Depression Economics Explained 17 October, 2008
Posted by Zack in Missouri.2 comments
In case you’re interested — I’ve posted two pieces about economics over at my friend Ari Rabin-Havt’s Oxdown Gazette and the HuffingtonPost.
Depression Economics Explained: Speculative Bubbles
Depression Economics Explained: The Credit Crunch
My goal here is to dig down into the fundamental concepts we use to explain the economy. The concepts we’ve been raised on are inaccurate, and they’re causing a lot of problems right now.
Let me know what you think!
Dale Wiley interview with Matthew Sleeth 8 October, 2008
Posted by Zack in Missouri.1 comment so far
Dale Wiley of Bid for Green (among many other things, the bio-fuel provider for the Church Basement Roadshow) has an interview with environmentalist Matthew Sleeth. I’ve heard Sleeth a couple times on the Mars Hill podcast. Sleeth did a “Green Bible” with HarperOne — in which all the environmental stewardship and social justice bits are in green letters.
HarperOne releases the Green Bible today, October 7. The volume contains essays from noted scholars such as N.T. Wright, and luminaries such as Bishop Desmond Tutu. Instead of the traditional “red letter” Bible that highlights the words of Jesus, this Bible highlights in green passages dealing with nature and social justice.
BidForGreen was lucky enough to get the editor of the volume, Matthew Sleeth, to spend some time and answer some questions.
BidForGreen: Why do we need a green Bible?
Matthew Sleeth: The Green Bible focuses the reader on the vast amount of scripture that deals with God creating, sustaining, and commanding us to maintain the world. The format of verses highlighted in green allows the reader to easily find relevant scripture. What is God’s first commandment to mankind? It is now printed in green. We are to placed on earth to protect and care for the garden. This charge, found in Genesis 2:15, has no time limit. It hasn’t run out. We live in an era when environmental questions abound. What should we do about water or fuel shortages? How should we help refugees displaced by flood or drought? The answers can be found in the Bible.
Come see The Ordinary Radicals Tuesday Night in Kansas City 22 September, 2008
Posted by Zack in Missouri.2 comments
The Ordinary Radicals is a documentary made by one of the founders of the Simple Way community in Philadelphia, Jamie Moffett. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve heard great things. (And I’m in it!) As I understand, the movie has a ton of interviews with leaders of all sorts from among the “ordinary radicals” (Shane Claiborne’s term for the rising generation of socially aware Christians).
Jamie will be at the screening to speak — and I’ll be there too. Come on down. The showing is 8:00PM at Screenland Crossroads. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like they added this one-night only screening to their listings so you just have to have FAITH and show up. Please send some emails and bring some friends. This will be a very cool night.
Here’s the trailer:
Want to help refugees in Kansas City? 27 August, 2008
Posted by Zack in kansas, Kansas City, Missouri, Refugees.5 comments
This post if for readers who live in the Kansas City area.
Elizabeth and I have gotten involved in the lives of this amazing group of refugees from Burma. They’re from a minority nationality from Burma who have been struggling for survival against all kinds of attacks by the Burmese state and army there for about 60 years. People from this nationality just started arriving in the U.S. two years ago. They have very little support. And almost no one speaks English yet. Most of these families have been living in refugee camps in Thailand for the last 10 years.
They’re really struggling here just to get jobs, make it to the doctor, get immunizations, enroll in school, get dental care for long-standing issues, learn to drive, fill out forms for basic assistance and housing, etc…
About 20 years ago, I hitched hiked through a part of South East Asia just a few hundred miles from where these folks come from, and where a related nationality lived. I’d wind up in a village near night fall, and the village would just get together and decide who would take care of me that night. A family would take me home, feed me, tell me stories (we all spoke about the same amount of Chinese), and give me the best mat in the house to sleep on. I was 18 years old and was so arrogant as to think that I should just be able to walk into villages and have people take care of me. They didn’t mind — they thought it was normal to put themselves out to take care of strangers, even when it could potentially get them in trouble with the government.
And so that’s part of why it’s breaking my heart seeing these families stuck in inadequate housing, with roaches crawling all over everything (not able to communicate with the landlord or pay for exterminators), without enough food half the time, and with hardly anyone lending a hand. But being around these families is an amazing thing. Watching them do church, whether you’re Christian or not, will blow you away. (They got totally missionized in the 1850′s, which is part of why they’re being driven out of Burma, and therefore why we owe them!) Watching them laugh and have a great time even as they’re getting beat up at school, going hungry at home, and being sick and stranded at home without transportation will blow you away too. They’re just awesome people. You should meet them if you live in Kansas City.
Anyone want to help meet some of these needs and get to know these families? Email us at help@revolutioninjesusland.com.
Just one little example of Christian house meetings 26 August, 2008
Posted by Zack in house church, Missouri, Prayer, small groups.6 comments
House gatherings are a major feature of today’s evangelical/born again culture. House meetings are such a broad and diverse phenomenon in the church that it’s impossible to generalize about them. There is also some controversy about house meetings, or “house church,” and how to do them (and whether to do them). Some point out that house meetings were the first kind of Christian church. Others say that Christian communities need the guidance of formal organization. Some (perhaps most) say both are necessary.
Here’s one little glimpse at how one group of young Christians gathers and thinks about its gatherings. This email came from a new friend in Kansas City this morning. He and an overlapping group also gather at his house after church on Sunday evenings for a meal, conversation and the occasional card game, guitar jam or review of the latest dense theological book that Tim is reading. Here they’re restarting another kind of gathering after a summer break:
Greetings and hello and hey,
This Thursday, after a nice long summer hiatus, our group will be starting up our weekly Conversations meeting again. We’ll meet at 7 at the Freak Show (Sam and Adam’s apartment (since it’s centrally located, and not to far from public transport)) at 7. Bring something to contribute to delicious sandwich making. After eating, we’ll take communion, sing a song or two, and then pray for about an hour. It’s pretty laid-back, eyes-open, conversation kind of praying. We follow a basic structure of praying from large-scale things down to small-scale things. Hope to see you there.
Peace to you,
Timothy.PS. I’m culling from a pretty old list, and adding some new people, so please let me know if you don’t want to get any more emails on stuff like this.
By the way, you may have noticed that the posts on this blog are now rotating between three types:
- posts that engage Christians,
- posts that seek to explain aspects of born again Christian culture to people outside of that culture,
- and posts that have something to say to both audiences.
I’m saying this because the Christian audience will find this post absurd because I’m reporting something that is so commonplace to them. Timothy, who wrote the email, for example says:
Heh. Always cracks me up to think of our group in these terms. Feel free to post the email if you think it illustrates. It’s just another email to me. Tell all you’d like about us. We’re just trying to live in the moment, and live where we are, so if it’s of interest, that’s fine.
Timothy: I assure you that this kind of thing is fascinating to many people who are outside of any born again Christian culture.
One thing that many (including myself) will want some more info on: What is prayer all about? What do you pray for? Who do you pray for? What do you think prayer accomplishes? Why pray for anything when you say you believe that God has his own plan that we can’t really understand? How do you feel when you’re praying—and after? What effect does prayer have on your group/community?
And here’s a silly but vexing question from me: Why close your eyes when you pray? Why is there this feeling in church that you’re being seditious if you open your eyes while praying? What does it mean in Timothy’s group’s case when he says, “open eyed prayer?”
YouthFront 30 July, 2008
Posted by Zack in Mike King, Missouri, youth workers, YouthFront.1 comment so far
At that meeting over the weekend I met an amazing guy named Mike King. He hosted us at the campus of YouthFront, an organization he’s worked for and led for 33 years. I got some of Mike’s story in the car on the way and filled in some details reading his book later, Presence-centered Youth Ministry.
After driving through Missouri and Kansas fields and forest, when we finally arrived at YouthFront I immediately thought of that scene in the Matrix when Neo walks into the Oracle’s apartment for the first time. Remember the scene?: those kids, rebels in training, are sitting around silently meditating, levitating, bending spoons with their minds—sharpening their resistance to the Matrix. In her living room that Oracle character was building a revolutionary counter culture right in the belly of the beast.
So when we pulled up into the YouthFront compound, a couple hundred teenagers were scattered individually in silence around the grounds: they were sitting alone under trees and in doorways, in quiet meditation, writing in journals or studying the Bible. There was a magic energy. Like…you could just feel how much these kids were into what they were doing.
Earlier, the kids had been in a session with a “story teller” who (and I’m sorry if I’m getting it a little wrong here) tried to help them see the Bible as a story, and help them to see their own lives as stories inside of God’s story. I think an insufficient but helpful secular translation might be: they were finding significance for their own lives in the grand unfolding of history.
After the first part of our meeting, we joined the kids in the sanctuary where they were meditating, praying silently and out loud, reciting scripture and participating in liturgy. They were together accessing ancient Christian traditions of worship and prayer. (Again, my description will seem off to Christians because I still don’t understand the nuances of all these words.)
Mike King has been with YouthFront for 33 years. I think he started right out of high school. For most of that time he has been the leader of the organization. I also met the camp manger who has been there for more than 20 years, and he didn’t look more than 40. In other words, this place is being built by people who have dedicated their entire lives to it. That kind of dedication to and continuity in institutions is almost unheard of in the world I come from. Maybe it’s more common among Christians because the central model of leadership is of pastors and volunteers who often live out their adult lives—or their whole lives—serving in a single church.
And after all this time, YouthFront seems to be only just getting started. The same revolution/movement of the spirit that’s sweeping the church everywhere is at work out here in these Kansas woods, in this one-time outpost of extreme Fundamentalism. There is a feeling there of a whole new project, a whole new world unfolding. It made me think of the Highlander Folk School. Highlander had already been around for 25 years by the time it emerged as one of the incubating institutions of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50′s and 60′s. It was a place where young leaders of groups like the SCLC and their mentors gathered for practical training, study and spiritual retreat. I thought of the importance of the unconscious traditions that are embodied in these “long haul” leaders like Mike King: all of the knowledge and habits, all the little things, as well as the big ideas and inspiring words, that make a place work smoothly and make it a place where people can unfold and find themselves and others and, in this case, God.
A little more about Mike’s story: he grew up in a mainline church, was a bit of an “experimenter” in high school in the early 70′s, and then got sucked up into Christian fundamentalism through his participation in Youth for Christ (later renamed YouthFront). Youth for Christ started out in the 40′s as a relatively progressive (for it’s time anyways) church organization to serve the masses of adolescents left behind by World War II (by their fathers who were fighting and their mothers who were in the factories working overtime). Then in the 60′s and 70′s, the movement become consumed by the expansion of Fundamentalism (no rock and roll, no dancing, “literal” interpretation of the Bible, exclusive focus on salvation as getting to heaven when you die, etc…).
I’ve read that when the Christian Rock scene rose up, there were a whole lot of Christian fundamentalists taking issue with it. To a certain subculture, Rock was still the devil’s music. That’s still out there actually. I heard an anti-Rock tirade just last year on a rural Christian radio station. The speaker described a scientific study that played Rock music and Gospel music to plants. Yes, Rock music killed the plants! They thrived when exposed to Gospel music. Except… (yes, really) the Marijuana plant! It thrived with Rock and shriveled with Gospel.
Mike was one of those guys. But eventually one day (or one year) he woke up and said, “I’m a Pharisee.” The Pharisees were the religious sticklers in ancient Israel who Jesus was always challenging. They were concerned with following the rules of scripture to a T, but had lost sight of their overall message. Jesus’ engagement with the Pharisees is one of the key defining stories of this rising movement in the church.
So Mike was born again, again. Just as the whole church is being born again, again right now. You step anywhere near YouthFront’s beautiful 600 acres of sacred space and you can feel it happening right under your feet.
It sounds like YouthFront has suffered a little bit of blowback for these changes. Some fundamentalist and conservative evangelical churches have stopped sending their kids. But “postliberal” and other evangelicals have taken their place. It sounds like a lot of mainline churches that had kind of lost their steam are getting it back partly with the help of evangelical and fundamentalist refugees. I have seen some examples of this, but for some reason I didn’t sense that it was a movement with any momentum. Now I have a word for it (“postliberal”) and I’ll look for more examples of evangelical workers injecting a little extra passion into mainline churches that might have gotten a little too low key for their own good.
Before we left YouthFront in the evening, the teenagers were finally acting like normal kids (what a relief!), chasing each other around, playing games, being incredibly excited about everything (remember that?). Thank you to Mike for hosting us and taking the time to talk to me about YouthFront when he had so many other things that day to do!
A bunch of new stuff 28 July, 2008
Posted by Zack in Missouri.15 comments
I got to hang out with an amazing group of Christians for a few days this weekend. The small group included Christian rockers, publishers, preachers, youth workers, post-liberals (a new one for me!), post-evangelicals, recovering fundamentalists, recovering mainliners, reclaiming-it-mainliners, emergents, resurgent Catholics and all kinds of other chaos.
I am not going to tell you who all was there because, like I joked a couple posts ago, I am making people crazy jealous of all these famous Christians I’m getting to hang out with. It’s so unfair. They’re like, “You don’t even know who that is…I’ve dreamed about meeting him my whole life…” I feel so unworthy. So I’m going to keep a lid on it lest some jealous rank and file Emergent beat me up on the street one of these days.
Labels are a cruel thing when it comes to faith and spirituality. They’re necessary if we’re going to use language at all. But no label can do justice to even one person in this realm. Being around these folks was constantly unsettling because they kept blowing up all kinds of things I was hoping I understood.
And it was incredibly exciting. I feel like I just got to the top of another hill on this journey and can see miles of new territory to be explored:
- A whole new chunk of the Christian music scene I didn’t know existed. I think it is the Christian “indy” scene — and it is a true, gritty, complex indy thing. It’s so great. I thought there was only this “POSITIVE AND ENCOURAGING K-LOVE!” stuff, which, don’t get me wrong, I have been really enjoying! But check out this band called Waterdeep.
- Christian meditation. Like Monks! Yes, the Christians are meditating again. I was totally against it. They almost made me meditate for 20 minutes but I was saved by someone needing to catch a plane. But then, on the way to the airport, the meditator told me, “In meditation, you are letting God rewire you.” That made me really want to do it and I’ve already spent some time meditating because that image really works for me. I need rewiring!
- “Post-Liberal” mainliners: Christians in mainline churches who are getting back into…I don’t even know how to describe this…getting back into the Bible as a “true” story. No, not as “literal” or “inerrant” or even “inspired by God” but nevertheless as a truth to live communally in relation to. This seems to be a growing movement among some mainliners who grew up in churches that had kind of left the Bible behind.
- The Christian youth worker universe. I say universe because it’s just so huge. It grew up in the 70′s and 80′s and kept growing and I think is still growing. A whole generation of a broad segment of the Church (spanning from just left to just right of the evangelical base) grew up under the influence of some Christian youth group with a young, usually hip, youth worker as leader. These youth workers went to conferences and trainings to learn how to do their job, and kept going to learn how to do it better. One goal was to indoctrinate young people into whatever theology the church had, but the bigger priority in most cases was to raise healthy, confident, kind and loving people — and to keep kids out of trouble.
- The stories of conservative Episcopal churches who put themselves under the authority of African Anglican Bishops rather than belong to a church that ordained gay priests. Now, what fascinates me about this story is how, inside of this bitter act there might be a beautiful consequence. It’s like God is saying, “Oh, you don’t want to deal with this contradiction in your own heart and community? You want to get away from it, do you? No problem, just step right over here…” And they find themselves in a whole new cauldron of contradiction. But there are other, amazing, beautiful unforeseen results—as there always are. One of surely a thousand examples is this film, made by a young American Christian who wound up in Rwanda when her church re-affiliated with the Anglican church there. Watch the trailer below, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. How ironic that this beautiful film about radical reconciliation and acceptance would never have happened if her church had simply accepted gays?
Those were just of the few new spaces that opened up for me this weekend.
“The Emergent Church” 19 July, 2008
Posted by Zack in Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Emergent, Mark Scandrette, Missouri, Tony Jones.4 comments
Over the last week, I have been living the dream of every rank and file Emergent Christian.
First, I got to hang out with the guys from the Church Basement Road show: Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt and Mark Scandrette — and Emergent leader Tim Keel, who’s church, Jacob’s Well, was hosting the show. They were doing their performance/book tour at Jacob’s Well in Kansas City. Like a groupie, I finagled my way into their RV and wound up going on a pre-show walk with Tony Jones. He told me the insider’s history of the Emergent Church — and I felt so privileged. I didn’t realize at the time that it was the second chapter of his book! — but I still feel privileged.
After the show, Elizabeth and I bribed our way into their lawn chair hangout session outside their RV with two large Imo’s pizza. Again, what a privilege to talk to so many of the early leaders of the Emergent movement at length!
Often, people have commented on this blog, “You’re writing about the Emergent Church, why do you keep saying the movement doesn’t have a name?” But the Emergent movement is a sub-movement within a much larger phenomenon. These guys are the ones who were willing to be overt and explicit about the full implications of the wider movement. A consequence of that was accepting a name, and therefore becoming an easy target for fierce criticism from conservatives. It also means that pastors and leaders who’ve been ostracized, demoted or chronically ignored in the struggle to change their churches find their way to Emergent mailing lists and websites. These Emergent leaders carry weight on their shoulders: they see the consequences of working toward a new future for the church. From my perspective as newcomer and outsider, it all looks good. I can easily see the change the change that’s happening in the church, but it’s not easy for me to see the pain and turmoil that abundant just under the surface. These guys are seeing the friction and tension and hurt that are an inevitable by-product of any sea change in a tight-knit culture.
I have to admit, I still don’t really understand what Emergent is all about. I feel like I should understand it, because I’ve studied all the postmodern philosophers who these guys like. They seem to share many of my positions social issues. And their style of “doing church” appeals to me more than any other. So if there are any Christians I should understand, it’s these guys. But the more questions I asked them, the more of a mystery they became. So, I’m diving into some more of their books. Right now I’m reading Tony Jones’ The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier. It is an incredible overview of this chunk of the Revolution in Jesusland, covering all aspects of the Emergent church from its history to theology to church methods. And it’s a great read.
And then, to make Emergent visitors to this site even more jealous, I got to visit with Brian McLaren before the Matthew 25 Network event in DC the night before last. What a great guy! Since he stepped down from being a pastor in 2006, he’s been to some crazy number of countries learning about the global church (and a lot of other things). A lot of good is clearly coming from his travels.
Put one back in the Mennonite column 8 July, 2008
Posted by Zack in mennonites, Missouri, pacificsm, transformation.12 comments
We went to a church house group Sunday night. A few people there said they read this blog! So they will laugh when they see see this story. Or maybe they were just humoring me and they don’t really read the blog. I will soon see…
So, here’s a typical and awesome story. I’ve met a whole bunch of people with a progression similar to this. There were at least a few other people with the same basic story there tonight; I also met a bunch of these guys on my visit to Ozark Christian College; and I’ve met scattered others.
“Ted” is about 23 (I think), really tall, blond, with a smile that never leaves his face. He grew up in a conservative evangelical family, going to a small country church in South Dakota.
His church had thread of historical connection to the Mennonites. He remembers in high school talking to a Mennonite pastor who served briefly at his church about pacifism. Ted couldn’t understand how the guy could oppose just wars of liberation or self-defense (like, I suppose, Iraq—this would have been the early days of the war). The pastor told him, “I used to feel the same way as you. Just read the Word of God and see what it has to say.”
Ted didn’t take him up on that challenge right away. After high school, he went to (very conservative) Calvary Bible College in Kansas City. After a couple years, he then transfered to another conservative Bible college. I can’t remember the exact name but it was: Midwest Bible…or Baptist…or Christian College — and yes, all three of those possible entities actually exist.
There he read Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, a best selling memoir of a young hipster/geek/intellectual Christian writer. One of the characters in the book was a pacifist. This got Ted thinking and he finally started to do a little Bible study on the topic, just like his pastor in high school had suggested. (And it’s funny, because the group had just been joking about how Donald Miller is the “gateway drug” to a radical Christianity. And, further, that Rob Bell‘s Velvet Elvis is when you start lacing the gateway drug with something a little more serious.)
A little later, in a Christian bookstore in South Dakota, Ted picked up a copy of Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution. It was right there on display, and he also had heard some other students talking about the book. Reading Irresistible Revolution sent him back to the Bible for more serious study. (Shane must be the Crack Cocaine of radical Christianity.)
Just like several other young, recently-right-wing Christians I’ve met, he wrote a list of passages in the New Testament that might justify violence in certain circumstances, and another list of passages that ruled out violence. The first list was very short, the second was very long. Moreover, just reading the words of the Bible through this new lens seemed to make the non-violent message of the Gospel stand out crystal clear and very loud. Ted became a pacifist—or “peacemaker,” as he prefers to say, because “it sounds more active.”
Ted graduated from college and went to work at an elementary school that mostly serves a refugee population in Kansas City. He believed in helping people in his community on a person-to-person basis, and he started living out that philosophy in his school.
I suppose he still had some partisan Republican instincts clanging around in his head and heart, and that’s why he threw himself into the Ron Paul campaign, with its mix of “conservative” social values (anti-abortion, etc…), libertarian economic policies and hardline, anti-imperial/anti-war stance. It was the perfect combo for Ted and he couldn’t resist. He dove in head first and spent a ton of time working in the Great Ron Paul Netroots Army.
Around the time that Ron Paul pulled out of the race, Ted read Shane Claiborne’s latest book, “Jesus for President.” Thanks to Shane, Ted realized that the government is not the solution to humanity’s problems. He decided to withdraw completely from politics. He plans not even to vote this year.
I asked him about Obama and McCain. Right off the bat he said that he doesn’t want McCain because he doesn’t want more war.
So what about Obama? Ted says he is really moved and excited about Obama when he sees his speeches on YouTube. But then he goes to the Obama website and looks at his polices. There’s nothing there that excites him. “There’s no substance. Obama talks about Change, but what is he really going to change? How is he really going to change it? I think both the parties are just out for power,” he said. He remarked that when he went to Ron Paul’s site, there were convincing specifics about how he was going to really change America.
I bet there are at least a million Ted’s out there. They are a group to watch. They have insane leadership skills thanks to the well-organized training grounds of their churches, camps, schools, conferences, etc… They are personally and emotionally well adjusted. And they are willing to sacrifice their lives (either literally or just in hard endless work) to save the world.
