes about bombing Iranians, as if all residents of contemporary Persia are terrorists. On any given day in Iraq, an explosion can take out the same number of lives as were snuffed out in Blacksburg that awful April morning.

Who mourns?

Popular religion promises prosperity.

Biblical faith requires mourning; it requires sensitivity to the evil around us and in us, and it challenges any forces that obstruct our view of senseless deaths.

Faith nudges us to take the time to discern and pray for all that goes on around us and to acknowledge the carnage that is the collateral damage of sin, both personal and corporate.

Tears must flow for the victims and their families, from Columbine to September 11th to Virginia Tech, and from Baltimore to Blacksburg to Baghdad. Mourning releases grief and invites healing. Mourning empties and then strengthens us, motivating us to action. But lest we become anesthetized to the death around us or misdirect our mourning, may we consciously resist the tendencies to allow anything other than the heart of God to be our model for mourning. Let us weep over a creation marred by malaise, stained by sin, and bathed in blood. And let us remember the comfort Jesus promises us, if only we will mourn. ■ H.D. Trulear teaches applied theology at Howard University Divinity School and is a fellow at the Center for Public Justice.

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FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Difference or Indifference?

our work on their behalf—would be conscripted by the time and information given by politicians and news outlets.

Consistent with Ellul’s warning, our attention has moved away from domestic policy and the poor to foreign policy and the war. It’s not that these aren’t Memo to Christians: There are poor important issues, it’s just that the energy surrounding policy and poverty has children in the United States.

As we plow into the campaign for waned. Just as it received virtually no the U.S. presidential elections in 2008, attention in the 2004 election campaigns, it is hard to remember what the 2000 it threatens to slip under the radar screen campaign looked like, especially with in 2008 unless people of faith decide respect to domestic policy. We were all that economic justice is important— active and anxious concerning the ways irrespective of whether politicians or in which poverty and distressed com- pundits say so.

Jesus told his disciples that the poor munities would be addressed.

We had shadow conventions along- would always be with us. Anyone who side both the Republican and Democratic heard him and knew the Hebrew conventions in order to keep poverty Scriptures would know the full verse to on the map as the campaign intensified. which he referred: “There will always And we debated the role of faith-based be poor people in the land. Therefore I institutions in alleviating distress and command you to be openhanded toward providing empowerment to the least of the poor and needy in your land” these in our society. After the election, (Deut.15:11). Our command to be opena number of us, including Ron Sider handed is not dependent on the visibiland myself, met with President-elect ity of the poor; people of the Book must Bush in Austin to discuss his plans for take initiative. That’s what is encouragthe Faith-Based Initiative, with propos- ing about the biennial gathering of als to deal with pressing social needs in the American Baptist Churches USA (ABCUSA) in D.C. in June of this year impoverished communities.

Even when we were unsure of where and the various program components of things were headed and how the vari- that event related to children in poverty.

Not only will children in poverty ous policy initiatives shook out, there was hope for optimism. Noting the be on the agenda for the denomination uncertainty of the outcome of such itself, but the two days preceding the proposals, Jim Wallis comforted us with biennial will be devoted to a special meetthe idea that for the first time in a gen- ing where the sole agenda will be the eration, poor people were in the public churches’ challenge to address the issue. eye. Dealing with poverty was impor- “Seeing the Children—Transforming the Church,” to be held at Howard University tant again.

What a difference eight years make. School of Divinity and sponsored by Actually, Jacques Ellul warned us National Ministries/ABCUSA, will decades ago that Christians could not explore strategies for congregations to afford to let the media or the government take practical action in dealing with child dictate what social issues and problems poverty issues, such as access to solid we would engage. The French lawyer education, family economic success, reland ethicist insisted that if we depend- evant policy initiatives, and other worked on these entities to tell us what the able ways to address what has become issues were, our interest in them—and an invisible problem.

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At National Ministries’ Children in Poverty website (nationalministries.org/ CIP/) you will find helpful links for all Christians looking for an appropriate assessment of our current challenge.

Monthly breakdown of activities and stories from diverse ministries augment the site’s emphasis. Perhaps most encouraging, the denomination is not waiting to be told by the current administration, political campaigns, or media coverage to address this biblical mandate.

Whether or not candidates in either party make children in poverty an issue, ABCUSA, like other denominations, has determined that the testimony of people like Jane Knitzer, director of the National Center for Children in Poverty, be heard beyond the narrow confines of the House Ways and Means Committee. On January 24, 2007, she stated that “we are talking about a large part of the future work force: 39 percent of America’s children—more than 28 million children—live in low-income families, that is, in families with income at or below twice the poverty level.” She went on to describe the challenges for these children, most of whom “live with parents who work full time, full year.”

National Ministries/ABCUSA is questioning the underfunded mandate of “No Child Left Behind”; preparing bulletin inserts for advocacy Sundays; building partnerships with parent-teacher associations, community organizations, and the research community; and developing strategies to link congregations around poor children and their families.

They are not the only churches doing this work, but their example needs to be lifted as an example of what can happen when Christians take initiative. If eight years make a difference, how much more of a difference can we as God’s people make when we follow God’s mandate to care? ■ Rev. Trulear teaches applied theology at Howard University Divinity School.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Sober Thinking

incarceration.

It should not surprise careful observers that the two are related. But people of faith have a difficult time comprehending the connection, because we are We live in a nation where the consen- still relatively ignorant concerning substance abuse and addiction as social sus is “Get tough on crime!”

That is the national mood, stimu- problems, preferring to relegate them lated in the late ’60s when the Nixon to the role of personal offense or weakpresidential campaign promised “law and ness. Our methods of address reflect our order” to a nation horrified by TV screen belief that personal faith will overcome images of confrontations between pro- personal weakness—just a little talk with testors of various persuasions and law Jesus makes it right.Yet many who reguenforcement officers and urban streets larly attend church struggle with addicplagued by inner-city frustration run tions—including alcoholism—and find amok. It intensified during the ’80s— little solace or hope for deliverance in when public officials promised to stop our truncated view of addiction.

The church is slow to adopt the coddling criminals—through everything from tougher sentencing policies to the notion that alcoholism and other forms removal of social programs from jails and of addiction are best understood as a prisons. George H. W. Bush’s notorious disease. Dr. James Robert Milam’s text Willie Horton commercial during the Under the Influence (Bantam, 1984) has 1988 presidential campaign was simply an served for over 20 years as a concise exclamation point at the end of a sen- primer on alcoholism, synthesizing the best of research on the subject and demtence (pun intended) in full crescendo.

And so we have gotten tough: onstrating why everyone from the Incarceration rates have escalated, sen- American Psychological Association to tences have lengthened, and we have medical professionals from a variety of borrowed language from the bucolic backgrounds consider alcoholism to be a pastime of baseball to describe the dra- disease. Milam documents the physioconian sport of sentencing, declaring, logical, chemical, and psycho-biological dimensions of the disease. Church folk “Three strikes, you’re out.”

I have been very cautious in con- struggling with the notion that alcoholsidering the language of “political pris- ism is a disease would do well to read oner” to describe the disproportionate Milam’s work and then prayerfully number of African Americans who are reconsider.

We are ignorant, too, of alcoholism’s incarcerated in this country. I am similarly skeptical of those who call for mass great toll on society. According to the release of prisoners as a solution to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and systematic overcrowding that creates hor- Alcoholism, our country spends over rific conditions in prisons and jails— $80 billion annually on alcohol treatespecially those who make this seemingly ment programs, hospitalization for prophetic call from the safety of neigh- alcohol-related mental and physical borhoods to which released prisoners problems, training for professionals in do not return. But my work with the the field, loss in job productivity, and criminal justice system over the past 15 premature death from alcohol and alcoyears has made it clear to me that anoth- hol-related problems.

Among youth, the problems coner problem plagues our prisons and jails to which little attention has been given: tinue to escalate, especially among young the relationship between addiction and women. A study entitled Women Under PRISM 2007

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the Influence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) reports that 46 percent of high school girls are regular drinkers and that more than half of women between the ages of 18 and 25 have used illicit drugs. The steep rise in the numbers of women abusing prescription drugs reflects another alarming trend.

But once you spend time talking to and working with the men and women who are incarcerated in our nation’s prisons and jails, the bottom line matters less, and the stories of addiction reveal the staggering cost of alcoholism and drug abuse in our nation—and especially among those who become incarcerated. The Justice Department tells us that three-fourths of all convicted inmates in the United States have drug and/or alcohol problems.These numbers increase with incarceration rates. The numbers that decline are the percentage of inmates who have access to treatment programs while incarcerated.

As we consider the best use of our tax dollars in reducing crime, wouldn’t it make sense to increase or at least divert spending to drug and alcohol treatment for inmates in order to give them the best possible chance of success after incarceration? Most governments don’t think so, and they get away with it because we are part of that national consensus that wants to “get tough on crime.”

It is one thing to say, “Lock ’em up and throw away the key.” It is quite another to recognize that the lives of those warehoused under such a policy have minds and bodies chemically altered by substance abuse and require treatment that leads to abstinence both within and without the walls.Throwing away the key also reduces their chance at recovery—unless we expand substance abuse treatment in our correctional facilities.

In Dayton, Ohio, county officials have employed the Secure Transitional Continued on page 5.

him in his death and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:10,11). By sharing in the suffering of others we also share in Christ’s suffering and move through crucifixion towards the healing balm of resurrection. As Francis McNutt, a Catholic authority on healing, explains, “Through the power of the resurrection, God’s life is breaking into our wounded world, and he gives us the

power to cooperate with him by healing and reconciling man and all of creation” (in Healing, Ave Maria Press, 1974).

I still struggle with the problem of suffering and find that all our explanations are inadequate to explain the extent of misery we see in the world around us. However, just as God was able to transform the horror of Christ’s crucifixion and death into the glory of res-

urrection, so God is still at work transforming the horror of suffering and pain into healing and wholeness. How can we refuse to enter into the suffering of life when we know that by so doing we actually cooperate with God in healing our broken world? ■

Not to Be Forgotten continued from page 3.

applause from her fellow “soldiers.”

Two years later, the frail activist received word that a resolution had been passed by the American Equal Rights Association paying tribute to “its venerable early leader and friend, Lucretia Mott, whose life in its rounded perfections as wife, mother, preacher, and reformer is the prophecy of the future

of woman.” Lucretia died in her sleep on November 11, 1880, just days after receiving word of this homage. ■

ceded most of her leadership role to younger women, but she was able to walk unaided into the 30th anniversary convention of the Meeting at Seneca Falls.

Greeted from the platform by Frederick Douglass, the 85-year-old received warm

Faithful Citizenship continued from page 6.

Offender Program (STOP) as a means of providing treatment for men in the county jail system. They spend their incarceration time in a special facility that provides them with drug and alcohol treatment, from psychologists and counselors who deal with their situations to drug educators and other professionals who help them develop the coping skills needed to live a life of abstinence after their release. Through partnerships with halfway houses, the Veterans’ Administration, and other organizations, they develop aftercare systems for support upon release. Several churches, including Dayton’s Omega Baptist, provide pastoral and worship services, and even a 12-step Bible study using the Life Recovery Bible.

But STOP doesn’t begin to address the vast numbers of incarcerated persons who need treatment. And it won’t as

long as the county reflects the national consensus in favor of punishment. In 2004 voters had an opportunity to pass an initiative that would broaden the availability of treatment for offenders with substance abuse problems. They soundly rejected the initiative. According to one of the church volunteers, “They just determined that these people were criminals and belonged in jail.They don’t understand addiction.” Nor will they have to as long as the national consensus— including people of faith—is that punitive treatment is preferable to healing treatment.

It is particularly regrettable that the church’s attitude is not recognizably different from the rest of society’s.

Researchers like Baylor University’s Byron Johnson have demonstrated the strong correlation between faith and sobriety. The faith component of treatment both reflects the hard work of volunteers and forms the foundation of 12-step recovery. The founders of PRISM 2007

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Visit Christine and Tom Sine’s Mustard Seed Associates website at www.msainfo.org.

Leslie Hammond is PRISM’s copy editor and has also edited works as diverse as a prison diary, a stock market textbook, and books on character education.

Alcoholics Anonymous affirmed the alcoholic’s inability to change without the assistance of God (generically referred to as “higher power” in an effort to spread recovery beyond religious communities) and the necessity of self-examination (referred to in AA as a personal inventory) and accountability (people in recovery are told to “get a sponsor” who serves as a mentor through the recovery process).

The power of God, self-examination, and accountability—sounds a lot like what Christ calls us to. Treatment programs require this from those desiring to live sober lives. Surely sober-thinking citizens should support such opportunities for incarcerated men and women who will one day soon be our neighbors again. ■ Harold Dean Trulear is a pastor, associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity, and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice inWashington, D.C.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Holy Innocents

people were killed in a number of U.S. cities than American soldiers were killed in Iraq. It makes me wonder if some residents of inner cities who are now stationed in Iraq might have a better chance This past Christmas I was once again of survival over there than back home.

Children caught in shootings grabbed struck by the absence of an important dimension of the Christmas story that our attention last fall when a man entered enjoys real attention only in those an Amish school in bucolic Lancaster churches that take Christmas seriously as County, Pa., and gunned down schoola season and not just a day: the somber girls. I suspect that we reacted in horror, memorial Feast of the Holy Innocents. however, not to the alleged senselessThe term Holy Innocents refers to ness of the deed, but rather because, as in those murdered when Herod unleashed recent suburban school shootings, it could his cruel forces on Judea in an attempt to have been our children. Our own perexterminate the Child King. This story, sonal sense of safety was threatened.

Sixty miles east of Lancaster, families recorded in the second chapter of Matthew, is often overlooked at Christmas, even have buried children in steady numbers though it effectively completes the nar- for years. There, in Philadelphia, 2006 rative of the visit of the Magi. It echoes saw violence occur in rising numbers, Pharaoh’s order in the book of Exodus to with today’s Holy Innocents at the forekill the Hebrew male children. Out of the front. Children playing on streets, a girl killing in Egypt, Moses emerges; out of the riding in the back seat of her mother’s killing in Judea, Jesus emerges. But while car, a boy playing with his mother’s boyour attention is drawn to the prodigious friend’s pistol—the list goes on. And the survivors of these massacres, we should number could have been higher if a Philly father, frustrated by his 5-yearforget the loss of life in each scenario.

We don’t know how many children old’s lack of playing time in Pee Wee Herod’s henchmen killed two millennia football, had actually pulled the trigger ago, but even if we did, would it make of the gun he wielded in the coach’s any difference? We have official statis- direction at halftime, as the children— tics on the number of contemporary the Innocents—were herded across the innocents killed in gun violence in this field out of harm’s way by the referee.

In Philadelphia, as in many other country, and it has made precious little difference in the attitudes of Christians major cities, the primary cause of gun outside of those neighborhoods where violence is not drug or gang activity— it is interpersonal conflict. Christians are the tolls are staggering.

Herod ordered the execution to pro- reconciled to God in order to be recontect (or so he believed) his power. But cilers; simply put, the ministry we have today’s murdered children—who ben- been given directly relates to the cause efits? Gun manufacturers? Rural folks for of murder in our country. Are we up to whom prison jobs fuel the economy? the challenge?

Beginning with the efforts of Boston Politicians who turn crime into a political football to pump up fear at election law-enforcement and community agentime? Those of us who voted to keep our cies in the 1990s, many areas have sought property taxes low at the expense of not simply to step up police efforts to urban education? Somebody must be deter violence but also to provide alterbenefiting from the killing of the chil- natives to violent behavior through dren, or surely we would work to stop it. building community relationships and During certain months last year, more investing in recreational and educational PRISM 2007

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programs.

The Chicago Project for Violence Prevention took the approach a step further by treating gun violence as a public health issue. This meant using “public education to change attitudes and behavior towards violence” in addition to “using individuals recruited from [the] target population [and] community involvement to change norms.”Their program, CeaseFire (ceasefirechicago.org), began in the late 1990s, building partnerships among law-enforcement agencies and neighborhood and faith-based organizations to develop strategies that would not only reduce gun violence but also change a community culture that glorifies violence and offer alternative means of conflict resolution. In the first year of their pilot demonstration, shootings were down 67 percent.

As the program has spread to other neighborhoods and cities, shootings have been reduced from 40 to 60 percent.

Our friend Mary Nelson of Bethel New Life Ministries in Chicago reports that the program has been effective but could improve in its reaching out to community and faith-based groups. As people of faith, we can press our elected officials to replicate programs like CeaseFire, strengthen their ties to the faith community, and unleash the power of reconciled fellowship into our violent culture.

Who will stand and defy contemporary Herods whose sacrifice of children’s lives keeps their taxes low and their prison-driven economy high? Who will hear the cries of today’s Rachel, uncontrollably weeping for her children?

No, I didn’t hear much about the Holy Innocents this Christmas. But with the silence of people of faith, I expect to read about them regularly in the newspaper again this year. ■ Rev. Harold Dean Trulear teaches theology at Howard University School of Divinity and is a fellow at the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Appreciation Day

sacrifice brought about the ultimate reconciliation. This role is now taken by Abraham Lincoln, whose life and death on behalf of a divided nation reconciled the seemingly disparate sections of our Thanksgiving Day makes no sense in a country, with peace made through his postmodern world. I’ll come back to blood.

Holidays, too: “Holy days” are now this thought in a moment.

Forty years ago, sociologist Robert much more about our nation than the Bellah changed the way we look at Christian faith. Scan our “days of obserAmerican religious history with his vance” and you will find the best that groundbreaking essay, “Civil Religion America has to offer: from military in America.” Bellah, who has since memorials to the celebration of labor. become better known as the lead author While Bellah does not spend much time of Habits of the Heart (University of in his essay on these holidays, he does California Press, 1996), passionately point clearly to the Fourth of July as the argued that the United States had devel- new defining celebration of our time. oped a national religion that, while Our celebration of national indepenechoing themes of Christianity, had dence looms large in the national conmoved to a different set of icons through science. Contemporary observers such which to interpret its sense of ultimate as Minnesota pastor and theology professor Greg Boyd have wondered aloud meaning.

In order to better understand this if the celebration of Independence Day “civil religion,” Bellah explored American in our churches eclipses in intensity and mythology, believing, like all social sci- devotion the celebration of our ultimate entists, that a people’s stories about thier freedom in Christ.

And what about Thanksgiving, which past clearly influence their interpretation of the present. Just as the Jews’ stories of may loom even larger in the American the exodus and deliverance help them psyche than the Fourth of July? The feast to understand their current place in the in which we partake on that day serves world, so do Americans’ stories of our as much as a celebration of consumption founding, past struggles, and historic as it does of gratitude. And in a nation achievements yield insights into how we that struggles with its violent history, nothing brings the folks together better view ourselves as a nation today.

Bellah believed that, although this than a football game. Football becomes new religion borrowed extensively from the morality play that draws our aggresthe official model of Christian faith, it sion to its “proper” place, vicariously had developed a distinctly American dramatized by well-paid heroes whose flavor. The exodus theme, for example, grit symbolizes what we believe to be is alive and well in America. We see our- the best of ourselves.

Which brings me back to the openselves as a nation “delivered,” with the Revolutionary War standing in for the ing assertion of this essay: Thanksgiving Red Sea crossing and George Washington Day makes no sense in a postmodern as the American Moses. Our celebration world. Wouldn’t a more era-appropriate of Washington, his character as well as celebration be “Appreciation Day”? his exploits, gives us a sense of our own Postmodern thinking has become so national character (honesty, determina- anthropocentric that “thanks” is hard to tion) and place in the world (fighters give. The concept of “thanksgiving” is for freedom and democracy). No lon- implicitly transcendent; it assumes a sense ger is Jesus the defining martyr whose of dependency on a Giver, and postPRISM 2006

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modern human fulfillment requires us to be dependent on no one.

Due to our contemporary tendency to credit the self—personal, corporate, and national—as the source of blessing and abundance, Thanksgiving Day has become an increasingly ego-driven celebration during which we engage in rituals that celebrate the best in us and our resolve to continue to be that way.

We stop to appreciate what we have and who we are, but our national consciousness has no Transcendent Other to whom we can turn with gratitude; after all, we did it all ourselves.

We do have a national language that acknowledges God (Bellah notes the number of presidential inaugural speeches that have invoked the deity), but our operative theologies say otherwise. If you believe there is a God to thank, you ought to believe that God exists for other purposes than waiting for an annual Hallmark holler. Who is the God of Thanksgiving? Is it the God of the Bible, whose compassion for the poor, commitment to justice and peace, and heart for the hungry may go undetected by the simply appreciative?

Grateful people share—they pass along what they have been given.Appreciative folks first make sure they have theirs— and then give out of their excess. Grateful people know that what they have is a blessing bestowed. Appreciative folks value their stuff, but never acknowledge its true source. Why? Because to truly acknowledge God involves causing considerable discomfort to the ego: It is hard to thank a bountiful God for the food on my table and not set an extra place for someone who is hungry of body or soul. It is hard to feign total reliance on God as a people and then move preemptively as if God cannot be trusted to execute justice.

So, in an effort to be sensitive to the prevailing (civil) religion of our times, I wish you a very happy Appreciation Continued next page.

I N L I K E M A N N E R… THE WOMEN E L I Z A B E T H D. R I O S

Conversations in the Living Room

doing, we can expect to be labeled— but can you resist the stick of the label?

We need to dream. God wants his women to dream, which I believe is distinct from daydreaming. While daydreaming focuses on the destination, dreaming focuses on the journey. The sisters shared how when they look back The living room of my house is where on what God has done in their lives and acquaintances become friends, where how they made it through, the nuggets bonds deepen as we laugh and dream, they carry with them are the ones they take off our masks and relax. Recently, learned in the journey. “Our focus seems in the comfort of my living room, I to be off,” says Terry Wheeler, who until gathered together a few women of God recently was serving as a congregational —educators, pastors, secretaries, and life pastor in a growing church in South missionaries who belong to what I call Florida. “We seem to be told to focus the “pulpit sisterhood”—to share some on getting to the next building project, of the living we’ve done in the past few getting another program, growing memyears. We brought our stories, hopes, and bership...but within the whirlwind, we fears, and encouraged one another to con- stop dreaming.”

We need sister sojourners.Regardless tinue to become less as our God becomes greater (John 3:30) within us. Here is a of whether or not a woman is called glimpse of what we confirmed that day. into ministry at any given time, women We need courage. Eleanor Roosevelt agree that they need each other: likeonce said, “You gain strength, courage, minded seekers who love God and will and confidence by every experience in “spur one another on towards love and which you really stop to look fear in good deeds” (Heb. 10:24). Forming and the face...You must do the thing which maintaining fruitful friendships are difyou think you cannot do.” The ladies ficult in general, but as Marilyn Sanchez gathered in the living room all agreed of a church in Hallandale Beach, Fla., that courage is something they struggle states, friendships “are even harder for for daily. Sandra Ford Walston, author those in ministry because of our tri-roles of Courage: The Heart and Spirit of Every as mom, wife, and ministry leader.” Over Woman (walstoncourage.com), calls café con leche and tea, all the living room women to search within to find the cour- ladies agreed: Oh, how we need sister age to do what God has called them to soldiers to kick up our heels with, partdo. She encourages them to resist the ner with in ministry, and lean on through labels that others place on them, because thick and thin. As Norman Vincent in accepting those labels we accept a Peale liked to remind us, most people lesser version of the person God make —despite their confident appearance us to be. As women who are doing what and demeanor—are often as scared as you others might not expect women to be are and as doubtful of themselves. We

Faithful Citizenship continued from previous page.

Day! But if you persist in celebrating Thanksgiving, please, make sure to sub-

ject your ego to the proper degree of discomfort—share your blessings with those around you. Remember, “from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required...” (Luke 12:48). ■ PRISM 2006

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all need sister sojourners to take the journey with and to complement our strengths and weaknesses.

At the end of our fellowship, one sister brought tears to our eyes when she acknowledged,“We are not as strong as people think we are, and we all lead with a limp.” With that statement, we held each other, prayed for each other, and determined to keep meeting together, because one thing we all have in common is that we live to change the world. Whether out in the world or in our communities of faith, women who have been called to be God’s mouthpiece are at their core vulnerable human beings who need courage, the space to dream, and the support of other women of God. As we ate our last bite of cheesecake and prepared to go back to our respective homes, the impact of our living room conversation was already becoming apparent. Acknowledging that we are already doing what God wants us to do, we rejoiced in the reality of this “pulpit sisterhood.” What was already being celebrated in heaven was now being experienced right here on earth, amongst each other in the simplicity of the living room.

So now, let me ask:Who will you be inviting over for conversations in your living room this week? ■ Liz Rios is a church birther in South Florida.

Visit her blog at www.latinaliz.typepad.com.

Join her at the Women in Ministry Conference in October in Los Angeles (www.wimin2. com), where she will be sharing on church planting. For reduced rates for seminarians, students, and church planters, contact her at latinaliz@aol.com.

Rev. Harold Dean Trulear is associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

“Nobody Wants the God You Got”

tics with God’s agenda, the richness of faith traditions would be compromised and the prophetic voice nonexistent.

Why call this to mind today? Because when Bush put pen to paper that cold January day, beneath the admiring eyes of American religious elites, it represented In 1992 Stephen Carter wrote The a high water mark in the faith romance Culture of Disbelief: The Trivialization of to which we shall never return. The Religion in Public Life. Carter, an active marriage ceremony delighted us as we Episcopalian, bemoaned the absence of envisioned a progeny of armies of comreligious voices in public dialogue in passion, the pitter patter of little “feats” such areas as public policy, social and descending upon the places of poverty cultural mores, and community and and pain with their humble cups of water neighborhood life. His was not a call turned to full-sized water coolers through for the legislation of religiously deter- the aid of federal funds. However, to quote mined morality, but rather a petition for the blues singer, “The thrill is gone!”

While many faith-based programs faith-inspired voices from a variety of persuasions to be included in the robust chug merrily along in providing impordiscourse which should characterize the tant services, the bloom is off the rose best of the democratic tradition. The of their romance with the government.

Large, nonsectarian social service agenbook became a best seller.

Not 10 years later, newly inaugurat- cies were the first to protest the Bush ed President George W. Bush issued an initiative, claiming that the religious orgaexecutive order creating a federal office nizations targeted by the executive order of “Faith-Based and Community Initia- were unproven in their ability to deliver. tives” that would enable faith-based Other opponents attacked the constituorganizations to compete for federal tionality of federal funding for religious contracts for the delivery of social ser- organizations exempt from Title IX vices. Suddenly religion was in; faith was mandates concerning discrimination in hiring. September 11th and the War on fashionable.

Flying under the faith-euphoria radar Terror took center stage and, like the screen, however, was another Carter proverbial ham actor, will not be removed tome. God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs nor upstaged (save for the occasional and Rights of Religion in Politics appeared cameo of same-sex marriage).

“They don’t love us anymore!” laments in late 2000 as a warning to church and society against associating religious per- the faith community today, no longer spectives too closely with partisan poli- the darling savior of its society. Church tics. He chided both white evangelicals attendance has shifted little, the armies for equating Republicans with righ- of compassion are no longer featured on teousness and black Protestants for bap- the evening news, and faith is no longer tizing the Democrats as divine. Carter flavor of the month. What happened?

“Everyone wants the God in you, reminded those who would listen (this book was not nearly as popular as the but nobody wants the God you got.” other) that the call was for religious per- Rev. Inez James, late United Methodist spectives to be a part of the conversation, pastor and the first black woman to lead not to be legislated into fixed policies a UMC congregation in the state of that deemed limited religious perspec- Maine, offered this maxim to me many tives as good for the nation. He also times over the years. The world sees the warned that by equating partisan poli- power that God works through indiPRISM 2006

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viduals, and it clamors for that power.

The world sees God using people to do great works, and it wants in on the results. But when it comes to seeking the Presence behind the Power, the world stops short. It wants the effect (the God in you) but not the cause (the God you got).

We’ve been used. The government, the politicians never really loved us, our faith, our God.They simply wanted something that “worked.”We were a new love, an attractive but quaint alternative to the bigness and bureaucracy of the service delivery industry.

The world’s interest in religion should never be equated with an honest and sincere search for God and truth.

Society’s interest in religious institutions should never be mistaken for a serious interest in faith.

The heroes of the Babylonian exile understood this.When Daniel was called before King Belshazzar, he knew that what the king wanted was his practical help, not his God’s presence. Nehemiah’s troubled countenance drew the attention of his king, but it was likely bald self-interest that prompted him to be concerned about the royal foodtaster’s well-being. Neither of these men depended upon the favor of the government to execute their ministries. Their commitment to do God’s work came from God himself; the partnerships they had with the public sector simply amplified a predetermined path to which they were committed.

When the love affair ends, when the dollars dry up, when the courting ceases, people of faith will have to check their motivation for social service delivery, and see whether they have mistaken interest in “the God in them” for a desire for “the God they got.” ■ Rev. Harold Dean Trulear is associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Symbolic Sacrifices The word sacrifice suffers in our culture, agonizing between the poles of misuse and neglect. For some, it has degenerated into a synonym for inconvenience, like some cheap Lenten vow. Robbed of its gravity, sacrifice means simply to give up a creature comfort rather than to assume a costly choice. For others, it has disappeared from their radar screen altogether, craftily hidden behind those anti-detection devices of prosperity and self-interest. The greater good for which sacrifice is designed becomes little more than an outmoded relic of a hardscrabble age, a memory fading further with each passing generation.

This is especially tragic for the church, because without sacrifice we cease to exist.

It was as a sacrifice that Jesus paid for our greater good.The Apostle Paul calls us to be “living sacrifices” in presenting our very selves in service to the One who paid the ultimate price.

The first dictionary definition for sacrifice is “a giving up of something valuable or important for somebody or something else considered to be of more value or importance.” It means allowing somebody or something to be harmed or destroyed in order to obtain a greater advantage. But this refers to intentional sacrifices, decisions made by persons and communities that have a greater good in mind. In an age where intentional sacrifice has lost its meaning, an unintentional sacrifice has emerged to take its place, a “sacrifice” that serves not the common good but the very self-interest that so distorts our understanding of true sacrifice.

Consider the working poor, the impoverished, the underclass, the mentally or physically disabled, ex-offenders, or the elderly. Their interest is not our interest;

indeed, their greater good is often sacrificed for our convenience, comfort, serenity, and security. These groups of people become our dirty little secrets, because many of us are too busy enjoying the rewards of keeping them underpaid, overmedicated, mistreated, or ignored.

Once properly stigmatized, they become sacrifices to our greed, selfishness, prejudice, insecurity, and impatience, and to our intolerance for anyone who doesn’t fit into our neat little boxes of intelligence, beauty, or propriety. Because they remind us of the dark side of the human condition, the limitations of our own humanity, we must restrict them to the hidden underbelly of society.

Because they inconveniently refuse to be ignored, we have a way of placating ourselves by drowning them in services— many of which they don’t need and very often can’t comprehend. The social service industry has become an elixir—a means of deadening hearts, minds, spirits, bonds, creativity, and the desire for health—administered with the supercilious assurance of those who know best.

It replaces the community support of friendship and the biblical idea of neighbor, as in “Love thy...” When the least, last, and lost become clients, care is commodified, and the two-way street of love is paved over by a one-way highway of dependence on institutional provision.

We are not arguing against the existence of social work, agencies, or welfare.

Rather, we question the pervasive nature of such institutions as the primary way of reaching distressed individuals and communities. Institutional services cannot replace relationships. We wonder if getting our hands dirty by rubbing elbows with the marginalized requires a level of sacrifice more costly than most people of faith are willing to pay.

Some will argue that we need institutions to tackle gross illiteracy rates, unmet legal needs, lack of housing, etc.

Agencies are necessary as long as legal barriers exist for those who face eviction PRISM 2006

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and do not have representation or those who experience challenges in accessing the government and legal services because they speak little English. With access to healthcare and job opportunities seemingly controlled by social location and economics, we need institutional and policy-based responses to address the sheer enormity of the issues that face us.

But these realities can never substitute for our duty to make friends with the poor and marginalized. In reducing them to client status, we sacrifice their ultimate worth—the dignity inherent in being created in the image of a loving God. The church has an obligation to address the above-mentioned issues because our communities are wasting away. But we must also provide the personal support necessary for people to access available services and be their advocates so that they are never reduced to mere numbers —statistics for the McService industry that boasts “over X million served.”The church has access to knowledge that transcends the narrow interests of singleservice industries and, when it taps into the Holy Spirit’s power, can supply a holistic approach to human need. While we’ve been expecting institutions and the government to “fix” what is wrong, holistic ministry walks alongside people, partnering with them in their desire to become truly whole.

Meanwhile some of our best and brightest treasures are being forfeited— falling by the wayside with complacency, dependency, and shame. By insisting on the equitable treatment of the disadvantaged, churches can use their influence and outreach to clarify what we can do best and to work together to achieve common objectives. We can address the enslavement of people’s minds by provoking the desire to change and determining where people fit in and what talents they can contribute. We can contribute to enhancing education, training, and employment opportunities for disadvantaged youth; to improving the

I N L I K E M A N N E R… THE WOMEN E L I Z A B E T H D. R I O S

Saving the City

and women, it at one time received government funds but at present operates str ictly on pr ivate donations (lightbringers.com/wayoutchurch.htm).

Since the early days of this nation, women of faith have been engaged in community building and empowerment as they sought to improve their own lives and those of their families and neighbors. Long before “faith-based initiatives” were the buzzwords of the day, women were working hard—mostly without government help—to fight for a more just society.

Sojourner Truth fought for racial equality. Eliza Shirley served the poor.

Mother Jones crusaded for workers’ rights.

Frances Willard worked for women’s suffrage and prison reform.

Across the country, women have established themselves as leaders in the community development field and acquired the skills to bring positive change to their cities through social welfare services, educational institutions, healthcare facilities, and civic organizing for structural change.

These have produced housing, created jobs, provided education, and, most importantly, offered hope for millions of people.

Indeed, history continues to point to faith-based organizations founded and/ or directed by women working to “save the city.” Here are just a few:

Mujeres de Esperanza is a ministry of Esperanza USA, one of the largest Latino faith-based organizations in the country.

Launched in 2005, it uses funds from the government, private foundations, and individual citizens to fight sexual abuse, domestic violence, and lack of sexual education while addressing discrimination/oppression based on gender and race (www.esperanza.us).

Way-Out Ministries was founded in the South Bronx in 1969 by Rev. Anna Villafane. A residential drug treatment and counseling program for both men

Faithful Citizenship continued from page 6. incentives of less-skilled young workers to accept employment; and to addressing the severe barriers and disincentives faced by people such as ex-offenders and noncustodial fathers. We need to teach basic

Pastor Aimee Garcia Cortese (along with her son Joseph Henry Cortese) established the Boden Center for the Performing Arts in the Bronx to expose an underprivileged community to the wonders of music and drama. Established with donations from individuals, it is currently seeking funds from a variety of arenas. A ministry of Crossroads Tabernacle, the center teaches neighborhood young people instrumental lessons, music theory, dance, drama, and video recording (bodencenter.com).

The Reverend Cheryl Anthony founded the Judah International Christian Center to facilitate the stability of her community through human and economic development, stabilization, and revitalization (judahinternational.com).

These women (whom I call “progressive Pentecostals”) have simultaneously

financial literacy in order to empower people with the skills and discipline they need for financial success.

We can do all of this and more by simply being there. We can sacrifice our time, talents, and money so that others may not be sacrificed.Yes, we are our brothers’ keeper and our sisters’ sentry. ■ PRISM 2006

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taken a vertical focus—seeking to be more like Jesus—and a horizontal focus —based on their ministry calling to serve those around them. They have been able to transform their communities through Jesus and his Word and also through government partnerships, advocacy, policy analysis, and community and clergy education.

Even without President Bush and the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, community development in collaboration with all those who dare to partner with women like these will continue its long and rich history. Women will persist in working as vessels of God to save our cities.

What these women have done is available to all women who call on the power of God. I challenge those of you with a heart for community ministry, a vision to transform culture, and an ability to engage the powers, to hear God and then move forward in faith.You are proclaimers of good news to the oppressed, comforters of the brokenhearted, rebuilders of our cities, and restorers of our hope.You are God’s oaks of righteousness, and he will display his glory through you (Isa. 61:4)! ■ Elizabeth D. Rios is an Ed.D. candidate in organizational leadership at Nova Southeastern University, co-pastor alongside her husband of Wounded Healer Fellowship, and academic advisor/professor at Trinity International University’s South Florida Regional Center.

You can contact her at latinaliz@aol.com.

Harold Dean Trulear is a pastor and associate professor of applied theology at Howard University in Washington, D.C. This essay was co-written by Denise E. Grant, a secondyear student at Howard University School of Divinity and a manager in the District of Columbia municipal government.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Pentecost, Ascension, and Politics

eye toward their true meaning for us in the life of the church, to ask ourselves how they speak to our contemporary malaise, and to resist our culture’s tendency to reduce all commemorations to a market exchange.

The Peace Pentecost celebrations that have developed over the past few years have been a helpful reminder of The Day of Pentecost exists as a well- the claims of Christ over all nations and kept secret in the contemporary church. the qualities of justice and peace required We all know Christmas and Easter, most for nations to coexist.

Ascension reminds us that our Lord even Lent and Advent, but very little attention is given to Pentecost either as a reigns from a place higher than any earthseason in the church year or as a day of ly authority. Such a climb should be remembering the “birthday of the church.” celebrated for how it puts in perspective John Horner, an Episcopalian priest any and all claims to human power and in Youngstown, Ohio, considers Pentecost prerogative (preemptive, unilateral, or to be possibly the only observance that otherwise). The reign of God, too often cannot be stolen from the church, a fate claimed as baptism of human desire, instead which other holidays have not been able provides a context within which the to evade. Christmas has been hijacked human spirit ought to derive humility by shopping and shrubbery, while the and meekness.

The ascended Christ pours out his Resurrection has been replaced with a rabbit, “but they can’t touch Pentecost,” Spirit on Pentecost. He makes claims on muses Horner. “The world wouldn’t nations and tribes. His act of pouring know what to do with the outpouring from the ascended position challenges all of the Spirit of God and the subsequent political positions limited in their outpower and witness of a group of ordi- look and circumscribed in scope to beware any claims to universality, and nary Palestinians.”

Not that the current political and it exposes any one particular policy as economic forces of our time wouldn’t dangerous litmus.The Ascension reveals try. They have offered us innumerable the true nature and locus of political ways to substitute kitsch and merchan- power: in the hands of the One who dise for the mystery and substance of declared to a Roman regent that any the holy days. Even the so-called secu- authority he had came from above.

The Spirit outpoured transcends sociolar holidays can’t escape tampering. We rest on Labor Day, celebrate gluttony and violence on Thanksgiving (isn’t that what feasting and football come down to?), and “In him all things in heaven and even “Martin Luther King had a dream on earth were created, things that YOU’LL buy a stereo with our crazy visible and invisible, whether thrones holiday prices!” or dominions or rulers or powers— So maybe we should keep Pentecost all things have been created through and Ascension a secret, lest these two him and for him. He himself is occasions for remembrance and celebrabefore all things, and in him all tion also fall victim to market forces and things hold together.” postmodern rhythm.

Col. 1:16-17 On the other hand, perhaps we ought to return to these observances with an PRISM 2006

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economic status. It gives power to heal that is not based on ability to pay, access to premium healthcare facilities, or the economic interests of insurance companies. Indeed, the first post-Pentecost narrative describes the physical healing of a poor man who, in modern terms, would likely be among the nearly 46 million uninsured Americans, many of whom list the local emergency room as their primary care physician.

The Spirit outpoured transcends race and ethnicity. It offers a word that can be heard in any language, and later a heavenly tongue that seeks to move beyond the limitations of cultural interpretation. Such an outpouring dwarfs the power of earthly language and exposes its claims that political reality can speak ultimate truth.The gift of tongues cannot be purchased in a bottle or implanted by any doctor; indeed, Paul tells the church at Corinth that the interpretation of tongues is a community enterprise too precious for any one individual’s responsibility.

The Spirit outpoured transcends the commoditization of information. Gifts of knowledge and wisdom insure that access to prestigious universities is not the sole guarantor of insight and analysis. The talking heads on the evening news just may be wrong as they meet the press or face the nation. God can give the true witness to Daniel in prison, Amos on a mountainside, or John in the wilderness, while rendering the information of others a non-reality factor.

There exists a higher power, a holy health, a sanctified culture, an ascended wisdom that lays claim on us all, and calls forth humility in the realm of ideas, policy, and services.There may be some truth to the rumor that a surefire way to make God laugh is to be sure. ■ Harold Dean Trulear is a pastor, an associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity, and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Welcome Home It’s a phrase that signifies warmth, acceptance, and belonging.The weary pilgrim, the anxious traveler, the displaced refugee long to hear those words.

But for many Americans, the longing for home will be left largely unsatisfied even upon their return. They are incarcerated men, women, and youth, and they will return to their communities— our communities—this year in record numbers.

Since the late ’90s we have known that 2006 would see unprecedented releases from prison, an actuarial anomaly brought on by the stringent drug sentencing of that decade. This has caused great concern among some who care about youth and young adults in poor communities, because many of these folks return unprepared for life “at home.”

Indeed, given the high recidivism rates for these populations, concern that their return could produce an upward spike in criminal and violent activity in poor communities is not unwarranted.

As early as 1998, Boston minister Eugene Rivers launched Operation 2006 in an attempt to mobilize congregations in 40 cities to be prepared to welcome home these returning prisoners. That same year, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Churches, under the leadership of Rev. Eugene Williams, organized congregations in South Central L.A. to push legislation that would make it mandatory for exfelons released from the California state correctional system to complete a GED program as a condition of their parole.

These efforts are noble, even heroic.

But despite their effectiveness, despite the Bush administration’s support for prisoner reentry programs, despite laudable philanthropic efforts by organizations like the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the issue of the reentry of incarcerated persons

into mainstream American society remains a blip on the social welfare and policy radar screens of the Christian church—especially those who claim to have laid claim to the moral high ground in our country.

The record numbers of returning ex-offenders bring with them special issues, many of which predate their arrest and incarceration. According to numbers posted by the National Alliance of Faith and Justice (NAFJ), an affiliate of the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice, 41.3 percent of the nation’s incarcerated have no high school diploma.

NAFJ states that “approximately onethird of prisoners cannot locate an intersection on a street map or identify and enter basic information on an application.”

They also note that “only one in 20 can determine which bus to take from using a schedule.” When one adds to the mix such necessary tasks as obtaining a driver’s license, Social Security card, and bank account, life skills taken for granted by many of us present major challenges for those seeking to come “home.”

At a recent conference sponsored by the University of the District of Columbia and the Kingmaker Foundation, an exoffender talked about how conditioned he had become to prison life:“Somebody tells you when to wake up and go to sleep.

They tell you when to eat, when you can study, when you can have recreation.

I got so used to waiting for a buzzer to walk through a door that when I got home, I went to a store and stood outside for 20 minutes waiting for a buzzer before I realized I could open the door myself and walk in.”

Those who know the criminal justice system agree that three things are necessary to facilitate the readjustment of incarcerated persons into society. First, they need a place to hang their hat. Many persons in prison have burned their bridges, which makes the return home anywhere from rough to impossible.

Families who do receive their loved ones PRISM 2006

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back must make major adjustments. Some families have moved on, wanting nothing to do with the ex-offender. Halfway houses and other facilities receive ex-offenders, but even those places are often overcrowded and under-resourced.

Second, ex-offenders need jobs.

Significant obstacles exist in the job market for this population, from legal barring to prejudicial discrimination.Yet employment is a critical component to successful reentry to community and society.

And third, ex-offenders need a community—a group of caring persons who make it their business to be present for those returning “home.” Sound like something a church could provide?

While we don’t have nearly enough people and communities of faith mobilized to receive this record reentry, many resources are available for those congregations and individuals who do choose to get involved. NAFJ’s website (nafjn abcj.org) is a good source for model programs and strategies. Emory University professor Robert Franklin has written a significant essay (reentrymediaoutreach. org/robertfranklin_essay1203.pdf) cogently arguing the theological mandate for congregations to welcome this population home. Other excellent resources are available from the Reentry National Media Outreach Campaign (reentrymediaoutreach.org).

People of goodwill have long decried overcrowded prisons and racial disparities in sentencing and have called for the release of those incarcerated unjustly.

These are meaningful endeavors, but if ex-offenders lack the three basic elements of readjustment—housing, employment, and community—how do we expect their release to be good news for either them or the society to which they return? Who will be there to welcome them home? ■ Harold Dean Trulear is a pastor, an associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity, and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

What Gives?

countdown (what used to be called Advent), you would be treated to Christmas music emanating from the largest pipe organ in North America.You could even sing along during the lunch I did not receive any gifts this holiday hour when Wanamaker made available season. Bill Bradley was a true senator. his own special hymnbooks.

Yet it was Wanamaker, along with (Stay with me on this—it is not the non friends like Macy and Gimbel, who popusequitur it appears to be.)

This holiday season I did not receive larized the Christmas gift exchange, thus any gifts. Oh, some items under the tree commercializing the season.

Would that our culture truly supbore my name, and cards arrived in the mail with “ice cream” money from vari- ported giving as a cherished value! Would ous friends and family, but they were that we cultivated what Society of Friends not gifts in the true sense. After all, I theologian Thomas Jeavons has called a bought something for each of them as “culture of generosity.” Most giving, argues Jeavons, is done out of obedience, well. It was more of a “holiday swap.”

I know it was a swap because I tend philanthropy, or investment. Obedience, to give “gifts” to people who give “gifts” he says, can become wooden, philanto me. If the gifts stop on one side, they thropic efforts change with donors’ will stop on the other. Altruism and very interests, and the “giving as investment” little sacrifice are involved, just a pleasant idea—now popular in the prosperity gospel movement—taps into the selfholiday exchange.

That does not mean the offerings interest of the heart. Jeavons presses us aren’t well intentioned or thoughtful. It to see that New Testament giving, in just means that any sense of generosity in contrast, is a matter of the heart, and in the act of giving is muted by the notion Growing Givers’ Hearts (Jossey-Bass, 2000), that I will get something in return. Holiday the book he coauthored with Rebekah Basinger, he says that is exactly what the gifts work that way in our culture.

Interestingly, until the latter part of church should be doing.

That is a great challenge to a culture the 19th century, it was Valentine’s Day —not Christmas—that held first place so ripe with self-interest, a prophetic in the national order of exchange. Only word in such a consumer-driven world. after a Christian businessman named John The cultural sea change involved in movWanamaker began promoting Christmas ing from self-interest to generosity would as a time of gift-giving did the Christmas surely be a battle against popular tides, not season take on such significance in our to mention human sin.

The extent to which our society fails culture. Of course, Brother Wanamaker was not possessed solely of a giving spirit. to be generous revealed itself during the He also possessed one of the largest natural disasters of last year. Our response department stores in the nation and to the victims of the tsunami, Hurricane sought to build a customer base through Katrina, and the South Asian earthquake betrayed an unwillingness to go the sachis promotion of yuletide gifts.

I won’t be too hard on the good rificial mile and offer generously to those shopkeeper. He used his wealth to sup- in need.To be sure, a number of organized port missions and ministry in his beloved efforts provided some much-needed Presbyterian Church, even financing the relief, but the emotional depth of our construction of a number of church edi- compassion was shallow compared to our fices.And, if you shopped at Wanamaker’s outrage over rising gasoline prices. And department store during the Christmas our government showed great reluctance PRISM 2006

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to redirecting to relief efforts any federal monies supporting various “pork” projects designed to bring money to congressional home districts and win electoral support for members of the House.

A truly generous society would have been appalled at the billions of dollars appropriated to build a bridge for an island with 50 residents in Ketchikan, Alaska; to widen a street that leads to the corporate headquarters of Wal-Mart in Bentonville, Ark.; to lay a 15-mile stretch of subway that will not ease traffic in Atlanta, Ga.; to convert hundreds of miles of unused railroad rights-of-way into bike and pedestrian pathways (called Non-Motorized Transportation Projects) in dozens of states; and to support scores of museums that few frequent. Any of these might be noble projects to operate out of a surplus budget (and some should be the responsibilities of state and local governments), but at a time when thousands have died and thousands more have been injured, physically displaced, and/or rendered homeless, surely a public outcry concerning the responsible demonstration of national largesse ought to be heard above complaints about gas prices.

I mentioned earlier that Bill Bradley was a good senator.That’s because Bradley understood the genius of bicameral representation in the legislative branch of government.America’s founding fathers envisioned our two-tiered system of representation in such a way that Congress would represent the interests of their constituencies while the Senate would rise above local self-interests to enact laws that reflected the common good of the commonwealth. When Bradley ran for president in 2000, he was beset by charges that he didn’t represent New Jersey interests enough. But his job was to do just the opposite—to rise above local interest and work for the common good.When members of Congress put pork above the poor, home projects Continued on page 7.

I N L I K E M A N N E R… THE WOMEN E L I Z A B E T H D. R I O S

Birthing a Church

active, and porous to the community around it.” Whereas the male approach to leadership is traditionally hierarchical, with one person dictating to others and information traveling down from the top Last year I heard author Edwina Gateley of a chain, the feminine approach feashare in a keynote address that “women tures shared leadership, with communiare called to be birthers of healing and cation occurring around a table in a hope in a broken world.” For centuries more relational, household type of model.

Christian women have struggled to nur- Titles are not important in this model; ture the lives of the downtrodden and community and holistic integration of marginalized, and more recently they all aspects of life are.

One particularly exasperating queshave begun birthing new churches as the ultimate institution for healing and hope. tion that is frequently asked of female Those women who feel that God has church birthers is “Does your church called them to go forth to plant, pasture, attract males?” Story responds with underand grow a church in what is still a pre- standable annoyance, “Do we ask male dominately male world are exploring pastors if they attract women? Our gathalternative models of doing so. They feel erings are focused not on men or women the necessity of moving beyond the high- but on people in the Kingdom. We’re ly touted, (generally white) male models all in this journey together. We’re all in of such megachurches as Willow Creek, the process of becoming whole.”

I was particularly intrigued with the Saddleback, and the Dream Center.

When a woman named Sherri Story Generations Quest model for church shared her model with me, I knew it birthing because I myself am a female needed to be passed on to a wider audi- church “birther,” and while I’ve heard ence. One of a team of five women many women (and men) talk about estaband two men who last year birthed lishing new churches I had never heard Generations Quest (www.generations anyone approach it from this perspective. quest.org), an emerging church in Story compares a new community of Virginia Beach, Va., Story seeks to faith to a newborn child and feels that reformat church using a feminine per- women are especially suited to nurturspective. She believes that women who ing such a body. “Most women know venture to plant churches need to look the joys and pains of birthing.We know within themselves to find an altogether how to give birth and then nurture new model in order to reach today’s something new, sensitive to all the nuances of a newborn. It requires much unchurched population.

The team at Generations Quest uses of the same tender and relational charan egg metaphor to illustrate their infra- acteristics.”

Like Story, I agree that those who structure, describing it as “living, inter-

feel called to establish a new church need to have alternative models for doing so.

Women will be encouraged to know that their feminine nurturing and relational skills are transferable to this area of ministry as well. “By reimagining how churches can be birthed,” explains Story, “women ministers may see, feel, and hear a new hope to lead and feed communities of faith that they have birthed.”

In addition, the team aspect of this model provides an excellent way for women to partner in birthing a church, especially those who are finishing seminary or graduate school but haven’t received a denominational invitation. In this way we can use our God-given creativity as well as incorporate the socialjustice aspect of ministry that Jesus modeled for us.

Story and her colleagues and the men who support them did not wait until they were invited to start a church community. They knew that the “line” they were not supposed to cross existed, but they realized the wall was not erected

by God but by man.Thus they chose to obey the Great Commission to “go and make disciples.” In that obedience a new church is emerging. Story admonishes women to feel the fear of God’s call but to respond to it anyway: “We have the call, we have the ability—we just need a new paradigm which fits us.” ■

What Gives? continued from page 6.

shouldn’t we be leading the way in generous living, both in our homes and in the halls of government? ■

above homelessness, needless bridges above the need to bridge the gap between poverty and sustenance, then it is the Senate’s job to stand firm and reverse the curse.

Sadly, the Senate has simply become self-interest writ large, a reflection of a society that has lost any real culture of generosity. Our self-interests run from what’s in the box with the Christmas wrapping to what’s in the congressional budget for my home district. If Christians purport to worship the ultimate Gift, PRISM 2006

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Elizabeth D. Rios uses her leadership skills at Wounded Healer Fellowship in Pembroke Pines, Fla.,Trinity International University’s South Florida Campus, and the Center for Emerging Female Leadership (cefl.org).

Harold Dean Trulear is a pastor, an associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity, and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

The Legion of the Lonely As a young adult Episcopalian, I was confronted by a graduate school colleague who asked me how I could stand to say the “same printed prayers every week.”

After giving it some thought, I responded to my Free Church friend, “You Baptists say the same prayers every week, too. They just aren’t written down.”

My schoolmate’s query was not without merit, however. What was it about the structure of the liturgy that made me feel so much at home, from the opening prayer of humble access to the closing dismissal? Even today, as a Baptist minister, I long for the regularity of liturgical ritual, a certain corporate discipline that puts the congregation all on the same page (pun intended).

But it was not just the regularity of the ritual; there was also the excitement of the church season—the annual calendar which rehearsed the significant events in the life of Christ, from the appearance of John the Baptist (and others who usher in the First Advent) through the wilderness of Lent, to the Cross and beyond. The birth of the church on Pentecost (we always had a birthday cake in our Sunday school and sang “Happy Birthday”) and hymns that actually lauded the Ascension were annual affairs.

Even the New Year’s Eve service carried the designation of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating those children slaughtered by Herod’s wrath.

(In light of all the children who die from famine, drought, and war in stricken lands, as well as those succumbing to violence and drugs in our own country, it seems to me that every church ought to have such a commemoration).The discipline of the ritual, liturgy, lectionary, and seasons gave

the serious worshiper opportunity to participate in a more fully rehearsed version of the salvation story than was available to me in other contexts.

There was more. In fact, our prayers were not the same every week.The Book of Common Prayer stood as a veritable encyclopedia of intercession, both in weekly form (when was the last time your church prayed for government leaders by name or title?) and in the so-called occasional intercessions. In the latter category, one prayer, indeed one line of one prayer, still nags at me today. It begins,“Oh Lord, who putteth the lonely in families...”

Who is this Lord, and where are the families receiving the lonely? I don’t have to ask where the lonely people are. They are legion.

If the lonely were not legion, inmates leaving jails and prisons would have communities of support to receive them, help them obtain employment, and provide the structure and resources that militate against recidivism.

If the lonely were not legion, young women would not flock to abortion clinics but rather to communities of support that would help them come to terms with their “unwanted” pregnancies and assist them in becoming the strong families that God intended.

If the lonely were not legion,Alcoholics Anonymous and their recovery support groups would be ministries of the church rather than simply renting space at the church.

If the lonely were not legion, teen suicide would be on the decline, whether in suburban bedrooms or on city streets.

If the lonely were not legion, media imagery would not serve as a primary source of identity construction for youth and young adults.

If the lonely were not legion,“irreconcilable differences” would not be a legal term.

If the lonely were not legion, we would not be embarking on the loneli-

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est time of the year as this issue of PRISM goes into circulation. Indeed, the holiday season brings out the “low” in lonely and the “I” in isolation. Where is this Lord, and where are the families he “putteth the lonely in”?

Congregations ought to be just that —bodies where people congregate, come together, embrace one another.Alas, fueled by a media orientation to entertainment, many of our churches behave as if all the action is up front in the pulpit and the choir loft, and that those in attendance are somehow clients or consumers whose attention spans have shrunk so much since the Lincoln-Douglas debates that their senses must be stimulated, even titillated, for them to see God. But I am not only worried about how such worship misses God. I am also concerned about how such worship further alienates us from each other. If my attention is focused exclusively on what’s up front on the sanctified stage (oops, pulpit), I probably won’t notice the person sitting in the pew next to or in front of me.

There’s an old joke about a man who, bumping into another man at the grocery store, thinks he may be a fellow member of his church. “I think I recognize you,” he proposes. “Let me look at you from the back.”

This season exacerbates the extant loneliness right around us. If you still don’t know any lonely people, feel free to refer to the above list. Or maybe try a family photo. Or a mirror. May the legion of the lonely nag at us this Christmas.

May we be moved to seek them out and offer them the love, fellowship, and support that are clearly proclaimed in Isaiah’s declaration that Jesus is “God with us.” ■ Harold Dean Trulear is a pastor, an associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity, and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Against Entitlement I had significant trouble with the doctrine of original sin until I became a parent. Adorable, seemingly innocent cherubs morphed before my eyes into self-centered, rebellious imps, hell-bent on having their own way.

At first glance, it seems babies are content to fulfill Paul’s dictum to the church at Corinth,“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”Then they reveal a deeper malady, twisting David’s pastoral pronouncement into something like: “My daddy (or mommy) is my shepherd; now give me what I want, shepherd!” Usually it comes out in the NIV (that’s the Naughty Infant Version) as simply, “Mine!”

“Mine!” It’s a mantra many never outgrow.

“Mine!” It’s a chant our society has memorized.

“Mine!” It’s original sin amplified by a culture of entitlement completely antithetical to our Lord’s command, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.”

Entitlement language and culture teem around us like a swirling tide.

Sadly, we Christian fishes are seldom aware of the extent to which we, too, swim in this sea of entitlement.

Madison Avenue is the powerful, stunning, compelling moon of entitlement, its gravitational pull governing the tide. How many products are marketed to us as things we deserve? From automobiles that reflect our status to the rewarding pleasure of a frosty, moodaltering beverage, merit is metered out at the end of a hard day’s work (“For all you do, this Bud’s for you”). Forgetting that Scripture clearly teaches that the

primary thing we have earned is death (“the wages of sin”), we uncritically adapt the trappings (double meaning intended) of entitlement in ways that manifest themselves in rampant consumerism, alienative individualism, and even a view of public and social policy that is increasingly isolationist. In the end, unilateralism is simply self-interest writ large, foreign policy reflecting a sense of that to which we believe we are entitled as Americans.

But enough about the big picture.

Enough about the “big stick,” though the United States no longer speaks softly.

Entitlement challenges us domestically, not just in foreign policy. And here I mean “domestic” in the most intimate of ways.

Divorce in modern America is a reflection of our entitlement culture.As the divorce rates rise, especially in the church, one hears more and more language that reflects entitlement:“I’m not having my needs met”; “I’m not being fulfilled in this relationship”;“I’m just not growing in this marriage.” It’s as if Christians enter into marriage as some sort of relational narcotic designed to provide the primary stimulus toward authentic personhood.

Gone is the notion of the marital covenant, replaced by human fulfillment masked in the guise of biblical “completeness.” “It is not good for the man to be alone” degenerates into “When are you getting married?”—as if singleness is some sort of leprosy to be washed in the purifying pool of matrimony.Rather than seeing single Christians as complete in Christ, we stigmatize singleness and play into the hand of entitlement ethics.The person in a troubled marriage “deserves to be happy”; indeed, “God wants you happy.”And so, a claim of “irreconcilable differences” offers legal solace that flies in the face of “with God all things are possible.”

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the maintenance of a marriage in a violent household. But I do wonder the extent to which our failure to rise above “mine” wreaks havoc on our ability to maintain the covenant of marriage.The mutual submission commanded by Paul in his letter to the Ephesians calls for a different attitude toward those with whom we enter into marriage: not “mine,” but “thine.”

Why offer these observations in a column on citizenship? The first reason is that marriage, as a civil institution, requires significant attention as a primary component of civil society. One does not have to agree with President Bush’s current marriage initiatives in social policy to make such an affirmation.

One need only take a long, hard look at the hurting among us, especially children of divorce, to know that churches, as instruments of healing and justice, must address the crises in our families.And if we believe that certain ministries have a misguided focus on the family, then we’d better be diligently prayerful in developing an alternative.

Secondly, as evangelical Christians mobilize against same-sex marriages and civil unions, we render our witness quite vulnerable when the divorce rate soars in our churches.

And thirdly, perhaps most importantly, healthy marriages based on a biblical notion of covenant and mutual submission send a prophetic warning to a larger culture concerning the ethics and ethos of entitlement.The Lord of Glory emptied himself of entitlement to take on our flesh, life, and sin, and to show that servanthood is the essence of kingdom relationships. What is my witness if I “serve the poor” but can’t serve the family I live with every day? ■ Harold Dean Trulear is a pastor, an associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity, and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Just Desserts “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.”

GALATIANS 6:7

Christian conservatives pay considerable attention these days to so-called “activist judges.” They have given us another ominous phrase to add to the list of contemporary evils such as political correctness, multiculturalism, and “no prayer in public schools.”

I am neither advocating for nor railing against any of the above. In the case of each of these ideological bogeymen, my objection is that the terms used represent the gross generalization and caricaturing of extremely complex issues that we, as Christian citizens, should engage in vigorous debate.

We need an informed discussion that doesn’t reduce to the offense of “political correctness” the many serious and justice-seeking attempts at examining language, culture, and institutional arrangements. We need conversations that engage the rich cultural diversity that has characterized the American experiment from its inception without demonizing such discourse as “multicultural ideology.” We need constructive dialogue on the role of religion in public schools such as that offered by Charles Haynes of the Freedom Forum and Clinton-era Education Secretary Richard Riley.

So, too, do we need an informed conversation about “judicial activism.”

The judge as legislator—the jurist who usurps the power of the people, their representatives, and the states—is nothing new in American history. It is just that when his/her gavel swings in a direction offensive to us we are more apt to notice.And that’s no way for respon-

sible Christians to engage in public discourse and political process. Christians should subject decisions to the ethical principles of Scripture, knowing that in a religiously diverse society their view of right and wrong will differ from— even be at odds with—other religious and philosophical points of view. Even within the Christian tradition disagreement will exist over political issues. But the contemporary reductionism that characterizes our public discourse concerning the role of the judiciary gives no room for such a discussion.

We reap what we sow. If Christians had challenged judges’ decisions in other areas of American history, we might not be questioning the role of jurists today.

Indeed, if the Warren Court was the spawning ground of contemporary judicial activism, then our current conversation must include the discussion of race, for the Warren Court’s ruling on Brown vs.Topeka Board of Education looms large as a decision subject to such criticism. (Indeed it was criticized back in 1954.)

Too many Christians throughout our history were silent on slavery, racism, and segregation. Many even championed these evils, defending them “biblically.”

Judges whose decisions went unchallenged by the majority of Christians affirmed a status quo approach to race, sometimes making decisions so at odds with the letter and spirit of the Constitution that those decisions seem mindboggling today, even when weighed against the ideologies of their day. Most notorious was the Dred Scott decision of 1857,where Supreme Court Justice Roger Haney opined that a black man has “no rights which a white man is bound to respect,” making it lawful for slave catchers to come into free Northern states and capture fugitive slaves for their Southern masters. In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled, in Plessy vs. Ferguson, that “separate but equal” accommodations

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were legal in interstate transportation.

It took the genius of a young attorney, Charles Hamilton Houston, to discern that the judges’ activism in making such rulings would be the point of attack for a civil rights litigation strategy that would eventuate in Brown vs.Topeka. Houston, then dean of the historically black Howard University Law School, assembled the energies of his students in challenging segregation, not in the Congress, but in the courts. Simply put, Houston reasoned that if “separate but equal” was the law of the land (as the activist judges had ruled in 1896) then he would file lawsuits against states that did not provide equal public accommodations for African Americans. His victory in these suits would force states to integrate their institutions, since they would not be willing to invest equally in black institutions.

One of Houston’s top students and disciples, Thurgood Marshall, was the lead lawyer in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, the 1954 decision that began the desegregation of public schools in America.That darn Earl Warren and his court headed down a slippery slope to judicial activism, and the rest is history (not to mention current events).

So I look at the current crisis of the bench as just (pun intended) desserts for a nation whose Christian community sat idly by and let millions of its citizens of color squirm under the weight of earlier judicial activism.The church should have said more back then. It should have gone national with a moral crusade in those days of slavery and segregation, of Dred Scott and Plessy and Ferguson.

Today we are merely reaping what we have sown. ■ Harold Dean Trulear is a pastor, an associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity, and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Small Seductions “You have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.”

MATTHEW 25:23

I just finished reading Ron Sider’s new book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, and it reminded me of just how troubled I am about church vans.

Don’t get me wrong.The good doctor, as ever, has taken on the weighty matters of injustice and poverty, greed and racism, cultural compromise and church apathy in this latest biblically based tome.

And I am sure that much debate will be generated in the evangelical church by this jeremiad. But I found myself thinking all the while about church vans.

Sider’s book documents cultural compromise in the church in stark, prophetic fashion. His examples are of far weightier stuff than my muse into the world of religious transportation.

Some churches don’t even have vans, while all churches must come to grips with the tragedy of abortion, the proliferation of greed, and the culture of materialism. But I found myself wondering, if we can’t work on seemingly small issues that require personal investment, how will we ever take on the mighty matters of divorce, poverty, violence, and oppression?

Marva Dawn, in her classic Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for This Urgent Time (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995), bemoans the presence in the church of certain postmodern idols.These idols include efficiency and technology—pointing to our need to do everything faster with minimal ener-

gy expended. (By the way, have you seen the new, efficient Communion kits, with individually wrapped elements that eliminate the need for time-wasting distribution?) Dawn rightly worries that efficiency challenges intimacy. Indeed, in a culture that already struggles with intimacy, efficiency exacerbates an already alienative culture. Even fellowship is “efficient,” properly reserved for the proper place in the order of worship. You know: “Opening Hymn, Scripture Reading, Altar Prayer, Moment of Friendliness …”

Church vans, for me, represent the self-centered, uncaring culture of contemporary Christianity.They are rolling reminders of our reluctance to ride in fellowship.They are moving monuments to a “me-first” mindset. If church members with cars would simply carpool, the need for church vans would be drastically reduced. But that would be too inconvenient for those of us who want to sleep as late as we can on Sunday morning. This would be inefficient for those of us who need to get to the local buffet before the post-church rush.You remember that sign hanging above the church door:“Enter to Worship, Depart to Red Lobster.”

How difficult would it be for church members to pick one another up and drop one another off for church events and worship services? How hard would it be to involve a good number of members in a Sunday car pool that would enhance fellowship and service senior citizens? And as for those outings, picnics, and trips that require larger vehicles— why not rent? In most cases such usage would be cheaper than a monthly note on a van plus the insurance costs. Maybe the problem is the pride of ownership the church has absorbed from a possession-rich society. You know, the same reason we eschew libraries and other institutions that lend us things but don’t

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give us that satisfaction of owning, possessing, showing off.

Some of you who have gotten this far in the column may view this argument as a trivialization of the ethics of Christian compromise. There are times when I think so myself.Yet, there is the matter of the small, the few, the seemingly insignificant things in our lives that point to the larger problems that plague our culture. The true depth of our selfishness, the true weight of our worship of convenience and efficiency, the true measure of our commitment to controlling our own destiny may well lie in our failure to participate in meaningful self-examination.We seldom realize we are being seduced—that’s why it’s called seduction.

The prophet Samuel was called to a mighty ministry in Israel. He became the last of the judges and the first of the prophets to the monarchy. God used him to anoint Saul and David to the kingship of Israel. He was God’s voice to Saul, one of the earliest examples of speaking truth to power in Israel. And how did God start his ministry? By announcing judgment in his own household.The sins of Eli the priest and his sons—the household of Samuel’s rearing—was out of order, and God told Samuel, then barely a teen, to speak to the man who raised him, exposing Eli’s indifference to his sons’ injustice.

Before he would address Israel, Samuel would address home. In his latest book, Ron Sider has given us a framework to rethink the big things. But perhaps we should make sure we are trustworthy in the small things first. ■ Harold Dean Trulear is senior pastor of the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church of Twin Oaks, Pa., associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity, and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C.

FAITHFUL CITIZENSHIP HAROLD DEAN TRULEAR

Division Problems “Is Christ divided?”

The Apostle Paul’s rhetorical question looms large on the heels of the 2004 presidential election. The 1st-century missionary addressed his question to the deeply fractured church at Corinth, whose members were pledging loyalty to one of several leaders in ways that dismissed the validity of the others.The parallel with the contemporary church is striking, although our situation is perhaps even more problematic since the divided loyalties in our day reflect allegiances to politicians and parties, not church leaders. (We could go there, too, but that’s another column.)

“I don’t see how anyone can call themselves a Christian and vote for __________.”

I left the name blank because there are multiple monikers that can fill the bill. George W. Bush, John Kerry, any candidate who favors abortion, any candidate who ignores the poor—take your pick. What is most troubling about the division this time is that the people who make such statements don’t see division, but instead see the other side as heretical, pagan, damnable, and downright unsaved.

The word in many pews today is that if you vote a certain way you are not a Christian.

C.S. Lewis warned about such thinking in a 1941 essay entitled “Meditations on the Third Commandment,” found in his collection God on the Dock.There, the famed writer bemoaned the attempt to organize a Christian political party in his beloved Britain, deeming it an affront to the notion of the kingdom of God. Lewis argued that no earthly political agenda could wholly encompass the dictates of Christian social relations and that any attempt to do so would necessitate calling anyone who didn’t join the party

(because of some disagreement with a platform plank or issue) an unbeliever.

Yale University law professor Stephen Carter amplified this theme in God’s Name in Vain (Basic Books, 2000), where he chastens white evangelicals for equating the kingdom of God with the Republican party platform and black Protestants for doing the same with the Democrat’s agenda. Carter cites Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights leader from Mississippi, as an exemplar of kingdom ethics in contrast to those who believe that political allegiance is determinative of Christian faith.When Hamer, as chair of the Mississippi Freedom Party, attempted to have her delegates seated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City (supplanting the Democratic delegates who had been elected through a segregated voting system), she was met by then Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who offered to have both sets of delegates seated as a compromise.

Hamer responded by saying she wasn’t looking for a compromise, she was “looking for the kingdom.”

Hamer refused to have what she termed a kingdom agenda molded to fit pragmatic politics. She looked higher—to an ethic that transcends realpolitik and makes the prophetic possible.Today’s church should do the same.To identify God’s agenda with any one political party is to render the church, when that party is in power, a “non-prophet organization.”

It also, de facto, renders certain people non-Christian based on party affiliation or voting pattern—a clear violation of, among other biblical teachings, salvation by grace alone.This is one of the points both Lewis and Carter make in their analyses. I never dreamed I would see the day when such statements as “You can’t be a Christian and vote for ______,” would find their way to the lips of respected Christians on both sides of an election. I have heard them, even from several people with more degrees than a thermometer.

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For African Americans, the differential in political power and public voice makes the statements particularly alienating. White evangelical voices proclaiming that the election of George W. Bush was an “answer to our prayers” are also declaring that God did not hear the prayers of black Christians who voted for Kerry. (Oops, I forgot, you can’t be Christian and vote for Kerry!) At least the counterargument that you can’t be Christian and vote for Bush, which has been voiced in some black church circles, is part of a longstanding dilemma for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of slaves who wondered aloud how anyone could be a slave master and expect to go to heaven (hence the line from the Negro spiritual, “Everybody talkin’ ‘bout heaven ain’t goin’ there”).

This doesn’t mean that Bush is a literal slave master. Rather it does point to an ongoing wrestling within the minds of the powerless over whether a politician’s abuse (or apparent abuse) of political power disqualifies him as a person of faith.

This presidential election was the first since the end of the Second World War where race issues were not a central focus of the political discourse of the candidates and their respective parties.

From the integration of the armed services, to the civil rights movement, to the Great Society, to law and order, affirmative action, Jesse Jackson, and Sister Souljah, there has always been a place for the discussion of race and social policy in presidential electoral politics.The same is virtually true for poverty and policy.

Those who are black and Christian— indeed especially those who are black, poor, and Christian as well as those who minister to and with them—feel understandably alienated. But not just from the political system—their very salvation is being questioned by white evangelical Christians whose moral virtue seems to be limited to several litmus tests.

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I N L I K E M A N N E R… THE WOMEN E L I Z A B E T H D. R I O S

Beyond Labels, Toward Calling When I was 12 years old, my Sunday school superintendent told me that she would be on vacation the following week, during which time I would be “in charge”—collecting attendance notebooks and offerings from all the teachers and reporting any news back to her when she returned. I was stunned.“Me, in charge?” I thought to myself.“I’m just a kid. My mom isn’t even a Christian!

Surely, she’s made a mistake.”

But Enid Rios Rivera had made no mistake. She recognized something in me at that age that no one had ever seen before.And that promotion (temporary, but oft-repeated) from nursery-supervisor/baby-bottom-cleaner extraordinaire to substitute superintendent changed the course of my life. Sunday school was the context in which that change took place, and a woman was the instrument that God used to give me my first chance at leadership.

And so at a young age I was comfortable with leadership responsibilities.

But growing up as a Puerto Rican female, and initially unfamiliar with God’s thoughts on women as revealed in his Word and in the life of his Son, I was not particularly disturbed by the machismo I observed in the male leadership of my church. That type of behavior was expected in my culture

Faithful Citizenship, continued from previous page.

Paul answers the question of division by pointing to the power of the Cross (1 Cor. 1:16b). Human wisdom—and hence political philosophy—is always relativized by the power of the Cross.

and, although I was hurt by it, I accepted it as the way things were.

But as I got more involved in citywide and even national events and partnerships through my 10-year involvement as an employee of the Latino Pastoral Action Center (www.lpacmin istries.com), the disparaging attitude about women in ministry leadership did start to offend me, especially when I realized that it was not limited to Latino men but was prevalent within the broader church. Rather than remaining in resentment or even joining the debate, however, I felt called to give voice and visibility to women in my circle of influence so they could fulfill their God-given destiny.

In 1996 I founded the Center for Emerging Female Leadership (CEFL), and Enid Rios Rivera—the woman who gave me my first leadership opportunity back in Sunday school—joined me as ministry partner and associate director (she also became my sister-in-law and was the first full-time female pastor to be installed in the Primitive Christian Church). CEFL was born from my belief that the gospel promotes a radical equality that extends across the artificial gender, racial, and socioeconomic barriers that humans love to erect.And so, like many of the sisters who have gone before me and many who now walk alongside me in the journey, I move onward toward the high calling that God has placed on my life and seek to help other women do the same.

Honored to author this new column on issues related to women in ministry,

I have decided to call it In Like Manner... the Women, because in various epistles Paul used these words to state similarities between men’s and women’s roles.

Rather than join the theological debate on women in ministry, this column will tell the stories of women who themselves have put the debate on the shelf and have gone on to “just do it.” It will also identify and tell stories about the issues that trouble women in ministry.

My ultimate hope is that readers will go beyond spirit-stifling attempts either to label others or to accept labels ascribed to them by others, so that all can go forward to fulfill their calling regardless of gender.

Many women have determined that they have no time to squander on the “great debate” and are mobilizing themselves by the thousands to fulfill what we are all here for: Christ’s Great Commission. They have gone beyond the labels and are moving toward their call. Their mantra? Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Join me here in the next issue for some storytelling! ■

The Cross reckons victory through sacrifice, not majority rules (electoral college notwithstanding).The church in the United States needs to examine its understanding of the meaning of the Cross both for personal salvation and political witness. Is Christ divided? No. But his church is…and it hurts. ■

Harold Dean Trulear is senior pastor of the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church of Twin Oaks, Pa, associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity, and a fellow at the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C.

PRISM 2005

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Elizabeth D. Rios is a bi-vocational lead pastor of a church plant called Wounded Healer Fellowship (www.woundedhealerfellowship .com) in Pembroke Pines, Fla., where she lives with her husband and two sons. Founder of the Center for Emerging Female Leadership (www.cefl.org), Rios is also a doctoral candidate in organizational leadership at Nova Southeastern University and consultant to faith-based nonprofit agencies. Visit her weblog at http://latinaliz.typepad.com.