“Radicals are those who believe that things are extremely bad with us, but they could feasibly be much improved. Conservatives believe that things are pretty bad, but that’s just the way the human animal is. And liberals believe that there’s a little bit of good and bad in all of us.”

Thoughts?

Location
Caritas Village
2509 Harvard Avenue,
Memphis, TN 38112

This year’s anarchism and Christianity conference, hosted by Jesus Radicals, will look squarely at the economic and ecological crisis facing the globe, and point to signs of hope for creativity, for alternative living, for radical sharing, for faithfulness, for a new way of being. We are living in a karios moment that will either break us or compel us to finally strive for a new, sane way of life. The question we face at this pivotal time is not if our empires will fall apart, but when they will fall–and how will we face it? We hope you will join the conversation.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS
Plenary presenters
- Layla Abdel Rahim, anti-authoritarian wanderer, researcher and university lecturer, writer, and unschooling mother
- Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, co-founder Pax Christi-USA, nonviolence advocate and peace activist
- Ewuare Osayande, author, poet and political activist; founder of POWER (People Organized Working to Eradicate Racism)
- John Zerzan, anti-civilization theorist, writer and speaker; host of Anarchy Radio

Panelists
- Jeannie Alexander, Amos House Catholic Worker
- Eric Anglada, New Hope Catholic Worker Farm
- Brenna Cussen, Saints Francis & Therese Catholic Worker
- Gene Davenport, Lambuth University

- Eileen Fleming, We Are Wide Awake
- Ethan Hughes, The Possibility Alliance
- Lee Van Ham, Jubilee Economics Ministries

SESSIONS
- Anarchism and Christianity Primer
- Seeing What Greenspan Couldn’t: A New, Partnership Economy
- Jesus & the Money Changers: Rioting Against the Economic Crisis

- Nonviolence in the Holy Land: A spiritual journey and nonviolent political odyssey from the Middle East to the USA
- Anarcho-Primitivism versus a Darkening Reality
- Revealing the Kingdom in the Midst of Empire: Reimagining Citizenship, Reimagining Economics
- A Lullaby for the Planet: Undressing Ourselves for a Viable Parenthood
- Exploring New Possibilities (tentative title)
- Gospel Nonviolent Anarchism—Logos & Emmunah

RECREATION
- Community Tour - GrowMemphis
- Film screening - “What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire”

More information: http://www.jesusradicals.com/conference/

InterVarsity Press
WTSbooks
Amazon

A high church Reformed Anglican bishop, NT Wright, has just written a book called Justification, which (as you can guess) is a summary of his thought on this much-debated issue within the Western Christian world.

His impetus for the book is a book published in 2007 by Dr. John Piper called The Future of Justification which probes the underpinnings of Wright’s understanding of Paul and if this is a helpful or harmful understanding.

Leaving aside the problems that Piper has elucidated (some of which Wright has not fully answered), Wright does proivde a vision of justification that - perhaps not surprisingly - is more in touch with the understanding of the 17th century Mennonite church than it is with Reformed theology. Perhaps it is a bridge between the two on this issue? Certainly, though, the doctrine of justification is not the strongest the Mennonite church has proclaimed, but it is nonetheless important and present in its confession.

What is N.T. Wright’s essential point, contra-the traditional Reformed/evangelical point of view? Because it is spread throughout the book, I will say essentially this: that the purpose of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection was not merely about individual salvation (restoring “my relationship with God” and “getting to heaven”) nor was it about fulfilling the Torah for us (the “active obedience” of Christ which is “imputed” to us,  but that it was about fulfilling the promises made from way before the law was established and then transgressed. It was about fulfilling the promises made to Abraham to restore and bless the whole world and reconcile all the children of God in an eschatological way. This, therefore, makes the scope of the Jesus story much larger than a restoration of Israel from under the law, but more broadly the fulfillment of the covenant promise to Abraham to restore the whole world into the covenant. Therefore, justification is the declaration that one has been become a member of the covenant family, not an act of God which brings you into the covenant family (the traditional understanding).For Wright, the traditional view has formed by asking and answering questions in Medieval ways, not Pauline ways.

The book is in two parts: the first is “theologizing” and providing a background the objections against Wright; the second is exegesis from Galatians and Romans. Regardless of what you think of his conclusions, the writing is intelligent and clear (even if mildly scattered, making it sometimes difficult to get the core points).

Another way of putting this:

N.T. Wright: Justification is eschatological (it looks toward the future reconcilation of the Chilren of God) and ecclesiological (through Christ, it defines who is in the covenant community and who is not)

Reformed View: justification is primarily soteriological (about my salvation) and only secondarily eschatological and ecclesiological

I’m not necessarily convinced that these two positions are irreconcilable (Wright tends to articulate “imputed righteousness” in different terms, as Doug Wilson points out) and I think Wright overstates the distinctions to the point of mutual exclusivity, which I’m not sure is necessary. There’s also some underlying questions I have about his methods, relying on the contemporaneous texts of 2nd Temple Judaism, which has been criticized elsewhere though Wright responds to this as well.

However, I find it interesting that this emphasis on covenant and a broader vision looking back to Christ’s fulfillment of the promise to Abraham vs. the fulfillment of the law is distinctly Mennonite, if we take the Dordrecht Confession with any seriousness. In Article III (”Of The Restoration of Man Through the Promise of the Coming Christ”), we have:

Concerning the restoration of the first man and his posterity we confess and believe, that God, notwithstanding their fall, transgression, and sin, and their utter inability, was nevertheless not willing to cast them off entirely, or to let them be forever lost; but that He called them again to Him, comforted them, and showed them that with Him there was yet a means for their reconciliation, namely, the immaculate Lamb, the Son of God, who had been foreordained thereto before the foundation of the world, and was promised them while they were yet in Paradise, for consolation, redemption, and salvation, for themselves as well as for their posterity; yea, who through faith, had, from that time on, been given them as their own; for whom all the pious patriarchs, unto whom this promise was frequently renewed, longed and inquired, and to whom, through faith, they looked forward from afar, waiting for the fulfillment, that He by His coming, would redeem, liberate, and raise the fallen race of man from their sin, guilt; and unrighteousness.

Later in the confession, the authors speak of justification (in regrettably vague terms). However, the framework for understanding justification, for Wright, is set in similar terms to those above. Within these terms, a biblical theology of redemption includes not only the redemption of individual believers from their particular and original sin, but the restoration of a whole covenant community, gathered under Abraham, which seeks peace with God and reconciliation among those made enemies after Adam and the sins of his sons and daughters.

It’s funny how 17th century Mennonites are all of sudden the rage (albeit perhaps unknowingly) among New Testament scholars of the calibur of N.T. Wright.

This is a great book, by the way. For an even-handed series of reviews on Wright’s book, I suggest searching Doug Wilson’s blog, linked above.

A few weeks ago, in a discussion thread over here, folknotions asked the question (seconded by Tim Baer): “What do radical anabaptists believe about the Bible?”. I’ve been pondering this question for a few weeks and I haven’t come up with anything definitive, but I do have a few thoughts to share. It just so happens that DenverS posted a piece two weeks ago that very much speaks to this question as well. I’d love to hear what others of you (especially women) think as well. We’ve already got a quite active The Bible so if you add your piece to that category, we could even have ourselves a “YAR on the Bible” series.

My awareness of how I read the bible has been strongly shaped by my experience of British Anabaptism through working Anabaptist Network. The second of the Anabaptist Network’s seven core convictions is:

Jesus is the focal point of God’s revelation. We are committed to a Jesus-centred approach to the Bible, and to the community of faith as the primary context in which we read the Bible and discern and apply its implications for discipleship.(read more from the AN)

Naming an Anabaptist value as a "Jesus-centred approach to the bible" helped me to understand some distinctive of my own Mennonite tradition that I had always taken for granted. I gradually came to understand that many traditions claim to read the bible in a flat way with all passages seen with the same weight. This is not the case for me. The core of Jesus message is a vision for shalom liberation for all of us. Some parts of the bible communicate, at least on the surface, a contradictory vision. For example,
when I read the story of Ehud I see the story of an exciting adventure story told ’round the camp fire down through the generations by the Jewish people. It comes out of the life of a people struggling for justice and liberation. But its a way of living out that struggle that is very from the vision of Jesus of loving your enemy and radical, cheek-turning nonviolence.

The community of faith as the primary context for reading the bible is also a central part of how I approach the Bible. I don’t find it useful to sit in the corner and open the bible at random and read it. I’m much more drawn to reading the Bible in a group or discussing it on a blog (like YAR) or reading a theologian who unpacks the social and historical context of the text.

And finally, the gospel of Jesus as a source for discipleship in our lives. The bible is not primarily a source for doctrine or a set of beliefs for us to ascribe to. Its a story in which we are all actors, not passive recipients. Jesus lays out a way of being in and relating to all of creation rooted in redemption, not just of our souls, but of our lives, our communities and our empires. The Bible is the story of God coming along side humanity in that struggle. It is a story that we are all invited to join.

For those familiar with Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church (different from Rob Bell’s Mars Hill Church… though it is darn confusing…), they recently launched a website called Re:Sound. Their first project is a sort of indie-rock version of a lot of classic hymns such as “Softly and Tenderly”, “What Wonderous Love Is This”, “Doxology”, “Amazing Love”, “I’ll Fly Away”, etc.

If you’ve attended a Mennonite church for any period of time, you probably have sung these hymns a lot. These re-creations are really good and I highly suggest them. Through Noise Trade for a limited time, you can pay what you want for the 12 tracks, or refer 5 friends via e-mail and get it for free. It’s pretty simple. Check it out.

Most of you are probably familiar with Galileo. In the 1600’s he made the bold claim that the earth was round, not flat as was the common understanding of the day. This bold assertion was met with strong opposition from the church. The earth could not possibly be round. Clearly this notion was contrary to Scripture. There is more to Galileo’s story, but that is not point of this post.

In the 1859, Charles Darwin published the book “On the Origin of Species” in which he made the bold claim that life on earth came through a process called evolution. This bold assertion was met with strong opposition from the church. All life was created by God in the span of a week approximately 6000 years ago. Clearly the idea that species evolved into new species over billions of years was contrary to Scripture. There is more to this debate that pits science against faith, but I should probably get to my own story.

I was raised in a Christian home and attended Christian schools all my life. In high school, I was an active member of the youth group. I still remember my youth pastors warning before heading to college. “When you get to college, watch out. There will be professors/students who will challenge your faith. Check everything against Scripture.” These weren’t his exact words, but he strongly cautioned me about the faith challenges academia might bring.

This was a man who I hold a great deal of respect for even to this day. Perhaps I misunderstood his advice, but in general I shied away from anything that seemed to conflict with my understanding of Scripture. So this was true for the duration of my college career. It was a Mennonite college, so it wasn’t too difficult to avoid subjects that would have challenged the authority of Scripture (or at least how I understood it). So I made my way through college with my mainstream conservative Christian theology intact.

In regards to creation of the earth, I believed in a fairly literal interpretation of Genesis. God made the earth. I probably suspected the earth was older than 6000 years, but I was buying the creationist explanation that the flood was the answer to most challenging fossil records. In my mind, I was fairly certain that the earth was not billions of years old, and macro evolution (the idea that species evolved into new species) was invented by atheists trying to cut God out of the picture. In general, I avoided any evolutionist theories because they didn’t make sense in my Scriptural worldview.

It wasn’t till I was two years out of college that I seriously dealt with the evolution question. I was with a group of young adults biking across the United States. While all of us were on the trip for different reasons, one common thread was that we had questions. Questions about what it meant to be a young adult in the context of the church and what it meant to be followers of Christ in this day and age. An environment was created in our group where it was safe and actually encouraged to question some of our preconceived notions and to reexamine what we had grown up learning.

Five days into the bike trip, I stopped at a museum in Oregon to inquire about a camping site. At one of the exhibits, they described their discovery in that area of layers after layers of dinosaur bones separated by millions of years with completely different dinosaur species, plant life, and climate zones. Suddenly the creationist flood theory didn’t make sense. And I was forced to wrestle with what I really believed about how the earth was formed.

Several weeks after my encounter with this dinosaur exhibit, we had made it to Iowa, and I interviewed a college friend who is an evolution biologist and also a Christian. For the first time in my life I realized that the being a Christian and believing in evolution was not mutually exclusive.

After the trip ended, I continued to dive into the topic of evolution. I went to a local college’s series on Genesis. I watched a creationist video series to balance out what I was learning about evolution. The deeper I looked, the more this evolution idea seemed plausible and the sillier the creationist sounded trying to use Genesis as a science textbook.

By this time my faith felt like it was falling apart. If God didn’t make the world 6000 years ago in six 24 hour days, then Genesis had it wrong! If Genesis was wrong, what about the rest of the Bible? My faith built upon this literal interpretation of all Scripture was crumbling.

Fortunately the moderator at the local college that was hosting the series on Genesis pointed me to “The Language of God” by Francis Collins. Collins was the lead scientist on the human genome project. He is scientist who became a Christian later in life, and believes that God made his creation through an evolutionary process. In his book, he frequently referenced C.S. Lewis’s writing because Lewis was of a similar persuasion on the topic of evolution.

Wow. Here were two very smart dudes saying that it was possible to be a Christian and understand Genesis in a new light. My faith didn’t have to die! But it did need rebuilt.

Suddenly I had more questions than ever before. How do I understand Genesis? How do I interpret scripture? If God created the world through an evolutionary process, then physical death had to exist before the fall of man. But that seems to change some of the assumed theology that I grew up with! So was the fall of man all about man’s spiritual death? What is the soul? What separates us from an ape? What was the ensoulment process? How did we become human and how was God involved in the process? Did Noah really build an ark if there is no evidence of a worldwide flood?

The hardest part for me when I felt my faith crumbling was that suddenly God felt very distant. What happened to my personal God whose hands molded the earth? It seems like 14 billion years ago, in a great burst of energy, God started everything in motion, and left things go on its own. Does God really care about me? Is there really an afterlife?

What followed this meltdown of faith was a period of rediscovering faith. I still don’t have answers for all my questions, but today I cling to the hope that God does care. And this faith is now centered squarely on this Jesus fellow. He is real right? He came to earth claiming to be God’s son. By making this claim, he was either insane, lying, or really was God (a C.S. Lewis argument). I believe that he is God and that he will follow through on his promises for those who choose to follow his narrow way. And he cares for ME. He is a personal God, not a distant God, and my relationship will last long after my physical body quits on me and in ways I can not begin to comprehend now. This is what gives me hope, and what I am pinning my faith on.

So what is the point of my post? For those of you out there who are not followers of Christ, I want to say this. To become a Christian does not mean you have to say the world is still flat. Jesus called us to live in ways that didn’t make sense to this world, but he wasn’t asking us to abandon reason. The Pharisees were the religious leaders that lived when Jesus was on earth, and they had all sort of rules about what to believe. Don’t let Christians who insist the earth is flat get in your way of following Jesus.

To fellow followers of Christ, I offer this. Whatever your beliefs are about the origins of the earth, I’m not trying to change them. We should be able to agree that God made us. How he did it is open for debate, but it should not get in the way of allowing others to be followers of Christ. And don’t be afraid of the questions that may challenge what you believe. Questions have the power to refine your faith, and center it on what truly maters.

When I start to get preachy on this subject, my wife reminds me that my approach is no different then a right wing Christian who is pushing an extremely literal interpretation. So I apologize if I came across this way. No matter how well I think I have something figured out, I’m still learning to be humble and open to God’s teaching.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story. I welcome any feedback and would love to hear your own wrestling with this topic and what faith and theological implications it may bring.

All references are from the ancient Hebrew prophets:

1. Refusing to defend the needy- Isaiah 1:17, 23; Jeremiah 5:28
2. Stealing from the poor- Isaiah 3:14-15
3. Unjust judgments against the poor- Isaiah 10:1-2
4. Not assisting the needy- Ezekiel 16:49
5. Taking interest for loans- Ezekiel 18:15-17
6. Enslaving a people- Amos 1:6
7. Excessive violence in war, especially against innocents- Amos 1:13
8. Excessive rent against the poor- Amos 5:11
9. Accepting bribes- Amos 5:12
10. Turning away those who need shelter for a night- Amos 5:12

We boldly decry #s 6 and 9. But when will we see that the basis for the current economic crisis is #s 4, 5, 8 and 10?

Every once in a while, I stumble across a bunch of links all at once that don’t quite have the coherence to link together in one story, but each offer a compelling perspective. Here are the links that caught my eye this week with brief summaries of the stories:

• Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back - I first became aware of Douglas Rushkoff last month after he published two of the best articles on the financial crisis I’ve read (here and here). Now he has a new book out on corporatism that lucidly illuminates the ruthless role of corporations in our economy as they extract maximum value while giving as little as possible in return. The article above includes brilliant excerpts from chapter 8 and chapter 9 of his book.
• Onward, Christian Soldiers - GQ magazine got their hands on cover sheets from Donald Rumsfeld’s reports to Bush featuring bible verses superimposed on images of war machinery. I don’t use the term lightly, but these images are sickeningly sacrilegious. In the lower left hand corner you can see the dates of each report. They were used during the first days and months of the Iraq invasion. These images go along way to cement the invasion in people’s minds as the face of US Christianity.
• Winning Hearts and Minds II: Drones and Human Terrain Teams - Gene Stotlzfus, former director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, draws on his experience from Vietnam to Pakistan as he looks at the reality of the "battler for hearts and minds", the use of drones at a new US military tactic called "Human Terrain Teams" which are teams made up of "anthropologists, other social scientists, linguists and analysts". Very informative.
• Amazonian Indigenous Protest Provokes Peruvian Government Reprisals - in one of the the most undercovered stories of the last two month, more then 30,000 indigenous people from 65 tribes have been blockading roads in a nonviolent protest against laws this will open up their lands for oil and gas exploration. The lawas are partly a result of the free trade agreement between Peru and the U.S.
• The Icelandic Volcano Erupts: A New Era of People Power in the Streets? - Rebecca Solnit tells the other story of another nation-wide nonviolent uprising you may have missed. The Saucepan revolution saw citizens gather around their parliament building banging pots to voice their displeasure with a neo-liberal government that led them into a massive economic crash. Five days later, the ruling coalition gave way under the pressure.
• Tiny Art Director - On a much lighter note, check out this endearing illustrated dialogue between an artist and his daughter who serves as his artistic director. The 4 year old gives the instructions, the father draws them. And then comes the The Critique. A sample: “Daddy it’s not supposed to be like that! He has dog legs! I’m so mad at you! I’m going to erase those legs! Daddy why did you do those legs??? [collapses in tears]” in response to this image:

adapted from As of Yet Untitled

Sunday evening I watched the first episode of We Shall Remain, a five part PBS series you can watch for free on their website. If you have 75 minutes to spare, don’t bother reading this review, just go watch After the Mayflower, the first episode, for yourself.

Contrary to its name, After the Mayflower starts slightly before the Pilgrims made landfall in Plymouth and provides a brief, but rich window into the way of life for the Wampanoag, the local Native American tribe near Plymouth, before the Pilgrims arrived. What was it like to be Wampanoag, the people of the first light, stretched out along the ocean, clearly aware of your place in the continent, welcoming the sun before all others? We also learn about the broad strokes of their political relationships with other local tribes as well as the plague that arrived just before the pilgrims killing 9 in 10 Wampanoag.

The documentary goes on to span the first 60 years of Native American and English relations, beginning with the first treaty between Massasoit, leader of the Wampanoag and ending with King Philip’s war, one of the bloodiest wars in North American history proportional to the population. It offers some challenging questions for pacifists. Especially Christian pacifists.


A few years ago when talking with a Caribbean friend about pacifism. What if refusing to use violence meant not just your death as an individual, but the death of your entire people and culture? He told me with the story of the Taínos, who were among the first to meet Colombus and welcomed him with gifts and open arms. For loving their enemy, they had the honor of being the first indigenous American culture to be made extinct by the Spanish through a combination of disease and having their hands cut off for not meeting gold quotas set by Columbus. Is this what Jesus had in mind?

The story in Massachusets Bay colony is more complex, but no less challenging to us as Christian pacifists. Massasoit’s decision to form an alliance with the Pilgrims was not simply the act of a noble man with good heart. It was a calculated political move driven by his people’s need for allies against rival tribes in the face of devastation by disease. The alliance was strengthened by cross-cultural relationship building and trade on both sides over the first few years. Both sides benefited from peace. So far, so Mennonite morality tale.

However, as the colonists grew in number, they became less reliant on the Wampanoag and more interested in their land. Their towns grew quickly with immigrants from England and they gradually pushed the Wampanoag into smaller and smaller pieces of land. Sound familiar? Its the process that settlers in the West bank are attempting to use on villagers in At-Tuwani today.

In 1660 the English began to establish "Praying Towns" which offered safety for natives in exchange for their conversion to Christianity and rejection of all of their traditional life ways. After the Mayflower includes excerpts from Tears of Repentence, a collection of testimonies that converts, known as "Praying Indians", gave in front of a panel of ministers in order to prove their sincerity. They reflect the effects of being told your whole culture and way of life is evil:

When they said the devil was my God, I was angry, because I was proud. I loved to pray to many Gods. Then going to your house, I more desired to hear of God… then I was angry with myself and loathed myself and thought God will not forgive my sins.

But After the Mayflower does not simply paint the Wampanoag as passive victims. In the figures of Massasoit and his son Metacom (or King Philip as the English knew him) we come to understand the difficult decisions these leaders made on behalf of and in consultation with their people. Would driving away the Pilgrims while they had the chance been the better option? What if they hadn’t loved their enemies?

Love is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community
Andrew Marin
InterVarsity Press
Published: March 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8308-3626-0

If you were to meet Andrew Marin (and providing you have some experience with Evangelical culture), it might strike you that he looks, acts, and talks like the epitome of a twenty-something Evangelical guy.  His hair is cut pretty short.  When I heard him speak, he was wearing long khaki cargo shorts and an oversized striped polo shirt.  He is effusive and outgoing in mannerisms, and when he speaks, he loves to interject words like “awesome” and “pumped up” into his emotional-wallop-packing anecdotes and series of simple, Bible-verse backed points.  Stock Evangelicalish phrases seem to work their way un-self-consciously into every other sentence.

In his own words (paraphrased from what I remember), he is what his large Evangelical church in a (quite) affluent Chicago suburb raised him to be: an outgoing, straight, conservative, Bible-believing alpha-male.  And he doesn’t just appear to be this.  He truly is this, and he fully claims it.

So… this has all been just to set up some tension over everything else I want to say about Andrew Marin, his eight year of work in the GLBT (gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered) community, and especially his new book published by Intervarsity Press, “Love is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community.”  For those who don’t know me, I grew up very Christian and very Mennonite, went through a lot of pain figuring out my sexual orientation, am gay, and currently approach the church and the Bible with a lot of ambivalence over whether they’re fundamentally good or bad (and whether they lead one toward Christ or kill any possibility of actually encountering Christ.)  Add that to the tension.

Let me give you the one-sentence-ish summary of Marin’s biography (which takes most of a chapter in the book): he grew up a homophobic Christian who called everyone a fag; best friends came out of the closet and shocked his worldview; moved into Boystown (neighborhood where many gay boys live/hang out in Chicago) and started spending all his times with gay people in gay places; hasn’t stopped doing so for eight years.  He started the Marin Foundation to do something that seems to have never been done (at least, never for real) in the Evangelical church before: approach GLBT people to learn about their lives and build a lasting, committed relational bond for talking about God.  The rest of the book tells you stories about the people he met, lessons he learned, and a number of principles the church has to adopt to move from violent non-productive opposition to the GLBT community into productive, fruitful, authentic, relational, and loving sharing of the Gospel with GLBT people - and by “sharing” he doesn’t mean “telling” as in “I know something you don’t”, he means “you’re experiencing this and I’m experiencing this.”  You know - sharing.  (If you can’t tell already, I believe Marin is doing something truly extraordinary in his work and in this book.  I think it’s going to be very important in Evangelical and conservative-ish Christian circles.)

If you are someone who care about the church and also longs for any sort of progress in a positive direction on the church’s obsession with the gays (or… maybe I should say… overwhelming amount energy focused on the issue) I would put this book at #1 on your priority of books to read.

I won’t directly summarize the book - and I don’t want this review to be taken as a direct representation of exactly what Marin’s thoughts are.  Rather, this is my version of the core of his message.  By some coincidence, he happened to be speaking at a nearby Mennonite church the week after I finished reading the book, so my impressions are also based on his presentation that I heard there. If you’re interested in the specifics, read the book.

He recognizes a poisonous situation in the current state of affairs between the Evangelical church and the GLBT community: one of two polarized sides, each with certain rigid orthodoxies, typified by certain simplistic answers to simplistic questions (”Is homosexuality a sin?”  “Can homosexuals change?”  “Are they born that way?” “Does the Bible teach homosexuality is wrong?”) which serve as markers of tribal identity for immediately placing a stranger into their appropriate tribal identification.  For someone who might on a superficial level seem to communicate in streams of Evangelical cliches, his analysis of the linguistic manifestation of this polarized state is very subtle and quite astute.  One of the pillars of his approach is to destabilize the basis of these simplistic polarizing questions.  There’s an interesting analysis in the book of Jesus’s answers to close-ended questions.  WWJD.

He calls on the church to take upon itself responsibility for ending the cultural war between itself and the GLBT community.  He calls on the church to use the true, freedom-in-Christ-centered Gospel as its tool to end the war.  He even, I think, calls the church to take responsibility for being the originators of this culture war: his thinking goes - “since we have spent so many years defining entire humans beings by the singular aspect of their sexual behavior, is it any surprise that they have formed identities based on their sexual behavior?”  He calls for an entirely new way (new in GLBT/Christian relations) of defining others’ identity, one based on claiming that all people’s true identity is in Christ.

He has a list of points/lessons/principles for the church to follow in making a transformation.  To be honest, I don’t have the book nearby right now, and I don’t really remember many of them.  If I was working as a Christian trying to understand and relate to the gay community (which I’m not), I’d go back and look at them.  I can tell you these things for sure:

1) Andrew Marin, more than any other straight conservative Christian who believes in a literal interpretation of scripture I’ve ever known, has a true understanding of GLBT people and their lives.  Maybe he’s spent too much time with us gays, actually - at his talk, some of his off-handed remarks about gay/Christian interactions were so straight-to-the-heart my partner and I spent half the time shaking with laughter, while all the sweet presumably straight Mennonites around us only smiled or mildly chuckled in a bit of vague confusion.

2) He’s committed his life to building a bridge between the GLBT and the Evangelical communities.  He’s spent all of his post-college life so far working with GLBT organizations, churches, and communities.  Check out his foundation’s website (google “Marin Foundation”) for all the stuff that they’re up to.

3) His book is powerful.

Some of his ideas are fundamentally Anabaptist: I think he even uses the exact phrase of “an upside-down kingdom”.  However, his ideas are also VERY refreshingly non-Anabaptist on another front: he has no instinctive obsession with making sure the church is a pure place that only the pure can inhabit.  He think people should be at church because it creates a place for them to practice and experience God’s love while they’re learning and allowing God to change their lives.

Okay.  This review is long.  But, now that I’ve talked as much as I can about Marin’s book and his ideas, I’d like to say what I truly think about him and his life.  I think the reason Marin stands out isn’t necessarily just because his ideas and language are fresh.  I think there’s this authentic spiritual core that he is living from - his words and ideas are only the fruits of this core.  He’s this very normal person, as I tried to describe.  Yet, in contintually submitting to what he understands as God’s calling to live as a link between two deeply polarized communities - and through empathizing with all the pain and suffering he’s witnessed in GLBT people’s experiences in the church yet contintuing on in hope and not despair - he has identified his own life and own path with Christ.  That was my main impression, overall.  He’s someone who is in the process of being transformed by following the path of Christ, the path of suffering, of being continually misunderstood, the process of giving up whatever he thought his life was and accepting instead the reality of what God is in his life.  I suspect that there are elements of his biography that are more complex and are darker that the breezy, simplistic stories he shares in the book - times of true despair and of having to give up his own identity.  Maybe this whole GLBT/Christian divide isn’t just a calling outward for him to change the word, but has also served as his own inward calling, to force him into identification with both the suffering and the love of Christ.

Maybe these are just words that don’t mean much either, this talk about giving up one’s life.  Thinking about it, I’ve heard these words before too, and usually they don’t mean too much.  So whatever.  Get the book.  If you’re into Evangelical-type things, it’s a major one, and people will be talking.  If you think a lot about the place of GLBT people in the church and all the current brouhaha over it, definitely pick it up.  Also - if you’re just really interested in someone doing something very unexpected, and exhibiting the beginnings of a truly amazing spirituality, look at it for that.  That’s most of what I want to say.  I have a lot more personal thoughts about what this book might mean for the church and for the GLBT community, but I’ll save those for the comments.

What follows is what I think about smoking/what I’m struggling with/the questions I have. Please, if you have any wisdom to share…SHARE IT. As a feminist I am willing to put this out in the public because I do believe the personal is political. And I know that the relationships that individuals have also effect the collective.

I realized again that I’m a “God-geek” when I wanted to know something marriage a few weeks ago and so I looked at C. Arnold Snyder’s chapter titled “Anabaptist Marriage” in Anabaptist History and Theology textbook. My point was to see how these young activists handled marriage in the context of an intense social movement. (It didn’t really help all that much, but I did learn that some women appreciated the relative freedom of the Anabaptist movement to leave abusive and restrictive spousal relationships and that sometimes a married couple referred to each other as “wedded brother” or “wedded sister,” their primary identification was still with the community and with the movement.)

I accept him, as he is, with all his good and bad. But when it comes to having to make a choice about who I want to share intimate spaces with and surround myself with…who I would want to spend the rest of my life with and commit my most broken and beautiful self to, I want it to be a person or people who in all ways strive for and live into health, healing, and wholeness for all of their days…in all ways.

Our bodies are God’s temples. Isn’t smoking/drinking/not exercising etc. a destruction of that temple? As young Anabaptist radicals we both work to protect the bodies of others…advocate for their safe passage between tanks and fences…stop war…How could someone willfully destroy that which is of God when they spend a lot of time trying to build up more of God in the world.

It feels like a contradiction to work in solidarity with others for a better life, but then whittle away at your own life…and if healthcare in your country is socialized, how selfish is it to use up resources that could go to someone else? Those resources could go to someone less wealthy, and someone who didn’t consciously and repeatedly inflict sickness upon themselves.

Or what about the issues with the tobacco companies? Or the land that is being used to grow tobacco for export crop instead of food for residents?

What is it that smoking gives people? Is it not possible that this feeling can be obtained through some other form? Exercise trains the mind and body to respond in the best way possible in a given situation. To calm down…to think creatively…to work as a team…Do I have the right as a potential partner to hold my potential partner to the highest standard? (Or at least the standard that I hold myself to?)

He sometimes reminds me that people have the right to kill themselves. Yes, in secular society, I would agree that you have the right to kill yourself, but I would argue that as a Christian, you do not have that right. Especially if one is committed to nonviolence (he’s a pacifist…doing excellent intellectual work to support radical nonviolent faith-based action in the world). But then, why do violence to one’s self? Smoking is SO well documented to hurt so much of the body…not to mention it puts out 2nd hand smoke and makes stuff smell bad.

If you treat your own body badly, why should I trust you to treat mine well? (Even though he says he will)

Marriage and long term partnerships include compromise. If I am going to give up some of my bad habits then the other person should do the same, right? If we’re not in this together in our struggles and joys and sacrifices (for the benefit of the beloved) then, even though it looks so possible and beautiful, we shouldn’t pursue it.

Help, my YAR friends! Am I off my rocker? Am I being to rough or judgmental? This stuff is hard. I am totally willing to change my views…I just need to be convinced and nuanced. I know I do. For example, since I am really putting myself out there at this point, I might as well say that I think coffee is cheating one’s health too (in addition to the complication of the blood-soaked politics) . It does your body’s work of waking you up for you…often masking unhealthy life rhythms of incorrect rest/busyness ratios…and sometimes creating a dependency/addiction.

Colossians and Philemon
N.T. Wright
Tyndale New Testament Commentary Series, Vol. 12
Released: Dec 30, 2008
ISBN:083084242X
Available at:
Amazon
Westminster Bookstore
Christianbook.com

Since N.T. Wright’s recently released book, Justification, is currently getting a lot of attention around the blogosphere, I thought a review of a less controversial volume of his writings would be a breath of fresh air.

An oft unread - or perhaps undiscussed - letter of the New Testament is Paul’s letter to Philemon, asking him (in subtle but not uncertain terms) that he should free Onesimus, the former’s runaway slave.

It is an interesting letter to consider for those probing the social implications of the gospel message. N.T. Wright’s highly engaging and astute commentary in Colossians and Philemon recently re-released by Intervarsity Press, offers a great starting point for those consideration. I think this is one of the most engaging biblical commentaries I’ve ever read. Wright is exceptionally clear in his writing and thinking. I want to get this out of the way before I say anything more: get a copy of this book. You can find it for less than $11 at Amazon, and it’s well worth the money to better understand the Word of God from an accomplished and respected scholar like Wright. It is a part of the Tyndale New Testament Commentary series, a series of affordable and understandable (i.e., you don’t have to be in seminary) commentaries currently under the IVP imprint.

Wright’s choice of these two letters is quite appropriate, as Philemon was a resident of Colossae and it is likely that the letter to Philemon accompanied the letter to the Colossians.

The fascinating part of the letter is that Paul never explicitly commands Philemon to release Onesimus, which he certainly had the spiritual authority to do. N.T. Wright offers the following questions which we - the modern readers - are compelled to ask:

Why did Paul not simply ask for Onesimus to be released from slavery? Why (for that matter) did he not order all Christian slaveowners to release all their slaves, rather than profit from an unjust social structure? Slavery was one of the really great evils of the ancient world, under which a large proportion of the population belonged totally to another person, for better or (usually) for worse, with no rights, no prospects, the possibility of sexual abuse, the chance of torture or death for trivial offences. Some slaves were fortunate in having kind or generous masters, and by the end of the first century some secular writers were expressing disgust at the institution. But for the great majority, life was at best drudgery and at worst “merciless exploitation’. Why, then, did Paul not protest against the whole dehumanizing system?

Our natural impulse, seeking a society transformed by the gospel, is to immediately take upon ourselves the task of being prophetic…even if that isn’t really our call. We see the social implications of sinfulness and wonder at the blindness of our brothers and sisters to the oppression around them. Why won’t Christians stop this? And, when we look to Scripture, we see Paul… and we want to say “Why won’t PAUL stop this?”. N.T. Wright attempts to probe Paul’s thinking on the matter:

What alternatives were actually open to him? He was committed to the life, and the standards, of the new age over against the old (Col. 3). But a loud protest, at that moment in social history, would have functioned simply on the level of the old age: it would have been heard only as a criticism by one part of society (Paul, not himself a slave-owner, had nothing to lose) against another. It would, without a doubt, have done more harm than good, making life harder for Christian slaves, and drawing upon the young church exactly the wrong sort of attention from the authorities. If Paul is jailed for proclaiming ‘another king’ (Acts 17:7), it must be clear that thekingdom in question is of a different order altogether from that of Caesar. In addition, inveghing against slavery per se would have been totally ineffective: one might as well, in modern Western society, protest against the mortgage system.

Ouch. And the idealistic hope of a just society crumbles before us. Wright sends another hook to the gut:

Even if all Christians of Paul’s day were suddenly to release their slaves, it is by no means clear that the slaves themselves, or society in general, would benefit: a large body of people suddenly unemployed in the ancient world might not enjoy their freedom as much as they would imagine.

Ok. Now he may be getting out of hand. Really? Slaves would have preferred it? C’mon, NT, give me something I can work with here:

Paul’s method is subtler… like Jesus, his way of changing the world is to plant a grain of mustard seed which, inconspicuous at first, grows into a spreading tree. And in the meantime… he teaches slaves and masters to treat themselves, and each other, as human beings.

Hmm. I think it is the particular sin of some Christians to neglect to see the forest for the trees. They spend so much time on interpersonal relationships that they never think about the broader implications of a just society. Perhaps, for the young radicals among us, a particular sin is present: we tend to want to keep guard over the forest, hovering above in a helicopter, without ever touching down to find out the trees are dead. What good is it if Onesimus is freed under compulsion, without ever reconciling with his master, and Philemon learning and accepting that the slave is his brother? Without doing the work of glorifying Christ through sacrificial love, isn’t Philemon just another tree in the forest: seeming alive from afar but spiritually dead?

God appoints seasons. Some seasons call for seeds to be planted. I couldn’t agree with N.T. Wright more on that point - Paul plants a seed. That seed led to the freeing of one slave. That slave, Onesimus later became Bishop of Byzantium and began collecting the books of the New Testament (Wright contends that there is no evidence for this…however, the story has been preserved in tradition, and it’s a story I quite like). That New Testament led William Wilberforce to labor for decades to abolish the slave trade in England. It led Martin Luther King to fight for the right to be an equal with whites in America.

Are we young radicals crying out at a forest of dead trees, when we should set ourselves to the task of planting seeds in that forest? Or is there room for both?

I suppose pretty much everyone on this forum is interested in reforming the church. Perhaps we don’t all agree at exactly what this reform looks like, but we agree that it must be done. There is a lot of talk here, but little action. It is time to make some changes.

But what is the most effective agent for change? What is the catalyst that will bring about the necessary reform? Let’s look at some of the reforms of the past and see how it happens:

-We could begin with one small group of reformers and live radical lifestyles. Of course, by the next generation (or possibly even before that) the radical lifestyle will be compromised to such a degree as to be un-radical. And besides, people will just exalt us as “special” or “a saint” and so separate themselves from the change they need to have. (Francis of Assisi)

-We could train the poor the truth of living radically for Jesus and let them preach openly. We just need to hope that they don’t start a war. (John Wycliffe- Lombards; Peter Waldo- Waldensians)

-We could begin a really successful writing campaign that stirs the hearts of angry young men and women until they cause an upheaval in churches around the world. Of course, we had better not get politically involved or else we might find ourselves on one side of a battle. (Martin Luther)

-We could go from congregation to congregation, teaching a single, unified message that becomes an underground movement (John Wesley; missionary movement)

-We could have a top-down decision to make some radical Jesus changes. (Vatican II, Desmond Tutu in South Africa)

-We could take to the streets, to show mass support of our important cause (MLK Jr.)

-We could teach a message that is threatening to the powers that be and have them kill us, which will plant the seed for a future generation to make the changes necessary. (Jesus, Anabaptist reformers)

There are so many ways for it to be done successfully. We don’t want to hang our hopes on just one. Reform is multifaceted and powerful and it can be done in many ways.

However, there is one component that is necessary for reform to happen. We need to have a mass of people—not a majority, mind you, but a good amount—knowing that change is necessary and is ready to make sacrifices for the change. Every reform happens in seasons of discontent and usually oppression.

How can we have reform amidst complacency? How can we have reform amidst people who feel that writing on a blog is their contribution to real change? How can we have reform when cable, DVDs, and preachers keep us entertained and satisfied with our lives? Yes, oppression happens, and our answer to it is to “click here”, and so we feel that we’ve done our part.

There is slavery in the world, the oppression of the poor, AIDS is an epidemic, the U.S. is continuing to stir up war to solve their economic woes—and the only thing we can get stirred up about is medical insurance? Just to give you a hint—the people on the street don’t care about medical insurance. They want a safe place to sleep where they won’t be bothered by the police. The people in Darfur aren’t concerned about medical insurance so much as having their family members survive. And Jesus himself is less concerned about medical insurance as he is about equity between the wealthy and the poor—which the Mennonite church seems to have forgotten about. As well as the Methodists, the Waldensians, the Unitarians and whoever else.

There’s plenty to reform. But it won’t happen until we FEEL the anger. God Himself is yelling at the world leaders, saying, “How long will you judge unjustly And show partiality to the wicked? Vindicate the weak and fatherless; Do justice to the afflicted and destitute. Rescue the weak and needy; Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked….You are gods, And all of you are sons of the Most High. Nevertheless you will die like men And fall like any one of the princes.” And the psalmists reply is:”Arise, O God, judge the earth!”

But we, the wealthy of the world are too caught up in our economic slowdown and the latest events on American Idol to feel the anger of God. We Mennonites are so fearful of experiencing that anger, of facing conflict, that we would rather take medication or slave-harvested chocolate to calm us down instead of changing the world as it should be changed.

This is why reform won’t happen. Not because of a wrong method. But because we lack empathy for the poor. And, as much work as I do for the poor, I have to admit that I am part of the problem myself. I need to be more radical. And I need to join more radical people, filled with the anger of God and ready to act, in order to make the change happen.

Over on Young Anabaptist Radicals, we recently had a post asking for opinions and thoughts regarding the search for a new Mennonite Church Executive director. I asked to hear more about the job of the current executive director and Dave S responded with an overview of the work Jim Schrag does. One of the things that struck me about his response was the amount of time Jim spends focused on structures. Dave mentions "agencies, conferences, schools… many groups, convention planning, several boards, committees and leadership groups, and so on".

Reading Dave’s comment led me to a clearer sense of my hopes for the new executive director: that he or she can facilitate the de-bureaucratization of Mennonite Church USA and its agencies.

The other week I had supper with Stuart Murray Williams, a British Anabaptist who has pioneered a non-institutional approach to church planting in the UK (see my 2007 interview with him for more). He was also my supervisor when I worked at the Anabaptist Network, a group that has consciously avoided becoming a traditional organization over its 20 year life together.

Stuart had just finished a three week tour visiting US Mennonite communities in the Northeast and Midwest. I asked him what his impressions where. He said, ‘top heavy’. In an email he elaborated, "I was more aware than before of how institutional and bureaucratic Mennonite church life is, with multiple committees and acronyms, a plurality of meetings and structures, all for a relatively small denomination."

In the last 40 years, Mennonites have wholeheartedly embraced the modern trend toward institutionalization. Our mission boards became agencies. And our committees have proliferated and congealed. Ah yes, committees. They promised a veneer of mainstream respectability to community gathering around a shared call. But they betrayed us and became symbols of stultifying bureaucracy; the punch-line in our jokes.

Our alphabet soups of agencies have too often become a barrier rather then agents as their name implies. This is especially true for young adults. I’ve watched many in my generation grow cynical and drift away from church life too focused on committees, buildings and boards to the neglect of letting God’s healing and hope flow through us to the world. We have grown up surrounded by institutions, for profit or not, focused on self-preservation ahead of all else. We have no interest in a church that gives us more of the same.

The proposal by the Mennonite Church USA Executive board in March 2008 was an attempt to respond to this issue. But even the process that got us there is indicative of a unwieldy structure desperately trying to be democratic:

Waltner and Diller said the denomination’s six year review, delegate table group responses from San José 2007, feedback from the Constituency Leaders Council, a 2006 CLC task force report, a 2005 funding study and the Church Member Profile 2006 all indicate a need for improving the ability of church-wide ministries to function effectively, to relate to each other and to support area conferences and congregations as they seek to join God’s work in the world.

That’s right, five different reports, studies and surveys. And that is the irony of it all. Each new committee and each new channel promises more capacity, more communication and more community. And we are drawn farther inward and away from living out the call of Jesus in the world.

The response of the executive board was to propose further centralization of leadership. If your only paradigm is modern bureaucracy, that makes sense. However, the executive director’s proposals drew strongly negative reactions (see CLC responds to Executive Board action for example). Perhaps their is a different way.

We are living in a world that is increasingly moving away from organizations and institutions as the main way of getting things done. Recently I reviewed Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, a brilliant book about the increasing irrelevance of traditional institutional methods of getting things done. Author Clay Shirky blows the bureaucratic paradigm out of the water with a vision of people coming together to do "big things for love" without institutions. Here’s an excerpt from my review (published in the Common Review) that summarizes some of his insights:

Organizations had previously operated on the "universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn’t simply self-assemble" because, Shirky explains, groups facing complex tasks traditionally become overburdened without a correspondingly complex hierarchy and structure such as management…

So what are the implications? It’s not that big institutions will disappear overnight (Shirky is no Utopian). Rather, the relative advantage of big management structures will disappear. The extensive overhead to pay managers and directors becomes an inefficiency to complete the same tasks.

What does this mean for Mennonite Church USA? It calls us to to come together to live as disciples of Christ outside of our alphabet soup of agencies. Anabaptist minded movements around us are already doing this. So far our main way of relating to them seems to be to try to assimilate them into our structures. What if the reverse happened?

Sometimes organizations will be useful. For example, Mennonite Mission Network has increasingly focused on facilitating relationships between congregations in the US and mission projects elsewhere. What other ways can we imagine Mennonite agencies stepping out of the way?

Whenever there is a move away from institutionalism, it is painful. It means giving up familiar structures and often the jobs that go with them. Just talk to former employees of Herald Press. Institutions build up massive momentum. They can go away in a chaotic, desperate decline, fighting it all the way. Or they can embrace their own transformation: gracefully dying to be resurrected in the life together of Mennonite communities across the US.

P.S. I would be remiss if I did not point that I too work at a church related organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams. And yet still I imagine a future where we are not needed.

I thought some of YAR’s readers might be interested in this: More than 100 Mennonite pastors and people in ministry have signed a letter calling for Mennonite Church USA to extend full welcome to people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT). The signers invite the church to confess its exclusion of LGBT people and witness to Jesus’ Good News of “radical hospitality and extravagant love.” Everyone who considers themselves part of MC USA is invited to sign the letter, which can be found at www.openlettertomcusa.org.

Thanks -
Sheri Hostetler
Pastor, First Mennonite Church of San Francisco and one of the Open Letter’s authors

Someone nominated me to be the Executive Director of MCUSA.

At first I figured it must be a joke. Who would, in their right mind, think that I—radical pastor who has to bite his tongue every time he speaks to a middle class person—would make a good Executive Director? Someone just did it for a lark, I thought. Or perhaps I was recommended by someone who just wanted to shake things up. Well, that would do it. Me as taking Jim Schrag’s place? Just unthinkable.

But some of my friends weren’t so sure. They thought it was not such a crazy idea after all, but fascinating. My wife looked over the qualifications in the packet I received and she said, “Actually, you pretty much qualify for the position.” Scary. And perhaps MCUSA needs a little shaking up. And it isn’t like I wouldn’t work with whomever God gave me.

In thinking about it, I thought about the things I could stir up, changes I might be able to initiate in the church:

1. While continuing the focus of antiracism, I could also encourage MCUSA to welcome another significant group that are without a voice in MCUSA: the lower class. For many different reasons, those who are poor or uneducated aren’t given an equal opportunity to speak out in the Church, conferences or in most congregations. I would want to champion their cause, to allow them to have a voice where they currently have no voice.

2. I would want to service agencies to be more missional and missional agencies to be more service-oriented.

3. As an aspect of following Jesus, I could encourage the following programs:
-A church-wide memorization program of Jesus’ words
-Discussion groups on Jesus’ words and life, investigating the meaning of Jesus’ words and pursuing the living of them out

4. I could invite leaders from the Mennonite church all around the world—for instance, Columbia, Vietnam, India, Congo, Ethiopia, and Germany— to talk in our churches and to our conferences. We can only become a world-wide church if we participate in and interact with the world.

5. I could try to help us balance our church and conference budgets by encouraging volunteerism, discouraging restructuring, and using technology to try to reduce costs.

6. I would directly challenge MCUSA and its congregations to be less nationalistic. This could mean a name change for the Church, as well as seeking out means to be politically involved that does not involve partisan dichotomies.

7. Encourage educational opportunities that teach how to create peace and love. I would encourage the Mennonite schools to have outreach courses not taught by professionals, but by those who have been involved in ongoing acts of love in challenging areas. For instance we can have an MCCer teach about cross cultural communication in an urban setting; a CPTer teaching about how to deal with an angry person; and perhaps someone who has been working with the homeless teaching about how a church can begin to be pastoral to the poor, etc.

8. I would want to encourage the development of new monastic-type communities, who could then become full members of every conference.

9. I would attempt to create contexts in which the church can openly talk about controversial issues, like LGTBQ

10. I would want to introduce the idea of stewardship as being giving to people’s needs in a way that creates relationship, instead of money being a replacement for relationship.

One thing is certain: I never lack for new ideas.

However, as tempting as it would be, I think it would be wrong for me to apply for the position.

First of all, my own church, Anawim, is not yet ready to stand without me, because of inadequate leadership (although in another year, it may be.) Also, I couldn’t in good conscience put my name forward as long as a woman has not yet been moderator of MCUSA.

But most of all, I do not actually represent MCUSA, nor, I think, could I ever (unless it changes considerably). The Executive Director position is as much as anything supposed to be the voice and face of MCUSA. Even if I got a haircut, I don’t think I fit the bill. Finally, I am more of a prophetic, even challenging voice, and the members of the church are much more used to leaders who are conciliatory. I don’t think MCUSA is ready for me. Maybe next time around, eh?

I still think it sounds funny.

In this position, you’ll learn to understand military law, military culture, and what’s really going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. There will also be opportunities to travel in the US and Europe to speak about issues of war and peace, explain what servicemembers who have been in the war actually say about it, and bring the Christian peace witness into the international debate.

For more information, e-mail mcn@dmfk.de. Feel free to pass this info on to other people who might be interested. For more information about the organization, check out mcn@dmfk.de. Feel free to pass this info on to other people who might be interested. For more information about the organization, check out www.mc-network.de.

On Wednesday, in London, disciplined climate change activists found a remarkably simple third way. They stood their ground, put their hands in the air and chanted “This is not a riot”.

link to original Indymedia footage

The “this is not a riot” tactic is by no means easy. It requires significant discipline, especially by those directly in front of police. At around 3:25 in the video you can watch a young man with a red scarf stand calmly with his hands in the air while being repeatedly shoved by police. At one point, he is knocked almost off his feet, but he calmly stands up again and keeps on chanting and holding is hands in the air.

The tactic requires some flexibility. At times, people on the front line link arms. From about 4:25 you can see two young women at the bottom of the frame looking a police officer in the eye and talking to them calmly but assertively. De-escalation is also a key component (and hopefully result) of this tactic.

During the entire course of the of the video, the police appear to advance about 30 feet in one part of the line and not at all in the another. More importantly they do not get the violent reaction they need to justify their own aggression (which they managed to get elsewhere in the city). And most importantly, their brutality is exposed for all to see.

This was not the first time climate change activists have used this tactic. In August of 2008, activists set up the annual Camp for Climate Action near the Kingsnorth coal-fired power plant. The police tried repeatedly to disrupt the gathering. Starting at minute mark 10:40 in this video, you can watch the “this is not a riot” tactic take hold among members of a climate camp confronting police trying to enter the camp:

See original BBC video

I don’t know if this was the first time this specific tactic was used or not, but it certainly seems to have flummoxed the police. The interview with the police officer immediately after the confrontation shows a man confused, overly defensive and completely unsure of what to do.

More broadly, standing one’s ground under the force of police batons was pioneered during the Dharasana Satyagraha, a non-violent raid of the Dharasana Salt Works at the conclusion of the Salt March. On May 21, 1930, a march led by two Indian women,Sarojini Naidu and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, was attacked by police. The marchers continued to walk forward even as those at the front of the line were beaten to a bloody pulp. 320 were injured. The news stories of this action were critical in bringing world wide attention to the Indian independence movement.

It will be interesting to see whether the video of the attack on the Bishopsgate Climate Action Camp will have a similar effect (so far it has 10,000 hits on Youtube). Regardless, I suspect the “This is not a riot” tactic is here to stay.

Other accounts

• A first person narrative of the action which include a description of what it was like to be directly in front of police lines: “I found myself in the front line, where I got booted in the leg by a cop whose features, behind the tinted visor of his helmet, were contorted with rage. He screamed ‘Get back, you fuck!’ in my face.” The author points to sheer numbers as a factor in preventing the police from moving forward further
• The BBC has a nice feature story on the educational festival atmosphere that was present at the camp before the police moved in.
• The Liberal Conspiracy blog has an account by an observer just outside police lins which includes catching a police admitting he lied about claims of violence in the camp.
• The Climate Camp 09 site has an overview of the 12 hour action which ended when police came back a second time later in the night.
• A report from the Guardian on police misconduct describes the second, more effective attack on the climate camp: “Without warning, from around midnight, the police repeatedly and violently surged forwards in full riot gear, occasionally rampaging through the protest line and deliberately destroying protesters’ property, some officers openly screaming in pumped-up rage.”

Update - 4/3/09 2:40 pm

I just got a Skype call from my friend Graham Martin after he read this post. He offered this very enlightening story of how the “This is not a riot” tactic emerged from the Climate Action Camp movement:

What’s even more interesting is how this decision got made.

In 2006, we started talking about the first camp happening. There was almost a decision not to decide whether it would be a non-violent camp. That decision was made as thing developed at the first two camps. The sticking hands in the air tactic with a massive crowd in front of police really sprang out of nowhere really when a group of police without riot gear marched in a line unto the camp outside Heathrow in 2007 [See Youtube video of incident]. There were 22 of them and everyone rushed up and stopped and put their hands up. My understanding is that no one ever shouted, “put your hand up”. No one ever strategized and said, this is how we would handle it nonviolently. The amazing thing isn’t that this was a formal decision, it’s that it just happened and everyone decided at the same time without hours of philosophical discussion that the right thing to do was remain calm and raise hands.

At the 2008 camp, the police tried to raid through the rear gate during the first afternoon. And what was very interesting was how people first started to stand around with their hands up and then everyone started to sit down. And again, that wasn’t a specific decision, just people started saying, we should sit down. And so we sat down and sang songs. If someone needed to leave we had them sit down and take their place. And so we just held that line. And we actually held that line for 24 hours. Food was brought out. Songs were sung. Workshops were held. I think the police were flabbergasted with the whole thing.”

And then, this time [on Wednesday], the whole “this is not a riot” thing. It was incredibly powerful to watch. No one described the historical tradition or the theory. It was just the response straight away. Pretty much everyone pitched in and set the tone for things immediately.

About 5 minutes after the first police surge, everyone in front of the police lines sat down. We got a bicycle trailer sound system up to the south end where the police. We managed to facilitate a decision to contract the camp so it took up less space. We had a consensus process going on despite the fact that police were digging knees into half the people in the meeting.

So people in the line slowly stood up with linked arms and the facilitator counted to 3 and then everyone took 2 steps backward. And the police were pretty surprised by how this worked. And effectively we took the police line with us, because they were leaning against us. I could hear their group commander behind the police line saying ‘Stay with the protestors’, but he was obviously pretty uncertain what to do given that we’d rewritten the rules.

It was clear as people moved back that different individual officers had different responses to our decision. And some of them were very angry that the protesters had control of the situation in a totally peaceful way. We moved at our own speed and they had to move with us. After we reached the line we agreed to move to, everyone sat down again and cheered very loudly. And then we gave people the option to swap with someone farther back. People made an attempt to thank the police nearest to them. Some smiled and some didn’t want to be thanked. Overall, we maintained more control of the situation ourselves through using nonviolent methods.

It wasn’t some big decision that people made to stand and die by. What made it all the more powerful was the spontaneity. It’s something people have chosen to do without making a big thing about it. What’s been interesting is there have been some police officers have really felt threatened by the fact that we’ve been nonviolent and we haven’t played by the rules they thought we’d play by. Others have been appreciative, actually.

I think the police have expected [the Climate Action Camp campaign] to get more violent as they’ve gone on and they’ve actually gotten less violent. It’s been really empowering.

You can read his account of the Prayer-I58 affinity group involvement in the Climate Camp. They were about to have a prayer meeting when the police first showed up.

I doubt, therefore I think.
I think, therefore I exist.
I doubt, therefore I am imperfect.
I am imperfect, therefore imperfection exists.
Imperfection exists, therefore perfection exists.
God, by definition, is perfection, therefore God exists.
God is perfect, therefore God is good.
God is good, therefore God would not deceive us.
God would not deceive us, therefore the world and my experiences in it are real.

This proof actually shares the same fatal flaw as the other God proof I’ve heard:

Something can exist either in thought or in reality.
I can think of God, therefore God exists in thought.
It is more powerful to exist in reality than in thought.
God is, by definition, the most powerful, therefore God exists in reality.

The flaw, of course, is that we are asked to accept that because something is conceptualized, it must exist in accordance to its intrinsic characteristics. Yet if I believe that God is, by definition, a delicious jelly donut sitting on my desk, there is still no jelly donut on my desk. Those of us not well schooled in metaphysics may not be able to articulate exactly why we know these proofs are bogus, but we do know it.

(Note: I am not a philosopher, so if you’re outraged at how much I screwed up my summary of these ideas, I apologize.)

However, in some of my musings this year, I have come across my own conditional proof that God exists. Conditional in that it does not prove God, but makes God a necessary derivative of another belief. Here it is:

If we have free will, God exists.

Maybe some of you are nodding your heads and saying “good point,” or shaking your heads and saying “nope.” You have probably already jumped ahead through everything else I’m about to say. If, however, you’re going “huh?” then you can benefit from reading my explanation.

It started in Mexico. I have no real explanation for why it started in Mexico, except perhaps that I (like Descartes, it would seem) had a lot of free time on my hands. It was then that I began doubting free will.

It seems, scientifically, that to believe in free will, you must at some point stop your understanding of physical science. Scientifically speaking, our brains are very complex systems of electrical signals and chemical reactions that form what we experience as thought. Like everything in nature, these systems react to stimuli in the environment, chug through some insanely complex equations, and churn out an answer. It’s conceptually no different from the reaction you get when you mix baking soda and vinegar, or when you charge a battery, or when you plant a seed. There are variables (how much vinegar you used, how long the battery is charging, nutrients in the soil, and so forth) that, depending on the complexity and our ability to measure them, we may or may not be aware of. But if we were to know all of these variables, we could predict the outcome. Chaos theory says that we cannot–that the universe is far too complex for us to predict outcomes like that. But if we were omniscient about the present, we would be able to predict the future.

Are you buying this? Let me ask you something: if you flip a coin, what are the chances that it will land heads? Fifty percent? Fifty-one percent? Say you flip a coin and it lands on heads. Given the exact physical circumstances of that toss–air currents in the room, your pulse, everything–what were the odds that it was going to be heads? I claim 100%. If you built a time machine, went back in time, and observed that coin toss again without changing anything (forget Heisenberg for a second), it would land on heads. Every time.

Apply the same concept to a choice. What will I eat for breakfast? Cereal or eggs? I think I’m choosing, but I’m actually just running an equation in my brain based on my hunger, how long it’s been since I last ate eggs, how much time I have before I have to be in class, and so forth. I may choose to make eggs. If I go back in time and watch that play out again, I will once again choose to make eggs, because that was the outcome of that equation (note: for this reason I don’t believe in alternate realities–at least not according to the “we create one with every choice” theory).

The end result is predetermination. Given the exact same circumstances, we will make the exact same choices, just like the same math equation will always yield the same result (and don’t give me any plus-or-minus crap or start talking about the number i).

There’s a whole concept in philosophy that assumes all this, and goes on to explain our experiences and sense of self: epiphenominalism. “In the Philosophy of Mind, a dualist theory of mind-body interaction which maintains all mental events are causally dependent upon physical events (i.e., brain states). According to this theory brain events cause mental events, but not vice versa” (Maricopa). Essentially, our experience of making a choice is actually a side-effect of our body making that choice. It’s an illusion, unintended by the brain–a “ghost in the machine.”

You may disagree, but I think all of this makes perfect sense.

So where does free will come in to play? Do we have free will? I believe I make choices all the time. I believe I have free will. Maybe I’m just suffering from the delusion of mental existence, but maybe I’m right, and there actually is free will. But here’s the thing:

To the best of my scientific and philosophical understanding, free will is impossible. Therefore, free will can only exist by divine miracle.

If there is divine miracle, there is God.

Last Saturday I rode my bicycle out to First Church of the Brethren for meetings. along Van Buren Street. As I biked away from the loop, west along Van Buren St., commercial properties gave way to the brand new condos where young urban professionals have recently arrived from the suburbs. As I went farther west I began to see a mix of older, more run down housing mixed with blocks full of brand new condos, a combination typical of neighborhoods in transition driven by property speculation and developers. I was reminded of the abrupt halt that the economic crisis has brought to the gentrification process. For some this has meant a major loss of invested capital, for others it has meant welcome breathing space on the brink of being pushed out of their homes due to rising rent costs and property taxes.

Just after the last block of new condos, I noticed remnants of an apparently under construction playground abandoned amidst dead tree branches and litter:

Was this the result of a failed development plan, the only thing left from a grandiose attempt to lure potential buyers to the bleeding edge of new condo complex? In my mind I composed the photo above and titled it "Where the Gentrification Ends." The next day on the way home I stopped to take the photographs I had imagined the day before. I spent 15 minutes walking around the mass of red posts and blue pastic roofs. The crowding dead branches and mass of litter should have told me this pre-dated the recent economic downturn, but my imagination had already fun off with the post-economic crisis hypothesis, fueled by the nearby piles of gravel which suggested building something.

I stood back and took this panoramic shot of the playground in the center of the abandoned lot from Interstate 290 on my right to the railroad on my left and the playground in the center:

I began walking back to my car and stopped at the edge of the lot I stopped to take one more photo. As I stood there I heard a voice behind me say, "I grew up there, you know." I turned around and met Craig, an African-American man who had grown up in the empty city block I had been walking around for the past few minutes.

It turns out I was looking at the former location of one of the towers of Rockwell Gardens. Craig talked warmly about his growing up years in the housing project. He pointed out the two or three houses in the area that dated from his childhood in the 50’s and 60’s. "Back then all my friends had parents and we didn’t know anyone in jail." he said. "It was nice the train and the bus right here and I could go anywhere in the city." He pointed to the Western stop on the Blue line clearly visible a block and a half away. "And then there were the riots.." he said and his voice trailed off.

During the late 70’s and 80’s Rockwell Gardens became known for its heavy gang presence. A New York times article from 1989 about Rockwell Gardens tells the story of attempts by the city of Chicago to reduce gang activity in the community. It paints a grim picture of a community dominated by violence. In the article residents talk about being to afraid to leave their homes at times and sleeping on the floor to avoid gunfire at night.

Apparently, "Operation Clean Sweep" wasn’t enough. Wikipedia says, "The ultimate failure of this (and previous) cleanup programs eventually led to the Chicago Housing Authority’s plan in the 1990s to demolish and redevelop city projects." Two years ago, in 2006 the massive apartment building was demolished. You can see photos of the demolition in progress on Flickr. You can still see the tower itself in the sattelite view on yahoo maps.

The playground pillars I had photographed were all that was left on the vast empty city block. They are an ending rather then a failed beginning. The other remnant is a Ning social network for former Rockwell Garden residents. "Never Forget From Whence You Came" is the slogan of the site.

The condos I had seen one block east are the new face of Rockwell Gardens, an attempt by the city of Chicago to resurrect the community. The Chicago Housing Authority page enthusiastically graphs the redevelopment plans goal for 784 units one third market rate, one third affordable housing and one third public housing. So far they’ve built 212 units.

I’m almost completely ignorant about housing issues in Chicago, but my conversation with Craig and my walk across the vast empty lot of Rockwell Gardens give me a window into the many different facets of a process that is called redevelopment by some and urban removal by others.

P.S. For those interested in more historical information about the area, Craig recommends West-side Historical Society and Dr. Christopher Reeds, professor emeritus of history at Roosevelt University.