PRISM March/April 2013

PRISM PRISMmagazine.org

March/April 2013

Forgiveness in Rwanda—one day at a time Saving lives post­-abortion

The Immigrant Industrial Complex Standing against the “Juan Crow” laws that dehumanize us all

Plus: Trash and transformation in Rio de Janeiro Songs from the Martyrs

PRISM Vol. 20, No. 2 Mar/Apr 2013

Editor Creative Director Copy Editor Deputy Director Publisher Operations Manager

Kristyn Komarnicki Rhian Tomassetti Leslie Hammond Sarah Withrow King Ronald J. Sider Josh Cradic

Contributing Editors Christine Aroney-Sine Myron Augsburger

We do nothing, and slavery continues.

Modeling themselves after the courageous women who stoked the flames of abolition some 200 years ago, Kimberly McOwen Yim and Shayne Moore embolden ordinary women to take up this legacy and fight modernday slavery with the resources they have.

“On each page you’ll be saying to yourself, ‘I can do this.’ Thanks be to God.” —Margot Starbuck, author, Small Things with Great Love

ivpcrescendo.com

Clive Calver

Rudy Carrasco

Andy Crouch J. James DeConto

Gloria Gaither David P. Gushee

Jan Johnson

Craig S. Keener Peter Larson

Richard Mouw

Philip Olson Jenell Williams Paris

Christine Pohl

James Skillen

Al Tizon

Jim Wallis

Issac Canales M. Daniel Carroll R. Paul Alexander James Edwards Perry Glanzer Ben Hartley Stanley Hauerwas Jo Kadlecek Marcie Macolino Mary Naber Earl Palmer Derek Perkins Elizabeth D. Rios Lisa Thompson Heidi Rolland Unruh Bruce Wydick

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A Publication of Evangelicals for Social Action The Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy www.EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University

All contents © 2013 ESA/PRISM magazine.

“Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

Matthew 25: 34-36

Contents 2 Reflections

March / April 2013

8 America, You must be born again!

Walking with Christ

Does the US have an immigrant rights problem or a freedom and justice problem?

3 Talk Back

18 Thirsty in the Midst of Abundance

4 Music Notes The Martyrs Project

20 a life for a life

Letters to the Editor

5 Art & Soul

One Man’s Trash

6 On Being the church A Season to Stop, Look & Listen 7 May I have a word?

Why Multi-Faith Matters

38 leading ladies

What Will It Profit a Woman…?

39 making a difference Church on the Porch

Facing up to the fact that the wealthy West is impoverished in community, simplicity, and gratitude.

A look at post-abortive syndrome and the high price women (and men) can pay when they choose to end their unborn child’s life.

24 one and then another

A young American learns about horror and hope, murder and forgiveness from the women of Rwanda.

30 love which enemies?

Whether or not it “works” in the short run, God’s purposes will be served in the long run when Jesus’ disciples love their enemies.

34 coloring inside the lines

God created the world with built-in limits. Why do we chafe at them instead of recognizing the beauty they make possible?

40 off the shelf Book Reviews

45 Ministry matters

Divine Wake-Up Calls: Nancy Sleeth

46 Washington Watch

A New Task for the Obama FaithBased Initiative

48 Ron Sider

Resigning from AARP

Cover graphic by Ernesto Yerena in collaboration with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance.

Steve Pavey

Reflections from the Editor 2

Walking with Christ School kids across the country still put their hands to their hearts and daily pledge their allegiance to our nation—“under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this portrayal were true? One nation under God, indivisible.

That’s a tall order, especially given that, most days, I’m hard-pressed to find it even on a much smaller scale. Like my family—under God, indivisible. How great would that be?

Even as an individual I don’t often feel indivisible. Two very different people live inside me. One is full of energy and ideals, able to envision and ready to fight for justice. The other is world-weary and easily discouraged by societal injustices. This one turns a blind eye to structural inequalities because they feel insurmountable. This one says (though not without embarrassment), “What can you do? It’s a broken world driven by avarice and self-gratification.

Things’ll never change…”

And yet I daily witness the results of visionary, dogged justice work. Some years ago, when investors singing the siren songs of New Jobs and Revitalization lobbied to build a casino in a blighted area just two miles from my house, a small group of determined residents fought back. Because of them, the city eventually told the investors to look elsewhere. Today, where casinos would have been built—and where all the maladies that accompany gambling sites would by now have become firmly entrenched—a multi-million dollar community recreation center now stands, thanks to a collaboration between the Salvation Army and the Ray and Joan B. Kroc Foundation. I work out there several times a week, along with folks from all walks of life who come out to connect, play, and get fit. That’s justice, plain and simple, unmistakably spelled out in both the masonry and the mission statement on the wall. That’s proof that when folks fight for things they can make a difference.

But I confess that my small, cowardly self emerges when I hear how immigrants are treated in this country, the topic of this issue’s cover story. It’s awful. It’s unjust. It’s rooted in greed and fertilized by fear. It exposes our national hypocrisy in vivid Technicolor. The issue (much PRISMmagazine.org

These 21st-Century Freedom Riders are among those who walk in solidarity with undocumented immigrants. (Photo: Steve Pavey)

like gun access and unregulated capitalism) has learned that they do not need saving— I do! the effect of kryptonite on me. So when I heard The biggest challenge for me is facing my own what a group of brave, young, undocumented complicity in a global political-economic order Americans are doing—risking all to stand tall that sins against migrants everyday. Standing against the “Juan Crow” laws that detain, deagainst this system—which benefits me —will port, and dehumanize so many of our nation’s necessitate suffering and solidarity with the Hispanic immigrants—I felt a mix of admiration, least of these. awe, and...futility.

“Solidarity,” he continues, “asks not what But futility is a privilege restricted to the we can do for them but whether we are willing comfortable. The undocumented immigrants to walk the road with them. Herein lies the opwho do so much to keep this country running portunity to walk with Christ.” smoothly and cheaply—from meat processing That’s good, but what if nothing changes? to lawn care, from housekeeping to construcWhat if immigration reforms don’t ever come, or tion—cannot afford feelings of futility. They come sufficiently, or come soon enough? are too busy working long hours for low pay, “I’ve become less concerned about reand in conditions that no documented American sults,” says Pavey, “and more concerned about will tolerate. They are too engrossed in worryfaithfulness. The challenge for us is to simply be ing how their children will ever get ahead in this present at the point where God comes in concountry, regardless of how hard they study or tact with the world’s suffering.” how impeccable their reputation. Whether they Can we find ways to be present with the keep their heads down and yearn for invisibility suffering of our undocumented brothers and or hold their heads high and march defiantly in sisters? Can we offer friendship, moral support, the streets, these immigrants from the global or even just a cup of cold water, whether they South have done what our European forefathers are surviving in the shadows or defiant in the and foremothers did when they entered the light? Can we relinquish our need for results and country through Ellis Island, but unlike those simply accompany them—indivisibly—in their ancestors these folks have little or no recourse struggle? Could that be a way to begin securing to legal citizenship. They might feel like saying, at least one kind of “liberty and justice for all”?

“Things’ll never change,” but they live each day I think I’m ready to swap my feelings of praying and working for change nonetheless. futility for an experience of solidarity. I’m ready But what can I—or any of us citizens to trade in my save-the-world fatigues for a without real political power—do? According celebrate-Christ’s-presence party dress. What to Steve Pavey, our cover story writer who has about you? been fighting alongside undocumented immigrants for the last three years, it’s not complicated. We can walk in solidarity with them, acknowledge our common humanity, and recognize Christ in Kristyn Komarnicki is devouring Tyler Wigg-Stevenson’s new them. book The World Is Not Ours to Save (IVP, 2013), which posits “As I live and that following Jesus, while leaving world-saving to God, is the work with undocuonly way to avoid both idealism and cynicism, both triumphamented migrants,” lism and slactivism. In a world rife with self-aggrandizement, says Pavey, “I’m compassion fatigue, and apathy, she is heartened by Wiggwith Jesus. I've Stevenson’s call for reality-based, Christ-focused vocation.

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Talk Back

Correction! In the January/February issue we failed to insert the editor’s note at the end of both “Refuse to Do Nothing” by Kimberly McOwen Yim and “Saving Bathsheba” by Rachel Marie Stone, indicating that the endnotes are posted at PRISMmagazine.org/currentissue/end-notes. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

And we wrongly attributed a quotation in “Sharing the Shame” (the May I Have a Word? column) to Raimond Gaita. It is actually from Simone Veil.

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also published by ESA, @ EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org/ePistle.

I attended my first ESA Conference in 1990. Hard to believe. It is what got me to Eastern University for grad school, and now I have a little organization—Someone’s Child (SomeonesChild.net)—to engage moms as to how they can use their pivotal role in the community to eradicate modern-day slavery. Thank you for playing such a major role in my learning curve over the past 20+ years.

Carrie Pierce Kuba Santa Clara, Calif.

I read with interest “Peace Begins on our Plates” by Sarah King in the January/February issue of PRISM. It was similar to the article “Pray Ceaselessly and Eat Justly”

by Bruce Friedrich in the September/October issue. Both made good points, though I was disappointed that Ms. King omitted any information about farmers, especially small-scale, who raise all manner of animals for milk, eggs, and meat in loving, humane ways. I was, however, most discouraged by the fact that neither author acknowledged with graciousness that for many people a vegetarian diet is impossible due to allergies and other health issues. She states that “we can choose peanut butter instead of pigs” and “we can choose barley over bacon.” Well, many of us can’t.

We were newlyweds with great zeal when Diet for a Small Planet was first published. At that point, we had only a few allergies to milk, and potatoes, beans, and rice were great sources of protein for us. After our first son was born, it took a few years until we discovered he was allergic to lentils. Son #2 came along, with an allergy to milk, eggs, and oranges. When our third son was 2, his entire face swelled like a balloon, and we thus discovered his anaphylactic allergy to peas and all legumes in addition to shellfish and other fish. I developed an allergy to tofu, milk, eggs, and beans, in addition to issues with many fruits and vegetables due to a “grumpy gut” (known to doctors as IBS). By the time all three boys were in their teens, the only protein all five of us could safely eat (without my fixing three different menus each meal!) was meat. I now have two daughters-in-law—one can’t have dairy or beans; the other can’t have any gluten.

We are not an isolated case! Since we married in 1973 we have been strong advocates for conscientious, frugal, low food-chain diets, but sometimes bodies change over time, and we need to adjust and make allowances. It would be lovely to someday see an article about how/where to locate “humane food” for people who cannot eat legumes, nuts, seeds, grains, dairy, etc. without serious health problems and to acknowledge the reality of Peter’s vision in Acts that God has given us all food to eat as needed.

Suzanne Grilman Vancouver, Wash.

I find it difficult to find words adequate to express my appreciation for the November/December issue of PRISM on “finding our identity in Christ, not sexual orientation.” The articles in this issue were profound, very moving, and greatly needed by all churches today. What a fascinating dialogue “Oriented to Love” must have been. You have put the discussion of homosexuality in a different and much-needed context for the Christian community. My wife and I read these articles along with Scripture for our morning devotions over a period of several weeks. As parents of a gay daughter, we found them insightful and deeply touching. We found ourselves responding to specific comments, experiences, and situations that are critical for the church today but too numerous to mention here.

A question that intrigued me was whether there were any practicing gays among the 12 in the dialogue, Christians who were living in a committed gay relationship. That was not clear to me. I understand that the dialogue was in the context of ESA’s official position on what constitutes marriage (a man and a woman covenanted for life), but would not the experiences of gays who are committed Christians but also living in a committed relationship have much to offer, as well as to learn from the dialogue experience? If commitment to Christ and the fruits of the Spirit are marks of a person’s Christian identity, then would not “gay” Christians living in relationships qualify for the dialogue? Is not that also a fundamental issue facing Christians today, and is it really separable from the issue of gay orientation and Christian faith?

The brief write-ups of the dialogue were very interesting, but I wish the writers would have expressed more directly the different experience or perspectives that emerged and to which they refer.

Each described their profound appreciation for the experience and how unique and meaningful it was for them. It would, however, have been extremely helpful to those of us who were not there to have some insight into the specifics about the differences and agreements that were experienced.

Thank you so very much for initiating this dialogue and for the meaningful articles in PRISM. Be assured we will keep this issue handy for future reference. Thank you and your staff for your significant work with PRISM in the cause of Christ.

Robert L. Turnipseed, Sr. Lansdale, Pa.

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Music Notes The Martyrs Project arrived in my mailbox around the time all of us collectively gasped at the Sandy Hook headlines. Little kids settling in for a day at school. Teachers suddenly herding them into lockers and closets. Twenty-six shot dead.

It felt like appropriate timing—an album seeking to weave the grief of death (ghastly and violent) with the hope of eternity and resurrection. Healing despite the loss. Hope despite the momentary triumph of evil.

The disc is a unique, 10-song collaboration between Michael Glen Bell and Duane W.H. Arnold—scholars, musicians, writers, friends—who reworked the prayers of Christian martyrs (some their last utterances on earth) into compelling songs with the help of a few of Christendom’s finest contemporary artists: Phil Keaggy, Jennifer Knapp, Margaret Becker, etc. It’s a smattering of musical persuasions harmonized around the brutal narratives of stalwart believers facing death for the sake of their Savior.

The project is a valiant effort to link the often obscure stories of martyrs—women and men who for most of us are an abstraction shrouded by antiquity, obscure circumstances, and the funny names of far-off places—to our mp3 players and headphones and morning commutes. A fresh bridge to a Salvadorian bishop who took bullets on behalf of the poor (“Romero”). A new tether to 19th-century Korea, where to be a believer once meant statesanctioned torture and beheading (“Ri”).

Bell and Arnold’s music is at its best when the strings stand alone and do their sad, heavy

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strings and vocal chords, and settle me in for a long dark night of the soul.

To be fair, however, despite being so sonically mercurial, this disc has some remarkable highs.

The anonymous prayer of victims from a Nazi concentration camp is resurrected in a spare acoustic duet by Bell and Knapp: Remember, courage…/Remember, remember, remember, Greatness of heart. It is perhaps the project’s plea. Don’t forget, it says. We have died for our convictions. Yet we look to God despite everything, because of everything, and even in the moment of death we see his smiling, weeping, glowing face.

And then there is Phil Keaggy’s stunning guitar solo in the waning moments of “Carpus,” which seems to ask in its sad notes the foundational question of the whole album: Would I die for my faith? Or rather, what would I be willing to die for?

The bishop Carpus, almost 2,000 years ago, was burned alive by Roman authorities for his simple answer: I am a Christian. Sorry, won’t recant.

Keaggy’s fluid notes have brought the bishop’s ghost into my living room. He’s sitting here now, shaking his head. Heavy times. He points at the computer’s newsfeed.

Anne Marie Murphy, 52, a special education teacher, stood between the shooter and her students. Her body was found draped over her kids.

Mary Sherlach, 56, mother of two daughters, ran toward the gunman even as he fired.

“She considered what she was doing as God's work,” said her husband. “That's all you need to know about her.”

Bell and Arnold have given us a treasury of ancient prayers that feel entirely prescient. The words of Clement in AD 95: “We beseech You to help and defend us, we beseech You to help… uplift those who have fallen, be the portion of those in need.”

I can only say, Amen.

Josh MacIvor-Andersen is a freelance writer and assistant professor of English at Northern Michigan University, Marquette, Mich.

Martyrdom of St Stephen by Bernardo Cavallino

The Martyrs Project

work. Lots of cello and acoustic guitar and violin.

Bell’s voice feels appropriately sparse and raspy and, at times, wonderfully defiant: “I will worship only my God,” he sings, echoing Quirinus as he stood before Roman authorities bent on wiping out this new scourge of vibrant faith. “This world cannot take You from me, no power on earth can make us part.”

But the album takes some unfortunate turns, particularly when the guitars are plugged in and turned to what I can only assume is the “crunchy” setting on the studio’s amplifier.

In “Sadoth,” for example, a song recounting the vision of a 4th-century Persian who stared down a Zoroastrian Shah and refused to worship his sun god, the music is a bombardment, replete with shrill guitars and rock and roll drums thumping in obligatory 4/4 time. I’m suddenly reminded of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone,” a fine anthem for Tom Cruise shooting Soviet MiGs out of the sky but, for me, a weird frame for the final haunting words of a man envisioning his own bodily sacrifice: A ladder is before me, surrounded by light,/ It stretches from earth to heaven./ I am called by my friend,/ To climb and not to fear, I will not fear. I don’t know, maybe it’s perfect. I just wish the guitars would stop screaming at me.

And while I get the fact that such a spectrum of contributors probably demands a diversity of aesthetic, there’s something about these narratives—these prayers—that begs for a little Gregorian chant. Something solemn and holy and full of ache.

You get a taste of such things in “Bonhoeffer,” a song based on some of the last words of the Lutheran pastor who was hung after attempting to assassinate Hitler. A bell tolls. A single piano plunks in a minor key. The austere, a cappella harmonies of very serious men kick in.

But then it sounds as if members of Linkin Park suddenly show up, push the choir out of the way and, yes, start crunching away on their guitars. I would have simply asked them to wait at the door.

Perhaps it’s just me, but the theme of this album—underscored by the theme of recent headlines—makes me feel old and morose, and all I want to listen to these days is Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, sans Fenders and Yamahas and Rolands. Give me

I tell my students, “Making art is an arrogant act. You are asking for someone’s time.” But on the same day I might say, “Make art—change the world!” It’s a dichotomy that not many artists are able to straddle, but Vik Muniz is one who has been able to combine good art with lifechanging care for his fellow human beings.

When you approach a Vik Muniz photograph for the first time, you do not suspect what lurks beneath the surface image. There is a portrait of a Caribbean child, an image of Van Gogh’s Sower, a shiny rendition of the painter Jackson Pollock at work, or a massive (almost 6-by-10-foot) photo that appears to be an interpretation of The Birth of Venus by Botticelli.

But move closer to these photographs and a

The Birth of Venus, after Botticelli, 2008

outside Rio de Janeiro, Muniz created monumental works using the pickers themselves as his models. As Muniz says in Waste Land, the documentary that chronicles the project, “I’m at this point in my career where I’m trying to step away from the realm of fine arts, because I think it’s a very exclusive, very restrictive place to be.

What I want to be able to do is to change the lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day.”

And so he does. The film follows the lives of laborers who race to pick through loads of garbage as it pours from dump trucks. They sort through to find plastic bottles, metal, and

Austin Tott

wonderful shift in perception occurs. The contours of the child’s face are made up of sugar; the rich palette of The Sower consists of dried flowers, grass, and wooden sticks; Jackson Pollock and his splattered canvas are depicted in none other than chocolate syrup; and Venus is an extraordinary collage of discarded computers, car parts, and random garbage assembled on a piece of land the size of a basketball court and photographed aerially.

Born in Brazil in 1961 and living in New York since 1983, Muniz is a hot commodity in the contemporary art world—so much so that Time magazine named him one of the leaders of

foil—anything they can sell to recycling businesses. The story is a profoundly human one as he befriends a handful of workers and uses both his art and his clout to try to pull them from poverty. They are his models for the pieces as well as his employees, as he has them assemble the works in a warehouse. Each of the gigantic images takes six weeks to meticulously organize.

Muniz oversees the progress from scaffolding where an 8”x10” camera is poised to capture the mammoth works when complete. One of the most moving moments in the film, among many, is when Muniz takes trash-picker/cooperativeorganizer Tião Santo with him to an auction in New York, where the piece he modeled for is to be sold. Santos breaks down when the work sells for $50,000, for Muniz had promised that all proceeds of the sale would go back to the community at Jardim Gramacho.

In 2011 Muniz was named a Goodwill Ambassador for UNESCO in order to be an advocate for vulnerable groups in Brazil and elsewhere, an appropriate post for him given his recent achievements. With sales of the Junk series pieces and award money netted by the documentary, Muniz and the filmmakers have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cooperative Santo heads to fight for the rights of the trash pickers.

The funds have bought computers and trucks, financed small-business loans, and opened a library.

In recently exposing my students to Muniz, I found they were greatly buoyed by hope. You can be an artist and make work that is not only interesting and skillful but that also engages contemporary culture and makes a difference in the lives of others. That is something I think we who follow Christ all strive to do, no matter what discipline we may be called to.

Art & Soul

One Man’s Trash

the new millennium, and one of his photographs will cost you tens of thousands of dollars. You can get a sense of the man by observing his warm flair as he lectures about creativity at a TED conference, viewing the Oscar-nominated documentary about his work, or seeing his work in person in one of his numerous solo shows or major museum collections around the world.

Here I could end the story like so many narratives on contemporary artists: “Self absorbed artist makes a lot of money.” But there is more to say about Vik Muniz. Much more.

In 2008 Muniz embarked on a project to give back to his home country of Brazil. He decided to do so not from a place of prestige but literally from the bottom of a trash dump, creating a series he called Pictures of Junk. Working with a team of trash pickers at Jardim Gramacho, a 321-acre landfill (one of the world’s largest)

Tim Timmerman is a visual artist and professor of art at George Fox University in Newberg, Oreg.

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On Being the Church

A Season to Stop, Look & Listen

Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’”

Mark 5:30-31 As I write, my dad has returned from the hospital to rest as comfortably as possible in his own bed, surrounded by those who love him, until his final breath. Seven long years have spanned the journey from losing keys to losing appetite, not to mention so many memories that will now be ours, his survivors, to preserve and cherish. As one who transformed from a high school slacker to an accomplished interior designer, my father took pride in being someone who “made things happen” and pushed us to be likewise. In large part, to be sure, my dad imparted an impulse to design, to create, to achieve...for which I am grateful.

It may be, however, that among the most important lessons I’ll receive from Dad have come in this final season, one with few words and no monuments or creations to point to.

Was it making any difference to sit alongside my father, strapped in his motionless wheelchair, groping for things to say to him and clueless about whether anything was registering? When I feigned polite response to his incomprehensible mumbling or held up old photographs to his wandering eyes with my cumbersome laptop?

When I held his hand, did he know that I was the one whose hand he himself used to hold?

To simply be present with another human being, without agenda or tangible return, is woefully counterintuitive for someone like me. More

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to the crux of things, it’s hard to take myself out of the equation. Little inclined am I to stop, look, and listen for God in human spaces—territory I’d rather control for my own purposes (including ministry), or at least finesse for maximal comfort. Indeed, the disciples in Mark 5 were uncomfortable when their rabbi stopped, en route to save Jairus’ dying daughter, to see who touched his cloak. Doing the will of the Father, Jesus was not bound by time or sense of urgency. Faith enabled him to pay attention to the person in front of him.

After some 18 years of overseeing outreach ministry for my church, I have received from my pastors and elders a prescription for a long overdue sabbatical, but one of an unconventional nature. Coined by one of our elders as my “reverse sabbatical,” it will be a year free of outside speaking engagements, consultations, or writing projects. My original charge, begun in 1994, was to “listen to the congregation, learn the community, build local (and some national) relationships, and “give form” to ministry which, as one of my pastors astutely pointed out, is not the same as creating and managing ministry.

Moreover, I was to take on this role pastorally, which means paying attention to what God is doing among his flock.

Over the years, my time and attention have been diverted to national opportunities to serve

the church at large—not necessarily a negative, as my comrades are quick to affirm. However, preoccupied with external endeavors, I find myself offering an ecclesiology and missiology that can, and has, become increasingly abstract.

It is well and good for me to speak of the centrality of the church in urban mission, or the relationship between congregational life and prophetic witness, but if I am not relationally rooted in, and attentive to, the life of my own community, then my words ring hollow.

My pastor, Sharon Huey, summed up my “reverse sabbatical” this way: “Craig, help our congregation to love San Francisco” (emphasis mine). Inherent in this exhortation is a renewed love for my city, as well as for my fellow parishioners.

The two are inextricably connected. I will learn to love San Francisco anew through the lens and experiences of my pew mates as they follow Christ faithfully in every place, whether boardroom, classroom, or on the street. “Do more seeing and listening than talking,” she added.

As I sit bedside by my father, holding his

Doing the will of the Father, Jesus was not bound by time or sense of urgency.

Faith enabled him to pay attention to the person in front of him. hand and looking into his face, I want to notice the glimmer of response, the break of a smile, the squeeze of the hand, or the incomprehensible mumble that likely has meaning. I want to see, in this aging, mortal frame, the father— with God-given spirit—who raised me and gave of himself to many good things. In this season, amid the pain of loss, I hope to gain new eyes and ears to recognize God in the people and places in front of me.

Craig Wong is the executive director of Grace Urban Ministries in San Francisco.

He invites your feedback at onbeingthechurch@gum.org.

Il gioco della vita from BioregionalismoTreia

As I write this, I’m preparing for a gathering of several thousand Muslims and Christians for a Building Bridges event at our church this Sunday night. We will listen to one another, sign up for community projects together, and then eat halal beef ribs barbequed Texas style! Everyone is excited, except some outside our church who say we are compromising our faith and asking for all kinds of trouble by inviting Muslims and their imams to an event with us.

We’ve been here before.

I assure them we are not compromising our faith or theology, just building friendships—but it doesn’t satisfy them. For us to like them, invite them over, be around them— in some of my tribe’s eyes—is compromise. I don’t believe that. I’m accused of being one of those “interfaith” guys who is mushy. I prefer the word multi-faith. Multi-faith is where we build community through serving the common good of the city, being honest with what we believe but respectful of others who don’t believe what we believe.

I’m an evangelical, so words matter and so does mission. Our words and our mission are not having the impact they were meant to have in the 21st century—and no one seems to care much. When we began the multi-faith journey three years ago we lost 300 people from our church. Would I do it again? Absolutely! Some things we do that “grow” the church long term actually “pain” the church short term. Growth isn’t always impact or depth. Church growth is fun and, relatively speaking, doesn’t always have a long shelf life.

But why does multi-faith matter?

It connects us voluntarily to one another, requires love, and replaces hate! We need more love in this world, in our government, our cities, and even our churches. It’s funny how it’s acceptable in many churches to hate certain groups—like Muslims or gay people. Why? No one in their right mind would speak of hating or

fearing Jews—they’d be labeled anti-Semitic. Jesus didn’t pick and choose which people groups to love—he loved them all. Jesus commands us to love our enemies, because he knows that we can’t love them and continue to consider them an enemy.

Love also drives out fear. Our world is uptight and on the verge of explosion. Sadly, we Christians are part of the problem. We wind up relating to people tribally, and tribes have a tendency to fight over turf. This isn’t God’s will.

God cares about global peace. When we befriend people of other faiths, we begin to realize how connected we all are and how what we do at home impacts what happens in another nation.

It makes us think more deeply about our own faith. I want to know what Jews, Muslims, and others believe—and they also want to know what I believe. It’s one thing to read a theology book; it’s another thing to be asked a question on

the spot about the Trinity or atonement. Our town has had close to 100 exchange students come from Hanoi, Vietnam, for their senior year in high school. Most of them came to our church and were not Christians, and it was one of the best things that ever happened to our youth group. Instead of first encountering hard questions about their faith when going off to college, it happened to our youth in high school and in the church in a different context.

In addition, people don’t want your faith promoted to them like a product. But if you’re their friend they are naturally curious about what you believe, and you have the opportunity to

share it. But be ready, it’s not like sharing the Roman Road or Four Spiritual Laws. You have to be able to share your story and why you believe in God, and most of the time you won’t start with Bible verses. When you’re talking about your faith to a friend, it’s not the sales pitch that the word “witnessing” often brings to mind—no, you’re simply sharing a conversation with a friend, being real. Have I ever been asked a question I can’t answer? All the time!

It requires us to learn how to communicate with one another. We all live in a global public square. When I preach, people from different faiths and nations can hear me. How can I communicate honestly and clearly? The more honest we are with others, the more honest they will be with us. Relating honestly with one another builds civility in the global public square.

It helps me to live my faith right here at home. Migration has always been one of the great ways God has moved, whether with Abraham on a journey or the Israelites on their way to Canaan.

Nothing has shaped the world like migration. Faith used to be geographical and tribal, but today the world lives on my doorstep. I can reach the world by living out my faith and sharing the good news of Jesus with my next-door neighbors. (One word of caution, they’re people, not projects.)

It unites us in our common concern for our communities and the world. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics—all are in our public schools, public health, businesses, fitness centers, malls; we are all in the city together.

Instead of starting with telling people what we believe, let’s start with doing service around the common good that we all care about. Working side by side and sweating together builds trust—we begin to listen to, care about, learn from, and love each other. Jesus says that loving God and loving neighbor (all of them) is the way to inherit eternal life (Luke 10:25-27).

What are we waiting for?

May I Have a Word?

Why MultiFaith Matters

Bob Roberts Jr. is the founding pastor of NorthWood Church in the Dallas/ Ft. Worth area. He is the author of Bold as Love (Thomas Nelson, 2012).

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America, You Must Be Born Again!

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The Immigration Industrial Complex Text & Photos By Steve Pavey

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O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath – America will be!

-Langston Hughes

A

s America faces the challenge of immigration reform in 2013, I begin with this question: Does the US have an immigrant rights problem or a freedom and justice problem? After spending a great deal of time in local communities across the country— with undocumented youth fighting against the proliferation of anti-immigrant legislation and the expansion of an industrial complex that detains and deports record numbers of immigrants—my answer to that question is that we have a freedom and justice problem. We must not give up on our struggle for freedom in our shortsighted immediate fight for rights!

America is not the land of the free. What’s more, this is not a problem that will be fixed merely at the level of public policy or even by winning comprehensive immigration reform. The problem has never been at the level of legislation for rights but rather at the root level of a value system embodied in an unequal political-economic order that benefits those few with power.

Sure, legislation for immigrant rights would help—but at what cost?

We are facing a crisis of freedom and justice in America. I first began moving to this realization through the poetry and activism of my friend and guide Marco Saavedra. An undocumented activist and artist, Saavedra writes: This relationship between us—the displaced and disenfranchised—and the entire body politic has played out many a time before and is happening yet again. The future of the undocumented community determines the future of the nation—for the undocumented identity (and indictment) is a metaphor of the country. Now, in another attempt to purchase the Latino vote, the parties are at it again, again negotiating what rights to adjudicate for whom—blind to the reality that freedom cannot be determined for other people.1 Drawing from James Baldwin and the black-led struggles for freedom, Saavedra does several things for us. He connects immigrant justice to other forms of oppression both historically and in the present. He helps us to see the intersectionality of all struggles for freedom. But he further disturbs us, asking us to consider whether civil rights were won with compromises at the cost of justice and freedom. Baldwin and Saavedra suggest that the problem before us is not the problem of the “n****r” or the “illegal,” but rather why a nation and a people invented it. Saavedra asks, “If I’m not illegal, what does that make you?” The use of “illegal” then, becomes “more an indictment than an identity.”2 This is a more fundamental problem of power, or access to power, that severely limits freedom and justice rather than a problem of immigrant or civil rights. As Saavedra updates Baldwin for 2013: What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a n****r (ILLEGAL) in the first place. Because I’m not a n****r (ILLEGAL), I am a man (HUMAN), but if you think I’m a n****r (ILLEGAL), it means you need it... If I’m not a n****r (ILLEGAL) here, and if you invented him (you, the white people, invented him),

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then you’ve got to find out why.

And the future of the country depends on that.3

“…watching these DREAMers take back control of their lives from a brutal and impersonal system, seeing them refuse to cower, listening to them reassert their basic humanity when confronted with a litany of excuses and deceptions from those who claim to represent them has overwhelmed my carefully cultivated defenses. I experience a vicarious form of empowerment. I experience the hope that politicians promise but rarely deliver.”

- David Bennion (lawyer)

This is not to say that our brothers and sisters who are working on immigration reform through legislation should stop, if this is the work they feel called to. But we should not be blind to the fact that there will always be compromises when legislating for freedom and justice. Both parties are bargaining for reform based on uncompromising commitments to power brokers set on maintaining a broken politicaleconomic system that ensures a particular power structure continues. So, yes, let’s commit to fighting for immigrant rights, but let’s also commit to the more difficult work of transforming America toward freedom and justice. Injustice and the lack of freedom in the US is rooted in a deeply pathological economic system, brokered by a political system and morally sanctioned by a religious system—and it’s an unholy alliance.

America, you must be born again!

The growth of an immigration industrial complex ¡Ya basta! We’ve had enough empty rhetoric from politicians, including President Obama. As we begin to hear (again) promises of comprehensive immigration reform in 2013, we must say, “Enough is enough!” Before political work begins to heal the wound, the knife needs to be pulled out. Obama’s administration deported a record number 409,849 immigrants in 2012,4 and no efforts have been made to reduce detentions and deportations in 2013. Among those deported between 2010-12, nearly 205,000 were par-

ents of a US citizen child.5 Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), commenting on these recent statistics in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, said, “We are the one country that orphans children who have parents.”6 Drawing attention to Obama and the Democrats’ complicity does not absolve the Republicans of their part in the creation of this immigration industrial complex. This has been a bipartisan affair. Legislation (IIRIRA)7 requiring the mandatory detention of immigrants without the right to due process was passed in 1996, and nearly every piece of security legislation since then, especially after 9/11, has contained add-ons for immigration enforcement and detention.8 The nation’s immigration detention system expanded rapidly, from an average daily population of less than 7,500 detainees in 1995 to nearly 34,000 in 2012.9 Immigrants currently constitute the fastest growing population in federal prisons and detention facilities.10 These developments have given rise to what some are now calling the US “immigration industrial complex.”11 It is called an industrial complex because of the collusion between private and public sectors12 in generating the growth of state-level anti-immigrant legislation, the development and growing implementation of 287(g) and Secure Communities enforcement programs, and the failure to follow ICE Director John Morton’s policy memo on prosecutorial discretion13 in the apprehension and detention of undocumented migrants.

Clear connections exist between the growth of the immigrant detention system, the political capital gained by politicians, and the large profits for a small number of private corporations. Since the creation of DHS in 2002, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has spent more than $23 million on lobbying, and the GEO Group, Inc. has spent an additional $3 million.14 Just over half of all immigrant detainees are housed in privately owned and operated detention facilities, the majority owned by either CCA or the GEO Group.15 The prison industrial complex continues to expand through the unacceptable DHS practice of detaining immigrants, mostly low-priority noncriminals, for excessively long periods in which they are exposed to inexcusable conditions. This is a human rights crisis on US soil. Rapid growth in the privatization of immigrant detentions reflects US priorities for the rights of private prison corporations over the rights of human beings, in particular immigrants. In 2009, President Obama promised reforms to this immigration detention system, but research and activism with the undocumented community demonstrate that little has changed or portends change in 2013.

According to the National Immigration Forum’s report, “The Math of Immigration Detention,” the president requested a record-high $2 billion in funding for immigrant detention for fiscal year 2013.16 In most cases, these detainees are low-priority, people who would qualify for prosecutorial discretion as specified in ICE Director John Morton’s memo released on June 17, 2011.17 Prosecutorial discretion refers to the authority of a law enforcement agency or officer to refrain from enforcing immigration laws against individuals considered low risk or low priority, in order to encourage the direction of ICE enforcement resources toward those who are considered risks to national security and public safety. But this is clearly not happening. A spate of recent reports by the Deten-

tion Watch Network,18 ACLU,19 National Immigration Forum,20 and many other organizations confirm this grim reality.

The development of an immigration industrial complex is simply an extension of the prison industrial complex. America incarcerates more people than any other country, largely people from marginalized communities, people of color, and people with mental health or substance abuse problems.

Incarceration and detainment have become in America the primary response to far too many of the social problems of disenfranchised communities.

Let’s return to our opening question, “Is America the land of the free?”

In the important book The New Jim Crow, longtime civil rights advocate and litigator Michelle Alexander argues that a racial caste system is entrenched in America.21 I would extend her analysis of the new Jim Crow reality to include Juan Crow laws that criminalize immigrants. She posits that America has simply exchanged racial categories for criminal ones. One needs to look no further than the disproportionate numbers of brown and black bodies in prisons to recognize the truth of her argument. I would argue that the growth of anti-immigrant legislation that criminalizes migrants is an extension of the racial caste system in America described by Alexander.

America, you must be born again!

National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) infiltrates the Broward Transitional Center (BTC) located in Pompano Beach, Fla. In July 2012, NIYA activists Marco Saavedra and Viridiana Martinez strategically allowed themselves to be detained by ICE in order to gain access to the inside of Broward Transitional Center to begin research and organizing work. After 23 days in detention, they were kicked out, but only after having collected enough data from detainees inside and their families outside to produce over 110 individual petitions22 for low-priority individuals qualifying for prosecutorial discretion.23 These petitions include migrants eligible for the DREAM Act, U-visa, T-visa, VAWA petition, and asylum.

The vast majority of the almost 600 detainees held daily at the BTC are noncriminals. Because there is only one judge to hear all of

“We proudly told the agents we are undocumented and we are no longer afraid of them and will no longer tolerate the hate they bring to our families. They were really confused. They couldn’t understand why undocumented youth would come to ICE willingly. It felt great to confront what I was raised to fear.”

- Stephanie Hernandez 11

their cases, it can take months before a detainee’s case is completed. From the data collected with NIYA, we found that it was common for an immigrant detainee to be held six to eight months before, in most cases, being deported.

The cost to taxpayers is nearly $164 dollars per day per detainee.24 A new report, released in November 2012 by the Detention Watch Network, exposes the atrocities of the 10 worst detention centers in the country.25 The BTC, considered by DHS to be a “model detainment center,” did not make this list, but the NIYA has found identical conditions of human rights abuses in this “model” facility. What does this mean then for the more than 250 other immigration detention facilities? Criminal or not, no human being deserves to be treated this inhumanely. Among the NIYA’s findings at BTC:

receive ongoing counseling as a result of the arrest and detention of parents. One child attempted suicide.

•Financial hardship on families—families are losing their homes and finding it hard to feed and clothe their children when the breadwinner for the family is detained.

•Lack of sufficient federal oversight—there is little accountability between ICE agents in local communities and the administration’s policy of exercising prosecutorial discretion. ICE agents have actually said they disregard the administration’s policy, citing as a reason the distance and disconnect between Florida and Washington, DC.

•Excessive length of stay—several Sri Lankan men seeking asylum have been detained over two-and-a-half years.

Saavedra and Martinez were re•Poor medical access—one woman, after repeated requests for medical care, was found in her own pool of blood and only then rushed to the leased on August 3, 2012. A letter signed by 26 Democrat members of Congress hospital for an emergency procedure. calling for a full review of BTC was sent to •Exposure to danger—a man was raped while detained.

•Lack of legal access—one man wrote to every pro bono lawyer on the list given to him, and each denied his request.

•Psychological torture—this is how one man described the common experience of all detainees who wait for a meeting to appear before the judge, only to have their court date cancelled. Over a period of six months, one man appeared three times before a judge, while also having four other court dates cancelled.

•Pressure to voluntarily deport—almost all detainees are asked at their first court appearance, as well as at regular ICE officer visits in detention, to sign a paper for voluntary deportation.

•Detention of non-criminals—the majority of detainees are non-criminals, many arrested on traffic violations. One man was arrested when asked for ID as a passenger of a vehicle.

•Psychological trauma to children—many of the children of detainees

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“As long as there are wars and poverty there will be migrants. As long as there are people in power who benefit from deportations, there will be deportations—but there will also be those of us fighting them. And as long as there are undocumented people, there will be those of us willing to protest, willing to risk arrest, willing to risk deportation in order to highlight the hypocrisy of the government.

Because as long as there is oppression there will be resistance.”

- Tania Unzueta carrasco

DHS on September 13, 2012. Conditions remained the same. Another letter signed by 428 BTC detainees calling for a full review of BTC was sent to DHS on October 15, 2012. Conditions remained the same.

Another letter signed by nine other BTC detainees calling for a full review of the policies and procedures of BTC in light of the Morton memo was sent to DHS on November 12, 2012. Conditions remain the same.

A lack of prosecutorial discretion at every level of immigration enforcement has swept non-criminals into the immigration detention complex rather than prioritizing criminals.26 This appears to be done in order to meet quotas

for politicians and make money for business people, but it is inhumane and unjust. US immigration policy and practices violate human rights at a number of levels, including the separation of families, the lack of due process, racial profiling and discrimination, arbitrary and long detentions, and exposure to inhumane experiences and mistreatment.

We need to listen to the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, to the detainees within the BTC, and to their family members and demand an end to the inhumane practice of immigrant detention and deportation. We want a full review of all immigrant detention centers and demand the release of all low-priority detainees.

America, you must be born again!

“We don’t need to assimilate into a system that oppresses us. Instead we need to challenge that system, and create a real movement, a movement where we are fighting for human rights for all.”

- Santiago V. Leco

21st-Century Freedom Ride I joined the 21st-Century Freedom Ride27 from Durham, N.C., to Birmingham, Ala., for a retreat in December 2012 with African American historian Dr. Vincent Harding, who asked us to answer the question “Is another America possible?” The riders represented a diverse group of people across generations, ethnic background, and citizenship status. We came together to learn from an elder of the black-led freedom movement regarding what we could do about our own present-day struggles for prison reform, immigrant justice, ending homelessness and poverty, and abolishing war. On our journey to the retreat we stopped in downtown Atlanta for a Las Posadas, a Latino Christmas celebration, to raise awareness of immigrant injustices in our country today by walking as Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus in search of lodging.

Uncle Vincent (we learned to call each other by familial names) opened our retreat with the message, “America, you must be born again!” At his feet, we learned about freedom, hope, and our journey forward to struggle for immigrant justice and freedom. He reminded us that the freedom workers never sang, “I woke up this morning with my mind set on civil rights.”

“That was just lazy journalism,” he commented. “No, we sang, ‘I woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom.’” This understanding helps us with how we might jump in today to work not just for immigrant rights but also ultimately for freedom.

Harding reminded us of the significant development in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s thinking and commitments after four young black girls were killed

at the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., in September 1963. At the eulogy, King challenged America, “We must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.”28 Uncle Vincent helped us see that King moved from having a dream of racial equality to having a vision of the beloved community. And it was this move from civil rights to the struggle for freedom and justice for all that ultimately led to his assassination. In his book Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero, Harding writes: Just a few weeks before the bullet struck . . . King took his own sense of the American dilemma and challenge even further. By then he had come to the conclusion that the black freedom struggle was actually “exposing the evils that are deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society.

It reveals systemic rather than the superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”29 What we need now is not simply to advocate for public policy for immigrant rights; we must go further to challenge the system that produces such systemic evil. King identified these evils as racism, materialism, and militarism—apt descriptions for present-day America. The post-1963 King stated the following when addressing a Southern Christian Leadership Conference advisory committee in late 1967: “Something is wrong with capitalism as it now stands in the United States. We are not interested in being integrated

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////Organizations that are making a difference//////////////

into this value structure. Power must be relocated, a radical redistribution of power must take //Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR.org) facilitates the education, the organizing, and the participation of place.”30 marginalized border communities to defend and promote human and civil rights, helping them to create political, economic, and social conditions where every human being is equal in dignity and rights.

A few months before his death, King spoke to SCLC staff //Detention Watch Network (DetentionWatchNetwork.org) is a coalition that addresses the immigration detention in preparation for the Poor crisis head on, working to reform the US detention and deportation system so that all who come to our shores receive People’s Campaign set for the fair and humane treatment. spring of 1968. “We must formulate a program, and we must //The DREAM Act (DreamActivist.org) is about equal opportunity. This proposed legislation ensures that no child in fashion the new tactics that will America is denied the dream of having a better life if willing to work for it. compel unwilling authorities to yield to the mandates of jus//Alterna (AlternaCommunity.com) is an experiment in Christian missional living, welcoming the stranger and offering tice,” he told them.31 In his final hospitality to Jesus, who often visits us as an unauthorized immigrant from Latin America. book, Where Do We Go from Here?, King wrote, “Let us be //Georgia Detention Watch (GeorgiaDetentionWatch.com) is a group of organizations and individuals that advocate those creative dissenters who alongside immigrants to end the inhumane and unjust detention and law enforcement policies and practices directed will call our beloved nation to a against immigrant communities. higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble //Human Rights Watch (HRW.org) is one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and expression of humanness.”32 protecting human rights.

What would this higher destiny look like? I believe that //Immigration Policy Center (ImmigrationPolicy.org), the research and policy arm of the American Immigration Counwe should consider what mass cil, seeks to shape a rational conversation on immigration and immigrant integration. It provides policymakers, the medivine obedience would look dia, and the general public with accurate information about the role of immigrants and immigration policy in US society. like. At points in history this has also been called revival. I //Migration Policy Institute (MigrationPolicy.org) provides analysis, development, and evaluation of migration and remember listening to Jim Wallis refugee policies at the local, national, and international levels. It aims to meet the rising demand for pragmatic and speak at an interfaith rally just thoughtful responses to the challenges and opportunities that large-scale migration presents to communities and instibefore the failed senate vote tutions. for the Dream Act in 2010. In his speech he promised civil //National Immigration Forum (ImmigrationForum.org) advocates for the value of immigrants and immigration to disobedience from the Chrisour nation by promoting responsible federal immigration policies and addressing today’s economic and national security tian church if Congress failed needs while honoring the ideals of the Founding Fathers, who created America as a land of opportunity. to pass this legislation. He said, “We’re going to open our universities and colleges, and we’re going to go against the laws, because they’re going against the will of God.” In an interview later that day, an undocumented youth activist, Gaby Pacheco, spoke of the hope gained from that solidarity, by quoting from Wallis’ speech. “We’re going to do civil disobedience,” said Wallis, “and they’re going to have to go through us to get to these students.”33 Sadly, the church did not follow through with Wallis’ promise when the legislation was voted down. But the vision Wallis had proposed remains a tempting one to consider.

What would it look like for Christian colleges and universities, alongside churches, to embrace in divine obedience the marginalized and sojourner in our midst? Whatever this would look like, led by the Spirit, it would certainly require a relational component of both racial and economic reconciliation in local communities. Our undocumented brothers and sisters lead the way, through the work of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance and other undocumented youth-led groups, and with their guidance we might learn what divine obedience in practice looks like.

At our retreat Harding reminded us often of activist June Jordan’s admonition, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” We cannot rely on political leaders to legislate freedom. But we can begin that work today in our own communities, and it will begin, as James Baldwin tells us, with taking the poor, the marginalized, and the undocumented into our arms, embracing as brothers and sisters. When he wrote the following in a 1964

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“I cannot allow fear to control my life. I am so tired of just sitting around and waiting for change. I have decided to become that change and take action. I cannot sit around and watch as the full implementation of Secure Communities in my state continues to criminalize and tear apart families.”

- Diana Banda article, titled “What Price Freedom?,” Baldwin might just as easily have been addressing us today: In order for us to survive and transcend the terrible days ahead of us, the country will have to turn and take me in its arms. Now, this may sound mystical, but at the bottom that is what has got to happen, because it is not a matter of giving me this or that; it is not yours to give me. Let us be clear about that. It is not a question of whether they are going to give me any freedom. I am going to take my freedom. That problem is resolved. The real problem is the price. Not the price I will pay, but the price the country will pay. The price a white woman, man, boy, and girl will have to pay in themselves before they look on me as another human being. This metamorphosis is what we are driving toward, because without that we will perish—indeed, we are almost perishing now.34 America, you must be born again!

Divine obedience: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”35 What would it mean then, for America—you and me—to turn and take the undocumented migrants into our arms? Are we willing to pay the price required of us to treat migrants as human beings, as brothers and sisters, and, even further, as God incarnate in the least of these? What is the price if we don’t? A wise elder in the freedom movement, Jim Douglass, tells us: Liberation has two dimensions: Freedom from the bondage of the individual self . . . and freedom from the extended self of social oppression . . . Neither dimension of freedom, personal or social, can be won without suffering.36 Much of the violence and pain we inflict on others, both as individuals and as a society, is caused by our fear of death and lust for power. But Jesus

tells us, “Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. . . . your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matt. 6:25-33).” The freedom we seek is found in movement toward God’s kingdom and justice. This is the upside-down kingdom of powerlessness and nonviolence.

The Duke Center for Reconciliation recently led a trip to Africa with the purpose of hearing stories of liberation and reconciliation. During a lakeside memorial service to remember Ugandan martyrs, an African leader said, “Ugandan Christians don’t need to be more Christian, they need to be less Ugandan, Rwandan Christians less Rwandan, and American Christians less American.” This says a lot about power and violence, both personal and corporate. Nation-states have usurped the role of the sovereignty of God in our lives as Christians.

America, we must be born again!

Practical steps toward humane and just immigration reform37 At the beginning of this year, a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight” released a framework38 for immigration reform.39 The following day, President Obama affirmed the senators’ principles as in line with his, declaring, “Now is the time ... to fix the system that’s been broken for way too long.”40 President Obama’s brief policy address included a demand for Congress to act in a timely manner with an immigration bill. These public commitments from legislators to take concrete steps to address our broken immigration system are long overdue good news. Unfortunately, the resulting proposals are heavy on enforcement, criminalization, and securitization that are likely to increase the dehumanization of migrants and low-wage workers.

For those who work on the technical solutions for immigration reform, listed below are suggested principles for humane reform that come from listening to grassroots immigrant communities and organizations.41 But we do not need to wait for legislation reforms when President Obama could begin administrative reforms now by creating more accountability within US immigration enforcement. It is within the president’s power right now to implement his own policy of prosecutorial discretion and begin the dismantling of the immigrant detention and deportation complex. In the president’s own words, “The time is now!”

I mourn and lament the daily incarceration of over 32,000 immigrants in this country along with the daily deportations of 1,100 human beings. It is here, in concrete relationship with immigrants who are struggling, that we must all struggle as a nation if we are to move toward freedom and the presence of the kingdom. As politicians posit abstract solutions, I will listen to concrete reality and suggestions of my immigrant brothers and sisters, among them, Tania Unzueta Carrasco, who says, How much hope can I have in the president who has deported people at a higher rate than any other in the nation’s history? ...This is why I have learned to keep my hopes in check. Not only be-

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economic justice. There will be no freedom and justice until we confront, challenge, and change the social relations of power that generate and maintain great inequality between the rich and the poor (of all colors). This begins the more difficult task of addressing the causes of migration due to US foreign and trade policies that prioritize the interests of corporations over people.

America, we must—and we can—be born again!

(Editor’s note: Due to space limitations, endnotes for this article have been posted at PRISMmagazine.org/endnotes.)

cause of the years without action, but also because the lives of immigrant communities have become even harder.42

Hurt

By Jessica Hyejin Lee When my grandfather passed away, my dad couldn't visit because of [his] undocumented status. When my grandma became paralyzed, my dad also couldn't visit.

A starting point for technical solutions for immigration reforms: My dad opened his heart one night and told me those are the times •We must end the deportations he really can't endure, despite all the other times he works his of the vast majority of migrants, 70-hour-a-week job… keeping families together.

•We must close immigrant detenThere is no end to sad stories. My mom wanted to learn English at a community college so badly that she risked quitting her job that tion centers and utilize detention makes her ankles swollen all the time. I was so proud of her for alternatives that are both less taking the risks. But again, being undocumented and not having the costly and more humane. choice of where to work put her back at work and away from the •We must end all 287(g) and community college.

Secure Community agreements, Most of the times, I try not to think about these things, because it's so that local law enforcement can hard to function normally when I remember them. But sadly this is work on community safety. the reality for me, my family, and 12 million undocumented people in America, and I am righteously angry and resentful of all the people •We must create a pathway towho think that we need to demand change "strategically" while ward citizenship for the over 11 compromising all our values and demands to bureaucracy. million undocumented migrants living and working in the US. While I'm as public as I am about my undocumented status, I don't talk about sad things often, even with my closest friends, because •We must make border security it hurts me. It haunts me even after I stop talking about it. But … I more humane and less deadly, want you to know that this is what America is doing to me, my family, reducing costs to the US as well and other undocumented people every day, and I am hurt. as risks to migrants.

•We must provide for the needs of low-wage workers and their families, who are important threads in the fabric of US society, and far too often are among the most exploited and abused. Justice for those among low-wage and agricultural labor must take precedence over the demands of corporations.

•In our local communities and states, we must resist all anti-immigrant legislation, even to the point of committing civil disobedience.

•We must find a way to become friends with people different from ourselves, for citizens and non-citizens to get to know one another, learn from each other. Only then will we know how to love one another.

•We must make the connections between racial justice and

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Steve Pavey is a senior research scientist at the One Horizon Institute in Lexington, Ky. He is a member of the steering committee for the Southeast Immigrant Rights Network, as well as a close ally to the National Immigrant Youth Alliance. He is coauthor, with Marco Saavedra, of the recently released book Shadows Then Light (ShadowsThenLight.com), which explores civil disobedience in support of immigrant justice.

The photographs here capture the movement of undocumented youth utilizing civil disobedience to struggle for freedom and justice. Events shown took place over the last two-and-a-half years in Portland, Ore.; Los Angeles, Calif.; San Bernardino, Calif.; Phoenix, Ariz.; Chicago, Ill.; Indianapolis, Ind.; Philadelphia, Pa.; Washington, DC; Charlotte, N.C.; Atlanta, Ga.; Montgomery, Ala.; and Pompano Beach, Fla. For more information about the events behind the photos, go to ShadowsThenLight.com.

No parent wants their child playing in a polluted backyard.

Yet there are over 19,000 families in Central Appalachia who live in homes without complete plumbing. They must resort to improvised methods to remove raw sewage from their homes at the cost of a polluted yard and local water supplies.

Help us improve the lives of children in Central Appalachia by visiting www.fahe.org/donate.

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Thirsty in the Mids

by Kathy-Ann C. Hernandez

graive.deviantart.com

the famous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes the quintessential paradox of need.

A mariner and his crew have been lost at sea for several days without food and fresh water. Many have died of thirst, and decay permeates the air. The mariner looks around the deck in despair; he soon will be next. Parched and lying prostrate on the deck, he is tempted to drink from the abundance of salted water all around him. Coleridge sums it up well: “Water, water, all around, and not a drop to drink.” What a fitting metaphor to illustrate need in the midst of abundance!

Growing up in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, I remember the long dry season when a few miserly drops of water would trickle slowly out of dehydrated faucets, puddles evaporated, and the rains still did not come.

My sister and I would join other neighborhood children, armed with recycled buckets and bottles, along a forest path, across a river, and through a cocoa field to fetch water at a public standpipe. We made this trek several times a day to fill the steel drums that were common fixtures in each backyard. It was a chore, an experience, an adventure, and a social event; it was tiring, exhilarating, and tedious all at once. It was our life, and though others might describe it as impoverished or disadvantaged, we never knew it.

It was on those walks—back and forth across that murky river, balancing on a narrow log with one hand holding tightly to an overhanging rope and the other clutching our precious cargo—that we reveled in our childhood. We formed friendships, invented and abandoned games; we picked cocoa pods, sucked the juicy flesh, and discarded the pits; disagreements erupted into fights, reconciliation followed, and friendships were

In

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strengthened. On these trips we came to know each other by the special nicknames we created with childish malarkey. In the season of drought, we had abundance. We had stumbled on the truth that Henry David Thoreau discovered during his tenure at Walden pond for a little over two years, living with the barest of necessities: “If you are restricted in your range by poverty…, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest.”

I think of these things now as an immigrant living in the United States, prompted to give to relieve human suffering. My childhood experiences are dwarfed next to the severity of water and food shortages in various parts of the world. There is nothing romantic about struggling to meet a basic human need, such as access to clean water or adequate food. Yet, having been both donor and aid recipient, I have reflected a bit on the paradox of need in the midst of abundance.

Embedded in the donor-recipient relationship are temptations for both giver and receiver. As a donor, my advantaged position may put me in danger of living a life overly focused on superficial trappings and an inconsequential appreciation for the richness of a simple life. An inherent irony exists in having hundreds of friends on electronic social networks yet not knowing the neighbor next door beyond the perfunctory, “Hi, how are you?” Our comfortable state can lull us into casual acceptance of a counterfeit existence, an existence defined by the size of our homes, the brand of our car, or the balance on our bank account. Certainly, God calls us into seasons of abundance and wishes that we may “prosper in all things” (3

st of Abundance

John 1:2). But is it possible that we could still be thirsty in the midst of abundance? Thirsty for community, for meaningful friendships, thirsty for a clearer understanding of what matters most in this life?

We could be tempted to think of others in need as victims of a substandard quality of life. We may question their values, hygiene practices, and cultural norms. The desire to rush in and teach them how to “really live” may be overwhelming. To us the admonition of Jesus is pertinent: “And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye?”(Matt: 7:3-4).

In contrast, the recipient, confronted with the harsh realities of an impoverished existence, could focus on the meanness of life. The temptation may be great to lose faith in a God who allows such suffering, to ask, like David, “Awake! Why do You sleep, O Lord? Arise! Do not cast us off forever” (Psalm 44:23). Our circumstances could blind us to the bounty of God’s natural provisions. As Thoreau shrewdly observed: “The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the [poor-house] as brightly as from the rich man's abode.”

In spite of our situation, we can continue to trust God! As we are confident that the sun will rise and set at its accustomed time, and the moon and stars will not fail to give light, we can be assured that the God who performs these functions without fail will attend to our needs. Help is on the way! Moreover, with this assurance we can free ourselves to focus on the abundance of our possessions—authentic treasures in life—the

beauty of the natural world that God has created, and the incomparable wealth we have in the meaningful relationships we have cultivated with our family, our friends, and our God. Since moving to the United States, everyday tasks often cause me to reflect on the “advantages” or “abundance” that comes with living in a first-world economy. When I married, I inherited my husband’s bread machine. I tried it a few times and was happy that I could simply “fix it and forget it.” However, as we sat eating bread from one of my initial attempts, I thought nostalgically of my childhood days when we occasionally made flat breads called “Johnny bakes” over a makeshift fire in our backyard. Making this bread was a social event. Family and community members gathered to combine the ingredients (no measuring cups used here), knead the dough, and wait for it to rise. Neighbors pitched in to make the fire, stoke it, and participate in the intricate process of placing fire above and below the baking bread. There was always excitement and uncertainty about whether the bread would burn or the fire would go out. Finally, we would be rewarded with the sweet aroma of fresh bread enveloping the neighborhood. We would slather butter on hot slices and sit around eating, reliving the experience, and commenting on the texture, taste, and smell of our hard work.

No bread I have eaten since has tasted that good!

Kathy-Ann C. Hernandez is an associate professor for the Campolo College of Graduate and Professional Studies at Eastern University.

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A Life for a Life

by Michele Howe

How posT abortive syndrome steals a woman’s life 20

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Y

ou saved a life today.

Not many of us will ever hear those words spoken to us in direct response to something we’ve said or done. But Joan Canning, an advocate and regional spokesperson for Silent No More Awareness, an international awareness campaign that shares the truth about abortion, has heard it on more than one occasion. As owner of a strategic business and human resources management-consulting group, she spends her professional life warning, informing, and educating businesses about the current regulatory climate and HR best practices. But what her heart calls her to do personally is to warn, inform, and educate young teens and women about the painful aftermath that choosing an abortion can bring.

Canning’s quest to deliver truthful information to any female who is considering an abortion (or anyone who loves someone who is considering it), had a very personal and costly beginning. She describes herself even today as a woman of faith who has never forgotten the price both her baby and she paid after an abortion some 20 years ago. Having lived with the guilt, shame, and remorse for many years, Canning fully understands the ongoing struggle of trying to forget a decision as traumatic and irrevocable as ending the life of an unborn child.

Like many women who choose to end their unborn baby’s life, Canning did not grow up in poverty or obvious neglect. She was born into a seemingly well-adjusted pastor’s family where appearances were everything.

However, unlike the perfect picture Joan’s family presented to the outside world, her home was rife with conflict from physical, verbal, and alcohol abuse. Her parents openly supported a woman’s right to get an abortion during the 1960s, prior to its legalization. But even as a young teen she sensed the hypocrisy between welcoming life as a gift from God, as taught in her home and through her religious training, and the message her parents expressed in their support of abortion rights. She was understandably confused, and this further fueled her later entry into alcohol abuse, eating disorders, and sexual promiscuity.

Always an exemplary student, Canning went to college on a full scholarship, and despite her black-out drinking and erratic eating, she excelled. But she got pregnant during her sophomore year, dropped out of college, and married her boyfriend. Her baby boy, Lucas, was delivered by emergency C-section, and three years later her second son, Chase, was born. Despite the joy her sons brought, her troubled marriage ended soon after her Chase’s first birthday.

Fast forward a few months: Canning is a single mom living in a small apartment with her young sons; her parents express their disappointment in her for divorcing; her employment options are limited due to her incomplete college education.

Despair soon overtook Canning. Alcoholism consumed her, as did vain attempts to soothe the pain of her broken marriage by looking for love at nightclubs. She didn’t find love, but she did find herself single, alone, and pregnant again. The baby’s father reacted to the news of her pregnancy by going out and sleeping with another woman, though Canning wanted to marry him and keep the baby. After that painful wake-up call, abortion looked like the only possible choice.

Years later, Canning still recalls the dingy atmosphere—both physical and emotional—of the abortion clinic. The staff, too, were harsh and cold and completely insensitive to the needs of the women there.

She remembers thinking to herself, “How does a mother who has already Post-Abortive Syndrome been blessed with precious § Guilt Symptoms children knowingly end § Anxiety the life of her baby? I am § Psychological numbing truly a despicable person.” § Depression and thoughts of suicide Immediately following § Anniversary syndrome the abortion, she felt § Re-experiencing the abortion relieved not to be pregnant § Preoccupation with becoming pregnant again anymore, but her relief § Anxiety over fertility and childbearing issues was quickly overshadowed § Interruption of the bonding process with present and/or future children by guilt and remorse. A § Survival guilt few months later, she quit § Development of eating disorders her respectable clerical job § Alcohol and drug abuse and began working in bars, § Other self-punishing or self-degrading behaviors isolating herself more from § Brief reactive psychosis her family and giving up

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custody of her sons to their father.

She didn’t know it at the time, but Canning was imploding, and her case is all too common. The Post Abortion Review cites that “women who have undergone abortion often fit the profile of someone suffering from Post Traumatic Stress according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (standard for diagnosis of psychiatric illness in the United States.)” [The Post Abortion Review, 2, (3): 4-8 Fall 1994, published by the Elliot Institute; additional material posted on AfterAbortion.org.]

After several years of spiraling ever downward physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually following her abortion, Canning broke down and turned to Christ. Her life changed dramatically as she started her faith walk with Jesus, began a life of sobriety, responsibility, and healing. She knew God had forgiven her for her choice to abort her baby. What she didn’t yet understand was that she still needed to grieve the loss of her unborn child.

In 2009, Canning heard the testimony of Linda Cochrane, a woman who had also had an abortion, and how she had been set free from the guilt, shame, depression, and a multitude of other post-abortive syndrome issues. Canning sat up and took notice. Later she worked through Cochrane’s Bible study, Forgiven and Set Free, and during that intense study Canning took that final step out of the abyss and was herself set free.

Canning’s story is typical for women across the US who out of desperation make a choice that is frequently done under extreme pressure and coercion. Consider these statistics from Abortion Is the Un-Choice (TheUnChoice.com): • 64 percent felt pressured by others. Pressure can come in the form of anything from guilt trips and persuasive arguments to verbal threats and physical violence. Deceptive or inadequate information presented as fact by health officials, experts, authorities, educators, pastors, and other leaders also acts coercively.

• Up to 83 percent of abortions are unwanted.

• Most felt rushed and uncertain, yet 67 percent had no counseling before abortion.

• 79 percent were not informed about available alternatives.

• 84 percent said they were not given enough information to make an informed choice.

When women end their child’s life, they often then spend the rest of their own life paying the price. An estimated 20 million US women suffer from post-abortive symptoms (fathers suffer as well). While this number is staggering, the answer to the pain lies in the decision to seek healing. One woman at a time, one day at a time, mothers who ended their baby’s life can find forgiveness, freedom, and healing.

As Canning realized, healing often comes from places we least expect it. Sometimes the truest form of healing comes when we share our experiences with others in the hope that they won’t repeat our mistakes. Canning found restoration

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Orgs that offer help with post-abortive syndrome § Abortion Changes You (AbortionChangesYou.com) provides a space for post-abortive women, men, and family members to share their stories. § Abortion Is the Un-Choice (TheUnChoice.com) provides information and resources concerning unwanted abortion and its side effects. § Forgiven and Set Free (ForgivenandSetFree.com) provides Bible studies and a tollfree number for post-abortive women. § Rachel’s Vineyard Ministries (RachelsVineyard.org) offers educational and training resources as well as weekend retreats to facilitate the healing process after an abortion.

Check out their resource page for men. § Ramah International (RamahInternational.org) provides information on abortion, abortion risks, and post-abortive syndrome. It also provides resources for local assistance. § Restoring the Heart Ministries offers a 10-part video series called Into My Arms for those who have suffered the pain of abortion. The curriculum is targeted at counseling professionals and lay people who can lead post-abortive women through the forgiveness journey after an abortion. Learn more at RTHM.cc/Into-My-Arms.asp. § Silent No More Awareness (SilentNoMoreAwareness.org) is a Christian organization that seeks to make the public aware of the physical and emotional devastation of abortion for both women and men.

through her personal relationship with Christ, but it didn’t end there. She continued to work through her grief with others who have walked her path. Today she leads other young women away from abortion by sharing her story and educating the public about the hidden costs of choosing abortion.

What many people don’t realize is that not only are a woman’s emotions and mind affected by an abortion, but she risks her physical health as well. Over 140,000 women per year have immediate medical complications from abortion that include infection, uterine perforation, hemorrhaging, cervical trauma, and failed abortion/ ongoing pregnancy. A woman’s risk of breast cancer rises by 30 percent with an abortion. Abortion can lead to infertility and to complications in future pregnancies.

A woman’s suicide risk is six times higher than childbearing women who have not had an abortion.

Certainly, having an abortion is not the isolated, personal choice that mainstream media makes it out to be. It affects the mother. It affects the baby. It affects everyone in the mother’s circle of influence. It affects society at large. Perhaps the biggest challenge for men and women today is to look for practical ways to help women (of all ages) to know they have options other than abortion and to help them know they are loved, accepted, and will have help caring for their child or in finding that child a loving home. There are many viable options available to pregnant women today. The only option not viable—in any sense of the word—is to abort.

Michele Howe (MicheleHowe.wordpress.com) is the author of 12 books for women and hundreds of articles on mothering, health, and spirituality. Her newest release is One Size Fits All: Making Healthy Choices, Stepping into a Meaningful Life (Lighthouse of the Carolinas, 2013).

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T 23

In Rwanda, reconciliation happens one day and one individual at a time.

by Stephanie Marienau Turpin

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Stephanie Marienau Turpin

One and Then Another

A

lready the house was dark, though it was barely 5:30.

Outside I knew the sun would be just sinking behind Rwanda’s iconic thousand hills and the red dirt would still reflect enough light to walk easily for another hour, but with no electricity and no windows in the thick walls, inside it may as well have been midnight.

I ran my fingers against the mud brick, trying to feel my way to the front door, but my sandal caught on the hem of my skirt and I tripped. Mama Muhire called out to me, “Are you okay?” She must have known that I was yet again in need of help and come back to find me, because I felt a hand slip into mine in the darkness.

“When I was young,” she whispered, “and our house would get dark, my mother would tell me to see with the eyes of my heart.”

I sighed, “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

A world away On April 6, 1994, I was 9 years old and living in Southern California. I did not know that the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira had been shot down and the 100 terrifying days of the Rwandan genocide had begun.

That summer as I spent afternoons with friends at the neighborhood pool and meandered through the fourth-grade reading list, women I would love many years later were watching their husbands be hacked to death with machetes or were being raped by friends with whom they had once shared meals and neighborhood gossip or were telling their children to “run” with no idea where or to whom.

Fourteen years later, my plane touched down in Kigali, where I would be spending a few months for work, conducting an impact evaluation of a widow support group called SEVOTA. All I knew was that the organization’s founder, Mama Muhire, would be meeting me at the airport. I was there for work, and my job was to listen. I did not yet know what a gift this would be.

Only with God My work in Rwanda did not exactly follow the work plan I had developed before my departure. I often found myself sitting at the SEVOTA center waiting hours for women I had scheduled interviews with to arrive. This left me with plenty of time to think.

While the women often had other things they needed to do before coming to meet me, their children always seemed to make time to come stare at me, play with my hair, or solemnly ask permission to touch my laptop. They would announce their arrival with an exuberant, “Bonjour, Mzungu,* bonjour!

Commentallezvouuus!?!?!” Later, when I had taught them a bit about American culture, they cheerfully adjusted their greeting to make me feel more at home, “Whasupdog! Muzungu! Whasupdog!"

But mostly, I would just sit and talk with Alain, the man who lived next door to the SEVOTA center. He spoke great French and always had an interesting bit of news or question to greet me with.

“Stephania, how much does a machine like this one you have cost?”

“Stephania, did you hear that President Kagame is coming to Gitarama Stadium today?”

“Stephania, did I tell you that my son is looking for an American wife?”

He had. But a friendly conversation was often exactly what I needed to help pass the time while I waited. Whenever one of my interviewees would finally arrive, Alain would stand up and quickly leave us to our business. *Mzungu is the Swahili word used to refer to white people in East Africa.

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Our business often proceeded like this conversation, which I had with a woman named Agate.

Me: Since you became a member of SEVOTA, how has your household income been affected?

Translator: [Lengthy translation into Kinyarwanda] Agate: [Confused look and what sounds like a question in Kinyarwanda] Translator: [Rapid arm motions and what sounds like an answer in Kinyarwanda] Agate: [Emphatic nodding and lengthy soliloquy in, still, Kinyarwanda] Translator: She is saying it has helped her.

Me: Oh. I paused. I closed my laptop.

“Agate, what happened to you and your family during the genocide?”

Agate smiled knowingly, as though we had now come to the one question that made any sense to her and the one story she was ready to tell. Leaning back, she slowly told me of watching her neighbor kill her father on the first night the killing came to their village. She managed to escape into the bush with her husband and their three children. She had heard that children were being protected in the local stadium, so she sent her kids there. But it had been a

trick, and two of the children were killed inside the stadium shortly after seeking refuge there. Her eldest son managed to climb the fence and escape.

She said that she doesn’t remember how she survived herself, but that her darkest days were after the killing had ended. She grew sick, weighed down by her own sadness, bitterness, fear, and anger. She was so paralyzed that she was unable to care for her son and was afraid she might die, perhaps at her own hand. It was many years before she could forgive her family’s killers, but she said she came to realize that she needed to forgive them in order to survive. Since that time, she felt as if a heavy burden had been lifted from her.

In the silence that followed her story, my heart closed up, and I murmured, "I don't know how anyone could forgive something like that."

She scolded me, "No! No human can forgive something like that. Only with God." “We dance to forget...”

Once a month, the women who participated in SEVOTA’s support groups would all come together in one large group meeting. The first such meeting I attended had about 60 women assembled, seated on long low benches lining the room.

Without introduction, one of the women stood and broke into song.

“Njye nzahora mpimbaza uwiteka…”

It was low and beautiful, slow, but with a rhythm all the women clapped along to. Everyone began to join in the singing, quietly at first and then louder, with eyes pressed closed and hands lifted into the air.

“Umwami wange, imana yange!” they sang. “My King and my God!” I sat silent. A young woman from the group slid onto the bench next to me. “Let me help you,” she whispered in French, tossing her dark, flowered wrap over her shoulder. “I’m Yvonne.”

For the next three hours, Yvonne translated into my ear the worst stories humans have to tell, without emotion, as though she were reciting a grocery list.

“This is Marie. She is saying that her AIDS is getting worse. She cannot afford her medicine this week because her child has malaria and is in the hospital, where she must pay for her malaria medication and food. She cannot even afford the cost of the bus to go visit her.”

“This is Sandrine. She was raped. Her son, that boy there, he is a child of rape. She says sometimes she hates him when she sees him. He is having trouble at school, since everyone knows where he came from and doesn’t want to sit close to him.”

“Mutesi is so poor. She has been coming to our homes begging us for food. Her home was destroyed in the rain last night, so now she needs to build it back up.”

After three hours of the women pouring their hearts out to one another,

I don’t know how to reconcile the kindness I experienced with the evil I heard so much about.

How can such extremes coexist, not just in the same community but in the same person?

The author with the women who participate in SEVOTA’s support groups.

(Photo: Jennifer Ashley Vanderburgh)

Mama Muhire stood and read this Bible verse: "Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us" (Rom. 5:3-5). I had read this verse many times, but seeing heads nod as it was read to women who have seen their families killed, been raped by many men, and daily live in extreme poverty left me numb. I had nothing to say.

The women never used the word genocide. They didn’t have to. The genocide was the space between every word, the silence after laughter, the nod after turning away. Its omnipresence was accepted to the point that it didn’t need to be named. Terms like "before" and "after" didn’t need to be qualified, and when I was told "her husband/child/mother/father was killed," I didn’t need to ask how.

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Rwanda’s future is composed of a million individual choices to forgive.

Before I came to Rwanda, I wondered how anyone could forgive something this horrible. After meeting the widows and seeing them cry 14 years after the genocide ended, I understood that they have not forgiven. They are forgiving, and it seems must do so many times a day for the community to hold together. They are forgiving not only the loss of their loved ones but also what is taken from them every day those people remain absent. They are forgiving the atrocities of rape and murder and the everyday indignity of being poor and a widow.

As Mama Muhire set down her Bible, the singing started again, low just as before. One by one the women rose and began to sway. They began to dance together, circling the room, arms suspended above them. From my seat in the corner I watched their faces drift past me: sad, apologetic, resolute.

One of the women collapsed onto the bench next to me and clasped my knee, “We dance to forget…” she whispered.

Mass graves My weekends in Rwanda were quiet. I would read or work on my evaluation or take the bus to Kigali just to walk on paved roads for an hour or maybe get a frozen yogurt from one of the recently built shops catering to expatriates. For some variety one Saturday, I took a bus to a little town an hour from Gitarama.

I was worried about finding the stop, but I guess the driver knew the only reason someone like me would come somewhere like this. He pulled over in front of a small church.

“I think this is what you are looking for,” he said, with no judgment.

The church serves as one of Rwanda’s many genocide memorials.

Before that, it served as one of Rwanda’s many death traps. During the genocide, Tutsis were lured into churches with promises of safety from the chaos outside. Some were invited and given assurance by their own pastors.

So they came, carrying belongings, their children, and their elderly parents.

Once inside, the doors would be locked and the killing would begin. With bullets when available. With machetes when not.

I knew from reading about genocide memorials in Rwanda that often the victims' bones are displayed to show how many were killed at that place. I thought I was prepared as I walked down into the basement below the church.

The basement floor and walls were covered in white tiles and in the center of the room was a glass case with about 150 skulls, lined up in neat rows. I looked at them, not really knowing what to feel, and then walked back up the stairs to leave the memorial.

As I began to walk away from the church, a woman came running outside, gesturing at me to wait. She did not speak French, and when I did not respond to her Kinyarwanda, she took my hand and led me behind the church to another basement. She pulled up a door from the ground and pointed me to a ladder. As I descended, at first I could see nothing in the dim light.

Then my eyes began to adjust and I realized with horror what I was seeing: a hallway of wooden shelves stacked to the ceiling with femurs and shoulder bones, skulls and bits of bashed-in skulls, unrecognizable pieces of what used to be human.

I can't describe to you what it is like to see thousands of bodies’ worth of bones stacked up one on top of the other, row after row, shelf after shelf.

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Mama Muhire (her full name is Godelieve Mukasarasi) is pictured here, in blue suit on right, surrounded by the women and children of the widow support group SEVOTA. (Photo: Jennifer Ashley Vanderburgh)

All I know how to say is that as I walked up from the second basement, shaking, the guide led me to a third. And then a fourth.

As I left, the guide asked me to sign a guestbook, which had a column for "comments."

I wish I could tell you that I developed some deep insight into humanity's brokenness, but honestly I left the memorial angry at and afraid of these people, whose hands I have held and whose children I've hugged. I wanted to distance myself from them and claim that I never, never, ever would do something like that, even if you told me they would kill my family if I didn't kill them first, even if everyone around me was killing, even if you put a machete in my hands.… It's so much easier to look at my neighbor and ask, "What did he do?" than to look at myself and ask, "What would I have done?"

And yet I knew this request for comments was not rhetorical. All of Rwanda is looking for a way to interpret their history, as a nation and as individuals. Everyone I met was haunted: by ghosts of their loved ones, by memories of what they saw, by guilt over what they did (or didn’t do), or by hope that the madness could begin again.

At the genocide memorial in Kigali, 250,000 people are buried in mass graves. Yet only a few yards away were men busy digging more graves for the bodies that are still being found. As killers admit the details of their crimes in the courts, more bodies are being uncovered under peoples' houses, in latrines, or in shallow pits covered over with dirt.

At the memorial, there is a matter-of-fact sign that reads, "Please do not

That night as I sat in the home of a friend while she cooked, I looked through the responses. Some pages were covered in indecipherable smudges and faint squiggles, with no correlation to the lines I had drawn for each question. Others were completely blank.

I put down the papers and watched my friend leaning over the cooking fire to stir her pot. She hummed quietly to herself, yet another song I did not know. This woman has seen so much, I thought. There is so much information and so many stories in her head, yet she cannot write even a a single word, not even the name of what she is stirring in her own pot.

And me, I have too many words for everything. Beans, stew, dinner.

Anger, forgiveness, hope. I can type them or write them in cursive or spray them up on a brick wall. And I can write them into stories. I have never felt literacy as such a gift before.

But these women’s stories are not easy to tell, even for those with a gift for shaping lines on paper into meaning. They are torn apart, rambling, and painful. The timelines do not always hold together, some of the memories are blurred, and yet they are bursting with darkness and light.… There is so much power in these stories, but it is the power of lightning, streaking across the sky, lighting up the world for a moment, and then disappearing.

I can write. But how can I harness that kind of power with a pen? How can I, who was not there and who does not know, presume to tell these stories? How can I write the heat and the sweat on her forehead and the tears I can hear but not see and the brown blood on the red dirt and then life for decades she never thought she would see.… I looked down at those empty papers. If I write it, God, you will have to translate.

walk on the mass graves." In Rwanda, that's not as easy to do as you might think. So many graves, physical and emotional, remain unmarked.

How do I tell a story that does not yet have an ending? That may never have one? I would call the genocide unimaginable, but after months of stories I can imagine it all too well. I would call it un-human, but I'm discovering that the desire to destroy someone else is about as human as it gets. I would call what happened unforgiveable, but then I remember Agate’s stern reminder.

Only with God. Bursting with darkness and light After months of one-on-one interviews, I decided it would be useful for my evaluation to have some standardized data. Knowing that some of the women were illiterate, I devised a simple rating system, where I would read a question out loud and the women would just make a mark on a line—all the way to the left if they disagreed, all the way to the right if they agreed, and somewhere in the middle if they somewhat agreed and somewhat disagreed.

I passed out pencils to the group of women who had assembled. Some accepted them confidently, but others looked as if I was offering them a dead fish. I explained the instructions and asked if they were ready. A sea of blank faces stared back at me. Some held the pencil in their fists like a carrot, pointy side upward. Others balanced it between two fingers like a banana peel. Others had already set it aside, determined that this mzungu would not humiliate them.

Daily miracle The prisoners in Rwanda wear hot pink jumpsuits without irony. These are men who have killed and raped and planned acts of genocide, dressed like Prisoner Barbie. In pictures in news articles I had read before arriving, I thought this was funny. In person, this did not make them less terrifying to me.

It was not uncommon to see groups of prisoners out working in communities. In Rwanda, the prisons have been overcrowded since the genocide.

In fact, a year after the genocide in the town where I lived, the prison held four prisoners per square yard. In order to deal with the overflow of the accused, the government instituted a traditional legal system called gacaca, where essentially anyone who participated in rape, beatings, or killing, but not in planning for the genocide, could admit their crimes to the community, ask forgiveness, and then perform community service, like this road cleaning, for a few months while living at home. It's not exactly justice, but what would justice look like in a small country with hundreds of thousands of killers and hundreds of thousands of victims?

One day, while sitting on SEVOTA’s front stoop waiting for my interviewees, I saw a prisoner work group coming up the road, picking up trash. I was about to go inside so I could avoid the unnerving experience of greeting and making eye contact with a row of admitted killers, when my friend Alain came up to talk. We chatted for a few minutes about his time at university, the rental market in DC, and whether or not I should marry his youngest son.

He left to go finish his yard work, and Mama Muhire came out to sit with me. She spotted Alain across the street and said nonchalantly, "You know, he just finished his community service last month." My stomach dropped at the reminder that not every killer is wearing a pink jumpsuit.

"What did Alain do to require community service?"

She waved her hand dismissively, "He participated in the genocide. I Continued on page 47

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Love Which Enemies?

When it comes to forgiveness, what God wants is better than what “works� from a human perspective

by Craig Keener 30

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t was 3 a.m. I was flying across the Atlantic when I felt God challenge me that I didn’t really love my enemies. I was traveling to postwar Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) with my wife, Médine, a former Congolese war refugee. There we were scheduled to speak about ethnic reconciliation to 1,700 pastors in two key cities.

I have often taught about ethnic reconciliation, but usually through biblical passages that teach it among believers. How does one instead address a postwar situation where the church should also lead in reconciliation toward those who are not Christians? Jesus did not teach us to love only our fellow believers. Nor did he teach us to love only those who have not harmed us. He taught us to love our enemies.

That exhortation, however, really stuck in my mouth. How could I urge people to love their enemies if enemies had killed their loved ones?

Of course, loving mere critics is easier. Lately some of the “new atheists” have critiqued some of my writings, sometimes unfairly, but God has filled my heart with love for them. (I can understand their unbelief; I was an atheist before God revealed himself to me in Jesus Christ.) More dramatically, I have been beaten and had my life threatened on the streets for my witness, but it has never occurred to me to hate those who did these things. I was an agent of Jesus and was biblically ready to face suffering for his name.

Suffering for Christ individually is not the same, however, as having to endure the sufferings of one’s people. In September 2001, I experienced anguish as many of my dear friends in Jos, Nigeria, faced violence from jihadists (violence not related to the later conflicts in Côte d’Ivoire).

Such attacks continued periodically over the years, and though some younger members of the Christian community began to retaliate, including against Muslim noncombatants, many elders kept counseling peace and reconciliation. I had been dialoguing with a Nigerian friend who argued that nonviolence did not work in that context, because jihadists were happy to crush those they saw as weak. While I argued from Jesus’ teachings, he made a fair case that I was comparing apples and oranges, because this situation was closer to genocide. Although we agreed that killing noncombatants was wrong, I felt that I had little right to speak about reconciliation to people who had suffered so much.

Now, on the night that I was traveling to Côte d’Ivoire, God challenged one of my prepared messages, in which I would be touching only weakly on loving our enemies. I realized that I was touching the subject so weakly because I was a hypocrite. I did not love the jihadists who had attacked my Christian friends in Nigeria.

Examples from Congo’s civil war Before explaining how and why my heart changed that night, I should recount what we taught when we reached Côte d’Ivoire. Médine taught one of the sessions, and pointed out that you can love an enemy without ignoring their patterns of abusive behavior or inviting such behavior to continue. Although Joseph forgave his brothers, she warned, he prudently avoided trusting them until he could know that they had changed.

Yet Médine also recounted costly reconciliation in Congo. Shortly after her cousin was shot dead, Médine’s family fled into the rainforest, pushing her disabled father in a wheelbarrow. They remained refugees for 18 months, and their home and all their possessions were destroyed.

Often Médine walked many miles a day through snake-infested swamps and fields of army ants to gather food for her family; at any given time, a member was close to death from malaria, typhoid, or other illnesses.

And yet her father, who suffered most of all, always urged her to love and forgive everyone.

One foreigner she helped, Abubakar, was thought to be a spy for her people’s oppressors. After being beaten, he was left to forage for his own food. Once Médine overcame her fear, she regularly shared with Abubaker from her own meager supplies. She also helped others in need who were from the hostile region. Following Christ’s example, she explained, she could do no less.

Examples from the Bible and beyond In my sessions, I taught the pastors about ethnic reconciliation from the Bible, and in one I used Matthew’s gospel to teach about loving our enemies. Matthew climaxes with a commission to the nations, a commission for which his Jewish Christian hearers were probably initially less than enthusiastic. Depending on when Matthew wrote, many of his people were either being provoked to revolt or had been killed and enslaved by Rome in that revolt. In either case, Jewish people had good reason to hate Gentiles, yet Matthew portrays open-minded Gentiles from start (some women in Jesus’ genealogy and the Magi) to finish (the Gentile execution squad acknowledging Jesus as God’s Son).

Matthew, however, talks not just about any Gentiles but even about

Nonviolent resistance has not always “worked” by converting the enemies; neither did it “work” for Jesus.

Though he preached love of enemies, he was executed on a Roman cross as a rebel king. an officer in the Roman army who asked Jesus for a miracle (Matthew 8:5-13). Jesus not only granted the miracle but praised this officer’s faith. Some of Jesus’ more radical contemporaries could have viewed his response to this potential oppressor as betraying his own people. Jesus, however, foresaw the destruction to which the conflict between his people and Rome would lead a generation later.

Jesus offers the model for his disciples. If we love him more than our people (cf. Matthew 10:37), we must love personal enemies and even those considered the corporate enemies of our people.

I closed by describing one of my former students, now a professor in Nigeria. Some years ago peaceful protesters were gunned down in the Nigerian city of Kaduna. My student, Sunday Agang, was anxious for the safety of his wife and brothers, whom he thought might have participated in the protest. We later learned that they were safe, but at the time, Sunday had good reason to feel devastated.

As Sunday and I prayed together, I evoked biblical cries of the oppressed. “Rise up, O Lord, mighty warrior!” I cried. “Trample down the enemies of your people!” When I finished, Sunday prayed. “Oh God, forgive them!” he pleaded. “We know where we will be when we die, but our oppressors have no hope.” Sunday loved his enemies and prayed for

those who persecuted him. I was embarrassed. My prayer was biblical, but Sunday’s followed an even purer biblical path. The pastors listening to this story were moved by Sunday’s example.

Does nonviolence “work”?

I could not have taught this message with integrity had God not dealt with me on the plane. That night across the Atlantic, I struggled with what I was feeling and how I could communicate it once we reached Côte d’Ivoire. I weighed the different sides of the argument as I prayed. I knew I could not speak with authority on some subjects. I was invited not as an expert on the crucial subject of international peacekeeping but as someone who could teach what the Bible had to say about ethnic reconciliation. But though the concrete logistics of peacekeeping are obviously beyond my particular competence, for what it is worth, I still do not believe that the world dare remain passive during genocide. I believe that armed international peacekeepers are necessary in some settings, where the ideal of peace is not yet reachable. In a fallen world, standing for justice may mean protecting the innocent by an international community using force against the aggressors.

Nevertheless, the above concession does not reduce Jesus’ demand for me as a disciple to personally love my enemies. Nor is this demand only applicable where nonviolence “works.” Although nonviolent approaches are often neglected, when implemented they often bring peace and reconciliation, working to end a cycle of violence. At the same time, I think it is naïve to believe that nonviolent resistance always “works,” if by “works” we mean leading immediately to just resolutions. Gandhi and King succeeded in the settings they addressed; nonviolence did not run the same course in Tiananmen Square, and nonviolent approaches probably come too late at the stage of genocide. Nonviolence did not convert my oppressors when I was beaten on the street.

Even as I was weighing whether nonviolence “worked,” however, the Lord convicted me because I was not thinking as a disciple. Nonviolent resistance has not always “worked” by converting the enemies; neither did it “work” for Jesus. Though he preached love of enemies, he was executed on a Roman cross as a rebel king. He loved his enemies and even asked his Father to forgive them. That did not stop them from killing him. Jesus also insisted that part of what it means for us to be his disciples is to follow him to the cross (Matthew 16:24). He offers no promise that our enemies will change their minds and take us down from the cross before they have finished with us.

And yet here is the real challenge of our faith. Do we really believe that the cross is the final word? Do we believe that the cross is defeat, or do we believe that it is a perfect victory? Our Lord Jesus taught that we should depend on our heavenly Father for food and clothing; he exemplified perfect faith in the Father. He spent time healing the sick and blessing the marginalized rather than cultivating favor with the elite and arrogant.

The cross was the natural climax of such faith. Without physically resisting, he entrusted his care fully to the Father and depended on the Father to

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restore his life.

Loving enemies is not something we can expect nonbelievers to do, because for them the cross is a hopeless dead end. Loving enemies makes sense only for Jesus’ disciples, who can trust that whether or not love “works” in the short run, our heavenly Father will work out his purposes. Of course, other sages in antiquity did teach nonresistance of

Loving enemies makes sense only for Jesus’ disciples, who can trust that whether or not love “works” in the short run, our heavenly Father will work out his purposes. various kinds, and loving enemies does not necessarily prohibit all kinds of resistance. But genuinely, deeply loving our enemies makes sense only in a life of faith in a God who is not intimidated by Roman crosses and through the example of our Lord who summons us to follow him to the cross.

Even as I felt these points become clearer to me, God was still not done challenging me. As I kept praying, he reminded me that I owed everything to Jesus’ love for his enemies. While we were yet enemies, Scripture says, Christ died for us (Romans 5:6-10). No one took Jesus down alive from the cross; yet no act in history has been more central in God’s plan or has yielded greater fruit than the cross. I wept as I remembered that before I ever knew the gospel I was an atheist who blasphemed against God. Though I had been his enemy, yet God loved me, showed mercy on me, and brought me hope in Christ.

That night on the plane, I asked God to change my heart, to help me love jihadists. (What, after all, was Paul before his conversion, but a jihadist?) My heart did change that night—and not just toward jihadists. When I preached in Côte d’Ivoire, I couldn’t tell people that it is always easy to love our enemies. I couldn’t advise them on the logistics of peacemaking.

But as a disciple of Jesus I could call my fellow disciples to heed his our Lord’s teaching, which he lived out by his sacrifice for us.

Formerly at Eastern University’s Palmer Seminary, Craig Keener is a professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary and the author of 17 books and some 200 articles. His wife, Dr. Médine Moussounga Keener, was a refugee in her nation before their marriage; her story is being published in a book by Regal. Recently, Médine’s niece from Congo, Keren, joined the family.

Coloring Inside the Lines

by Matt Appling An art teacher on discovering beauty through the things that constrain us

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“Contour” by angrycrycrymonster.deviantart.com

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Whenever mothers tell their children to just “be creative,” or children whine because they’ve only been given three colors of paint, they are missing a very important reality about the neces­sity, nay the beauty, of constraints.

hen God formed the universe, he set limits on the sea to separate it from the land. He set the atmosphere around Earth to separate it from space.

And he created life. He made plants to be immobile, rooted to the ground. He made elephants with trunks but no hands. He made fish to swim but not to walk. He made cheetahs to run fast, but he gave them small hearts so they can only run short distances.

When God formed Adam from the dust, he didn’t make him the strongest or fastest animal. He made Adam rather delicate, with skin that needed shade from the sun and feet that needed protection from the ground. He made Adam to need to eat and sleep and follow all kinds of routines born of the limitations of his body and mind. And God told Adam and Eve that one day they would return to the dust.

God created a world restrained by gravity, constrained by innumerable physical laws. He created animal and plant life, each kind with its own strengths and limitations. And he created humanity to live and die by all kinds of constraints.

God created all of these constraints and limitations— and called them “good.”

That’s the lesson we didn’t learn as third graders. Or we forgot it and we’ve been paying the price ever since.

Whenever mothers tell their children to just “be creative,” or children whine because they’ve only been given three colors of paint, they are missing a very important reality about the necessity, nay the beauty, of constraints.

What would the universe look like without any constraints placed on it? Chaos.

The same is true of a piece of child’s art with absolutely no constraints. It is absolute chaos. Without the constraints of discipline, a child is wildly directionless and ultimately unhappy. Without the constraints of commonly shared morality, society falls into chaos.

It is the lines and constraints that make the universe orderly, society livable, children mature, and art beautiful. We call the constraints “design.”

The artist decides if he will create a representational or an abstract painting. That’s a constraint. He decides the style and the media he will use.

That’s another constraint. Then he decides the subject matter, and the constraints go on and on, and the design becomes more defined. If he desires to paint a tree, there are some essential limitations he will have to abide by in order to make his tree a tree. If he goes outside of those constraints, his tree will no longer be a tree but something else. The Sistine Chapel isn’t great because it’s both abstract and representational. It is amazing because it is a pinnacle in a very specific, limited, defined kind of art. The chapel is not supposed to be a modern piece of abstract art. If it was, it would be a failure.

A piece of children’s art becomes beautiful and refined when a child is taught to work within constraints, to create some lines, some boundaries, and color inside them, and to know when a piece of art is finished.

All the “good” constraints God placed on the universe (which we call “laws of nature”) create all the beauty we are privy to in God’s creation.

When God was creating the universe, he didn’t draw a line and call it “gravity” and then say, “Dang, where’s my eraser?” because he really wanted to see what a planet would look like without gravity (or because he just wanted to see all his little people humorously fly off the planet). He preferred to

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draw lines in ink. When God drew a line in the sand and made a promise or said, “I will do this,” or “I will never do that,” he didn’t go back and color outside the lines he had drawn.

What if the very constraints on your life, which defeat and frustrate you, which you try to rebel against to no avail, have been placed on your life because they are good? What if the constraints on your life are there to actually make your life beautiful? What if you learned that even the mistakes that have marked your life can be redeemed? What if you learned, rather than be defeated by the lines that have been marked on your life, to color inside the lines?

The most beautiful marriages are colored within the lines of fidelity and commitment. Being a good parent means coloring vigorously within the lines of parental duty. Becoming a good leader, employee, craftsman, or anything else requires that you master coloring within some very specific lines that define the job.

But the human folly is always to try to erase lines and constraints that have been drawn. God tells us to color inside the lines, that our lives will be better if we stay inside the lines he has drawn. We instead scribble around and always with consequences. Our lives turn out a little less beautiful.

Children and adults react to constraints in different ways and with different effects.

Some children try to constantly push against the constraints a teacher or parent puts on them. Many adults do the same thing, dreaming of a life without any limitations. Other children and adults are defeated by constraints and limitations. They adopt a fatalistic attitude that life is hopeless and meaningless. They settle for laziness and their lives remain unfulfilled.

And then there are the children and adults who are able to discern the good, positive boundaries that God has placed on their lives, and the negative, unnecessary boundaries they place on themselves. They learn to let go of the self-defeating pursuit of trying to erase the lines in their lives, or pretend they are not there, or that they do not matter. It means realizing that inside your lines—the lines of money, talent, time, energy, health, job, beauty, disability, and every other line that you see as a limit—there is still a lot of room for vibrant, joyful color.

People prove this every day. They defy the odds. They do amazing

things despite some limitation or awful circumstance. They become famous and people see them on the news and read the book and watch the movie about their lives because they are amazing.

People prove this every day. They defy the odds. They do amazing things despite some limitation or awful circumstance. They become famous and people see them on the news and read the book and watch the movie about their lives because they are amazing.

You know these people: the woman who escapes exploitation and then helps other women; the child who achieves victory despite a disability; the man who overcomes years of abuse and rewrites his future.

Of course, you and I also know the other kind of person, the kind of person who is defeated by lines, the person who never changes his life, who stays hopeless, who just makes excuses. This is the kind of person who wants encouragement, maybe even pity, but never invests those things into real change. The only thing he creates is excuses.

There have been times in my life when I have fallen into a slump of excuses and apathy, and the result is always the same. If you are in the habit of creating excuses, nurturing a victimhood mentality and just generally being lazy because you think your life is unfair, please be careful.

People may encourage you. They may tell you that things will get better, that you are smart and capable. But people, even the encouraging ones, like to think they are making a difference. You are unlikely, despite all your determination, to find many people who will encourage you to not change.

If they can see that their encouragement is having no effect on you, they are more likely than not to give up altogether, and then you will have no pity, no encouragement, and still no change in your life. You will just have those same lines and boundaries, but no color.

Perfect vs. better For the first hour of my school day I prepare. I am very analytically minded, which I know is unusual for an art teacher, but I don’t know how I would get anything done if I were not so analytical. At 7:30 a.m. the room is quiet and serene. I leave half the lights off as I feed the little red Beta fish, a gift from a trio of fourth-grade girls. I do some cleaning, reorganize materials, hang up new art work, look over my notes for high school art history. I keep a journal of the lessons we do and make notes on where I went wrong as a teacher.

Before becoming a teacher, I visited my mother’s second-grade classroom and smirked at how much control teachers exercised over students.

So much energy seemed to be wasted, in my opinion, on lining up quietly or using the bathroom at the proper time. Now I pour over seating charts for my own classroom with the strategy of a chess master. Which students should sit next to one another? Which students could help one another?

Which students are toxic together? How do I keep those two students as far apart as possible? There are a million combinations and considerations to make.

I create demonstrations of the projects the students will do. Every project, for every grade level, I work through ahead of time, dozens of art projects every year. It allows me to see how kids should be instructed and what pitfalls they may encounter. It gives them a visual reference to know what their goal is. And it never hurts for the teacher to be able to show work that impresses kids.

The other side of the art teacher’s world is an all-out assault on the senses. “Bombardment” is the word that comes to mind. An hour at a time, kids are jostling for attention, instruction, or validation. There are messes

Finished is better than perfect.

to manage. There are problems to solve. I am a teacher, a trainer, a janitor, a counselor, and a drill sergeant. It’s just me against the forces of anarchy.

Finally, the day is done, and I drive home, weary. My mental camcorder plays through the day’s conversations and confrontations. I am happy with some interactions I had, and I mentally replay those scenes a couple of times. Others I wish I could erase and rewrite. I think about students who are struggling and need special encouragement next time. On the way home, the simple prayer that has been repeating in my head on a loop all day continues: God, please make me a better teacher than I was yesterday.

I desperately want God to answer that prayer. I want to be more compassionate, more motivating, more knowledgeable, more disciplined, more everything.

I want to be better because I start thinking about this perceived need we humans have, to push against lines and create excuses, and I think about the last constraint placed on us, the last line that we will have to learn to color inside if we are ever going to leave anything behind worth looking at—that line is imperfection.

As humans, our lines are clearly drawn, and perfection is not inside the lines. If you are wishing for perfection in any pursuit, your life will end unfulfilled.

I see myself in the perfectionist students. They are struggling and frustrated and erasing marks on their paper that won’t go away. I quietly whisper, “Finished is better than perfect.” If they continue to focus on perfection at the expense of all else, they will achieve nothing.

I’ve slowly learned to let go of perfectionism. You can get a perfect score on a science project, but who can say if a painting is perfect? There certainly are no 100 percents awarded in life. I cannot pray to be a perfect teacher. I cannot even pray to have one perfect day as an art teacher. I’ve learned simply to pray that God would help be to be better than the day before.

As artists and as humans, we have to learn to color inside the line that is imperfect, messy, or even a mistake. Nothing in your life will ever be just right. There will always be pressures and conflicts, making errant smudges and splatters on your life. Living a “good” life is not about living a “perfect” life.

An amateur artist tries to erase a mistake. A master artist learns how to work with a mistake.

Matt Appling teaches pre-K through sixth-grade art, as well as high school art history. His is the author of Life After Art: What You Forgot About Life and Faith Since You Left the Art Room, from which this article was excerpted, just released by Moody Publishers (MoodyCollective.com), by whose kind permission it appears. Appling lives with his wife, Cheri, in Kansas City, Mo.

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Leading Ladies

What Will It Profit a Woman…?

In the recent election, Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” quote emblemized America’s either-or perspective on economics: We could have Romney’s entrepreneurial spirit or Obama’s generous “socialism,” and never the twain shall meet. Well, folks, here in Durham, N.C., we have a woman who embodies both.

Eighteen years ago, Wendy Clark followed her older sister from their hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., to North Carolina. She studied for a year at Wake Forest University and a semester at UNC-Chapel Hill before she quit college to start Carpe Diem Cleaning as a business that makes a difference in the world.

From the time she was 4 years old, she had felt an urge to offer her life as a sacrifice of thanks to the Creator.

“There was that gift of the eternal that was put in my heart at a young age,” she says. “I knew that life was not about me.”

After her dad died when she was 14, grief led to many fights with her mom, and she contemplated suicide. A verse in Lamentations saved her life: “It is good for one to bear the yoke in youth.”

Those words gave her the strength to endure her mourning, but they also gave her a long view of her vocation. College, she thought, wouldn’t prepare her for what she felt called to do—build a business that would provide jobs to underprivileged young people.

“When I was a kid I hated cleaning. I still do today. But it was worth doing to start a business.”

Within five years of launching Carpe Diem, she achieved her goal of employing other people to do the cleaning so she could run the back-office side of the business. Today she has 33 employees and 400 clients throughout North Carolina’s Research Triangle region.

Clark takes care of her workers. She has a fleet of eight company cars to get them to and from jobs. She pays above-market wages. Every Thanksgiving, she hires a professional photographer so her staff can have family pictures for the

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holidays.

“I want a place where people are loved, accepted, and can have hope,” she says. “I’m a nonprofit person in a for-profit body.”

Five years ago, she opened the John O’Daniel Exchange in a World War One-era, 14,500-square-foot, brick warehouse in crimeplagued Northeast Central Durham. What used to house a hosiery mill, then a wholesale farmer’s market, now houses 15 tenants, including grassroots nonprofits like ActionNC, Food and Water Watch, the office for SEEDS youth-education garden, the anti-human trafficking agency Transforming Hope, the refugee-resettlement group World Relief, and the local volunteerism catalysts at DurhamCares.

Even though the Exchange also collects rent from a lawyer, design and marketing firms, a flooring contractor, a hair stylist, and a videographer, and even though Carpe Diem grosses over $1 million a year, Clark has chosen to live in the challenged NE Central neighborhood on a moderate income.

“I live in the ’hood. I drive an old car. I’ve chosen to live a different lifestyle that helps make that dollar stretch,” she says. “The banker knows my numbers, and they yell at me for how much I give away.”

Clark says her profit drive and her big heart are perfectly compatible. In fact, she says, it’s because she invests so much in her businesses that she’s able to do more good.

“If more people were able to reach financial

sustainability, we’d be a lot better off,” she says.

“If I had been worried all along about getting a paycheck, I would never have been able to build this business.”

With her Ron-Swanson-style libertarian spirit, she had a hard time accepting the $177,000 grant from the City of Durham that helped her renovate the Exchange. But the neighborhood needed jobs, and the city needed new tax revenue, so she went for it.

“It wasn’t just a handout—it was an investment that would yield them returns,” she eventually reasoned. “I can handle government funding for capital improvements, but I think the day-today operations need to be sustainable.”

One of Carpe Diem’s challenges is the language barrier for its mostly Hispanic workforce.

“We need more Americans,” she says. “Our biggest competition for employees is the welfare system. There is no motivation to work. Americans don’t want to clean.”

She didn’t want to clean either, as an ambitious, entrepreneurial 20-year-old. But she saw it as a path to success.

“By building my business, I am taking care of myself and others,” says Clark. “Offering employment is the best way to care for people.”

Citing an idea from Francis Schaeffer, she says that if Christian business-people paid their workers more and gave away less to charity, the American economy would be much better off, and more of us would have the freedom to be generous.

“The way Christendom is set up right now, it will implode,” she says.

For Clark, it’s not profits vs. people, but profits for people.

Wendy Clark

Jesse James DeConto is a writer and musician in Durham, N.C. Find his work at jessejamesdeconto.com.

“Porch” by stefan10.deviantart.com

When tall, blond American Jeff Sundell began spreading the gospel among Tibetan Buddhists in the politically sensitive and remote villages of the Himalaya Mountains of northern India and Nepal, he stood out like a sore thumb. Realizing there was no way he could reach this people group alone, he began instead to train local believers to make disciples and plant churches.

Sundell sought out best practices from church planting movements around the world. He learned to identify leaders not by their knowledge and gifts but by their obedience. Local believers with little or no education faced persecution with courage and boldly declared the gospel—they learned to obey what they knew. Sundell discovered that a disciple who is obeying the little he knows is on the road to maturity.

Over the years Sundell and the leaders he trained equipped thousands of local believers to share the gospel and plant churches. Across the region tens of thousands of new disciples formed new simple churches—many of them in regions officially hostile toward Christianity.

In 2009 Sundell and his family moved back to the US and began applying what he had learned to their new situation. They moved to an old mill town in North Carolina that had been in decline since the ’70s. Unemployment and substance abuse were rampant. With help from the police, Sundell identified the three toughest neighborhoods in the county and chose them as his mission field.

Sundell met with pastors in the wider area to cast vision and offer training to anyone interested.

He gathered a small group of men and women on Monday mornings and began training them in how to share their story and Jesus’ story. Then they went out prayer-walking, expecting God to lead them.

They walked, prayed, and looked for opportunities to connect with people who were far from God. These neighborhoods are known for their pit bulls and meth labs. As Sundell and his coworkers met people, they asked, “If God could do a miracle in your life today, what would it be?” Then they prayed for people on the spot.

Sundell recruited his parents, Norm and Paula, to the team. On their first day out, they visited an African American neighborhood. The day didn’t begin well when Sundell’s “Yankee” father asked two middle-aged women, “How are you guys?” They

thought he was addressing them as men and began cursing him. (A real Southerner would have asked, “How are y’all?”)

Norm and Paula persisted in the conversation, however, and eventually one of the women, Ruth, asked them to pray for a severe pain in her chest. The other asked, “Just pray I’ll get through the day.” Sundell’s parents prayed for them and promised to visit again.

A week later Norm and Paula returned and met a man named Randy sitting out on his front porch drinking at 10 a.m. Randy’s porch was the place to hang out if you wanted to party. He invited them to come back to share some stories about Jesus.

They moved on and visited Ruth to pray for her again. Word spread that they had returned, and a woman named Annie came looking for them. She’d heard there were some folks praying for people and wanted them to pray that God would provide a stove for her and her family. They prayed for her—and for a new stove. A few days later a friend of the Sundells heard about the need and donated a stove.

The next week Sundell’s parents were at Annie’s house enjoying the cookies she had baked in her new stove when Ruth came banging on the door. She wanted prayer. The doctor had just told her that the pain in her chest was breast cancer.

They prayed for her.

Norm and Paula began a simple discovery Bible study with Randy and his drinking buddies on Randy’s porch. They read stories about Jesus and asked, “What does this say about God? What does this say about people? Is there a command

Making a Difference

Church on the Porch

to obey or an example to follow?” Norm had them reading the story of the four friends who lowered the paralytic through the roof so that Jesus could heal him, when Randy realized he needed to do something about Ruth’s condition. Since being diagnosed with cancer, Ruth had missed all her medical appointments out of a combination of fear and her drinking problem.

Randy and his buddies knew this, and when they read the story of the four men who brought their friend to Jesus, they knew what they had to do.

Before Ruth’s next appointment, they stayed up all night to make sure she didn’t get drunk. The next morning she arrived at her appointment on time.

The Bible studies on the porch continued until one day Sundell’s dad got a call from Randy saying, “I believe! I believe!” Ruth also gave her life to Christ.

Six weeks after his conversion, Randy told Norm, “You know I’m an alcoholic. Would you pray that I’d get healed?” Today Sundell’s parents have a ministry on Randy’s porch, praying for people and asking that “alcohol would taste bad in their mouths.” They also pray for people to find work, and God answers.

Randy, Ruth, and other new believers in the community consider that porch to be their church.

Where the parties once happened, now no one is allowed to drink. Instead, those who are still drinking bring their bench as close to the porch as possible so they can listen in while the church meets around God’s word. Over 20 people have been baptized, and disciples are meeting in three simple neighborhood churches. One of the groups meets in a hotel room.

Sundell and his coworkers continue to prayerwalk the community. They pray for needs, share their story, share the gospel, and make disciples. Discipleship can be a challenge as new believers grapple with drug and alcohol addiction and fractured relationships. But Sundell never compromises what the Scripture teaches; he knows that making disciples takes time.

This column was adapted from the book What Jesus Started: Joining the Movement to Change the World (InterVarsity Press, 2013) and appears by kind permission of the publisher (IVPress.com).

Steve Addison leads MOVE, a mission agency devoted to training and deploying workers who multiply communities of Jesus’ disciples everywhere.

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Off the Shelf

Word versus Deed

by Duane Liftin Crossway Reviewed by Benjamin L. Hartley Five years ago, when Duane Litfin served as president of Wheaton College, he expressed a concern that the balance was being lost between “word and deed” in evangelicals’ witness. Word versus Deed: Resetting the Scales to a Biblical Balance is a book-length treatment of that concern. Litfin is correct about the need for clarity concerning the verbal and nonverbal dimensions of Christian witness. Unfortunately, this book befuddles more than it clarifies. The most significant problems with this book can be placed in three broad categories: historical, terminological, and biblical.

While not intending to provide a thorough historical treatment of this issue, Litfin briefly retells in his early chapters the standard history of American evangelicalism that has its origins in the early 20th-century fundamentalist movement and its opposition to liberal Protestantism’s embrace “[The gospel] must be incarnated in the conof the “social gospel.” This is only part of the crete details of our lives, enacted by Christ’s story, however, and leaves out large swaths church before a watching world.” - D. Liftin of Mennonite, Methodist, holiness, and Pentecostal movements in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For many of these groups the contrast between word and deed was never so extreme as it was for those groups that emerged from the fundamentalist movement. Their history is instructive.

A second, more serious, problem in this book is a terminological one. Litfin rightly states the importance of clarity in the words we use to express Christians’ need to be faithful in word and deed. Ironically, his book lacks precise and accurate language. For example, while Litfin entitles his work Word versus Deed, these are not in actuality oppositional concepts. Litfin admits that it is important for Christians to be faithful in both word and deed, but by using the term “versus” repeatedly in this book he confuses the issue. His imprecise use of the term “preach” is also distracting. In early chapters he argues against persons who state that one can “preach the gospel” with deeds. The problem here is with the metaphorical use of the term “preach.” Of course one cannot “preach the gospel” with deeds. The act of preaching on Sunday morning everywhere is a verbal activity. In the second chapter Litfin finally gets more precise and states clearly that “[t]he gospel can only be communicated Continued on page 42

The Triumph of Christianity

by Rodney Stark HarperOne Reviewed by Joshua Gonnerman Every story worth telling is worth telling well, and Rodney Stark is worried that the story of Christianity has often been told poorly. The Enlightenment in general and Hobbes and Voltaire in particular have exalted their own times and ideals by maligning what went before: Religion belongs to oppressive regimes and unwashed masses, and this shackle on the advancement of civilization and the development of the individual mind must be shrugged off as reason begins to shine.

Stark, a noted sociologist of religion, knows that this old chestnut does not mesh with observable facts, and he sets out to provide a counter-narrative.

The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion is compelling and Stark’s style engaging. The chapter on the Spanish Inquisition provides strong analysis of the extensive texts and records from Aragon and Castile to argue that the Inquisition was exemplary in moderation, humanity, and due process in an age where minority religions were widely persecuted. While it is not uncommon to note that Christianity has not (as secularists would have us believe) been antithetical to science, Stark goes further by noting the disproportionate numbers of believers among scientists and mathematicians in contrast, as he dutifully informs us, to social scientists. He also locates this fact in the Judeo-Christian belief in a God who is a rational creator of a rational world. He devotes considerable effort to situating Christianity in the Greco-Roman world, where its original appeal was to the large numbers of hellenized Jews in the empire for whom Christianity offered a bridge between their Jewish roots and the Greek world that surrounded them. Unfortunately, Stark neglects to treat the relation between Christianity and the philosophies of late antiquity, a necessary element of any attempt to situate it in that world.

Sometimes Stark over-argues his case. While he is right that the Crusades were not the utter blight on human history that we are taught, he pushes the stick too far in the other direction, concluding flatly in their favor: “No apologies are required.” His paradigm of the Church of Piety and the Church of Power is a useful tool for thinking about lax and strict elements in the church, but he sometimes almost seems to forget that there were not, in fact, two clearly delineated rivaling ecclesial bodies.

The most striking element of Stark’s story is his strong and compelling argument that Christianity is thriving today. Indeed, it is stronger now than it has ever been, and it is precisely a capitalistic “free market” of religion that makes it strong. While Stark’s claims have a certain plausibility, one of the pillars of this counter-narrative is Continued on page 42

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The Space Between

by Eric O. Jacobsen Baker Academic Reviewed by Rusty Pritchard If fish were scientists, the last thing they would discover would be water.

Thinking about the built environment is a bit like that. If you look at cities and merely see buildings and roads, Eric Jacobsen has written the book that will change the way you experience human settlements. The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment describes how the buildings, sidewalks, roads, parks, and other components of a cityscape have traditionally unfolded in configurations that fit the scale of human bodies and the communities that they comprise. Since the middle of the 20th century, cities—North American cities in particular—have been increasingly designed not as habitat for people but as habitat for the automobile, with brutalizing effects on children, the elderly, the disabled, the poor, and pretty much everyone else.

Many Christians have rediscovered “the city.” Thinkers like Shane Claiborne, Bob Lupton, and Tim Keller, for example, write about good kingdom living in dense urban spaces. Christians have thought most about how to inhabit these places; they haven’t thought so much about how to create them. Jacobsen explores the forces that structure good places, the sine qua non of community, health, and human flourishing; more than that, he nests this in a theological understanding of the human experience, telling us from a theological perspective how the environment shapes social possibilities.

For many Christians this book will be their first exposure to the principles of New Urbanism—the application to new development of ideas gleaned from the Old Urbanism of the world’s liveliest and most beautiful cities. The book’s significance comes from its role not just as a succinct and readable primer but also as a tutorial in how to think Christianly about the issues raised. The longing for meaningful places where community thrives is part of human nature but is also a reflection of the imago dei in which we are created.

Jacobsen doesn’t dwell on the significant downsides of the status quo. If deaths by car and deaths by obesity were rightly linked to the built environment we’ve permitted, instead of being attributed to accidents or poor choices, we would recognize our plight as an epidemic. Likewise, the urgency of building environments that Continued on page 42

Debt

by David Graeber Melville House Reviewed by Jenell Paris In Debt: The First 5,000 Years anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber contemplates the origin of money and debt, spinning out to great questions of human reciprocity, social bonds, indebtedness, and freedom. Graeber’s ideas are controversial, sometimes strident, but so is his life: Active in labor, anarchist, and anti-capitalist endeavors, Graeber was an early leader in the Occupy movement.

Debt challenges conventional wisdom about money, namely, that it was invented to streamline systems of barter. Graeber marshals evidence from history, economics, and ethnography to argue instead that humans have long used various systems of credit “The real question now is how to ratchet things that predate money, showing how debt—monetary or otherwise—shackles individual lives and leads to social unrest and revolution. His brilliant down a bit, to move anthropological perspective shows contemporary debt crises—personal, toward a society where people can live more by national, and international—to be anything but natural or inevitable. It’s a working less.” - D. Graeber consequence of modern capitalism, not human nature or cosmic intent, that so much of our lives are measured with precise monetary calculations and so many of our exchanges are impersonal and market-based. Humans created debt, its meanings, and its consequences, and we can use our ingenuity to change our world.

On a larger level, Graeber leans toward a post-capitalist world that he describes as “the beginning of something…” Like many academics, he is stronger on critique than vision, but the hazy vision he describes is nonetheless compelling. He describes a world in which exchange is quantified less precisely, in which less of human life is reduced to market exchange. In its place is a resurgence of human friendship and gifting, where people give what they’re able and take what they need. He draws on the biblical example of Jubilee and historical examples of debt forgiveness to argue that debt should not be a circumstance of birth, nor a lifelong, generational condition worthy of moral and legal punishment.

Of particular interest to Christians, Debt draws especially poignant connections between monetary debt and religious, or existential, debt. Not attemptContinued on page 42

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Word versus Deed continued from page 40

The Space Between continued from page 41

with words.” But then, on at least three other occasions, Litfin states explicitly that the gospel must be “lived”; this would suggest that the gospel involves more than words.

Finally, it is in his assessment of Scripture that Litfin perhaps makes his most significant errors. Litfin notes that many Old and New Testament texts about poverty and the poor refer to the poor among the Israelites or Christian community rather than to outsiders beyond these communities. This is true, but Litfin understates the outward direction of God’s mission, which includes concern for the poor throughout the Bible. He sees this outward focus only in the biblical books of Proverbs and Job, but the book of Jonah, the second half of Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, Ruth, and the stories of Melchizedek, Jethro, and Cyrus are all examples of God’s mission extending beyond the Israelite community. It is true that many of these stories do not speak directly to the problem of poverty, but I believe Litfin portrays a sharp line between insiders and outsiders that is not warranted in Scripture.

Litfin is imbalanced in other ways as well. For example, he suggests that a theological position which espouses a “preferential option for the poor” is the result of a superficial numerical counting of Bible passages on poverty rather than being a respected part of official Roman Catholic social teaching (not only from “liberation theology movements of the 1960s”). Litfin provides a critique of this teaching in a footnote, but not in a very thorough manner.

In spite of these problems—and perhaps because of them—this book may still be helpful for evangelicals who are searching for a different sort of “balance” between word and deed. Litfin rightly asserts that issues of biblical interpretation must be given serious attention. My hope for this book is that other evangelical leaders will use it to identify how and why they differ from Litfin. This reviewer found the book clarifying for that reason. Others may as well.

the breaking demographic wave of seniors can navigate is not emphasized. But by focusing mostly on the positive vision of what could be, he is probably more convincing.

No group should be allowed to attempt “Christian community development” without reading this book. No church should proceed with buying or renting property without understanding the principles outlined here. No Christian should think about moving house without coming to grips with the rich theological and systematic worldview Jacobsen helps to construct.

Jacobsen writes with a scholar’s acumen and a pastor’s heart. In his first book, Sidewalks in the Kingdom, he took the ideas of New Urbanism and put them out on the bottom shelf where everyone could reach them. In this book, he is still talking to everyone (as a pastor does), but he is also raising the intellectual level of the conversation, drawing us into a dialogue with our communities and our neighbors about how to create a flourishing society by seeing something we didn’t see before—like those fish seeing water for the first time.

A natural resource economist, Rusty Pritchard is the CEO of Flourish (FlourishOnline.org), a ministry that equips Christians to engage the world of environmental science and action.

Debt continued from page 41

built on imperfect historiography: The picture he paints of the Middle Ages as a time of profound irreligion needs stronger evidence. He primarily draws upon two sources for this: reports on ecclesiastical visitations in Lutheran Germany and the rhetoric of medieval preachers and writers who promote reform. While it is always dangerous to assume continuity over the course of several centuries, assuming continuity in the face of the kind of religious upheaval effected by the Reformation seems particularly problematic. As for the medieval reformers, insufficient attention is given to the likelihood that their rhetoric overstated the case.

While the evidence that Christian practice is more robust today than ever may be a bit shaky, Stark’s statistical analysis and argumentation for the vitality of Christianity today is strong. The mainline denominations (which, Stark drily notes, might be more accurately described today as “sideline”) are declining, but more conservative branches have experienced an explosive growth in both traditionally Christian regions and mission territory. While this age is not without its challenges, Stark is right that we should hear a rallying cry for a vital and dynamic faith, not the death rattle of a tired old religion.

ing to support a Christian view, Graeber finds it wrong to say that people are born indebted, with a debt they can’t possibly pay, whether to society or to God. In Christianity (and other world religions, too) he sees double messages—on the one hand, uplifting of the poor and cyclical elimination of debt (the Old Testament Jubilee, for example), but on the other hand, affirmation of an existential debt, that humans are born indebted to an inevitably unpayable degree and so must depend on Jesus for full payment.

He hopes redemption can mean something more than buying something back or settling a debt.

“It’s really more a matter of destroying the entire system of accounting,” he says. Graeber’s critique of Christian teachings are well worth consideration; at the very least, he exposes ways in which Christian language of salvation and redemption are sometimes trapped in the moral logic and vocabulary of the worldly systems they wish to critique.

The most obvious application of Debt may be to protest capitalism and live toward some new global economy, which is just what Graeber and his most loyal readers are doing. For those of more ordinary lives and views, Debt is a powerful encouragement to resist the reduction of “all human relations to exchange, as if our ties to society, even to the cosmos itself, can be imagined in the same terms as a business deal.” We could strengthen the reciprocal, nonmonetary relationships in our personal spheres. In the public realm, we could support initiatives that reduce the crushing burden of debt, whether for slaves, the global poor, or developing nations. This is urgent, too, for the richest nations, where corporate, governmental, student loan, and consumer debt dampen the happiness of even relatively wealthy lives.

Joshua Gonnerman lives in Washington, DC, where he is pursuing a doctorate in historical theology at the Catholic University of America.

Jenell Paris is professor of anthropology at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa.

Benjamin L. Hartley is associate professor of Christian mission at Eastern University’s Palmer Theological Seminary.

The Triumph of Christianity continued from page 40

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ESA's 40th Anniversary Gala and Experience Registration First Name* _____________________________________________________________________________ Last Name* _____________________________________________________________________________ Email* _________________________________________________________________________________ Street* _________________________________________________________________________________ Street 2 ________________________________________________________________________________ City* __________________________________________ State/Province* _________ Zip* ______________ Guest Attendee #1: ________________________________________________________________________ Guest Attendee #2: ________________________________________________________________________ (Must choose same package below for guest(s))

Please choose: (for more details or to register/pay online visit ESA40.com) ❑ $329.00 FULL REGISTRATION WITH (ON CAMPUS) LODGING: Includes Friday night Gala dinner and roast, all Saturday events and meals, and breakfast and events on Sunday. Dorm-style lodging (i.e. shared rooms and restroom facilities) at Eastern University. Rooms will be pre-assigned and check-in details will be e-mailed. ❑ $199.00 STUDENT ONLY RATE WITH LODGING: Includes Saturday meals and events, and breakfast and events on Sunday, does not include the Friday gala. Valid student ID must be presented at check-in. Dorm-style lodging (i.e. shared rooms and restroom facilities) at Eastern University. Rooms will be pre-assigned and check-in details will be e-mailed. ❑ $209.00 PASTOR RATE (FRIDAY AND SATURDAY EVENTS ONLY): For our ministry friends who need to be at work on Sunday, this price includes the Friday gala and all Saturday events (including breakfast, lunch, and dinner). ❑ $249.00 STANDARD REGISTRATION: Includes Friday night Gala dinner and roast, all Saturday events and meals, and breakfast and events on Sunday. (Group rates offered at nearby hotels if hotel lodging is preferred.) ❑ $119.00 STUDENT ONLY RATE: Includes Saturday meals and events, and breakfast and events on Sunday, does not include the Friday gala. Valid student ID must be presented at check-in. ❑ $75.00 One ticket to the Friday, July 12, 2013 Gala and roast of Ron Sider. ❑ $140.00 Two tickets to the Friday, July 12, 2013 Gala and roast of Ron Sider. ❑ $250.00 Four tickets to the Friday, July 12, 2013 Gala and roast of Ron Sider.

Please make all checks payable to ESA & mail registration form with payment to P.O. Box 367, Wayne PA 19087

Nancy Sleeth is cofounder, with husband Matthew, and managing director of Blessed Earth, an educational nonprofit based in Lexington, Ky., that focuses on stewardship of the earth.

The organization works to build bridges in two directions: helping people connect their love for the Creator with a love for creation, and helping those who love creation connect with the Creator.

Sleeth specializes in leading workshops on the nuts and bolts of stewardship practices at home, work, school, and church and facilitating women’s retreats on Sabbath practices, simplicity, and sustainability.

PRISM caught up with Sleeth to ask her about the hows, whys, and whats of doing holistic ministry.

What is one challenge that you encounter in working with the people you do?

Many Christians were raised to believe that dominion over the earth means we can do anything we want with it. But dominion implies great responsibility.

If we borrowed a car from God, we would not want to return it with dents in the bumper, an empty gas tank, and cigarette stubs in the ashtray. The same principles apply to the earth.

The earth belongs to the Lord, not us; we are tasked with passing it on to future generations in as good or better shape than we received it.

From Genesis to Revelation, the Scriptures are full of passages showing God’s love for his creation, God revealing himself through creation, and God tasking us to care for his creation.

One way we can show our love for God is to love what he loves—this glorious earth he created to sustain all of creation. And one of the most practical, daily ways we can show love to our global neighbors is by not wasting resources that were designed to be enjoyed by all.

Can you tell us about a mistake you've made in your years of doing ministry, and what it taught you?

The biggest mistake we made in ministry was to stop taking our weekly Sabbath. Our Stop Day

Ministry Matters

Divine Wake-Up Calls: Nancy Sleeth

“Sabbath is a gift we are invited to open 52 times a year. We will never lose the Sabbath again.”

was a central part of our family coming to Christ, the source from which our lives spring and the highlight of our week.

When my husband left his position as an ER doctor to answer God’s call to heal the earth, it turned our lives completely upside down—our vocations, where we lived, our use of resources, and our purpose in life all changed radically. Because we felt such urgency in our new calling, we said yes to everything.

For about six months, I made the mistake of scheduling Matthew 24/7. When we missed our Sabbath, his physical, mental, and spiritual health quickly tanked. Fortunately, we got a couple of divine wake-up calls that set us on the right path again.

God wants us to live a 24/6 (the title of my husband’s latest book!) life. Sabbath is a gift we are invited to open 52 times a year. We will never lose the Sabbath again.

How would you define success in holistic ministry?

For me, success means that my faith and way of life are indistinguishable.

In my most recent book, Almost Amish, I write about 10 principles of Amish communities that I admire. While they are not a perfect people, the Amish try to integrate their faith with everything they do—their vocation, their connection to the earth, their proximity to family, and their commitment to community all emanate from a desire to follow Jesus. One example is their use of technology as a tool rather than allowing it to rule them like a master; this helps their com-

munity live in this world but not of it.

At Blessed Earth and in our family’s daily lives, before we make any decision, we ask ourselves two questions: Will this bring me closer to God? and Will this help me love my neighbor?

The answers always lead us down the right path.

What are you most excited about in your work right now?

Our two major projects at the moment—the Seminary Stewardship Alliance (SSA) and Creation Care Year. The SSA works with seminary leaders across North America to teach, preach, model, and hold each other accountable for good stewardship practices. Together we will be training up the pastors of our 300,000 houses of worship to be good stewards of God’s green earth.

In Creation Care Year, we dig in deeply with one community each year, offering classes, sermons, forums, lectures, panels, and events on a whole range of creation care issues. For 201314 we are partnering with the National Cathedral in DC. We have funding for four more years, so I’d like to invite your readers to let us know if their church would like to partner with Blessed Earth.

Learn more at BlessedEarth.org.

Ministry Matters gets into the hearts and minds of innovative holistic ministry practitioners. The May/June issue will feature Pamela Leon of El Refugio in Guatemala City.

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Washington Watch

A New Task for the Obama Faith-Based Initiative To the surprise of many and the deep distress of some, the faith-based initiative (FBI) is now clearly a bipartisan effort. With roots going back to the Clinton years, it was a prominent commitment of George W. Bush, and it is now entering the fifth year of its Obama variation. That continuity is encouraging. Yet to remain a lively commitment of the federal government to equal protection and respect for faith-based services alongside secular organizations, the Obama FBI must take on a new mission.

The continuity of the FBI, despite the fierce political polarization of our time, demands notice. After all, church-state relations, particularly when government funds are involved, are a contentious matter. And yet the Charitable Choice rules passed by Congress and signed into law

by President Clinton were adopted by President Bush and then expanded to apply across the board to federally funded social services. And while candidate Obama expressed some concerns about those rules, President Obama, after making a few changes, ratified them in a special executive order (November 2010).

Even the most contentious rules, concerning the freedom of religious organizations to consider faith when hiring and firing staff, have been maintained by President Obama.

That freedom is deeply anchored in the law and court cases and prohibited only in some federal programs that fund private groups to provide services. Candidate Obama promised a major change, but (perhaps because of that long legal history and because so many of the federal government’s partners are religious organizations for whom a faith-full staff is essential) he has withstood criticism and not overturned the rules and disrupted the partnerships.

The Bush FBI worked hard to push into government operations a new energy and direction: The flow should be bottom-up rather than top-down in the relationship between government and the private organizations that provide assistance to distressed and poor families and

communities. The federal government should assist the good work already being accomplished by civil society organizations and not see them simply as cheaper tools to do what the government already has decided to do.

The Obama administration’s commitment to “civic partnerships” is a new version of this idea. These are nonfinancial relationships between government and faith groups that promote creation care, disaster preparedness, job-readiness programs, and help for returning ex-prisoners. President

grassroots and faith-based organizations to consider federal partnerships; by making some grants smaller and less prescriptive; and by prominently placing on the faith-based office websites the church-state rules and a clear explanation of those rules.

But somehow, despite the Obama administration’s stress on expanding partnerships, it is no longer so clear from websites and publications what the level playing field rules are and what they mean. You now have to be an expert in researching federal data resources to find the Charitable Choice and Equal Treatment rules and even simply to find Obama’s executive order

The federal government does not know everything, so it should listen to the views offered by America’s diverse religious and secular communities.

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Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is another expression of this idea: The federal government does not know everything, so it should listen to the views offered by America’s diverse religious and secular communities.

Yet there are problems, too, with the Obama FBI, and there is a big new challenge it should take on. The problems stem from the administration’s (over)commitment to governmental activism. Despite good intentions, the Obama FBI’s outreach to community and faith-based organizations and leaders has on balance really been more top-down than bottom-up. The consultations and conference calls have too often taken a “how your organization should support the policies and programs of the Obama administration” approach and too infrequently taken a “how federal resources can help you carry out the projects and priorities that you regard as most necessary” tack.

Another worrisome trend is what I’ll call federal government entropy. Without constant countervailing pressure, the government’s funding and partnership practices default to bigger and more secular: a preference for bigger grants and bigger partners; for state and local government agencies rather than private groups; for secularism rather than the complexities of working with faith-based organizations.

The Bush initiative actively worked against this entropy. The fight was carried on by a wide range of public efforts to educate federal, state, and local government officials; by hosting public events to welcome

setting out the fundamental principles for faithbased partnerships.

Yet letting these rules and principles disappear from sight allows the default government practice to become the rule once again—a bias in favor of the big, the governmental, and the secular. That is not good for robust faith-based and neighborhood partnerships.

The new challenge is to lift up religious freedom. The faith-based office ought to press HHS officials and Obama to broaden the religious employer exemption to the contraceptives mandate to extend to all religious organizations— not only churches but also faith-based service organizations. Recently proposed changes are not adequate. It should take the lead to ensure that when the president issues an executive order for employment nondiscrimination by federal contractors, he will include robust protections for religious organizations.

Surely it is true that to make progress in addressing poverty, sickness, and injustice in our own society and abroad, the government must collaborate with faith-based as well as secular organizations. That means that in the next four years of the Obama FBI, special attention needs to be paid to protecting the religious freedom of faith-based services.

Having served both the Bush and Obama administrations, Stanley Carlson-Thies is founder/president of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance and a senior fellow with the Center for Public Justice.

OVERHEARD “Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion — without transposing the enemy from the sphere of the monstrous… into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When one knows [as the cross demonstrates] that the torturer will not eternally triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person’s humanity and imitate God’s love for him. And when one knows that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.”

-Miroslav Volf in Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon Press, 1996) “As fallen and vulnerable human beings in a world marred by sin and death, the endurance of suffering and death is necessary for us all, and courageous endurance is an answer to the question ‘What is left for me to do when my own strength is exhausted, my burdens can’t be lightened by human resources or power, or when faithfulness to the good demands that I suffer rather than betray what I love most?’”

- Rebecca Konyndyk Deyoung in Being Good: Christian Virtues for Everyday Life, Michael W. Austin and R. Douglas Geivett, eds. (Eerdmans, 2012)

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

-C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory “Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person's throat... Forgiveness in no way requires that you trust the one you forgive. But should they finally confess and repent, you will discover a miracle in your own heart that allows you to reach out and begin to build between you a bridge of reconciliation...Forgiveness does not excuse anything...You may have to declare your forgiveness a hundred times the first day and the second day, but the third day will be less and each day after, until one day you will realize that you have forgiven completely. And then one day you will pray for his wholeness....”

- Wm. Paul Young in The Shack (Windblown Media, 2007) Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly.

The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”

- Henri J.M. Nouwen

“One and Then Another” continued from page 35 don't remember exactly."

She then stood and in her loud, clear voice yelled across the street for Alain to come over and greet her. He smiled and ran over. Then in the daily miracle that is Rwanda, this man who committed acts of genocide embraced this woman whose husband was killed in the genocide.

I don’t have words for that. It is so much easier to see people in categories: widow, rapist, orphan, killer, mzungu. Yet, I’m learning that a story is not a destiny, and a story without an ending, well, it leaves room for hope. I don't know how yet, but I want to learn to look at people and ask not just what their story is, but what their story could be.

Individual acts On my last day in Rwanda, I made the rounds, visiting the SEVOTA women in their homes to say goodbye. They live in houses whose walls and floors are made of mud, with a sheet of tin over the roof and sometimes a little fabric across the doorway. They offered me the best seat they had, often an overturned bucket or a rickety bench. They all embraced me, thanked me for coming, and wished me good luck at finding a husband in America. They were eager to please me and seemed apologetic for their rundown homes and half-clothed children, as though their poverty were their own fault. However, Mama Muhire, who was no longer impressed by my whiteness, called me out in my seat of privilege. As a tiny, bentover woman named Emérit walked us to the door, Mama Muhire took her hand and asked me, "Stéphanie, when you go back to America and you are in your house with tile floors and an indoor toilet, what are you going to tell your friends about us?"

Here's the truth: I don't know. I don't know yet how to explain Rwanda, the people there, or what they mean to me. I don't know how to reconcile the kindness I experienced with the evil I heard so much about. How can such extremes coexist, not just in the same community but in the same person?

There is so much goodness and so much pain that I don't know any magic words to explain this heart-shattering fullness. The words I do have come from a quote on the wall of a genocide memorial I visited. It said, "The Nazis did not kill 6 million Jews… Nor the Interahamwe a million Tutsis. They killed one and then another, then another..." If I accept that is how the genocide happened, as a series of individual acts of hate, it becomes even more terrifying. Then I have to stop imagining a faceless mob that swept the country, and think about Alain, who one morning decided to pick up his machete and go look for his neighbor.

But this quote gives me hope too, because the SEVOTA women showed me that this is the same way reconciliation happens. Rwanda's future is composed of a million individual choices to forgive. If Agate can forgive the people who took her family, if Yvonne can forgive the men who raped her and gave her AIDS, if Mama Muhire can forgive the man who killed her husband, and if millions of other victims can forgive millions of their neighbors, well, then maybe Rwanda can finally close up its graves.

This is not an ending. And praise God for that.

(Author’s note: With the exception of SEVOTA and Mama Muhire, all other names have been changed, because it was not possible to obtain permission from every person to share his or her story.)

Stephanie Marienau Turpin works in International Development, giving her the opportunity to work throughout Africa, including Rwanda and, most recently, South Sudan, the world's newest country. She loves reading, writing, and traveling to new places. Stephanie lives in the Boston area with her husband, John.

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Ron Sider

Resigning from AARP I’m a senior. And I’m mad. In fact, I am resigning from AARP. AARP has about 38 million members and is one of the biggest, most influential lobbies in Washington. It has done many good things for older Americans, but in some important ways it is just plain wrong—selfish and guilty of intergenerational injustice.

As Fareed Zakaria pointed out in an October 2011 column in Time, the federal government spends about $4 on every senior over 65 and only $1 on every child under 18. “That is a statement about our priorities,” Zakaria rightly says, “favoring consumption over investment, the present over the future, ourselves over our children.” Partly as a result of this, the poverty rate for children (22 percent) is much higher than that for seniors (9.7 percent).

That is not to say we should abolish or privatize Social Security (pensions for seniors) or Medicare (healthcare for seniors). Both are highly effective government programs. Without Social Security, about half of all seniors today would fall below the poverty line. Because of Social Security, less than 10 percent of seniors are poor. Before Medicare began in 1965, more than half of all seniors lacked health insurance. Today, almost all enjoy this security. Those are wonderful results from highly successful programs. (See my Fixing the Moral Deficit: A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget for more details.)

But there are serious problems that must be faced. We have a large, unsustainable federal budget deficit. If we continue current patterns, by 2025 all federal income will be needed simply to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid (healthcare for poor Americans), and interest on the national debt!

So we must make some changes. We need both tax increases and cuts in expenditures.

That means most of us will have to sacrifice some. (I say “most” because we should not balance the budget by cutting effective programs for poor Americans.)

But AARP is using its huge lobbying muscle to oppose reasonable changes in Social Security and Medicare.

AARP opposes increases in the modest

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payments seniors make for their Medicare, even for seniors with annual incomes over $85,000!

We certainly should not increase the monthly Medicare payments for lower-income Americans, but people with an annual income of $85,000 can afford another $50 or $100 a month. AARP says, “No way!”

AARP opposes a reasonable proposal to discourage unnecessary use of doctor visits and medical tests by seniors. Medicare does not cover all medical costs for seniors. So seniors buy “Medigap” insurance to cover the uncovered costs. That is good up to a point, but when Medigap covers all the additional costs, too many seniors use medical services unnecessarily because it costs them nothing. So reformers propose a change that would require seniors (depending on their income) to pay some initial deductible and then a copayment to discourage unnecessary usage of services. AARP says, “No way!”

Why? One reason is that AARP makes tens of millions of dollars by endorsing insurance companies selling Medigap.

AARP opposes modest cuts in Social Security payments even for seniors with large additional income. Social Security payments for lower-income Americans should be increased.

But rich seniors with large additional income could easily afford a modest cut in their Social Security income. AARP says, “No way!”

No matter how much other income seniors receive, part of their Social Security income is tax-free. Is there any reason why a senior with a total income (Social Security plus other income) of $100,000 should not pay income tax on all of their Social Security income? AARP says, “No way!”

There are other issues, too. But

you get the picture. AARP is a selfish lobby demanding things for seniors even though modest sacrifices would help us reduce the deficit and enable us to spend more on crucial things like better education for our children. In fact, John Rother (longtime chief lobbyist for AARP) suggested as much in 2011 and promptly lost his job, because selfish seniors protested loudly, and AARP quickly backpedalled.

Seniors like that are saying, “I’ll keep everything I have. Let the children suffer. Let my grandchildren pay my bills.” That is intergenerational injustice. It is time for seniors like myself who care about justice to send AARP a similar message: “No way! We reject that selfishness.

We are ready to make some sacrifices for our children and grandchildren.”

I’m resigning from AARP until they change.

I hope every senior who cares about intergenerational justice will do the same.

Please go to EvangelicalsforSocialAction. org/resign-from-aarp/ and join me in sending a message to AARP and Washington.

I also hope that young people will talk to their grandparents about this. Ask Grandpa and Grandma whether they think spending four times more on a senior than on a young person is fair.

Ask them to write to AARP and our politicians.

It is time for an intergenerational dialogue on intergenerational justice.

Ron Sider is president of ESA and professor of theology/public policy at Palmer Seminary of Eastern University. His most recent book is Fixing the Moral Deficit: A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget (IVP, 2012).

PRISM Vol. 20, No. 2

Mar/Apr 2013

Editorial Board

Miriam Adeney

Tony Campolo

Luis Cortés

Richard Foster G. Gaebelein Hull

Karen Mains

Vinay Samuel

Tom Sine

Eldin Villafane

George Barna Rodney Clapp Samuel Escobar William Frey Roberta Hestenes John Perkins Amy Sherman Vinson Synan Harold DeanTrulear

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A Publication of Evangelicals for Social Action The Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy www.EvangelicalsforSocialAction.org Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University

All contents © 2013 ESA/PRISM magazine.

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