Archive | April, 2010

Life Together Conference

by on April 29, 2010

Earlier this year I was able to connect with the great people over at Englewood Review of Books when they did a review of The Boundary-Breaking God.  In concert with Englewood Christian Church, every spring they put on a conference to engage in an issue practically relevant to Christian life, and this year’s theme is Life Together:  Being the People of God in the 21st Century.  Here’s the idea, from the event website:

“For many years now, the individualism of American culture has exerted great influence on the way we approach life, even in matters of faith. However, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, there are some churches that are regaining a sense of our calling to be communities of God’s people, who share life together in meaningful and redemptive ways. However, the forms that these churches take are often quite different. We have invited representatives from a wide variety of such churches to share stories from their life together and to lead us in a conversation about what it means to be communities of God’s people in the twenty-first century.”

The conference will be Friday June 11-Saturday June 12 in Indianapolis and registration is limited to 350 so book now.  Cost is $50 if you register before May 15, after which it is $65.  I’ll be joined by John Nugent, Professor of Old Testament at Great Lakes Christian College; Sally Schreiner Youngsquist, Pastor of Reba Place Fellowship Community; and Matt Tebbe, Pastor of Life on the Vine Community.  In addition, there will be workshop speakers including Will Samson and others.

It’s going to be a great conversation, and I’d love to see you there!

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How much do your tomatoes cost?

by on April 26, 2010

Last Thursday I had the opportunity to tour the town of Immokalee, Florida, where the overwhelming majority of our tomatoes in America are grown.  The farmworkers in Immokalee work unbelievably long days under grueling heat.   They usually wake up at 4:30 or 5:00am, head to a pick-up site where they hope they will be chosen for work that day, and then are charged $7/day to ride the bus to the fields.  They spend the next 8 hours hauling buckets of tomatoes from the field to the trailer.  And for every 32-lb. bucket of tomatoes they pick, they are paid 45 cents.

Forty-five cents.

To put that into perspective, if they were to make minimum daily wage, they would have to gather over two and a half TONS of tomatoes.  Usually, time or tomato supply doesn’t allow that to happen.  After they have finished picking for the day, they ride back on the bus, usually arriving home between 6-8pm.  These men work from 5am to 6pm, doing hard labor, to be paid quite literally nothing.

We drove around Immokalee and saw the trailers that serve as the farmworkers’ homes.  A regular trailer (not a double wide) usually holds 8-15 occupants who have mats laid out one after the other along the length of the trailer.  They are required to pay $55/week (A WEEK) for this.  And let me be clear- these are not nice trailers.  These are falling down, non-air-conditioned, rusting and rotting trailers.  I wouldn’t pay $55 to own one.  And do the math:  8 men at 55/week is $1760/month.  If there are 15 men, it’s $3300/month.  So if these men were in Dallas, rather than living in that trailer, for that kind of cash they could rent in a high rise like this for $1200/month, including a pool and a workout room and other amenities:

Instead, they are paying for this:

Two years ago just blocks from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers building where we were sitting, a man was arrested and charged with slavery after men escaped the truck trailer where they were held against their will for 18 months.  The men were taken to work in fields by day and padlocked in by night, forced to use one corner of the truck trailer as the bathroom.  There were no windows.  There have been 7 slavery prosecutions in Florida in the past 12 years, which is why people call Florida “ground zero for modern day slavery.”

So when you go to a restaurant, or a fast food place, or your grocery store, or your child’s school cafeteria, and you see a tomato, think of these men.  And feel angry enough and guilty enough to do something about it.  Demand that you will not eat tomatoes that come from farm growers who treat their workers like this.  So far, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King and Subway have agreed to buy tomatoes only from growers who adhere to a Code of Conduct.  Whole Foods Market, Bon Appetit and Aramark have also signed on.  If you eat or purchase tomatoes anywhere else, your voice is needed.  Find out how to help here.  If you’re a person who asks grace over your meals, shouldn’t you be a person who asks grace for those who have toiled for your meal?

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What is emerging in the (C/c)hurch?

by on April 19, 2010

Today I’m participating in a Synchroblog to discuss what is emerging in the Church.  You can find other great posts from a diverse group of voices by checking out the linked FB page.

“Life seeks systems so that more may flourish.  Life is in the business of creating more life.  An interesting way to observe this phenomenon is in a system’s creation of niches- specific areas or talents distributed with clear lines of ownership.  In business, we talk about niches as a competitive strategy.  We advise one another to find our unique contribution and move it into the world.  We talk about the need to beat out others for our space and the need to dominate in our market.  We see differentiation in nature and interpret it as the key to competitive advantage.  We look at the prevalence of narrow specializations and see it as the road to supremacy.

We couldn’t be more wrong.  Life creates niches not to dominate, but to support…They aren’t competing to destroy one another.  They are using their differences to find new ways of living together.”

-          Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Keller-Rogers, in “A Simpler Way.”

When eleven-ish years ago a group of people decided to begin describing this conversation that had been happening about church and culture and philosophy and life as “Emergent,” it was a very intentional word choice.  The concept of emergence is widespread across many disciplines- art, architecture, philosophy, economics, and of course, science- and in each unique environment, it speaks of a new possibility that arises out of the fullness of all the old possibilities.  It is not, as I said in my post below, a totalizing word.  It is rather a word that seeks a reality that makes room for as many possibilities as one could imagine.  It even holds within it the old possibilities rather than pushing them away.

It has become messy when we have mistakenly placed a layer of competition atop our spiritual emergence, because then it has become bickering about authority and rightness and book deals and platforms and church politics and whose leader is best/coolest/said it first.  That happens when you are human.  And it particularly happens when you are an American human taught that the most competitive one always wins.  That’s why I deeply appreciate the wisdom of Wheatley and others who remind us that we have often assumed nature and life are competitive just because we are, and that in reality nature is a far more cooperative organism than we’ve likely given it credit.

In the broadest way possible, I believe what is emerging in the church is this very realization- the realization that the Realm of God and the world God has lovingly created is not about competition but about contribution.  It is the realization that those things that make us unique do not need to be leveraged against one another in battle for supremacy but rather accessed in service to one another for fullness of life.  It is the hope that we can find ways to create communities and organizations and life systems that allow a multiplicity of possibilities to spring forth in niche ways- and that we can then use these differences to find new ways of living together.  What is emerging is the desire for us to be the kind of people that work with one another rather than against one another, and that we can absolutely find ways of doing this without giving up our own identities.  It is the beautiful possibility that we can have our niche and a diverse supportive community, too.

On a personal level, it speaks to my deepest prayer, which most days goes something like this:  “Loving God, teach us to choose life rather than death, to value the power of collaboration over the pain of competition.  Give us the courage to lay down the cadre of weapons we’ve created to dominate each other, and courage still to take up the path of the One who leads us toward you and one another in love.  Amen.”

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Big Tent God: A Response to the recent Sojourners article

by on April 19, 2010

I have spent some time reflecting on the recent Sojourners article about the emerging church conversation being a primarily white (and male) conversation.  I have heard this critique many times in the past, and I highly doubt this last attempt at jabbing the emerging church for its perceived hip white maleness will be the last.   I will agree with those who have said that it’s becoming obvious that the latest cool trend is to declare something negative about Emergent, and I am not remotely surprised that people are using this trend to sell magazines and bolster blog traffic and whatever else people do with fads.

I will also say, for the record, that I found the cover art appalling and sensationalist.  I felt that it chose for the purposes of emotional reaction (which then garner buzz and profit) to ignore the many people I care about in this conversation who happen not to be white.

So my first retort is to say that there are countless people who consider themselves part of the emerging church conversation who happen not to be white.  There are so many, in fact, that I believe it strange for anyone to be able to write an article so thoroughly ignoring them.  (There is, of course, the matter that the article in question does in fact quote women and minorities throughout, which others have mentioned as ironic double-speak.)  I also feel the need to offer a reminder that in our American cultural melting pot, it may be best not to take everything at perceived face value.  Though one may not count me as a “minority” at first glance, my mother is Lebanese and a first generation American.   In plenty of everyday ways, I can give you examples of how I am still learning what “mainstream American culture” does because we’re still fairly new at it.   In terms of my mom’s religious heritage, we are brand new to the Jesus family, and much of our extended family still remains Druze Muslim, so we don’t have the first clue about “white Christian culture” either.   We spent the last thousand or so years NOT being Christian, and we only have about fifty years of practice behind us, if that puts it in perspective.  All of this is to say, many of us come from families who straddle two worlds and cultures and religions, regardless of how “white” we may look on the outside.  To write an article that seemingly places us all in an evangelical white person category is entirely unfair.  I, for one, am neither of those things.

My second comment:  At no point in this movement did any of the much-maligned white male leadership declare that the shift that is taking place in our culture is primarily or even predominantly American, white, middle-class, evangelical, or whatever other moniker one would like to add.  OTHER people have said that; but those of us invested in this conversation have never said it about ourselves.  Just because we may be speaking from one or more of the previously mentioned categories in our own contexts, it does not follow that we have any designs to define the entire movement as such, or even to totalize our own experiences and conclusions about the movement.  The emerging church conversation is not and never has been a totalizing conversation.  It is about seeking to make sense of the global shifts taking place by finding common themes, but it is also about listening to a wide spectrum of voices so that those common themes do not become one note over and above the rest, but a symphony of notes that combine to declare new music altogether.  That begins, as any thought does, inside one’s own context, but the intention has never been to stay there and set up camp.  The longer a person has spent in this conversation, the more aware they become of the conversations going on in Africa and Australia and Latin America and Europe and in countless small communities of faith across this globe that are working to make meaning out of our increasingly complex world.  As Phyllis Tickle often reminds us, this religious rummage sale is more far-reaching than most people first realize.  We may speak from an American perspective, but we speak into a global conversation.

On a more theological note:  I believe in the global Church, meaning that I see those of us who follow Jesus as one large organism called to live in community with one another.  I realize that for much of our shared ecclesial life, we have constructed borders like denominational lines and theological doctrines and yes, geographical boundaries including cultural identity.  In some ways, these borders are real, in that they help us make sense of the ways we are different.  In other ways, these borders are false, because they often mask how much we hold in common.  Clearly, I am of the mind that even our Christian borders present a false reality if we really follow the One who has redeemed all of creation, so boundaries are not particularly my favorite thing.  The story as I see it, and as I wrote, is usually about us being the ones who put lines in the sand and God being the One who lovingly walks through them anyway.  Because God is this way, we ought to be people who by now have learned to see one another, not as “types” but as fellow travelers, even if we disagree with how someone else happens to be traveling at the moment.  So theologically speaking, I find the argument about the exclusivity of the emerging church movement to be confusing, as every friend I have in the conversation shares this belief in the global Church, and in the difficulty of human-constructed boundaries, and in our hope to become people who listen to one another as we travel the road.  That by no means implies we have lived fully into that desire, but it does attempt to say that we truly desire it.

As far as ecclesiology goes, I believe the emerging church, and Emergent Village in particular, advocates a Really Big Tent.  We are happy to debate a matter of theology, but we do so by first seeing both parties as under the same Tent.  In the past year those of us at Emergent Village have been using the metaphor of the Village Green as one way of describing and encouraging this Really Big Tent-ness.  The Green is a place we can gather for conversation and shared life.  There are no gates on the green.  No secret handshakes or passwords, no preferred cultural identities.  If you want to come out and play on the Green and share how God is showing up in your own story, you are more than welcome to do so- you are encouraged and invited to do so, even.   And we hope to continually find ways to foster meaningful connections with one another while we are all there, expanding our understandings of how big this story really is and how there is room for each of us to play our unique part.  For my part, I would love to meet as many of you as possible.  And if one of you happens to begin asking others to leave the Village Green, I will do my best to smile and redirect you again to the Big Tent God we follow- a God who, surprisingly, even still makes room for white American men.

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