Like most worthy endeavors, it started with an idea. The forum: a book club with several friends from church. The book: <God’s Politics>, by Rev. Jim Wallis, founder and editor-in-chief of Sojourners – a faith-based organization and publication whose mission is "to articulate the biblical call to social justice."
Little did we know at the time that what started as a mild undertaking amongst peers to keep the heart and mind engaged would lead us to Pentecost 2007, a forum organized by <Sojourners> in Washington D.C. of preachers, activists, students, and politicians committed to eliminating poverty by placing it at the top of the national agenda. To our surprise, each of us had registered separately only to discover later that we would all be attending the same event – hardly a coincidence, but confirmation, rather, of a common underlying desire not only among us, but Christians at large in America, to realize a deeper meaning of faith and church.
In a country whose distrust for the church has been spawned and exacerbated by sex scandals involving top clergymen, an austere Religious Right that bullies private faith into the laws of the land, and a "Christian" President whose administration – marred by scandal, deceit, and evidence of torture – has ushered the country into what the majority now deems an unjust war, Wallis’s book emerges as a refreshing, almost prophetic voice that reveals the dichotomy of Christianity in America.
Wallis offers an alternative approach to the integration of faith and politics, one rooted in love and justice, and more accurately aligned with the prophetic vision of the gospel. He urges Christians to reclaim their faith from the polarized viewpoints of the Religious Right, which he accuses of hijacking, misrepresenting, and pigeonholing Christianity into two narrow issues – abortion and gay marriage – and leveraging the Christian response to these social issues to get its candidates elected.
In the cyclical process of securing political power to promote its agenda, the agenda itself has strayed from the fundamental message of the gospel, and morphed into something suspiciously non-Religious and similar to traditional Republican values. Since when was Jesus a proponent of pre-emptive war, tax cuts for the rich, privatized social security, and capital punishment?
On the other hand, neither is Jesus a member of the Democratic Party, which, to its dismay, has so far distanced its policy making from a dialogue of values that its agenda has lost the moral vitality required to reach voters. According to Wallis, faith must remain independent from partisan loyalties. We must endorse just policies, not just politicians. Rather than endorsing a particular candidate or party, the church should mobilize movements that force politicians to endorse a gospel agenda for each issue. He cites the Civil Rights movement as the perfect example of the church mobilizing to uproot racial injustice and effect real systemic change, monumentalized by the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Whereas the Religious Right movement sought to enforce laws that might shape the collective moral conscience – a top-down strategy that has proven ineffective – the Civil Rights movement shaped the collective moral conscience to enforce changes in the law.
Faith, therefore, must inform our politics on all the issues across the spectrum, from fiscal policy to foreign relations, poverty to the environment, abortion to capital punishment; and the only standard by which we ought to measure the merit of each policy is the moral truth articulated in the gospel.
Wallis opened the conference with a passage from Luke 4, in which Jesus utters his first public words or, as Wallis puts it, His mission statement: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." This was Jesus’ core purpose, His mantra. And yet, in our neighborhoods and cities, are our churches acting as agents for the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, and the oppressed?
In America, our overemphasis of personal piety and private faith has minimized the significance of converting that faith into – or perhaps completing it with (James 2:14-26) – public works of justice for the poor. "We serve a God who is personal, but never private," Wallis would say. Preaching on Amos 24, Rev. Freddie Haynes said that "your vertical connection ought to have horizontal consequences… Righteousness that is personal manifests itself in justice that is social." Or in the words of Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, "Justice is simply applied righteousness. "In essence, each of these preachers was articulating a call to manifest personal faith through public works both on a grassroots and policy level. Christians should be on the front lines in the streets and in congressional offices fighting injustice and advocating for the "least of these."
Indeed, the church has never lacked moxie when it comes to overseas missions and charity initiatives, but how can the church engage society, and all its institutions of wealth and power, in ways that will dismantle the unjust structures that sustain poverty and oppression? Would not the channeling of our resources into such visionary work exemplify a greater testimony, a greater reason for reluctant believers in a hopeless world to see truth in a church that fights for justice with a love that radically defies reason?
Rev. Romal Tune, CEO of Clergy Strategic Alliances, who trains pastors and churches for the ministry of civic participation, distinguished "just generosity" from "social justice." whereas the former deals with alleviating the effects of oppression, the latter deals with combating the systems of oppression that render the effects. Thus, rather than simply visiting prisoners and holding Bible studies in prison, we ought to ask how can the church mobilize to reform the prison system, the justice system, and the education system – and all other institutions entangled in the web of injustice – to keep prisoners out of jail in the first place? On which streets must we march, with which leaders must we plead?
In our nation’s capitol, my friends and I saw the vision come alive in a burgeoning movement of Presbyterians, Baptists, Mennonites, Episcopalians, Pentecostals, etc. – all unified by a clear call that pierces through petty denominational differences – discussing, articulating, and ultimately enacting the biblical vision of social justice in their respective neighborhoods and communities. They were responding to a call so lucid and potent that it is quickly leaking into the halls of justice and policy where even the politicians feel obliged to change the way they talk – and vote – about faith and poverty.
Perhaps the clearest indication of the movement’s "arrival" was the main event of the conference, a Candidates Forum jointly hosted by <Sojourners> and CNN, in which the three leading Democratic Presidential nominees – John Edwards, Barak Obama, and Hillary Clinton – were individually pressed on live television to explain how they planned to cut poverty in half in 10 years. The next day, after a march and rally on Capital Hill, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, addressed the conference by quoting St. Augustine: "Unless politicians were in office to promote justice, they were just a gang of thieves." Here was the church engaging society, pushing the politicians to endorse a gospel agenda.
Inspired by what we witnessed – the possibility of the body of Christ to exact real change in the world – my friends and I returned to New York equipped with vision and eager to take action. All that was left to ask was, "What now?" How do we apply this vision in our church and in our local communities? We started by committing to meet weekly to continue refining the vision and plan for the creation of a social justice ministry at our church. In addition to the newfound vision, however, the conference raised some hard questions about our own church and community that we will have to answer over the next few months before proceeding any further with talk of a ministry.
Every church has a statement of faith: what is our statement of practice? Every church has a budget: does our budget reflect Jesus’ mission statement in Luke 4? For whom does our church exist: for those within or those without? Do we exist to be fed, or do we exist to feed? Are our congregation’s finances structured in a way that benefits our neighbors, or merely institutionalizes a comfortable sub-urban Christian community, oblivious to suffering? Would a homeless person feel welcome at our church?
Some questions are more elementary, but I am ashamed for not knowing the answers to them. Who are our neighbors? What is the history of our community? Who are "the least of these" in our community? What percentage of our activities as a church involves the pouring out of our time and resources, and what impact are we having on our immediate community, not in a remote slum overseas, but in our neighborhood; and if not in our neighborhood, in our zip code; and if not in our zip code, in our borough; and if not in our borough, the next borough over? How do the people in our neighborhood perceive our church? Do they recognize us by our love? Do they even know we are a church? Or are we simply noisy neighbors who clog their streets with traffic on Sunday mornings?
We wonder why the message has lost its touch, why no matter who speaks at the pulpit the message fails to take root; and though inspiring stories about personal piety and insightful theological remarks may keep our spirits soaring high for a time, we settle back into complacency and doubt, wondering if this Christianity thing is real. The message has become empty words; profound spiritual truths have become clichés. Why and how? We have neglected to act upon the core message of the gospel to feed the poor, clothe the naked, and seek justice in the world. A message is only reinforced by its praxis, and praxis validates the message. In the absence of praxis, the message no longer sticks.
We should start where we are, with our neighbors, simply by forging relationships before we start tackling issues. And as we get to know our neighbors – who they are, and where they’re from – we will get to know their needs; and once we know their needs, and begin to pour out our resources to meet them, the message that we preach, which we already know deep within our hearts, which we hear week in and week out, will finally come alive, and we will be fed by feeding others.
As those who fall on the privileged side of society, born in the richest country in the world, it is our duty to be concerned about those born into less fortunate circumstances. Lynn Hybels, wife of Bill Hybels, head pastor of Willow Creek Community Church, said, "The more you’re blessed, the more you need to be a blessing to others." If we are a church that our neighbors know and love, would fancy high-tech evangelism campaigns be necessary to lure in those who do not believe? Our actions will have already spoken volumes and won them over.
The challenge for the next generation is not to build homogeneous multiplex mega-churches, nor to build more churches that carry out an insular existence, but to transform our already existing churches into communities that radically impact their surrounding communities, not only through charitable giving or short-term mission trips across oceans, where engagement is conveniently optional or short-lived, but actual face-to-face encounters with those around us who are oppressed.
They are there if we look for them, if not in our town, the next town over. And once relationships are forged we will be much more inclined, if not obliged, to tackle the systemic injustices that cause and sustain the oppression of our neighbors. What an awesome testimony it would be for the 21st century church to emulate the nature of a Christ who lived with the poor and disdained injustice. Indeed, the church should have no problem filling its pews if it truly exists for those who were meant to fill them.
It is at this juncture of vision and action – always the most irreconcilable point – that this account must end, for what happens hereafter is left to be seen. The vision is clear; the road to attaining the vision, not as much – bound to be strewn with obstacles and mistakes. But as Oswald Chambers writes, we must live in the inspiration of the vision until He fulfills it through us, even and especially through our weaknesses and shortcomings.
