David Foster Wallace gave a now famous Commencement Speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College entitled, This is Water. In this speech he argued about the difficulty of staying conscious to the meaning-making aspects of life, rather than drifting off into the formative norms of the cultural water we swim in. We can all become blind to the things in our culture that have become normative- even if those things are corrosive to our design as human beings. It’s hard to see the stuff that has become normal culturally. Those things become nothing more than the water we are swimming in.
Growing up in an environment soaked in segregation, it’s hard to believe that our lives were created for something so much fuller and richer than this. Segregation is like carbon monoxide to the human brain. It can be nearly impossible to detect, but if you allow it to put you to sleep, it’ll kill you. Terrifyingly, Apple Pie is less American than segregation. It’s all around us. It’s formed our neighborhoods, our social spaces, public parks, our churches, and most of our workplaces. There are almost no spaces in America that were not intentionally segregated. These intentional decisions have left almost no aspect of American life untouched. It is therefore impossible to address the topic of community development, without prioritizing God’s mission of reconciliation.
A central theme in God’s mission for human restoration is reconciliation - the restoration of relationships that have been fractured or broken. And is there a better way to describe cross-class relationships in America other than to say they are deeply broken? We travel the same roads, and traffic in the same patterns of sin…yet our country is utterly divided by race and class. As wide-eyed 22-year olds, my wife and I felt God clearly calling us to live among neighbors whose ethnic makeup and economic means were different from our own. To complicate things further, we were still trying to figure out how to be knit together in marriage as people coming from very different cultural backgrounds ourselves (Joy as a Chinese, Puerto Rican American, and myself as a Bon Iver listening, Birkenstock wearing white dude.) Still, as we learned to celebrate the cultural differences in our own home, we were learning to long for the cultural kaleidoscope of God’s Kingdom.
In the weeks leading up to our wedding, we began our search for housing. We were advised to avoid “drive-by ministry” by making a five year commitment to a place before making the move. Five years turned into eleven, and we have no plans of moving. We never intended to start a non-profit, or do this work “professionally.” It just sort of happened. The ministry of neighbor-love and reconciliation is my full-time job now, and the organization that I am privileged to serve with is a Christian non-profit.
I get asked fairly often about the Christian portion of that. I often say that our work is fueled and formed by our faith, which is a short-hand way of saying “I don’t really wanna get into it.” (Being a religious organization can be a liability, depending on the space you’re in.) If I’m pressed, I’ll say that our faith is important to us, but we don’t force it on anyone we serve (which is true), and we welcome all people no matter what (which is double true). They’ll nod respectfully and we’ll change the subject to politics.
Just kidding.
I’m not a big politics guy, but I do get asked questions about faith and justice quite often. And even though this topic is a delicate one, I think it’s valuable enough to warrant a more detailed answer. My faith isn’t just important to me. It’s everything to me. If I weren’t a Christian, I wouldn’t do what I do. Seriously… I see the work that I do as a calling. I have a deep sense that God has asked me (called me) to do Christian Community Development. My faith informs the work I do, the way I do it, and why I keep doing it. There’s nothing it leaves untouched. I took the red pill and I was drawn into a transcendent story (and I haven’t been able to unsee it since). My imagination has become soaked with the story of the scriptures, and it has changed the way I see the world, and my role here on earth. Here’s what I mean by that: I have a deep conviction that God is healing the world and setting all things right. Perhaps most surprising of all, I believe that God is inviting ordinary people like you and me to participate in that work of renewal. This conviction has shaped the reason I do community development work and the reason I pursue that work in the way of Jesus. I realize that’s a loaded idea, and rather than leaving it overly vague, I’d like to unpack the importance of Christian Community Development, here.
Christian faith is both transcendent and incarnational. It comes from the heavens and makes it home in the dust below. As such, it involves truth that originates outside of us but settles into us - a God who exists over all things, and yet remains intimately involved with the most mundane parts of the human experience. I believe the Chrisian faith offers us the resources necessary to contend for justice in a way that leads to deep transformation and lasting liberation for the most vulnerable among us. Here’s how:
A transcendent vision creates a holy unrest towards the status quo.
An Incarnate Savior frees us to pursue justice without the liability of self-righteousness.
An immanent hope provides the endurance necessary to carry on in a world marked by suffering.
Transcendent Vision:
Karl Marx referred to religion as the opium of the people (or the masses). There’s plenty of debate about what he meant by that… Did he mean that religion discouraged social engagement? Did he mean that religion offered medicinal value to those that suffered under systems they couldn’t change? I’m not sure… but I know what he wasn’t saying. He wasn’t saying that religion was an animating force that turned people into justice warriors!
He was saying that religion offered a way to cope with the world, not correct the world.
And he couldn’t have been more wrong.
A less-popular (and less controversial 😉) German philosopher and theologian born about 50 years after Marx died, put it well when he said, “faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present. (Jürgen Moltmann)
Christian faith is less like opium and more like jet fuel.
It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Jürgen’s words resonate deeply with me. I have been caught up in a vision of what could be and I have been suffering under it ever since! It won’t let go of me. It quite literally stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present. And while that might sound like a miserable way to live - it’s not. It animates my heart with meaning and my life with purpose. Any life that has been lit up with a vibrant purpose is a life of joy - despite the sting of the unfulfilled present. In fact, C.S. Lewis describes the sting that accompanies joy when he said, “Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.” A life of joy is a life of inconsolable longing… leaning forward towards the promised future. This is not to be confused with the misguided thinking that assumes Christian faith is waiting (for the sweet by and by) …a belief in the afterlife that helps one cope with the here and now. Don’t get me wrong… the promise of an unfading inheritance is indeed a great comfort when the cacophony of life’s cruelty is deafening, but christianity isn’t primarily about going to God’s home when you die. It’s about God bringing his home here (on earth as it is in heaven). The movement of the scriptures is not primarily upward – its downward. It’s less about us going up…and more about God coming down.
The promised future that stabs inexorably into the unfulfilled present is a world without racism, or classism… without human trafficking or exploitation– a world where affordable housing is anathema – not because of discrimination but because unaffordable housing is unconscionable. The promised future is a vision of a world made new - healed and restored. Where justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. And if you allow that vision to fill your heart, it will inevitably overflow with a holy discontentment towards all that is unwell and unright in our world. It is jet fuel for the loving action our world needs. Wherever we experience incongruence between God’s vision for the world, and our experience of it, we should feel the sharp prod of God’s Spirit moving us to do something about it.
But Cam…surely you’re not suggesting we can fix everything that is broken in the world, right? Certainly not. But as James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” There is much in our world that will remain broken until Christ returns to make it whole, and until then, it is good and right that our hearts throb and our bones ache… for these pains lead us to continue praying, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.” But we can never allow that prayer to lull us to sleep. It must light a fire under our feet. Christian faith is less like opium and more like jet fuel.
And that’s a good thing.
But the last thing our world needs is a bunch of religious folks running around with a messiah complex… Can I get a witness? We need more than a transcendent vision. We need an incarnate Savior as well.
More on that, next.
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