Zack Exley

Ganz at Pentecost 4 June, 2007

Marshall Ganz just gave a great talk to the conference. He closed with four key elements that he believes link organizing together:

1) Relationships and relational skills. Relationships are the fundamental material of organization. Petitions are not relationships. Donations are not relationships. They may be very important, but they are not sufficient. What does it take to make a relationship? Commitment. Are you going to build relationships? Or are you just going to get names and dollars? It takes a community to build relationships.

2) Motivation. Why does your campaign, your effort, matter? Why should I commit my life to this? Anyone who challenges the status quo is not going to have the resources that those in power have. You have to compensate with resourcefulness—and that is driven by motivation and determination. Values are necessary for motivation. Stories are a key way to share values. Stories evoke feelings. Feelings drive motivation. The question is not whether we know the right thing, but whether we will act on it—and we get there through stories. Sometimes we get so focused on the nuts and bolts, that we forget to celebrate the values that we share. We have to do that or we will lose our way.

3) Like Jesus said, “Be shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves.” Be wily and resourceful. Use your creative and analytic powers. Being strategic means stepping out of routine and being thoughtful about mobilizing resources to accomplish the things that will make a difference.

4) Action. There’s a disrespect for craft prevalent today that gets in the way of action. There’s a difference between talking about action and acting—and that difference is capable practice of the craft of organizng. Example: holding a couple house meetings that go nowhere vs. holding house meetings that are designed correctly to breed additional house meetings.

Live blogging Pentecost 4 June, 2007

I’m at Sojourner’s Pentecost conference today. A few weeks ago I wrote about the ADD nature of tech conferences—where everyone has laptops open and barely pays attention to what the speakers are saying. Here, right now I’m the only one with a laptop open. Freddie Haynes, the pastor at a big Dallas Evangelical Church was just up. He had the whole place on their feet as he preached a message of economic revolution with some great metaphors. Example: Earth is like an insane asylum. And there’s a faucet running, and a sink overflowing, making a mess of the whole place. And because it’s an insane asylum, someone gets a mop and just starts mopping—only mopping—without thinking to go to the source and turn off the faucet. As the water rises, the insane just keep mopping. And so we have to take over this insane asylum by going to the source and fixing the fundamental problem.

It’s just the exact opposite experience of the typical tech conference. There is no way to keep a distance from the experience while posting slightly snarky comments about it the way we often do at tech and political conferences.

Now Brian McLaren is introducing the next panel. He’s talking about how, decades ago, many conservative Christians withdrew, in a way, from the “public square.” But at the same time, they set up vast networks ofconservative Christian radio and television broadcasting. The way he says it, they set up a new “civil religion” by establishing that broadcasting force, as well as by signing on with one of the political parties.

Shane Claiborne just told a great story: In Philadelphia, where he works with the Simple Way community that he helped found about 10 years ago, he says they’ve basically made homelessness illegal. For example, they’ve made it illegal to distribute food to homeless people in parks. So Shane and others set up in a park to serve communion. And because Catholics believe that the food in a communion service is not actually food but is transformed into the “body of Christ,” everyone participating said they were Catholics and told the police what they were serving wasn’t food. They got arrested anyways, but won in court.

Last night, at the opening “revival” Jim Wallis told two good jokes, one religious, one political:

Two Christian members of Congress, a Democrat and a Republican, are talking about their Faith. The Republican says to the Democrat, “You’re not a real Christian. And to prove it, I bet you twenty bucks you can’t recite the Lord’s Prayer.” The Democrat took the bet and started off, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my lord my soul to keep…”* And the Republican says, “Wow, here’s your 20 bucks, I didn’t think you could do it!”

* Not the Lord’s Prayer, but rather a typical nighttime prayer taught to small children.

A man is drowning in a river, 100 feet off shore. A Republican hears the man’s cries, runs to the river, and throws out 50 feet of rope. “The rest is up to you!” he yells. A Democrat sees this and is appalled. He runs off and finds 200 feet of rope, throws it out to the drowning man…. And then lets go of his end of the rope.

I’m going to the Sojourners presidential candidates’ forum tonight here, so I’m looking forward to that.

If we’re going to start forcing people to *see* 12 April, 2007

This:

South Carolina is on the verge of requiring that a woman review ultrasound images of her fetus with a physician before consenting to end a pregnancy. In Mississippi, a woman must be given a chance to listen in as the abortion doctor checks the fetal heartbeat.

got me thinking. Here’s a better idea: Let’s get some laws that require politicians to spend a few days…

• trading places with single mothers on public assistance before voting on welfare-to-work or childcare bills,
• attending class in rough schools before passing legislation that effects them,
• working at anti-poverty programs before cutting them,
• sleeping in homeless shelters before voting on housing bills,
• living in a prison before making legislation to send more non-violent offenders there,
• …what else?

Your Bible study assignment for this week… 10 April, 2007

…is to listen to Rickie Lee Jones’ new album, The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard. Get it on iTunes. Or just listen to the couple of songs she does during this NPR interview. It’s an amazing album. She’s an athiest/agnostic or something — anyways not Christian. But she’s generated this powerful, convincing and sometimes terrifying picture of what it might have been like from Jesus’s point of veiw as he took a break from being God, came down to hang with us humans, stirred up revolution, and wound up in the Guantánamo of his day.

Link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9435180

UPDATE: there’s a cool video about the making of the album on the Amazon.com page.

Preaching Revolution 14 March, 2007

I’ve got an article in the magazine In These Times this week. (Buy it and support In These Times, which is a non-profit. The issue hits newsstands today and includes a great article by Barbara Ehrenrich too.)

The article is about a rising movement of “revolutionary” evangelical Christians. “Revolutionary” is not my word, it’s theirs. George Barna–the Stan Greenberg of the Christian Right, with clients like James Dobson and Billy Graham–estimates there are 20 million of these “Revolutionaries.” It’s a complicated topic, and I couldn’t do it justice in one short article–look for more posts here on this in the future.

You can read it online here.

This movement blows away a lot of the excuses the left makes for itself at the expense of American people. These preachers are filling churches with a challenge to sacrifice for the dream of making a better world (here on Earth). They’re asking people to change their lives in ways that go far beyond switching to florescent light-bulbs or voting–they’re asking people to turn their lives upside down in service of the poor and oppressed, and to overturn “systems of oppression”. Rather than running away, people are flocking to these churches and building incredibly powerful communities based on liberation.

The church I focus on in my article attracts 10,000 West Michigan suburbanites each Sunday. It meets in what used to be shopping mall. They’ve converted over the WHOLE MALL–with shops now serving as Sunday school classrooms and meeting spaces for events throughout the week.

You may need to flush some stereotypes about Bible-based Christian churches out of your mind in order to understand what these folks are up to. I’ve tried to capture something of what they’re about in the article, so please do check it out.

I got a lot of great comments from PastorDan over at Street Prophets when I sent him a copy yesterday. He pointed out that I used too broad a brush in describing “liberal churches” and that I should have talked more about small churches, where this revolution has been going on for quite some time. (I did follow one country church pastor in the article, but that got cut for space.) He also made me realize I should have drawn a sharper distinction between what’s going on at Mars Hill and other ‘revolutionary’ mega churches and the ‘seeker-sensitive’ churches that are more about putting on a nice show and less about sacrificing for one’s community.

(Also check out a post I wrote here last year about this movement.)

Revolutionary Evangelicals 4 May, 2006

There is a revolution going on inside American evangelical Christianity — a radical return to the spirit of the earliest Christian communities. Its fundamentals are love, community and multiculturalism. It’s true that those values in one form or another have guided every Christianity. But this new revolution preaches — and organizes — explicitly against consumerism, sexism, racism and even “imperialism” (their word choice, not mine!) in a way that feels more than a little leftwing. And yet, their appeal is mind bogglingly broad, already deeply involving millions of mainstream Americans in a way the left could never hope to.

I’ve been vaguely aware of this movement since working as a union organizer all over the Midwest and South in the ’90s. Over the years, I got to know hundreds of workplace leaders, many of whom were also leaders in their evangelical churches. Over and over, the stories they told me were irreconcilable with my Northeastern Liberal stereotype of what a Bible Banger was supposed to be.

Eventually, I went out exploring myself and I’m still trying to make sense of what I have found in various churches, communities, book and bands. As far as I can tell, no one has written about this revolution from a secular perspective yet. Last night, I had one more mind-blowing experience with this rising culture, and I’ve finally decided to put pen to paper on this topic.

Joe Ehrmann is an ex-NFL star, a high school football coach and the pastor of a Baltimore church. He is also the leader of a movement he calls, “Building Men for Others” — and has a radical critique of masculinity in America. He spoke to a large crowd in a Duke stadium at an event that was planned long before the rape allegations against the Duke Lacrosse team consumed Duke and Durham. Some saw God’s hand in the timing of Ehrmann’s appearance — after all, the idea to bring Ehrmann was born out of a men’s Bible study group. Most of the crowd were boys and young men with sports teams dragged by their coaches, many still in their uniforms from afternoon practice. The coaches had largely been turned out by publicity in local churches.

While his main topic was gender, he kicked the evening off on racism: “America’s original sin — our country was founded on the genocide of one people, and the enslavement of another.” I remember how radical we felt in college when we said things like that — and how far away we felt from ever being able to have a conversation with the American people as a consequence. But last night, even the audience’s large portion of suburban, polo-shirt-tucked-in, white men didn’t seem to bat an eyelash.

Ehrmann’s critique of America didn’t end at emancipation though. “We live in the richest, most powerful country in the world, and yet…” and he ran through a long list of the horrifying statistics that detail American poverty. “And so America’s challenge — and Durham’s challenge — is: how do we come together as a community where every man, woman and child has the opportunity to live with dignity? How can America — How can Durham — come together into a community that can bring an end to poverty, systemic racism, rape, domestic violence and child abuse? — a community that doesn’t put possessions before people?”

He was going to tell us how.

My Northeastern Liberal stereotyping would tell me that this evangelical, football-playing preacher’s solution would be to turn inward and backward, into the family, and back to those good old traditional values. But Ehrmann doesn’t want a “return to families values” until we do a whole lot of work on just what that might mean. “The home,” he said, “is now the most dangerous place in America for women.”

Masculinity in America, Ehrmann said, is defined by three things: athletic ability, sexual conquest, and financial success. He brought life to this definition with his own story of growing up in Buffalo, the son of a mostly absent father, and going on to become the high school tough guy, big man on campus, and finally NFL star.

Perhaps the most radical thing he said all night was that, “in this culture, we don’t raise boys to be men, we raise them not to be women,” getting at the misogynist aspect of sexism. “Boys are taught by grade two to identify the ‘sissy’ and attack and humiliate him.” While he didn’t come out and say it, he was dangerously close to going after homophobia.

And how is masculinity supposed to be different from femininity, according to Ehrmann? It’s not.

“So here’s what it means to be a man — and it’s the exact same thing that it means to be a woman — it is about our humanity: 1) it’s about relationships — about being capable to love and be loved — about what kind of friend, brother, husband or father you are. And 2) It’s about making the world a little bit better of a place — it’s about making a difference in the world.”

What’s so impressive to me about all of this is the drive that these revolutionary Christian organizers have to bring real change to their own culture — and the phenomenal success they’re having doing it. It’s always astounded me how generally bad the white, middleclass left has been at walking the walk among their own people. Our tendency is to do what I did out of college: I left my Connecticut suburb for the poorest enclaves of America I could find. We are obsessed with going off and “saving” poor people, people of color, people in developing or war torn countries — when really, our greatest gift to humanity would be if we could change the hearts of the world’s most powerful, and often the most disruptive, group of people: our own.

Ehrmann has a concrete plan and actual organization to infect every sports coach in America with his revolution. He has 10 minute lessons for them to give before practices on poverty, educational equality, racism, sexism, rape and child abuse. He even has a pledge for players to take about respecting women — designed to help prevent the “650,000 rapes that occur every year in America.” Ehrmann says he can reach 40 million kids a year through sports. So who’s game for going after chess club?

* Visit Ehrmann’s site Building Men for Others.

* Get the book about his work, Seasons of Life.