The Margins

Ed Gilbreath writes an excellent blog, and his post today includes a collection of interesting links I would recommend. One is to an article discussing the gentrification that is happening in my old neighborhood in Portland. Our recent visits to our old neighborhood and church have surprised me by how very much the neighborhood there has changed since we left in 2002.

I realize that the same is true for my old neighborhood in Chicago, and it makes me wonder what the future holds for our little corner of South Central. Already there is a substantial population of “gentrifiers”, and that trend is on the rise both here and in urban centers throughout the nation. Bob Lupton, who has inspired many in our community through his years of ministry in Atlanta, speaks of “reweaving the fabric” of frayed communities by bringing people of resources (read money, education, and power) back into under-resourced communities. In this article, Lupton shares about being confronted with his own identity as a “gentrifier”.

But during prayer and sharing times at our neighborhood church we began to hear prayer requests for housing needs. “Please pray for us – our rents have just doubled.” “Please pray for us – we’ve just gotten an eviction notice.” It wasn’t until Opal, a church member who lived within sight of the church, came in weeping one morning that I first made a disturbing connection. She had just received an eviction notice from the home she had lived in for many years – the city told the landlord to fix it up or board it up and he had decided to board it up until property values made it attractive to sell. For the first time it dawned on me that as my property value was nicely increasing, so was the value of the surrounding affordable homes. As my wealth was accumulating, Opal’s poverty was deepening. It was my investment that was the catalyst for her displacement. I could no longer sit in the circle and pray with integrity. I was the problem!

Driving in Pasadena this morning, I pulled up next to an enormous, shiny black luxury SUV with rims that probably cost double what my car is worth. Living in L.A. for almost six years now, I am so accustomed to car-bling that the vehicle itself was not enough to grab my attention. However, the Fuller Seminary parking sticker on the back was. Remarkable.

And coming home, as I neared my off-ramp on the 10, I swapped lanes with a shiny black Mercedes sporting a custom license plate that read: “DVA4GOD”. Really.

When did luxury cars with ridiculous rims and self-proclaimed “diva”-hood become even remotely compatible with Christ crucified?

When I left my house this morning I realized that my car was on empty so I swung into our neighborhood gas station to fill up. As I was leaving, I saw our friend David approaching and he was not looking very good. I stopped my car and rolled down the window and we talked for a bit. I gave him eleven dollars (what I had in my purse), and I knew that that equivalent of a morning Starbucks run for two would totally change his day.

I like to listen to the old-school mix on the local hip-hop station if I happen to be in the car mid-day. One of the songs played today used the phrase “Viewer discretion advised” in the context of speaking it’s message about life in the hood. Those words kept ringing in my ears as I thought about what it means to live as a disciple of Jesus in our cultural context. Honestly, and I know I do this too, it is just so easy to censor what we don’t want to see or admit or acknowledge around us, especially when doing so would demand a response. And so we create our own safe little play-lists that enable us to pursue “the American dream with a Jesus overlay” (can’t remember where I first heard that phrase) and simply tune out the Davids in our midst.

Doug read to me some staggering statistics the other day about the number of hours and images a typical person receives from the media in a week, and clearly the message spoken through television, movies, advertisements and the like is compelling, perhaps more so than the narrative of God With Us. Which is why we barely turn our heads at the Escalades and status symbols of the week that find their way into the lives and witness of the people of God and make for themselves a comfortable home. And so Lazarus sits, hungry, while we live in excess, and I wonder at the extent of reversal we can anticipate at the end of this life.

My friend, Jamie, tagged me with a meme he is starting. Reflecting on a quote from St. Francis he writes:

“The life of the Christian should be burning with such a light of holiness that by their very example and conduct, their life will be a rebuke to the wicked.” (St. Francis)

In an era where Christians are largely known for the sin they oppose, this wisdom could not be more timely. Francis calls us to face the compromises of our culture by becoming living alternatives with how we live.

In light of that, here is the question he is asking:

1. Consider aspects of our culture where we have too easily compromised, issues that you passionately oppose.

2. Then, ask yourself what it would mean for you, both as and individual and as a part of a community, to be a living alternative. Write about it.

3. Link back here to this post.

4. Tag others to participate.

I’m going with my first reaction to his question, and that is holding tightly to money and possessions: hoarding rather than holding loosely. While I could certainly write a long answer describing all the ways I have hoarded rather than given, I do have a few testimonies I can share. Alternatives to hoarding in my community have looked like this:

Not purchasing/owning a washer and drier and instead using a neighbor’s machine across the street.

Giving cars away (when our pastor joined our community, a couple gave them their second car and just this week, our friends gave their really nice Honda to my sister and her family).

Receiving inheritance money and giving a substantial portion of it away rather than stockpiling it.

Owning one pair of shoes that you wear every day.

Paying someone’s hospital bill outright rather than loaning the money.

Giving away thousands of dollars a year in rental assistance to a family struggling to get out of debt.

Buying a bunch of stuff at Costco for a friend repeatedly and refusing reimbursement because that friend’s finances are really tight.

Giving a large cash gift to help a growing family buy a van.

Offering to pay for some expensive self-defense classes for someone struggling with fear following a physical attack.

Sending monthly grocery gift cards to a single-mom with five children.

Choosing to give away the majority of your income to further the work of the church among the urban poor.

Buying Doug a new, really nice guitar when his strings were breaking weekly and it was held together with rope.

Living way beneath your means to free up money to give away.

Well, I could surely go on but that is a fine start. Thanks, Jamie. It was a blessing for me to rehearse these testimonies of generosity and sacrifice.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal…You cannot serve both God and money.”

Oops! I forgot the tagging part:

Jim

Eugene

Sonja

Last week a group of us from Servant Partners gathered for a workshop on Knowledge Management, ably led by a dear friend to our organization. When our executive director introduced Jason, she shared with us about his ministry involvements in Northwest Pasadena through an organization called Northwest Neighbors. And then, almost as an afterthought she said: “Oh, and he is a rocket scientist.” We all laughed.

As he led us through a great discussion about how knowledge transfer is happening in our organization, he would regularly use examples from his own workplace: JPL. To illustrate a point about distinguishing explicit knowledge from tacit knowledge he would say something like: “You know, like when we were receiving all of the data from the first images of Mars…” Or to make a point about key staff members who hold some specific piece of knowledge: “Like if there is one guy on the team who is just really exceptional at calculating orbits…”

Honestly, I couldn’t help laughing every time he did this. And while we could perhaps argue whether building a spacecraft or church-planting in the world’s slums is more difficult, I felt a sense of awe at what is for him another day at the office.

There was one example from his presentation that struck me and has pressed my imagination a bit the last few days. He said that, at JPL, one of the most successful ways they have fostered a culture of knowledge transfer is through a kind of story hour. Senior engineers are invited to simply tell the stories about designing this spacecraft or calculating that orbit or solving some problem, and the junior engineers bring their lunches and just sit and listen to the older guys tell their stories.

Jason said that part of what makes this effective is that people like to both tell and listen to stories (as opposed to being given some textbook-like document or a bunch of data), and there is an emotional impact that helps binds the knowledge being presented. And the emphasis isn’t as much on the actual results as it is the process of discovery and problem solving.

Bill Kinnon posted a challenge of sorts for those who would consider themselves “gurus” in what is called the Missional Church movement. He writes:

I confess that I’m really not interested in hearing theories anymore. I want to know how the missonal profundities emanating from the particular guru are applied in their own lives - right now. Not last year, last century or last millenium. But. Right now.

“Where are you plugged into a local expression of a missional community? How does that impact what you are sharing with us?”

His question resonated with me a bit and I thought about how hearing someone discuss competing theories about rocket science would stack up against story hour at JPL. Scot McKnight recently highlighted a post by David Fitch on “picking out a house missionally”, and as I read it in the context of this larger discussion I thought it was a good example of someone sharing their story of process and discovery; of calculating a missional orbit of sorts.

I have thought before that maybe I should try to write more “theory” here, and there are any number of reasons why that is not what this blog has become. But I have sensed that, in the Christian blog world, theory is elevated. Strong opinions and arguments get readers, links and comments, and while I don’t blog to acquire those things, I have wondered about what unique contribution I am making here.

I think I’m pretty happy being a story hour kind of girl, though often enough I don’t feel very far along in the journey. But then I remember the kind words Rebecca spoke and I am reminded that stories that don’t have all the orbits calculated can useful too:

This is why I was glad to find The Margins. Because the story is being told while it happens, there is no over-arching thesis to be proven. Her brain has not had time to protect her from the memory of being scared for herself and her children. Because of this, her faith in the midst of all she is going through shines all the brighter. Read especially Erika’s post A Walk in the Park to see what I’m talking about. She doesn’t know yet that it will all turn out to be OK. But she does it anyway.”

I read something today on my denomination’s website that moved me.

While I have been concerned by the ways short-term international trips have largely replaced local ministry involvement at my alma mater in terms of student enthusiasm and commitment (After Hours, the local outreach I founded at NPU was recently closed down due to a lack of institutional support), I was grateful for this very real and raw reflection written by a NPU student who visited Zambia.

I too was a young person whose life was changed by the red soil of Africa, and I remember that feeling of coming home to a world and culture and church that no longer made sense.

Thanks, Matt, for this piece. Godspeed on your cross-country bike trip!

Mercy has an Aladdin doll that is the size of a Barbie and is jointed and she loves to put him in different positions and pretend that he is everyone from Peter Pan to Hakim (some minor character in a Jasmine movie she saw). Lately, though, Aladdin has been God. And her little Eric (the prince in Little Mermaid) figurine from one of the many different Disney princess doll sets she has been given is Jesus. If you ask her why Eric is Jesus, she will tell you that it is because he has black hair: like God.

Yesterday Mercy came over to my desk where I was working: “Mommy, will you play with me?”

“Sure, baby.” I answered.

“You be God and I will be Jesus,” she said, handing me Aladdin.

“Okay,” I said, turning toward her and holding up the big naked Barbie man.

“When the whole bible is over, you are going to come with me,” the little Disney Jesus said.

“Where are we going to go?” The Barbie God asked.

“We are going to go through the whole world and take away all the people who are old.”

“Where are we going to take them?”

“We are going to bring them to your home.”

“Okay.”

Last Thursday, one of our very close friends here was robbed on the street. She has a baby the same age as Elijah and she was pushing him along in his stroller when two men ran up from behind and grabbed her purse off her arm, tipping the stroller over in the process. Thankfully, baby was strapped in and was not harmed. My sister was with her, pushing my two nephews in their stroller. Thankfully, my sister wasn’t touched and it was a grace that the boys slept through the entire attack.

When I got the call from my sister, my heart raced in that mix of terror at what had happened and relief that they were all okay. Tears stung my eyes as my heart felt all over again the violation of being attacked. There can be a temptation in circumstances like this to brush it off almost because everyone was okay and the crime itself wasn’t major. But I know that the pain of being attacked is more than the actual physical pain of bruises or cuts.

The thing I cannot shake is this: these women were pushing strollers with babies in them. I confess I have often told myself that I am safe out and about when I have my little ones all around me. Because what kind of monster attacks a mother carrying her children? But last week reminded me that crimes of desperation are just that: desperate. And while I never walk around with a purse in general, I am already thinking about how I will behave differently when I am out walking with my babies.

It is interesting to have my different false clams to security dissolve here. Like the realization that living on the second floor doesn’t mean that bullets can’t enter. Or now that pushing a stroller with a baby in it is not a reason for someone not to attack.

The other night, Doug and I were almost asleep when our apartment was filled with the sound of angry screaming coming from the street. It was around midnight, and we ignored it at first until the tone and language became so clearly violent. As we peered through our blinds, we saw a half-dressed young man walking wildly down the street screaming in rage. Another young man walked with him, and a cluster of young women walked at a distance behind them.

“You’ve never had your mom tell you you ain’t sh–. You’ve never had your dad wish you were dead.” And he went on, screaming through tears and punching the air.

“We’re in the middle of the street. You need to be quiet. Someone around here will call the cops,” one of the girls said, gently.

“Fu– them. Fu– the cops. They can come. I don’t care. They can kill me. I don’t care…”

My heart broke for that boy that night. I’m not sure how old he was, but he seemed so vulnerable. A child desperately wanting his mother and father’s love. A child who knew too well the language of despair. I remember the many conversations I had with young men in Chicago who genuinely doubted that they would live to see their eighteenth year. And I remember around the time of Jamar’s funeral finding out how many of them did not. This boy seemed to hold his life loosely in that same way: “I don’t care.” “It doesn’t matter.” “Fu– ‘em.”

There is so much that makes the system here what it is. And while I can point to all the great ways we are involved in the community; while I reflect on our afternoon spent swimming next door with a family whose son has been in and out of the juvenile system; while I consider the light that is our neighbor Elliot who is unflinching in his love for the youth of our street, I still struggle to not despair.

Just yesterday I was reading Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places where Eugene Peterson writes that creation is not something that God did in Genesis, but rather the thing that God keeps doing in our midst: “it is not confined to what the Spirit did; it is what the Spirit does.”. He makes the point that the verb to create is used more times in Isaiah’s preaching to God’s people in exile than in the whole creation narrative: “The Spirit of God created life out of nothing in the Babylon of the sixth century B.C. just as he had done in the formless void when the ‘darkness was upon the face of the deep’.”

Hollowness. Darkness. Chaos. These words can describe our community, a community than can feel almost exilic. And when I think of my friend watching her baby tipped over in front of her; when I hear the cries of a youth’s broken life; when I consider the addictions and desperation that fuel gang wars and rapes and robberies, I can only drop to my knees and cry out for a new creation.

In our worship service on Sunday, Doug led us in a song based on Habakuk 3:2. We sang:

“Lord,
I have heard of your fame and I stand in awe of your deeds

Lord,
I have heard of your fame and I stand in awe of your deeds

Oh Lord.

Renew them, renew them
In our day, and in our time, make them known

Renew them, renew them
In our day, and in our time, make them known

In wrath…remember Mercy

In wrath…remember Mercy.”

This past weekend, my alma mater granted two honorary doctorate degrees at their commencement ceremony. When I saw the recipients of these awards, I smiled.

Ivor Jenkins, a South African anti-apartheid activist, was the point-person for a study tour I took of that country months before the first free election in 1994. He guided us through our weeks there, opening doors for meetings with political and religious leaders and experiences with the South African people that proved life-changing for me. I am a different person because of that trip.

I met Brenda Salter McNeil my freshman year at North Park, and it was a conversation with her over lunch after she spoke in chapel one day that most deeply influenced my decision to not transfer: “God has something he wants to do with you here in this community,” she said. At the time I was only beginning my involvement in mentoring youth in that community. She spoke truly of what, years later, would become my most transformative ministry experience: founding a comprehensive community youth outreach based on North Park’s campus. I am a different person in ministry today because of her prophetic counsel.

What strikes me as I write this is how little we actually see or know about the impact our words and time have on the different people we meet. I think about my teaching and speaking opportunities and the individuals who seek me out for conversation or counsel; I think about the guest groups we host here in South Central; I think of the many interns who share a season of their lives with us here and I am reminded that every one of these can be used by God in that Ivor Jenkins/Brenda Salter McNeil/”I’m a different person than I was before” kind of way. Not because I am special or great or because our church is so amazing, but because God works that way.

What a burden and privilege that is.

I spent Sunday’s worship service helping out in the nursery. At one point, we headed outside to let the kids play on the playground and I stayed in the covered area with Elijah. It was an unusual worship service that focused on prayer, and a few youth had opted to hang out in the back with their skateboards instead of participating. I was sitting there with my baby when I saw a group of three youth come around from the other side of the building carrying skateboards and I realized that they must be in the practice of hopping the fence to skate behind the school.

We didn’t talk much. I mostly enjoyed watching them practice different jumps, and our two boys joined in with what they were doing. The whole skateboarding culture here still cracks me up. It brings back too many of my own memories of junior high.

As I watched them skate, I thought about our friends who joined our church family as a result of meeting us in the park where we met and they slept. Warm coffee and good food shared opened the door to meaningful relationships: with us and with Jesus. I was bummed when I saw that we didn’t have any food this week after the service because I wanted to invite these boys in for something to eat.

There is something good about being a sojourning church. There is something Acts-like in moving about, colliding with people in their everyday pursuits. Mark Galli wrote an interesting post on the importance of a building from his Anglican perspective. He writes:

Every Anglican parish is an icon of Israel, a people with a unique call from God to not wander but to settle down, not to live in exile in strange places, but to gather together on a certain piece of land where Jesus will take on flesh and dwell among them, a place that will become holy.

When I consider Church of the Redeemer, and the community that makes us, it makes sense that we wander: that our “space” speaks of what it means to be aliens; that we sit outside a land of milk and honey and still we choose to worship.

This past week, Doug wrote a guest post here that received extensive comments resulting in a quality dialogue about the identity of the church. I thought I would post a few excerpts here:

I think the concept of outreach versus inreach itself strikes a dissonant chord in me. When I read through the gospels, I find no striking characteristics that necessarily made someone in or out. There are those who are in, who are also out (Judas) and those considered most definitely out, who are ultimately elevated to kin-relationship with Jesus (woman with hemorrhage). Yet even those who are healed and want to follow him are not always given “disciple” status. Troubling!

Before you became a monk/nun you participated alongside the brothers/sisters in their work. Even those who didn’t intend to join were still welcome to participate. Some things were explained outright, other things were left for later explanation when they would actually make sense. Our consumerist mentality demands getting things right now and lacks patience in learning - thus it challenges this type of learning and undercuts any type of successful mentoring. Recently I read that those working toward baptism into the faith community in the first couple centuries had a three year process. For one year they studied Mark - nothing else. For the next year they studied Matthew - nothing else. For a third year they studied Luke/Acts - nothing else. And at the conclusion of that year they were offered (or not offered, mind you) baptism into the community. Then, only after baptism, they were given the gospel of John.

I think the way outreach is conducted is crucial. Without a clear ‘mentoring’ and ‘discipling’ focus that makes use of vigorous outreach as the crucible for growth right from day one, I think ‘delivery systems’ do little to help people mature.

Seems like Jesus developed the disciples ‘on the fly’ and ‘in the midst of mission’ because He used their experiences together in mission as an opportunity to intentionally teach and develop folks.

I think the primary goal should always be out, not in. If the purpose of outreach is ultimately to get people in, then we still have the wrong focus. It is the very fact that we don’t see our purpose as going out that those who are “with us” never become devoted apprentices.

Outreach isn’t just for those who are especially gifted in evangelism. Unless we see our primary identity as disciples sent into the world, we will never reach some imaginary moment of maturity and enlightenment wherein we will be compelled out to the world.

The focus of discipleship is going out, not plugging in.

Check out the entire conversation here.