R eflections from the Editor Unshakable Listen. Can you hear the joists creak? The windows shudder? Yep, the big bad wolves are out there again—out there still—huffing and puffing, threatening to blow the house down. You follow the news, you know their names: Unemployment, Foreclosure, Debt, and the big daddy of all them all, Despair. Even those of us who do not lose our job, home, savings, or sanity often succumb to that last one. Each wolf has its minions: pricey CEOs, unscrupulous mortgage dealers, usurious lenders. The latter are the focus of this issue’s cover story—the loan industry sharks who systematically target and prey on single moms, the working poor, and SSI/public assistance recipients. Advocates of the payday and title loan industry say—and they are correct in this—that the poor will always need quick cash to cover emergencies. But it’s what they don’t say that is so nefarious. When advertising their “free” or “discount” loans, for example, they don’t say that the average advance will need to be paid back at over 400 percent interest. When they show photos of gleeful people clutching fistfuls of $100 bills, they don’t show the tears and anguish a borrower will begin to feel within two weeks of taking the loan. And naturally they don’t talk about the bait-and-switch tactics that allow them to advertise one kind of loan while offering another. You don’t have to be ignorant, foolish, or oblivious—as some people would like to believe is the case—to fall into their clutches. No, just ineligible or in too much of a hurry for a bank loan...and desperate. Horror stories abound of hardworking folks getting trapped on a running wheel of debt. What don’t abound are stories about groups that offer alternative loans and how they can free folks from financial bondage even while educating them in essential fiscal skills such as saving, avoiding hidden fees, and investing. But we’re going to change that here and now. In these pages we celebrate the small but growing number of innovative faith-based programs that are providing viable substitutes for carnivorous lending practices.
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The God-given creativity of the people devising and administering these programs—and the results they produce—will do more to chase the despair wolf from your door than most of the news we hear these days. Likewise, the community-redemption efforts we discover in another of our features—“Repairing Broken Walls”—reveal what a committed group of people can accomplish when they follow the upside-down ways of our Savior. Renovating and moving
into a house in inner-city Indianapolis or Albuquerque may look like a bad investment from a financial-planning perspective, but not from a kingdom-building one. It’s positively glorious to see how God’s economy plays out within genuine, Christ-centered community. It’s also proof that the antidote to those furry, fire-breathing beasts at our door is holistic solidarity—real connection through real community in the body of Christ. Not because there’s safety in numbers, because there isn’t. Ask a group of cows that are being rounded up for slaughter; ask a group of paycheck-to-paycheck folks who are being targeted by payday lenders—and they’ll tell you that being part of a crowd can just make you easy pickings for the predators. No, there’s no safety in numbers, but there is safety in connectedness. When we put our heads together to solve problems; when we line our shoulders up against some great barrier; when we make our bed, knock heads, and break bread—together—we are strong.
Kristyn Komarnicki
Like everything else Jesus calls us to do—love our enemies, die to live, get at the end of the line in order to arrive first—living in community is counterintuitive. Joining hands with those who have “less” than we do initially makes us feel vulnerable—until we begin to see the things they have that we not only lack but also desperately need: faith, flexibility, humility, whatever the case may be. Living in full view of others also makes it hard—no, impossible—to hide our flaws, fears, and shortfalls. Lifting our small voice to protest injustice, to do battle with global Goliaths like AIDS, or to advocate and pray for people in war- or disaster-torn countries thousands of miles away from us—these things require courage, creativity, and the conviction that, in the long run, it all matters because we’re building something eternal when we build Christ’s kingdom. Thank God for all the everyday folks who are living precisely this way, enterprising, innovative, faith-fueled folks whose lives—tattered and road weary as they may be—nonetheless “shine like stars in the sky” (Phil. 2:15). These are the kinds of stars I want to dance with (sorry, Jennifer Grey and Derek Hough). There’s quite a line-up of just such folks in this issue of PRISM. So pull up a chair and gather round to hear their tales— from Haiti to Croatia, from Zambia to New Mexico. We’ll light a fire in the chimney, warm ourselves with a big pot of stone soup, and call out in chorus to the wolves that would harm us, “Huff and puff all you want. This house was built on the cornerstone of Christ, and it cannot be shaken!”
Truly he is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken. Psalm 62:6 Kristyn Komarnicki is editor of PRISM, a job she loves because it allows her to divulge a passion for sniffing out Christ’s grace, truth, and joy in some of the hardest places of this hard world. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three sons.