Letter from Accra
- -
The horrors of the dungeons: are we repeating history?
From the delegates gathered from throughout the world in Accra, Ghana, at the 24th General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to the congregations of all those churches belonging to this fellowship, greetings. We have met as 400 delegates in this council from July 30 to August 12 2004, worshipping, studying the Bible, deliberating on urgent issues facing God’s world, and participating in the rich life of local churches in Ghana. We write to share with you what, on your behalf, we have discerned and experienced. Grace and peace to you from our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Our most moving and memorable moments came from our visit to Elmina and Cape Coast, two “castles” on the coast of Ghana that held those who had been captured into slavery, as they suffered in dungeons waiting for slave ships that would take them to unknown lands and destinies. Over brutal centuries, 15 million African slaves were transported to the Americas, and millions more were captured and died. On this trade in humans as commodities, wealth in Europe was built. Through their labour, sweat, suffering, intelligence and creativity, the wealth of the Americas was developed.
At the Elmina Castle, the Dutch merchants, soldiers, and governor lived on the upper level, while the slaves were held in captivity one level below. We entered a room used as a church, with words from Psalm 132 on a sign still hanging above the door (“For the Lord has chosen Zion…”). And we imagined Reformed Christians worshipping their God while directly below them, right under their feet, those being sold into slavery languished in the chains and horror of those dungeons. For more than two centuries in that place this went on.
In angry bewilderment we thought, “How could their faith be so divided from life? How could they separate their spiritual experience from the torturous physical suffering directly beneath their feet? How could their faith be so blind?”
Some of us are descended from those slave traders and slave owners, and others of us are descendants of the those who were enslaved. We shared responses of tears, silence, anger, and lamentation. Those who are Reformed Christians have always declared God’s sovereignty over all life and all the earth. So how could these forbears of Reformed faith deny so blatantly what they believed so clearly?
Yet, as we listened to the voices today from our global fellowship, we discovered the mortal danger of repeating the same sin of those whose blindness we decried. For today’s world is divided between those who worship in comfortable contentment and those enslaved by the world’s economic injustice and ecological destruction who still suffer and die.
We perceive that the world today lives under the shadow of an oppressive empire. By this we mean the gathered power of pervasive economic and political forces throughout the globe that reinforce the division between the rich and the poor. Millions of those in our congregations live daily in the midst of these realities. The economies of many of our countries are trapped in international debt and imposed financial demands that worsen the lives of the poorest. So many suffer! Each day, 24,000 people die because of hunger and malnutrition, and global trends show that wealth grows for the few while poverty increases for the many. Meanwhile, millions of others in our congregations live lives as inattentive to this suffering as those who worshipped God on the floor above slave dungeons.
In our discussions in Accra – indeed in the past seven years of reflection since we last met in General Council at Debrecen, Hungary – we have come to realize that this is not just another “issue” to be “addressed”. Rather, it goes to the heart of our confession of faith. How can we say that we believe that Jesus Christ is the Lord over all life, and not stand against all that denies the promise of fullness of life to the world?
If Jesus Christ is not Lord over all, he is not Lord at all. That is why we find in the Bible a constant criticism of idolatry, emphasized in our Reformed tradition. To declare faith in the one true God is to reject divided loyalties between God and Mammon, dethrone the false gods of wealth and power, and turn from false promises to the true God of life.
We know that this does not come easily for any of us. Yet our hope lies in confessing that the power of the resurrected Christ can overturn the idols and the modern gods that hold the world captive to injustice and ecological destruction.
Therefore, we invite you, in Reformed churches throughout the world, to take this stance of faith, standing against all that denies life and hope for millions, as a concrete expression of our allegiance to Jesus Christ.
Brothers and sisters, this is a grave and serious invitation. As those who have met on your behalf in Accra, we declare to you that the integrity of our Christian faith is now at stake, just as it was for those worshipping in the Elmina castle. Confessing our faith and giving our lives to the Lordship of Jesus Christ requires our opposition to all that denies the fullness of life to all those in our world so loved by God.
Such a confession also sends us forth with new eyes of faith into the world. Mission, it can be said, is embodied in the life of the church in the world. In Accra we recognized that living according to what we say we believe changes our understanding of mission today. We recalled that the church was born in a time of empire. God’s Spirit called forth the church, in response to God’s work in the world, as a new community bearing witness to a new global reality and opposing the false claims of earthly gods.
God’s mission involves your congregation and each of ours in fresh and challenging ways today. How can we share the message and liberating love of Christ’s life in those places where suffering and death seem to reign? This much we discovered for certain in Accra: more than ever, faithful mission today requires our connection – really it demands bonds of belonging – between one another as churches. The challenges we now face in proclaiming the Good News will simply overwhelm us if we confront them as individual churches alone.
In today’s world the divisions between the North and the South, the rich and the poor, and the powerful and the powerless, grow sharper and seek to isolate us from one another. That’s why mission requires us as churches to belong more deeply to one another, overcoming those divisions through the work of God’s Spirit as an evidence of the hope that is offered to the world. In our inclusive fellowship here in Accra, we have experienced a taste of this hope and seek to share it with you.
In this council we have focused on current threats to life, especially economic neoliberalism and the arrogance of imperial power. Our churches in Central and Eastern Europe remind us that for long decades they suffered under the tyranny of another empire. The wounds of this past are not yet healed. We recognize the need for all of us – East and West – to work through this bleak chapter of our history, and to ask whether Reformed churches in the West heard sufficiently the cry of their sisters and brothers in the East.
Being truly mutual and accountable is hard and even painful, testing the depth of our trust. It requires the vulnerability demonstrated in Jesus. But there is no other way for us to follow God’s mission, and building unity for this purpose is one of the practical things the World Alliance of Reformed Churches can make possible.
But we discovered one more truth in Accra that we want to share. If confessing what we believe as Christians requires our spiritual and practical resistance to economic injustice as well as environmental destruction, then we need new depths of spirituality. This isn’t mere political activism; we’re being called to a spiritual engagement against evil, and for that we need our lives to be deeply rooted in the power of God’s Spirit. To put it simply, we need, as never before, the transformation of our lives promised through Jesus Christ.
This spiritual challenge flows from the words found in John 10:10, where Jesus declares the promise “that all may have life in fullness”. That biblical theme, in fact, wove itself through the work of the council during these days. Our Christian spirituality opens us to the presence and power of God in all the creation. Further, it draws us into ever-deeper community with one another. Deepening our spirituality can connect us with God’s power for the healing of personal wounds, social scars, and political divisions.
We also realized more clearly than ever that such spiritual transformation and the community that it creates are only possible as the gifts of women and young people are freely exercized and liberated in our life together. We experienced a glimpse of this in our gathering, as both women and youth shared so richly in worship, Bible study, presentations to the council, and leadership roles, and we long for the spirituality that makes this possible in every one of our congregations.
Because we were in Accra, Ghana, we were blessed constantly with the spiritual vitality and power of the local churches that hosted and received us. The drums and songs that saturate the soul of the African church permeated our worship. We marvelled at offerings given with such dancing and joy from hearts so full of gratitude. Here we tasted a spirituality that seemed so whole, so worshipful, so connected in community, and so embracing of God’s creation. It draws from the gifts of the culture and sings not only in these enchanting songs, but also in their daily lives, as their witness to the fullness of life in Christ.
As we entered the homes of our hosts on a weekend of visits to churches throughout Ghana and then were carried away by the power of their worship, our hearts were filled with hope and gratitude. We experienced the warmth of their hospitality and the power of God’s Spirit to bring new life and community. And we knew this is the sign of the only power that can sustain us as we confess our faith in Christ, stand against the powers of evil that threaten life, and live in mission with the hope of fullness of life for all promised by our Lord.
We want you to join in the confession and covenant with one another we have made in Accra. As part of the fellowship of those churches throughout the globe that share in common the Reformed tradition of Christian faith, we long for our experience here to enrich and encourage your mission and ministry.
We’ve included a liturgy that could enable you to share in worship the same confession, commitments, and promises that we have made here at this council. And we’ve also included an appendix that gives a summary of the many other urgent issues and concerns from around the globe that received our attention.
Our prayer for you is that God may reveal to you in fresh ways how our faith is deeply connected to all of life. May none of us ever live our faith insensitive to brutal suffering and indifferent to urgent cries from our world. May all of us know the power of God at work in our Lord Jesus Christ to overcome evil and offer to all the world life in the fullness intended by God.
And may the grace of God, the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you now and forever more.
Accra, Ghana
August 12 2004
Howard's Sermons and Article Clippings.
About Me
- Howard
- Im a Mainline protestant minister who loves serving in multicultural and urban contexts. I'm very interested in how liberation theology and existential-humanistic psychology are applied to the praxis of pastoral care and counseling. My most profound encounters with God come as we sojourn as brothers and sisters seeking the inbreaking of God's reign, here and now.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Friday, October 10, 2008
Doing good, doing better: Short-term mission more than a trip
Doing good, doing better: Short-term mission more than a trip
Leslie Scanton, Presbyterian Outlook July 8, 2008
Transformative or tourism?
This is high season for short-term mission trips, with congregations all over the United States sending groups to paint and hammer, teach and worship, and fix teeth. As popular as these trips are, however — and some estimate that more than a million Americans go on them each year — some Christians deeply immersed in mission work are starting to ask hard questions about the value of what they achieve, including Hunter Farrell, director of world mission for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
What’s the benefit of short-term mission trips compared to the thousands of dollars spent to send Americans overseas for a week or two? How are the Americans viewed by the people in the communities they visit? Should more resources be shifted away from short-term trips and towards more deeply-rooted, long-term mission work? And what can congregations and presbyteries do to make sure the trips they take have a real impact, both overseas and in their own communities back home?
Here is an example of what doesn’t work.
Maria Arroyo, the PC(USA)’s regional liaison for South America and the Caribbean, was told by one partner church that a day care center in a particular village was painted seven times in one summer by visitors from the United States. Steve Hayner, an associate professor of evangelism and church growth and director of international programs at Columbia Theological Seminary, said he’d heard of a church recently that had gone repeatedly to a community just over the Mexican border, building basic shelters for squatters.
“As soon as they left, the work they were doing was dismantled for the price of the material,” he said. “They would come back, and the things they had built the previous year were gone. But they kept doing this year after year after year.” These trips had become part of that congregation’s way of life. “That’s a colossal waste of everybody’s time and effort.”
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of well-planned short-term trips that have led to ongoing relationships and have opened people’s eyes to the realities of a global Christianity. “It’s the grassroots American church awakening to mission, and that’s all good,” said Roberta Hestenes, an educator, speaker, and pastor who has been involved in international mission work for decades. “I really do believe it’s of God — that this movement is of God. It’s exploding. I think this is a genuine, serious, sustainable movement from which people are learning and which cannot be disregarded.”
But “the concern I have,” Hestenes said, “is when these are one-time, short-term involvements oriented to quick, tangible results.” Rob Weingartner, executive director of The Outreach Foundation, which is involved in evangelism around the world, knows from personal experience how a first-hand encounter with the global church can change the way people think.
When he first went to Africa in the 1990s, “I was confronted there with a vital, dynamic global church” and “it turned my life upside-down,” Weingartner said. “I do see mission trips becoming more transformational, but it doesn’t happen automatically because our automatic default is to go with our own agenda, to be focused on our own need, and to come back to our own comfort.”
When done right, Weingartner said, “it’s not about a kind of church-sanctioned tourism. It’s not about doing good deeds so we feel better about ourselves. … Congregations invite their members to follow Jesus out into the world. And when we follow Jesus out into the world, we find God’s people everywhere we go.”
The question of what works well and not-so-well in short-term mission trips, and what amounts to good stewardship of resources, is being asked more and more as the movement of congregations being directly involved in world mission gains increasing maturity. At the World Mission ’07 convocation in Louisville last fall, for example, Farrell told of a group spending $37,000 on plane tickets and donating $5,000 for construction materials to assist with a project at Nile Theological College in Sudan. But Farrell said that two long-time PC(USA) mission co-workers, Bill and the late Lois Anderson, faithfully raised the question of whether all that money spent on travel might have been better used to hire Sudanese carpenters and masons, people “desperate for a job,” to do the construction work themselves. As the church is being challenged to think more deeply about such trips, here are some of the major strands of the conversation.
Learning to listen.
American Christians going to other countries need to pay attention not just to what they want to achieve, but to what’s already happening in those places. “Too much in the past the focus of these short-term mission trips has been our agenda, our experience,” Weingartner said. “I even had someone call me and say, ‘We’ve done Mexico. We want to do someplace else.’ It’s almost obscene, like a one-night stand. The focus on our agenda and our experience, even the focus on our transformation, can be lived out in a way that’s demeaning to our hosts … and can cause us to miss what God is doing in that place and what God desires us to do.”
Sometimes, hosting travelers from the U.S. can cause difficulty for the local churches, particularly if they are deluged with group after group who may not be sensitive to the culture or to the region’s political, economic, and religious dynamics. Many U.S. groups tend to go to the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America, because they are closer and travel costs are less than going to Africa or Asia.
“It is a burden when too many groups travel to just one place,” Arroyo said. “They overwhelm small churches,” and can create dependency or an imbalance among partner churches if one community is seen as receiving too much assistance while others receive little or none. Working through presbytery partnerships can help, she said, because then U.S. Presbyterians start to perceive the connections that local congregations have with other Christians and ministries in the region.
“They don’t have the big perspective,” Arroyo said of many U.S. visitors. “What they see is a little church in some little town with a lot of needs. And since we are U.S. people, we try to fix things. … What you need is just to worship with them,” to start a friendship among equals — people with names and faces.
Last fall, Rodrigo Maslucan, president of the Evangelical Reformed Church of Peru, told a workshop at the World Mission ’07 convocation that some U.S. visitors bring gifts of clothing or medicine, but “it doesn’t really have a healthy impact,” because there’s no fair system for dispersing the gifts. Using an interpreter, Maslucan spoke of “service with humility,” of the need for U.S. visitors to take the time to get to know their hosts, to “listen to what it is that the churches in Peru are seeking.”
Building long-term connections. Some of the most successful mission trips focus not on work — building, hammering, painting, digging — but on establishing relationships. That means listening to local partners, learning about their lives and their involvements in ministry, praying for one another, staying in touch, sometimes visiting back and forth. In other words: making a long-term commitment to support one another.
Hestenes, for example, has been involved with a project started at Solana Beach Church in southern California, working with the Afar people of Ethiopia. The Presbyterians involved in this work have made a series of short-term mission trips, but “let local people on the ground determine what the needs are,” she said, and have stuck with the commitment for years. As a result, “there is water where there wasn’t water,” agriculture, schooling, and health care. “We worked in partnership with World Vision Ethiopia” and with other groups, including Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship. “We weren’t lone rangers,” Hestenes said. “We were working with people who were committed over the long run. We prayed and worked and studied a long time to find those partners and do a sustained effort with them. They shouldn’t be the fad of the day.”
Hayner’s congregation has taken mission trips simply to show solidarity — to be “standing next to Christians who are in very difficult places,” such as in Iran and North Korea. For Palestinian Christians, “it’s a huge thing when Christians show up and pray with them,” Hayner said, a sign they have not been forgotten and are not alone.
Milton Nunez-Coba is pastor of Nueva Esperanza Presbyterian Church in Jersey City, a small, urban Hispanic congregation. From July 28 to August 6, he will lead a mission trip to the community of Santa Marta in Colombia. As a native of Colombia himself, Nunez-Coba knows well that one visit won’t change a lot. But it is a way, he said, to “show our solidarity with our sisters and brothers in South America.”
Nunez-Coba has been corresponding with La Puerta Reformed Church in Santa Marta for several years, where a friend is the pastor and where he has gone periodically to preach. This time he is bringing people from his own church and from Palisades Presbytery to visit La Puerta, which has a ministry with native Chimilis Indians displaced by the violence in Colombia.
“We would like to meet them personally,” Nunez-Coba said. The idea is “to get to know people face-to-face, to try to learn from them. We don’t want to go in in a paternalistic way, saying, ‘We’re bringing our money, let us fix something, let us build something.’ We approach it from a different place.”
Many of the people in his congregation are of Hispanic descent, “but have never been in a developing or third-world country,” Nunez-Coba said. “They are kind of middle-class people. It will be a thoroughly new experience for them.” And when his parishioners come home, Nunez-Coba hopes they will better understand that “the best way to really deal with the problems in Colombia is to advocate in Washington.”
In other words, there will be a next step.
Preparation and followup. People experienced in international mission say that’s key: preparing and educating a group before they take a short-term trip and having a plan of action for when they come home.
The preparation before departure can include Bible study, group-building exercises, and training in “how do you view the world through cross-cultural eyes,” Hayner said.
And when they come back, there needs to be time for debriefing and evaluation, to talk about “what did we see, who did we meet, what were our experiences, where can we follow up with this, who will do it?”
Hayner speaks of the need for accountability — making sure the resources spent on mission are producing strong results. Hestenes advocates thinking of partnership more broadly, with Presbyterians working through mission networks concentrated on particular parts of the world, and connecting with the resources of groups outside the PC(USA) such as World Vision or other non-governmental organizations.
This seems plain: local congregations will go where they want and partner with whomever they want. This is a grassroots movement. The denomination’s national staff has discovered that “even if they want to control Presbyterians, they can’t,” Weingartner said.
But through the mission networks — that focus on work in Malawi or China or wherever — the PC(USA) can “create a table where everybody involved in the country can come together and learn from each other. Sometimes if another congregation can share a horror story of the mistakes they’ve made and what they’ve learned, another congregation can hear that more than if it came from a national staff member.”
Hayner also stresses story-telling, as a means of bringing the rest of the congregation into the circle of the experience of the mission trip — and into the conversation about where that trip should lead next in ministry.“ They’re discovering that what happens before the trip and what happens after the trip is just as important as what happens on the trip” Weingartner said, if anything long-lasting is to come out of it.
Two-way street. Sometimes, the involvement with global partners helps U.S. congregations to think differently about their priorities back at home. For example, after some churches in Greensboro, N.C., became involved with a partnership in Peru, they invited a Peruvian to come to North Carolina to help develop a ministry to Hispanic immigrants living and working in the area.
A church in Texas asked a pastor and an elder from Ethiopia — a place where the growth of Christianity has been phenomenal over the last 50 years — to come for a month to teach about evangelism.
In mission work, “there are gifts we have to share,” Weingartner said. “There are also gifts we have to receive.”
Sometimes the interaction with a particular country or group of people leads Presbyterians to view their own communities with fresh eyes. When Solana Beach Church started working in Ethiopia, for example, suddenly “we found Ethiopians all across San Diego” too, Hestenes said — including an Ethiopian Coptic church just three blocks away. Now “we’re sensitized to the presence of these people among us” back home.
The witness of Christians in other places also can challenge Americans to take on new commitments in ministry back home. Often they’ve seen a southern hemisphere church “where people know that evangelism is everyone’s responsibility, that acts of compassion and speaking of Jesus are essential,” Weingartner said. They understand better that “we need to take matters of poverty and justice seriously. I think in a sense God is lifting up the global church as an example to us” to do better.
Leslie Scanton, Presbyterian Outlook July 8, 2008
Transformative or tourism?
This is high season for short-term mission trips, with congregations all over the United States sending groups to paint and hammer, teach and worship, and fix teeth. As popular as these trips are, however — and some estimate that more than a million Americans go on them each year — some Christians deeply immersed in mission work are starting to ask hard questions about the value of what they achieve, including Hunter Farrell, director of world mission for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
What’s the benefit of short-term mission trips compared to the thousands of dollars spent to send Americans overseas for a week or two? How are the Americans viewed by the people in the communities they visit? Should more resources be shifted away from short-term trips and towards more deeply-rooted, long-term mission work? And what can congregations and presbyteries do to make sure the trips they take have a real impact, both overseas and in their own communities back home?
Here is an example of what doesn’t work.
Maria Arroyo, the PC(USA)’s regional liaison for South America and the Caribbean, was told by one partner church that a day care center in a particular village was painted seven times in one summer by visitors from the United States. Steve Hayner, an associate professor of evangelism and church growth and director of international programs at Columbia Theological Seminary, said he’d heard of a church recently that had gone repeatedly to a community just over the Mexican border, building basic shelters for squatters.
“As soon as they left, the work they were doing was dismantled for the price of the material,” he said. “They would come back, and the things they had built the previous year were gone. But they kept doing this year after year after year.” These trips had become part of that congregation’s way of life. “That’s a colossal waste of everybody’s time and effort.”
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of well-planned short-term trips that have led to ongoing relationships and have opened people’s eyes to the realities of a global Christianity. “It’s the grassroots American church awakening to mission, and that’s all good,” said Roberta Hestenes, an educator, speaker, and pastor who has been involved in international mission work for decades. “I really do believe it’s of God — that this movement is of God. It’s exploding. I think this is a genuine, serious, sustainable movement from which people are learning and which cannot be disregarded.”
But “the concern I have,” Hestenes said, “is when these are one-time, short-term involvements oriented to quick, tangible results.” Rob Weingartner, executive director of The Outreach Foundation, which is involved in evangelism around the world, knows from personal experience how a first-hand encounter with the global church can change the way people think.
When he first went to Africa in the 1990s, “I was confronted there with a vital, dynamic global church” and “it turned my life upside-down,” Weingartner said. “I do see mission trips becoming more transformational, but it doesn’t happen automatically because our automatic default is to go with our own agenda, to be focused on our own need, and to come back to our own comfort.”
When done right, Weingartner said, “it’s not about a kind of church-sanctioned tourism. It’s not about doing good deeds so we feel better about ourselves. … Congregations invite their members to follow Jesus out into the world. And when we follow Jesus out into the world, we find God’s people everywhere we go.”
The question of what works well and not-so-well in short-term mission trips, and what amounts to good stewardship of resources, is being asked more and more as the movement of congregations being directly involved in world mission gains increasing maturity. At the World Mission ’07 convocation in Louisville last fall, for example, Farrell told of a group spending $37,000 on plane tickets and donating $5,000 for construction materials to assist with a project at Nile Theological College in Sudan. But Farrell said that two long-time PC(USA) mission co-workers, Bill and the late Lois Anderson, faithfully raised the question of whether all that money spent on travel might have been better used to hire Sudanese carpenters and masons, people “desperate for a job,” to do the construction work themselves. As the church is being challenged to think more deeply about such trips, here are some of the major strands of the conversation.
Learning to listen.
American Christians going to other countries need to pay attention not just to what they want to achieve, but to what’s already happening in those places. “Too much in the past the focus of these short-term mission trips has been our agenda, our experience,” Weingartner said. “I even had someone call me and say, ‘We’ve done Mexico. We want to do someplace else.’ It’s almost obscene, like a one-night stand. The focus on our agenda and our experience, even the focus on our transformation, can be lived out in a way that’s demeaning to our hosts … and can cause us to miss what God is doing in that place and what God desires us to do.”
Sometimes, hosting travelers from the U.S. can cause difficulty for the local churches, particularly if they are deluged with group after group who may not be sensitive to the culture or to the region’s political, economic, and religious dynamics. Many U.S. groups tend to go to the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America, because they are closer and travel costs are less than going to Africa or Asia.
“It is a burden when too many groups travel to just one place,” Arroyo said. “They overwhelm small churches,” and can create dependency or an imbalance among partner churches if one community is seen as receiving too much assistance while others receive little or none. Working through presbytery partnerships can help, she said, because then U.S. Presbyterians start to perceive the connections that local congregations have with other Christians and ministries in the region.
“They don’t have the big perspective,” Arroyo said of many U.S. visitors. “What they see is a little church in some little town with a lot of needs. And since we are U.S. people, we try to fix things. … What you need is just to worship with them,” to start a friendship among equals — people with names and faces.
Last fall, Rodrigo Maslucan, president of the Evangelical Reformed Church of Peru, told a workshop at the World Mission ’07 convocation that some U.S. visitors bring gifts of clothing or medicine, but “it doesn’t really have a healthy impact,” because there’s no fair system for dispersing the gifts. Using an interpreter, Maslucan spoke of “service with humility,” of the need for U.S. visitors to take the time to get to know their hosts, to “listen to what it is that the churches in Peru are seeking.”
Building long-term connections. Some of the most successful mission trips focus not on work — building, hammering, painting, digging — but on establishing relationships. That means listening to local partners, learning about their lives and their involvements in ministry, praying for one another, staying in touch, sometimes visiting back and forth. In other words: making a long-term commitment to support one another.
Hestenes, for example, has been involved with a project started at Solana Beach Church in southern California, working with the Afar people of Ethiopia. The Presbyterians involved in this work have made a series of short-term mission trips, but “let local people on the ground determine what the needs are,” she said, and have stuck with the commitment for years. As a result, “there is water where there wasn’t water,” agriculture, schooling, and health care. “We worked in partnership with World Vision Ethiopia” and with other groups, including Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship. “We weren’t lone rangers,” Hestenes said. “We were working with people who were committed over the long run. We prayed and worked and studied a long time to find those partners and do a sustained effort with them. They shouldn’t be the fad of the day.”
Hayner’s congregation has taken mission trips simply to show solidarity — to be “standing next to Christians who are in very difficult places,” such as in Iran and North Korea. For Palestinian Christians, “it’s a huge thing when Christians show up and pray with them,” Hayner said, a sign they have not been forgotten and are not alone.
Milton Nunez-Coba is pastor of Nueva Esperanza Presbyterian Church in Jersey City, a small, urban Hispanic congregation. From July 28 to August 6, he will lead a mission trip to the community of Santa Marta in Colombia. As a native of Colombia himself, Nunez-Coba knows well that one visit won’t change a lot. But it is a way, he said, to “show our solidarity with our sisters and brothers in South America.”
Nunez-Coba has been corresponding with La Puerta Reformed Church in Santa Marta for several years, where a friend is the pastor and where he has gone periodically to preach. This time he is bringing people from his own church and from Palisades Presbytery to visit La Puerta, which has a ministry with native Chimilis Indians displaced by the violence in Colombia.
“We would like to meet them personally,” Nunez-Coba said. The idea is “to get to know people face-to-face, to try to learn from them. We don’t want to go in in a paternalistic way, saying, ‘We’re bringing our money, let us fix something, let us build something.’ We approach it from a different place.”
Many of the people in his congregation are of Hispanic descent, “but have never been in a developing or third-world country,” Nunez-Coba said. “They are kind of middle-class people. It will be a thoroughly new experience for them.” And when his parishioners come home, Nunez-Coba hopes they will better understand that “the best way to really deal with the problems in Colombia is to advocate in Washington.”
In other words, there will be a next step.
Preparation and followup. People experienced in international mission say that’s key: preparing and educating a group before they take a short-term trip and having a plan of action for when they come home.
The preparation before departure can include Bible study, group-building exercises, and training in “how do you view the world through cross-cultural eyes,” Hayner said.
And when they come back, there needs to be time for debriefing and evaluation, to talk about “what did we see, who did we meet, what were our experiences, where can we follow up with this, who will do it?”
Hayner speaks of the need for accountability — making sure the resources spent on mission are producing strong results. Hestenes advocates thinking of partnership more broadly, with Presbyterians working through mission networks concentrated on particular parts of the world, and connecting with the resources of groups outside the PC(USA) such as World Vision or other non-governmental organizations.
This seems plain: local congregations will go where they want and partner with whomever they want. This is a grassroots movement. The denomination’s national staff has discovered that “even if they want to control Presbyterians, they can’t,” Weingartner said.
But through the mission networks — that focus on work in Malawi or China or wherever — the PC(USA) can “create a table where everybody involved in the country can come together and learn from each other. Sometimes if another congregation can share a horror story of the mistakes they’ve made and what they’ve learned, another congregation can hear that more than if it came from a national staff member.”
Hayner also stresses story-telling, as a means of bringing the rest of the congregation into the circle of the experience of the mission trip — and into the conversation about where that trip should lead next in ministry.“ They’re discovering that what happens before the trip and what happens after the trip is just as important as what happens on the trip” Weingartner said, if anything long-lasting is to come out of it.
Two-way street. Sometimes, the involvement with global partners helps U.S. congregations to think differently about their priorities back at home. For example, after some churches in Greensboro, N.C., became involved with a partnership in Peru, they invited a Peruvian to come to North Carolina to help develop a ministry to Hispanic immigrants living and working in the area.
A church in Texas asked a pastor and an elder from Ethiopia — a place where the growth of Christianity has been phenomenal over the last 50 years — to come for a month to teach about evangelism.
In mission work, “there are gifts we have to share,” Weingartner said. “There are also gifts we have to receive.”
Sometimes the interaction with a particular country or group of people leads Presbyterians to view their own communities with fresh eyes. When Solana Beach Church started working in Ethiopia, for example, suddenly “we found Ethiopians all across San Diego” too, Hestenes said — including an Ethiopian Coptic church just three blocks away. Now “we’re sensitized to the presence of these people among us” back home.
The witness of Christians in other places also can challenge Americans to take on new commitments in ministry back home. Often they’ve seen a southern hemisphere church “where people know that evangelism is everyone’s responsibility, that acts of compassion and speaking of Jesus are essential,” Weingartner said. They understand better that “we need to take matters of poverty and justice seriously. I think in a sense God is lifting up the global church as an example to us” to do better.
Following Jesus in America
Following Jesus in America
Stanley Hauerwas
One of the difficulties with being a Christian in a country like America — allegedly a Christian country — is that our familiarity with “Christianity” has made it difficult for us to read or hear Scripture. We have used faith in God to underwrite American pretensions that we are a Christian nation possessing righteousness other nations lack.
When presidents of the United States claim that the “God” of the Pledge of Allegiance is the God Christians worship, we have a problem. The Christian God is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is the only God worthy of worship. And the Christian pledge is not the Pledge of Allegiance, but rather is called the Apostles’ Creed.
There is no question that love between the persons of the Trinity is at the very heart of the Christian faith, but nothing is more destructive to the Christian faith than the current identification of Christianity with love. “Love” in this instance is often used as a substitution for being “nice.” But if God wants us to be more loving, why do we need Jesus to tell us that? Why didn’t God just tell us through an appropriate spokesperson that God wants us to love one another? If that is what Jesus is all about — that is, getting us to love one another — then why did everyone reject him? Why would anyone have bothered putting him to death?
The offense of Jesus is not that he wanted his followers to be loving; the offense is Jesus himself. Jesus is the politics of the new age. He is about the establishment of a kingdom that not only cares for the poor, but is willing to be poor — a kingdom that not only refuses to participate in the world’s violence, but is willing to die at the hands of a violent world.
The politics of Jesus
We should not be surprised that Jesus is the embodiment of such a politics. After all, Mary’s song promised that the proud would have their imaginations “scattered,” the powerful would be brought down from their thrones, the rich would be sent away empty, the lowly would be lifted up, and the hungry would be filled with good things.
Is it any wonder that the world was not prepared to welcome this kind of savior? Jesus was put to death because he embodied a politics that threatened all worldly regimes based on the fear-filled impulse to kill or be killed. The character of Jesus’ politics can be seen perhaps most clearly in the discourse between Jesus and Pilate. Indeed there can be no ambiguity about the political challenge Jesus represents before Pilate. Pilate is Roman authority; he is an authority who has the power to determine whether those who appear before Roman governors live or die.
Pilate begins in an inquiring fashion, “They tell me that you are the King of Jews. Is that true?” Pilate’s question is obviously meant to see if Jesus is “political.” Jesus responds by asking if Pilate came up with such a view on his own or did others tell him such was the case. “I am not a Jew, am I?” replies Pilate. To which Jesus responds, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from here.”
Many have read this remark as a confirmation that Jesus was not about politics. But Jesus never denies being a king, nor does he deny having a kingdom. Rather he denies that his kingdom is ruled according to the politics of this world. So is there a politic of the kingdom of God? Yes, and the name of that politics is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The gospel is the proclamation of a new age begun through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That gospel, moreover, has a form — a political form — called church. The church, as John Howard Yoder observes, is a society called into being by Jesus who gave us a new way to live. Yoder writes,
He gave them a new way to deal with offenders — by forgiving them. He gave them a new way to deal with violence — by suffering. He gave them a new way to deal with money — by sharing it. He gave them a new way to deal with problems of leadership — by drawing on the gift of every member, even the most humble. He gave them a new way to deal with a corrupt society — by building a new order, not making the old. He gave them a new pattern of relationships between man and woman, between parent and child, between master and slave, in which was made concrete a radical new vision of what it means to be a human person” (The Original Revolution, page 29).
That is the politics of Jesus — the “good news.”
An alternative to the world
The church does not exist to teach us how to be good Americans, or how to make Christianity “cool.” The church exists to form us, through the power of the Holy Spirit, into the likeness of Christ.
There’s no need to make the gospel “relevant” to the current culture. Jesus doesn’t care about being relevant; rather, Jesus cares about making disciples, about drawing people into the community called church that embodies the life-giving politics made possible through his life, death and resurrection.
Jesus does not promise that we will be made safe. Rather, this Savior offers to free us from our self-inflicted fears and anxieties.
Jesus does so, not by making our lives “more meaningful,” though we may discover our lives have renewed purpose, but by making us members of his body so that we can share in the goods of a community that is an alternative to the world.
As followers of Christ we may be hated and rejected, but we have been given such wonderful work that we may hardly notice.
Why did Jesus have to die? Jesus died to show us life is about God — not us. That is the good news of the gospel!
We are not left to our own devices. We are not in charge of our destinies. Jesus is our destiny. Jesus died so that we might find life, and life abundantly, in him.
Stanley Hauerwas, named “America’s Best Theologian” by Time magazine in 2001, is a professor of theological ethics at Duke University Divinity School. This article is adapted from lectures given at Duke and Princeton Theological Seminaries and originally published in The Cresset.
Stanley Hauerwas
One of the difficulties with being a Christian in a country like America — allegedly a Christian country — is that our familiarity with “Christianity” has made it difficult for us to read or hear Scripture. We have used faith in God to underwrite American pretensions that we are a Christian nation possessing righteousness other nations lack.
When presidents of the United States claim that the “God” of the Pledge of Allegiance is the God Christians worship, we have a problem. The Christian God is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is the only God worthy of worship. And the Christian pledge is not the Pledge of Allegiance, but rather is called the Apostles’ Creed.
There is no question that love between the persons of the Trinity is at the very heart of the Christian faith, but nothing is more destructive to the Christian faith than the current identification of Christianity with love. “Love” in this instance is often used as a substitution for being “nice.” But if God wants us to be more loving, why do we need Jesus to tell us that? Why didn’t God just tell us through an appropriate spokesperson that God wants us to love one another? If that is what Jesus is all about — that is, getting us to love one another — then why did everyone reject him? Why would anyone have bothered putting him to death?
The offense of Jesus is not that he wanted his followers to be loving; the offense is Jesus himself. Jesus is the politics of the new age. He is about the establishment of a kingdom that not only cares for the poor, but is willing to be poor — a kingdom that not only refuses to participate in the world’s violence, but is willing to die at the hands of a violent world.
The politics of Jesus
We should not be surprised that Jesus is the embodiment of such a politics. After all, Mary’s song promised that the proud would have their imaginations “scattered,” the powerful would be brought down from their thrones, the rich would be sent away empty, the lowly would be lifted up, and the hungry would be filled with good things.
Is it any wonder that the world was not prepared to welcome this kind of savior? Jesus was put to death because he embodied a politics that threatened all worldly regimes based on the fear-filled impulse to kill or be killed. The character of Jesus’ politics can be seen perhaps most clearly in the discourse between Jesus and Pilate. Indeed there can be no ambiguity about the political challenge Jesus represents before Pilate. Pilate is Roman authority; he is an authority who has the power to determine whether those who appear before Roman governors live or die.
Pilate begins in an inquiring fashion, “They tell me that you are the King of Jews. Is that true?” Pilate’s question is obviously meant to see if Jesus is “political.” Jesus responds by asking if Pilate came up with such a view on his own or did others tell him such was the case. “I am not a Jew, am I?” replies Pilate. To which Jesus responds, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from here.”
Many have read this remark as a confirmation that Jesus was not about politics. But Jesus never denies being a king, nor does he deny having a kingdom. Rather he denies that his kingdom is ruled according to the politics of this world. So is there a politic of the kingdom of God? Yes, and the name of that politics is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The gospel is the proclamation of a new age begun through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That gospel, moreover, has a form — a political form — called church. The church, as John Howard Yoder observes, is a society called into being by Jesus who gave us a new way to live. Yoder writes,
He gave them a new way to deal with offenders — by forgiving them. He gave them a new way to deal with violence — by suffering. He gave them a new way to deal with money — by sharing it. He gave them a new way to deal with problems of leadership — by drawing on the gift of every member, even the most humble. He gave them a new way to deal with a corrupt society — by building a new order, not making the old. He gave them a new pattern of relationships between man and woman, between parent and child, between master and slave, in which was made concrete a radical new vision of what it means to be a human person” (The Original Revolution, page 29).
That is the politics of Jesus — the “good news.”
An alternative to the world
The church does not exist to teach us how to be good Americans, or how to make Christianity “cool.” The church exists to form us, through the power of the Holy Spirit, into the likeness of Christ.
There’s no need to make the gospel “relevant” to the current culture. Jesus doesn’t care about being relevant; rather, Jesus cares about making disciples, about drawing people into the community called church that embodies the life-giving politics made possible through his life, death and resurrection.
Jesus does not promise that we will be made safe. Rather, this Savior offers to free us from our self-inflicted fears and anxieties.
Jesus does so, not by making our lives “more meaningful,” though we may discover our lives have renewed purpose, but by making us members of his body so that we can share in the goods of a community that is an alternative to the world.
As followers of Christ we may be hated and rejected, but we have been given such wonderful work that we may hardly notice.
Why did Jesus have to die? Jesus died to show us life is about God — not us. That is the good news of the gospel!
We are not left to our own devices. We are not in charge of our destinies. Jesus is our destiny. Jesus died so that we might find life, and life abundantly, in him.
Stanley Hauerwas, named “America’s Best Theologian” by Time magazine in 2001, is a professor of theological ethics at Duke University Divinity School. This article is adapted from lectures given at Duke and Princeton Theological Seminaries and originally published in The Cresset.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Scholar estimates that 2 million U.S. Christians travel abroad annually on short-term mission
‘An enormous phenomenon’
Scholar estimates that 2 million U.S. Christians travel abroad annually on short-term mission
by Pat Cole
LOUISVILLE — Short-term mission trips are “an enormous phenomenon" and "central to the ministry practices of a high proportion” of Christians in the United States, according to a seminary professor who studies the trend.
In a recent address to leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission networks, Robert Priest, professor of mission and intercultural studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL, said it is likely that more than 2 million U.S. Christians travel abroad each year on short-term mission trips.
Participation in international mission trips is particularly high among younger people, he said. In a study of students in 60 U.S. seminaries, Priest found that 48 percent of seminarians had been on an international short-term mission trip and that 67 percent of PC(USA) seminarians had a short-term mission experience abroad. A survey of students in Christian liberal arts colleges revealed that 47 percent of them had traveled internationally on short-term mission trips.
A total of 44 leaders from 31 PC(USA) mission networks gathered in Louisville Sept. 25–27 to share best practices and participate in training opportunities. PC(USA) mission networks are composed of Presbyterians who come together around a particular country, region, or other mission interest.
Short-term mission experiences, Priest said, can potentially broaden the horizons of participants, deepen their faith, and contribute to the well-being of communities in developing countries.
However, such positive outcomes from these trips, which usually last fewer than 14 days, are not automatic. In fact, Priest noted, many participants fail to try to understand the cultures they visit, can cite little evidence of spiritual transformation as a result of their trips, and engage in giving practices that create unhealthy dependencies.
Nevertheless, in his research with pastors in Peru and Thailand, Priest has found that most pastors in those countries who worked with short-term groups had positive appraisals of them. On a trip to one Latin American city Priest witnessed a large short-term mission team help construct a Protestant church building and staff a medical clinic that offered a variety of services.
“I couldn’t find anybody in that town who thought it (the mission trip group) was anything but wonderful,” Priest said. The economically poor townspeople appreciated their services and saw that the host congregation had connections with affluent foreigners. Those relationships, he said, raised the esteem of the congregation in the predominately Catholic town.
However, many mission pastors and youth pastors acknowledge that the strategic contributions of short-term mission trips to overseas communities are of limited value, Priest said. They justify short-term mission, he explained, “in terms of how it positively benefits the sending congregation or youth program.”
As the short-term mission trips began to grow in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, Priest said some leaders justified the trips by hoping the experience would nudge participants toward long-term mission service or make them more likely to support long-term mission personnel financially. Research has shown that has not been the case, he said.
“Today the results are clear that the explosion of short-term mission trips coincided with a plateauing and decline of career missions and that short-term mission expansion reflected a redirection of resources away from career missions rather than an increase in the amount given in support of career missions,” Priest said.
Priest, who has interviewed many short-term mission participants, said they experience spiritual transformation more often when they combine international service with work in economically poor communities near their homes. Some short-term mission participants have built relationships with recent immigrants from countries they visited on mission trips.
Yet a deepened involvement with economically poor people and lifestyle changes are not likely to happen “if you come from a church that doesn’t put justice issues front and center,” he said.
In his interviews with mission trip participants, Priest has found that many people struggle to identify ways they have changed as a result of their mission experience.
Priest recounted the story of one short-term mission trip participant who was eager to be interviewed about his experience. When questioned how he had changed as a result of the trip, the man could only say that he is now a more grateful person.
“Is gratefulness an adequate response to human need?” Priest asked.
Scholar estimates that 2 million U.S. Christians travel abroad annually on short-term mission
by Pat Cole
LOUISVILLE — Short-term mission trips are “an enormous phenomenon" and "central to the ministry practices of a high proportion” of Christians in the United States, according to a seminary professor who studies the trend.
In a recent address to leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission networks, Robert Priest, professor of mission and intercultural studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL, said it is likely that more than 2 million U.S. Christians travel abroad each year on short-term mission trips.
Participation in international mission trips is particularly high among younger people, he said. In a study of students in 60 U.S. seminaries, Priest found that 48 percent of seminarians had been on an international short-term mission trip and that 67 percent of PC(USA) seminarians had a short-term mission experience abroad. A survey of students in Christian liberal arts colleges revealed that 47 percent of them had traveled internationally on short-term mission trips.
A total of 44 leaders from 31 PC(USA) mission networks gathered in Louisville Sept. 25–27 to share best practices and participate in training opportunities. PC(USA) mission networks are composed of Presbyterians who come together around a particular country, region, or other mission interest.
Short-term mission experiences, Priest said, can potentially broaden the horizons of participants, deepen their faith, and contribute to the well-being of communities in developing countries.
However, such positive outcomes from these trips, which usually last fewer than 14 days, are not automatic. In fact, Priest noted, many participants fail to try to understand the cultures they visit, can cite little evidence of spiritual transformation as a result of their trips, and engage in giving practices that create unhealthy dependencies.
Nevertheless, in his research with pastors in Peru and Thailand, Priest has found that most pastors in those countries who worked with short-term groups had positive appraisals of them. On a trip to one Latin American city Priest witnessed a large short-term mission team help construct a Protestant church building and staff a medical clinic that offered a variety of services.
“I couldn’t find anybody in that town who thought it (the mission trip group) was anything but wonderful,” Priest said. The economically poor townspeople appreciated their services and saw that the host congregation had connections with affluent foreigners. Those relationships, he said, raised the esteem of the congregation in the predominately Catholic town.
However, many mission pastors and youth pastors acknowledge that the strategic contributions of short-term mission trips to overseas communities are of limited value, Priest said. They justify short-term mission, he explained, “in terms of how it positively benefits the sending congregation or youth program.”
As the short-term mission trips began to grow in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, Priest said some leaders justified the trips by hoping the experience would nudge participants toward long-term mission service or make them more likely to support long-term mission personnel financially. Research has shown that has not been the case, he said.
“Today the results are clear that the explosion of short-term mission trips coincided with a plateauing and decline of career missions and that short-term mission expansion reflected a redirection of resources away from career missions rather than an increase in the amount given in support of career missions,” Priest said.
Priest, who has interviewed many short-term mission participants, said they experience spiritual transformation more often when they combine international service with work in economically poor communities near their homes. Some short-term mission participants have built relationships with recent immigrants from countries they visited on mission trips.
Yet a deepened involvement with economically poor people and lifestyle changes are not likely to happen “if you come from a church that doesn’t put justice issues front and center,” he said.
In his interviews with mission trip participants, Priest has found that many people struggle to identify ways they have changed as a result of their mission experience.
Priest recounted the story of one short-term mission trip participant who was eager to be interviewed about his experience. When questioned how he had changed as a result of the trip, the man could only say that he is now a more grateful person.
“Is gratefulness an adequate response to human need?” Priest asked.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Bearing the Fruits of the Kingdom
Bearing the Fruits of the Kingdom
Matthew 21:33-46
Today, we will continue to explore the theme on the Kingdom of God. This concept can be too abstract and amorphous for us to appreciate just what is we are proclaiming. What do these fruits of the kingdom look like, what do they taste like? In Isaiah, the vineyard was a common metaphor for people of Israel. How are we as the Church of Jesus Christ living as the harvest of God’s good fruit?
If we are labourers in God’s vineyard, how do we distinguish the good fruit from the bad? We don’t want to pluck the grapes too soon, nor do we want to leave them on too long to waste away on the vine. There is a timing only God knows and we keep vigil, looking for the time and place to proclaim God’s Kingdom among us. There is a time when we need to raise our voice for the voiceless. We take a stand even when it is neither popular nor convenient. We carry our cross, knowing this is the path set for us all.
Our ancestors have walked this path of uncertainty before us. We too can feel like the tenants, our landlord has left us alone to fend for ourselves, God seems far away and our prayers go unanswered. After awhile we can forget just who it is we labour for and our egos get in the way. The church becomes more of a social club with our private fiefdoms. We need to have courage and patience as we tend the harvest and wait with pregnant hope. We don’t pluck or weed without God’s grace to guide us. Wait on the Lord, God will give us the words at the right time.
Have you ever heard someone say, “May you live in interesting times.” The headlines of late have made us very anxious. Will I lose my retirement in this mess? What will happen to our endowment, what does this mean for our church’s future? This is the pressing issue of the day. What happens to us when we get stuck in survival mode? This gloomy cloud set in around us at the end of our last Session meeting.
Our leaders in Washington have passed the bill that some call a bailout and others call a relief plan. No matter how you look at, we are facing very trying times! Between the cost of War and this Wall Street buyout, we are facing a mouth dropping and eye bulging debt. For too long the American way has been to live beyond our means. We need to remember how Jesus sent out the first disciples to live. They were more focused on living out the Kingdom of the God than getting in over their heads. How is this day opportunity for us to reclaim the simplicity and right livelihood that our ancestors have modelled for us?
As the church, we face a common criticism of being hypocrites. We don’t practice what we preach. We say one thing but under the cover night we whistle another tune. I love the bumper sticker that reads, “I’m Not Perfect, only Forgiven.” God is loving and gracious, but at some point our repentance, (turning the other way) needs to take hold. How are we bearing the good fruit of the Kingdom?
Many of our brothers and sisters in other countries find it hard to swallow the impact of this financial crisis. Many see America as very hypocritical. We told others to be careful of this and we withheld the purse strings until we saw some assurances. Now the world sees just how far we live beyond our means. Why should we bail out these three piece suits seated around the conference tables on Wall Street. People are entitled to be outraged and dismayed. It’s good for us to awake from our apathy and complacency.
I can’t help but imagine what Jesus would say to them if he was in lower Manhattan or in the halls of Congress. Who were the bigwigs of Jesus day, who made decisions that impacted others? People who do not seem to face any accountability. What did Jesus say to the temple and religious authorities running the show in Jerusalem?
In our gospel lesson, Jesus warns the powers that be that they must repent from their ways and produce good fruit. Just the night before Jesus had cleared the temple saying, “My father’s house will be called a house prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves.” The poor peasants coming into Jerusalem for the Passover feast are being exploited by profiteers who are in cahoots with the powers that be. They price gouged these pilgrims for the animal sacrifices they need in order to participate in the Temple festivities.
When I think of our brothers and sisters facing sub-prime foreclosures and those with ruined credit who are struggling to find a place to rent, I see a parallel with these poor peasants. They were just trying to be faithful to the expectations set for them. They have come to participate in the Passover festival hoping that God will once again liberate his children from poverty and oppression. People seeking the American dream have been duped by loan officers who never should have processed these loans. We have moved on beyond just pay day lending and loan sharks. There are wolves among us who prey on the sheep. Our Good Shepherd will clear the fold. The vineyard will be freed of greed and exploitation.
God has blessed this country as truly a land of milk and honey. We have access to an incredible array of resources, both material and intellectual. We know the saying, “to whom much is given much is required.” There is fruit from this harvest that belongs to God. Some of us have been tenants who have forgotten where this abundance comes from. The FBI is investing fraud allegations with these Wall Street Firms. More locally, Todd Petters is in custody facing charges for his own scheme. This is a hard cold reality that we are prone to being blinded by greed. We grow arrogant and think we are beyond recourse. Some of us think we are immune to accountability, we have made ourselves indispensable.
Jesus reminds us that we are called to bear the good fruit of the Kingdom. If we do not, God may turn the vineyard over to people who are willing to plant and harvest the God’s fruit. We are all children of God bearing the image of God in us. Regardless of the longitude or latitude of where we were born, we know in our bones this hunger for love, justice and compassion.
We need to expand our understanding of God’s mission. The vineyard is much more comprehensive than many people realize. As I mentioned last week, salvation is more than just our personal relationship with Jesus. We are forgiven, blessed and nourished. We are then sent out to extend this love and grace to others. Jesus does not send us out merely to thump our bibles and add convert notches to our belts. The numbers belong to God, it is not our harvest we merely tend the branches.
Jesus sends us out to work for the healing and liberation of our brothers and sisters living in the bondages of our time. When we extend love and forgiveness to others, we are planting seeds for the harvest. When we embrace the stranger struggling for their daily bread, the warmth of God’s light nourishes the branches. When we care for the widows and orphans surviving the diseases of poverty (TB, Malaria and HIV/AIDS) we bear the fruit of God’s vineyard.
Every day we need to ask ourselves, who are our brothers and sisters among us who gather around the pools of shiloam for healing and wholeness? We’ve respond to this question by opening our doors for a 12 step group. Every church can learn from our brothers and sisters in recovery what a grace spirituality is like. These folks are producing fruit for the kingdom.
Today we celebrate World Communion Sunday. Presbyterians started this traditions years ago. As the building storm of Nazism loomed on the horizon, our brothers and sisters gathered from the North and South and East and West to partake of the bread and wine our Lord sets for us. Today we still receive this foretaste of Christ’s great banquet. Here is where we enjoy the fruits of God’s Kingdom.
Today, we also collect the Peacemaking offering. Can you feel synergy? Years ago, our ancestors instituted this special communion service to remember how the global church was working together to bear the fruits of God’s harvest: peace, healing and reconciliation. AHP has directly benefited from this offering in the past to support our summer program. Numerous peacemaking delegations are funded through this offering. Due to the work of the Presbyterian AIDS Network, it is suggested that our 25 % for local ministries be directed to an HIV/AIDS related ministry.
As we pass the plate we remember that this harvest belongs to God. We are tenants in the field. We attend the branches that lead us back to Jesus, the true vine. These branches extend to every corner of the world. May we be known as harvesters of the fruit growing in God’s vineyard. No more hunger, no more thirst. Broken hearts are healed ; bodies are free of disease. Our children laugh and prosper. Our elders live with dignity and independence.
This is our time. We are the people we have been waiting for. Regardless of your party affiliation, I urge you to be engaged in the civic process. As Presbyterians, we embrace our call to be: "Reformed and always being Reformed according to the Word of God." The world needs to hear from us. What do these fruits of the harvest look and taste like? Noone has a monopoly on God’s mission. God’s vineyard is bigger than us all and we each have a row assigned for us. Let us kneel down and continue the nitty gritty work .
Matthew 21:33-46
Today, we will continue to explore the theme on the Kingdom of God. This concept can be too abstract and amorphous for us to appreciate just what is we are proclaiming. What do these fruits of the kingdom look like, what do they taste like? In Isaiah, the vineyard was a common metaphor for people of Israel. How are we as the Church of Jesus Christ living as the harvest of God’s good fruit?
If we are labourers in God’s vineyard, how do we distinguish the good fruit from the bad? We don’t want to pluck the grapes too soon, nor do we want to leave them on too long to waste away on the vine. There is a timing only God knows and we keep vigil, looking for the time and place to proclaim God’s Kingdom among us. There is a time when we need to raise our voice for the voiceless. We take a stand even when it is neither popular nor convenient. We carry our cross, knowing this is the path set for us all.
Our ancestors have walked this path of uncertainty before us. We too can feel like the tenants, our landlord has left us alone to fend for ourselves, God seems far away and our prayers go unanswered. After awhile we can forget just who it is we labour for and our egos get in the way. The church becomes more of a social club with our private fiefdoms. We need to have courage and patience as we tend the harvest and wait with pregnant hope. We don’t pluck or weed without God’s grace to guide us. Wait on the Lord, God will give us the words at the right time.
Have you ever heard someone say, “May you live in interesting times.” The headlines of late have made us very anxious. Will I lose my retirement in this mess? What will happen to our endowment, what does this mean for our church’s future? This is the pressing issue of the day. What happens to us when we get stuck in survival mode? This gloomy cloud set in around us at the end of our last Session meeting.
Our leaders in Washington have passed the bill that some call a bailout and others call a relief plan. No matter how you look at, we are facing very trying times! Between the cost of War and this Wall Street buyout, we are facing a mouth dropping and eye bulging debt. For too long the American way has been to live beyond our means. We need to remember how Jesus sent out the first disciples to live. They were more focused on living out the Kingdom of the God than getting in over their heads. How is this day opportunity for us to reclaim the simplicity and right livelihood that our ancestors have modelled for us?
As the church, we face a common criticism of being hypocrites. We don’t practice what we preach. We say one thing but under the cover night we whistle another tune. I love the bumper sticker that reads, “I’m Not Perfect, only Forgiven.” God is loving and gracious, but at some point our repentance, (turning the other way) needs to take hold. How are we bearing the good fruit of the Kingdom?
Many of our brothers and sisters in other countries find it hard to swallow the impact of this financial crisis. Many see America as very hypocritical. We told others to be careful of this and we withheld the purse strings until we saw some assurances. Now the world sees just how far we live beyond our means. Why should we bail out these three piece suits seated around the conference tables on Wall Street. People are entitled to be outraged and dismayed. It’s good for us to awake from our apathy and complacency.
I can’t help but imagine what Jesus would say to them if he was in lower Manhattan or in the halls of Congress. Who were the bigwigs of Jesus day, who made decisions that impacted others? People who do not seem to face any accountability. What did Jesus say to the temple and religious authorities running the show in Jerusalem?
In our gospel lesson, Jesus warns the powers that be that they must repent from their ways and produce good fruit. Just the night before Jesus had cleared the temple saying, “My father’s house will be called a house prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves.” The poor peasants coming into Jerusalem for the Passover feast are being exploited by profiteers who are in cahoots with the powers that be. They price gouged these pilgrims for the animal sacrifices they need in order to participate in the Temple festivities.
When I think of our brothers and sisters facing sub-prime foreclosures and those with ruined credit who are struggling to find a place to rent, I see a parallel with these poor peasants. They were just trying to be faithful to the expectations set for them. They have come to participate in the Passover festival hoping that God will once again liberate his children from poverty and oppression. People seeking the American dream have been duped by loan officers who never should have processed these loans. We have moved on beyond just pay day lending and loan sharks. There are wolves among us who prey on the sheep. Our Good Shepherd will clear the fold. The vineyard will be freed of greed and exploitation.
God has blessed this country as truly a land of milk and honey. We have access to an incredible array of resources, both material and intellectual. We know the saying, “to whom much is given much is required.” There is fruit from this harvest that belongs to God. Some of us have been tenants who have forgotten where this abundance comes from. The FBI is investing fraud allegations with these Wall Street Firms. More locally, Todd Petters is in custody facing charges for his own scheme. This is a hard cold reality that we are prone to being blinded by greed. We grow arrogant and think we are beyond recourse. Some of us think we are immune to accountability, we have made ourselves indispensable.
Jesus reminds us that we are called to bear the good fruit of the Kingdom. If we do not, God may turn the vineyard over to people who are willing to plant and harvest the God’s fruit. We are all children of God bearing the image of God in us. Regardless of the longitude or latitude of where we were born, we know in our bones this hunger for love, justice and compassion.
We need to expand our understanding of God’s mission. The vineyard is much more comprehensive than many people realize. As I mentioned last week, salvation is more than just our personal relationship with Jesus. We are forgiven, blessed and nourished. We are then sent out to extend this love and grace to others. Jesus does not send us out merely to thump our bibles and add convert notches to our belts. The numbers belong to God, it is not our harvest we merely tend the branches.
Jesus sends us out to work for the healing and liberation of our brothers and sisters living in the bondages of our time. When we extend love and forgiveness to others, we are planting seeds for the harvest. When we embrace the stranger struggling for their daily bread, the warmth of God’s light nourishes the branches. When we care for the widows and orphans surviving the diseases of poverty (TB, Malaria and HIV/AIDS) we bear the fruit of God’s vineyard.
Every day we need to ask ourselves, who are our brothers and sisters among us who gather around the pools of shiloam for healing and wholeness? We’ve respond to this question by opening our doors for a 12 step group. Every church can learn from our brothers and sisters in recovery what a grace spirituality is like. These folks are producing fruit for the kingdom.
Today we celebrate World Communion Sunday. Presbyterians started this traditions years ago. As the building storm of Nazism loomed on the horizon, our brothers and sisters gathered from the North and South and East and West to partake of the bread and wine our Lord sets for us. Today we still receive this foretaste of Christ’s great banquet. Here is where we enjoy the fruits of God’s Kingdom.
Today, we also collect the Peacemaking offering. Can you feel synergy? Years ago, our ancestors instituted this special communion service to remember how the global church was working together to bear the fruits of God’s harvest: peace, healing and reconciliation. AHP has directly benefited from this offering in the past to support our summer program. Numerous peacemaking delegations are funded through this offering. Due to the work of the Presbyterian AIDS Network, it is suggested that our 25 % for local ministries be directed to an HIV/AIDS related ministry.
As we pass the plate we remember that this harvest belongs to God. We are tenants in the field. We attend the branches that lead us back to Jesus, the true vine. These branches extend to every corner of the world. May we be known as harvesters of the fruit growing in God’s vineyard. No more hunger, no more thirst. Broken hearts are healed ; bodies are free of disease. Our children laugh and prosper. Our elders live with dignity and independence.
This is our time. We are the people we have been waiting for. Regardless of your party affiliation, I urge you to be engaged in the civic process. As Presbyterians, we embrace our call to be: "Reformed and always being Reformed according to the Word of God." The world needs to hear from us. What do these fruits of the harvest look and taste like? Noone has a monopoly on God’s mission. God’s vineyard is bigger than us all and we each have a row assigned for us. Let us kneel down and continue the nitty gritty work .
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Death row Realism
Death row realism
Do executions make us safer? San Quentin's former warden says no.
By Jeanne Woodford
October 2, 2008
» Discuss Article
As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, "Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?"
We knew the answer: No.
I worked in corrections for 30 years, starting as a correctional officer and working my way up to warden at San Quentin and then on to the top job in the state -- director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. During those years, I came to believe that the death penalty should be replaced with life without the possibility of parole.
I didn't reach that conclusion because I'm soft on crime. My No. 1 concern is public safety. I want my children and grandchildren to have the safety and freedom to pursue their dreams. I know from firsthand experience that some people are dangerous and must be removed from society forever -- people such as Robert Lee Massie.
I presided over Massie's execution in 2001. He was first sentenced to death for the 1965 murder of a mother of two. But when executions were temporarily banned in 1972, his sentence was changed to one that would allow parole, and he was released in 1978. Months later, he killed a 61-year-old liquor store owner and was returned to death row.
For supporters of the death penalty, Massie is a poster child. Yet for me, he stands out among the executions I presided over as the strongest example of how empty and futile the act of execution is.
I remember that night clearly. It was March 27, 2001. I was the last person to talk to Massie before he died. After that, I brought the witnesses in. I looked at the clock to make sure it was after midnight. I got a signal from two members of my staff who were on the phone with the state Supreme Court and the U.S. attorney general's office to make sure there were no last-minute legal impediments to the execution. There were none, so I gave the order to proceed. It took several minutes for the lethal injections to take effect.
I did my job, but I don't believe it was the right thing to have done. We should have condemned Massie to permanent imprisonment -- that would have made the world safer. But on the night we executed him, when the question was asked, "Did this make the world safer?" the answer remained no. Massie needed to be kept away from society, but we did not need to kill him.
Why should we pay to keep him locked up for life? I hear that question constantly. Few people know the answer: It's cheaper -- much, much cheaper than execution.
I wish the public knew how much the death penalty affects their wallets. California spends an additional $117 million each year pursuing the execution of those on death row. Just housing inmates on death row costs an additional $90,000 per prisoner per year above what it would cost to house them with the general prison population.
A statewide, bipartisan commission recently concluded that we must spend $100 million more each year to fix the many problems with capital punishment in California. Total price tag: in excess of $200 million-a-year more than simply condemning people to life without the possibility of parole.
If we condemn the worst offenders, like Massie, to permanent imprisonment, resources now spent on the death penalty could be used to investigate unsolved homicides, modernize crime labs and expand effective violence prevention programs, especially in at-risk communities. The money also could be used to intervene in the lives of children at risk and to invest in their education -- to stop future victimization.
As I presided over Massie's execution, I thought about the abuse and neglect he endured as a child in the foster care system. We failed to keep him safe, and our failure contributed to who he was as an adult. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to kill him, what if we spent that money on other foster children so that we stop producing men like Massie in the first place?
As director of corrections, I visited Watts and met with some ex-offenders. I learned that the prison system is paroling 300 people every week into the neighborhood without a plan or resources for success. How can we continue to spend more than $100 million a year seeking the execution of a handful of offenders while we fail to meet the basic safety needs of communities like Watts?
It is not realistic to think that Watts and neighborhoods like it will ever get well if we can't -- or won't -- support them in addressing the problems they face.
To say that I have regrets about my involvement in the death penalty is to let myself off the hook too easily. To take a life in order to prove how much we value another life does not strengthen our society. It is a public policy that devalues our very being and detracts crucial resources from programs that could truly make our communities safe.
Jeanne Woodford is the
former director of the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation and the
former warden of San Quentin State Prison.
Do executions make us safer? San Quentin's former warden says no.
By Jeanne Woodford
October 2, 2008
» Discuss Article
As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, "Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?"
We knew the answer: No.
I worked in corrections for 30 years, starting as a correctional officer and working my way up to warden at San Quentin and then on to the top job in the state -- director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. During those years, I came to believe that the death penalty should be replaced with life without the possibility of parole.
I didn't reach that conclusion because I'm soft on crime. My No. 1 concern is public safety. I want my children and grandchildren to have the safety and freedom to pursue their dreams. I know from firsthand experience that some people are dangerous and must be removed from society forever -- people such as Robert Lee Massie.
I presided over Massie's execution in 2001. He was first sentenced to death for the 1965 murder of a mother of two. But when executions were temporarily banned in 1972, his sentence was changed to one that would allow parole, and he was released in 1978. Months later, he killed a 61-year-old liquor store owner and was returned to death row.
For supporters of the death penalty, Massie is a poster child. Yet for me, he stands out among the executions I presided over as the strongest example of how empty and futile the act of execution is.
I remember that night clearly. It was March 27, 2001. I was the last person to talk to Massie before he died. After that, I brought the witnesses in. I looked at the clock to make sure it was after midnight. I got a signal from two members of my staff who were on the phone with the state Supreme Court and the U.S. attorney general's office to make sure there were no last-minute legal impediments to the execution. There were none, so I gave the order to proceed. It took several minutes for the lethal injections to take effect.
I did my job, but I don't believe it was the right thing to have done. We should have condemned Massie to permanent imprisonment -- that would have made the world safer. But on the night we executed him, when the question was asked, "Did this make the world safer?" the answer remained no. Massie needed to be kept away from society, but we did not need to kill him.
Why should we pay to keep him locked up for life? I hear that question constantly. Few people know the answer: It's cheaper -- much, much cheaper than execution.
I wish the public knew how much the death penalty affects their wallets. California spends an additional $117 million each year pursuing the execution of those on death row. Just housing inmates on death row costs an additional $90,000 per prisoner per year above what it would cost to house them with the general prison population.
A statewide, bipartisan commission recently concluded that we must spend $100 million more each year to fix the many problems with capital punishment in California. Total price tag: in excess of $200 million-a-year more than simply condemning people to life without the possibility of parole.
If we condemn the worst offenders, like Massie, to permanent imprisonment, resources now spent on the death penalty could be used to investigate unsolved homicides, modernize crime labs and expand effective violence prevention programs, especially in at-risk communities. The money also could be used to intervene in the lives of children at risk and to invest in their education -- to stop future victimization.
As I presided over Massie's execution, I thought about the abuse and neglect he endured as a child in the foster care system. We failed to keep him safe, and our failure contributed to who he was as an adult. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to kill him, what if we spent that money on other foster children so that we stop producing men like Massie in the first place?
As director of corrections, I visited Watts and met with some ex-offenders. I learned that the prison system is paroling 300 people every week into the neighborhood without a plan or resources for success. How can we continue to spend more than $100 million a year seeking the execution of a handful of offenders while we fail to meet the basic safety needs of communities like Watts?
It is not realistic to think that Watts and neighborhoods like it will ever get well if we can't -- or won't -- support them in addressing the problems they face.
To say that I have regrets about my involvement in the death penalty is to let myself off the hook too easily. To take a life in order to prove how much we value another life does not strengthen our society. It is a public policy that devalues our very being and detracts crucial resources from programs that could truly make our communities safe.
Jeanne Woodford is the
former director of the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation and the
former warden of San Quentin State Prison.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Lessons and Carols Friday Dec 5th
Lessons and Carols
Friday December 5th
7 PM
As the commercialization of Christmas begins sooner and sooner, we need to remember what the season of Advent means to us. Our diverse congregation and Eastide community will gather to celebrate the coming of our Prince of Peace. Several choirs and music groups are invited to join us.
Arlington Hills Presbyterian Church
1275 E Magnolia (Johnson Pkwy & Phalen Blvd) 651-7746028
Rev. Howard Dotson: hr_dotson@yahoo.com
Friday December 5th
7 PM
As the commercialization of Christmas begins sooner and sooner, we need to remember what the season of Advent means to us. Our diverse congregation and Eastide community will gather to celebrate the coming of our Prince of Peace. Several choirs and music groups are invited to join us.
Arlington Hills Presbyterian Church
1275 E Magnolia (Johnson Pkwy & Phalen Blvd) 651-7746028
Rev. Howard Dotson: hr_dotson@yahoo.com
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