"Children of the Americas" is a series of articles in the Miami Herald. The latest one deals with hunger in Guatemala, where more children are hungry and malnourished than in any other country of this hemisphere. Earlier articles deal with Haiti, Honduras, and Argentina. (You may have to register to read these articles, but there is no charge.)

While trillions fund regime change and foment civil war, a few million would feed these children. A few million would fund projects like those sponsored by Heifer International and World Vision to provide a sustainable life for these families.

On a related note, did you know that Heifer International has programs targeted to orphans and mothers who have been devastated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in southern Africa. In Uganda, Kenya, and other places, milk can increase the protein in diets so that AIDS drugs are more effective, as well as provide family income to purchase medications. As if I needed it, I have one more reason to support Heifer International.

Apocalypto will not be on my agenda in the foreseeable future. It's disappointing to have to say that because the culture and history of MesoAmerica is one of my strong interests. I've made a couple of trips to the Maya Weekend at the University of Pennsylvania, and I've learned and forgotten how to read a few basic Mayan glyphs.

The reason I'm not going to see Apocalypto is the same reason I still have not seen The Passion of Christ. I just don't believe that this sort of intense depiction of violence serves any useful or edifying purpose. I have read enough about the removal of beating hearts and the atrocities committed against Jesus to get the picture. I don't need to see someone's morbid depiction of it.

I read and heard a couple of provocative reviews of this latest Mel Gibson bloodfest, so I'll pass on the links.

Professor Zachary X. Hruby of U. C. Riverside's review on MesoWeb

L.A. Times and Morning Edition movie reviewer, Kenneth Turan on NPR

The Land of the House of Omri--Part 3
Psalm 146
1 Kings 16

How must we lead in the church? We must serve. We have elected our committees and officers recently. We have our deacons and trustees. Our choirs have their directors. Our classes have teachers. What kind of leaders are we going to be?

Most all of us have shared the joys and frustrations of working on committees. Things don’t always go the way we hoped they would. We try to treat one another with respect and as colleagues. But then sometimes when a committee member becomes a committee chair, it seems like a different person has appeared. The one who used to treat you like a colleague now starts telling you what to do. The one who used to listen to ideas of others starts announcing and pronouncing that this is what we are going to do.

Why do we think that chairing a committee makes us a boss? It makes us a servant. It gives us greater responsibility to listen. It requires that we become the channel of good communication. It requires that we seek the gifts of the Holy Spirit to work through each person so that our blindness can be overcome by the Spirit’s light which flows through each one.

Leading is serving, not bossing. The purpose is not to show how great I am as the one in charge, but to see how we can do what God is calling us to do together. We can’t be like the family of James and John and their mother, trying to work the system to get our sons and daughters, our brothers and aunts, named committee chairs and choir directresses or directors. Leading is about service, not status, not titles, but ministry.

How do we lead in teaching? Some people treat teaching as their chance to tell those people what I know. But teaching must be service. What does the class need? What would make their lives grow? If you have not figured it out yet, I’ll let you in on a secret. Just sitting in a room in rows or around a table while someone spouts off what pops into his or her head is not Christian education. To teach is to accept a calling to serve. The service of teaching is building a relationship. We cannot merely recruit teachers to fill slots on a chart to say we have teachers. We need teachers who want to build relationships week after week. We don’t just have a class to fill time on Sunday and Wednesday. We have class to provide the service of helping people learn to know God and follow Jesus in all that they do.

I recently heard a speaker talk about how adults lead youth in churches. He said that he has become very careful about selecting adults to work with youth. He said that there is a kind of entitlement that many adults seem to take on when they talk to young people. It is as if they have been storing up their resentment from all their own years of childhood, waiting for their chance. Then when they become adults they dump all this out on young people because they think it is their turn to boss people around.

There is no service in that kind of leadership. That is the house of Omri. That is the yeast of the Pharisees and Saducees. That is the leadership of a tyrant, of someone who thinks that the role gives entitlement to push people around. What do young people learn when we lead in this way? They learn that someday they can get their own chance to boss people around and put them in their place. They do not meet Jesus in that kind of leader.

The speaker went on to say that we are being blind to how we lead youth. We criticize them and boss them and put them in rows and tell them to be quiet. We give them few opportunities to try to lead, to sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. Then we wonder why so many young people of this generation are turning away from the church. We are like the Pharisees and Sadducees. The signs of the times are right before our eyes. These beautiful blessings of God’s creation are longing to find the way to live as God’s children. If we can’t see the way to listen and lead with service, to offer grace and mercy, to champion justice, then we will have missed one of the most important opportunities God has given us.

If we go full circle back to Psalm 146, we find the character of leadership that God expects of us, that Jesus lived for us. This Lord executes justice for the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. This Lord sets the prisoners free . This Lord opens the eyes of the blind and lifts up those who are bowed down. This Lord loves the righteous. This Lord watches over immigrants, upholds the orphan and the widow. This Lord brings the way of the wicked to ruin. This Lord will reign forever, keep faith forever, for all generations.

Knowing this Lord, do you want to stay in the house of Omri? Will someone someday remember our gatherings as the house of Omri? Have we hardened our hearts so that we can’t see the signs of the times? What would God have Mt. Level do here and now? How do we need to reorganize our lives to do that? How do we need to adjust our structures to make it happen? What will Mt. Level be in days to come? Will we lead with service, or will we shut out the world and hold onto our power as the Pharisees and Sadducees? Will we float along oblivious to what Jesus has been telling us as his disciples did, never realizing the truth of what we should be doing? Will we fixate on titles and offices and neglect service, mercy, and justice? Will we lord over others as tyrants and make ourselves no different from the world?

I want to tell you today that there is a Lord over us who in grace has come to serve. This waiting Lord sees that you are weary and heavy-laden. He stands dressed in work clothes, holding a bowl of water and a towel to wash your feet, to touch your life at the place of your deepest need. If you have not met this servant King, then why wait any longer. Come be embraced by the washing of regeneration. Come to give your life to the one who loves you supremely. Come to follow Jesus today.

Maybe you have been timid to lead. Maybe you fear you would fail to measure up. Maybe you fear you would be overbearing and unliked. Maybe you fear you would have to give up something you treasure. Let me tell you today that to become a servant in the band of Jesus’ followers is a place where grace abounds. If we cannot be a community of grace then we have not met the God of grace, or we have forgotten where he brought us from. God is calling out leaders to take up the role of a servant. If God is prodding you to commit your life to servant leadership, then do not delay. Those who already lead, if you need to reshape your leadership to be modeled after Jesus, then begin that path today. If you are living in the house of Omri and you want your ministry to be known as the house of the servant king, then come today to offer your body a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your worship.

Or perhaps you have no church home. You are new in town or you have been here awhile but never submitted yourself to serve in a particular body of gathered followers of Jesus. If Jesus is calling you to be part of this band of followers, to find your place as a servant leader, the doors of the church are open. We welcome you to join us in serving God in this place.

--

As we answer the call to follow Jesus, may the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with us now and always as we walk the road toward the House of the Servant King. Amen

The Land of the House of Omri--Part 2
Psalm 146
1 Kings 16

In times like these, we must listen to Jesus’ warning to “Watch out, beware the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” The Pharisees and the Sadducees were the two most powerful factions of the political life of Palestine in Jesus’ day. They disliked each other and tried to gain advantage over one another. But they also made sure they worked together to see that no one else could challenge their joint hold on power. The third parties, like the Zealots or Herodians, were either has-beens or not-gonna-bes, in their eyes. So when they challenged Jesus as recorded in Matthew 16, they were willing to work together to try to keep him down. It says they came to him asking for a sign. But he knew they represented the house of Omri. So he challenged their power in his response.

He told them he did not need to give them a sign and had no intention of doing so. He told them there were all kinds of obvious signs about what God was doing in the world that they should be looking at and talking about. He reminded them in front of the crowd that they knew how to look at a red sky and depending on the details, predict whether it would be fair weather or stormy weather. They had plenty of skill at interpreting signs. But they had closed their minds and hearts to the signs of the times, the signs of what God was doing right in front of them. They were satisfied with the house of Omri. They were not looking for the paths to greater justice and mercy. As far as Jesus was concerned, if they couldn’t see what is as plain as the back of their own hand, then they must be blinded by their hardheartedness. He says that only an evil and adulterous sort of people ask for more signs than the ones they already have. And he told them to go back and think about the sign of Jonah, then see what happens. And he walked away.

His disciples were confused, and they asked questions that hurt his feelings. He explained his point to them, and they sort of figured out he was talking about what the Pharisees and Sadducees teach. But they seem to have remained somewhat confused. They had not figured out for themselves what God was doing in front of their faces. On the other hand, the Sadducees and Pharisees claimed to be the ones who know all about God, but they refused to see what God is doing.

We in the church can respond to God in both of these ways. On our good days, we can be like the disciples, muddling along, getting confused, thinking we knew what was happening and suddenly realizing we just don’t get it. Church people too often hear people talking church talk and assume that means that they are working for the Kingdom of God. Both of the last two presidents of the United States have been experts at this form of manipulation. Pres. Clinton portrayed himself as a devoted Baptist Christian. Pres. Bush portrays himself as a devoted Methodist Christian. People get caught up in this appearance and this image, and they say, “Isn’t it wonderful to have a devoted Christian in the White House?” The fog of words and images gets in the way of the signs of the times.

Where is the money getting spent? Whose taxes are getting cut and whose tax bills are growing? Where and why are the bombs being dropped? Who is training our young people to commit acts of torture? These are the signs of the times. But we keep getting hung up on whether we like the person in charge or whether the president or congress says nice things to us and makes us feel good. Watch out, and beware the yeast of the Democrats and the Republicans. Beware the yeast of the Baptists and the Methodists. Look at the neighborhoods of this city. What are the signs of the times? Do not put your trust in princes.

The church can also become like the Pharisees and Sadducees. We can get so self-righteous, so sure that we are living just like God wants us to live, that we miss the signs of the times. We can hide the sins of our lives and magnify the sins of people who are not in our churches. We can attack those people who do things we aren’t doing while we ignore our own sins of omission. We can strain at a gnat, and ignore the weightier matters of the law such as justice and mercy. We make our short list of sins that we find easy to avoid, and then we leave off the list the sins of a society, a war-making machine, an economic system of exploitation that is destroying the lives of young people, the poor, the elderly, the sick, the mentally ill, and the prisoners. Where are we Mt. Level folks in this story? Are we the Pharisees and Sadducees? Lord, help us here.

Well clearly the Bible warns us against trusting in worldly rulers, princes and kings, presidents and governors, generals and commissioners. So what kind of leader does the Bible teach us to be? What kind of leader does the world need? What kind of leader do churches need? Jesus continued the tradition of Samuel and Jeremiah when he talked to his disciples about leadership.

The conversation happened when the disciples started getting eager to see a kingdom come about with powerful people bossing the rest of the people. They started wondering who would get the highest ranks. One couple of brothers and their mother came up with a plan to lobby Jesus for favors. They asked if they could be his top assistants, on his right hand and his left. Jesus was appalled. He asked them a challenging question, which they did not understand. He asked if they could be the kind of leader he was. They had not figured out that the way he had been with them was the way he would continue to be with them; they still thought he had been playing the role of the meek and mild Jesus as a way of biding his time until he could rise up and become the head person in charge and throw his weight around. So they said, in all their humility, “Yes, Jesus, we can be like you and do what you do.” They were eager to be in charge.

But Jesus answered them by pointing out that they really did not understand what he was saying, again. He assured them that in due time they would bear the same burden of leadership that he was to bear. But in the meantime, he told them to forget about all this foolishness about who was second in line to be in charge. All the disciples got angry about it. I think some were angry because they did not think of asking Jesus first.

Then he got everyone’s attention to make a point. He said, “The Gentiles have a way of leading that is not the way you should lead. Their rulers act like they have absolute power. They demand absolute loyalty. They treat everyone else as their servant. You are not to be that kind of leader. The way I am is the way you have to be. Leading is by serving. Whoever wants to be great must become great through service. Whoever wants to be first must act like the last and serve everyone else. That is who I am. That is what I have been doing. That is what I will continue to do, even to the point of giving my life for others.”

The gospel of John tells us that he went on to act it out for them soon. At the table of the last supper, he put aside his garments and wrapped himself in the garment of a slave. Then he took a bowl of water and a towel, knelt before them one at a time, and washed their dirty, stinking feet. When he finished, he said that they were to imitate him in this way, serving one another.

So we don’t need leaders who act like tyrants and just expect everyone to do what they say. We don’t need to let politicians treat us that way. We need to teach them to be public servants. We need to move them in the direction of serving those great needs that God is revealing to us as the signs of the times. Shouting condemnation on thieves and drug offenders, throwing them in jail to warehouse them and have them become a low-wage, locked-up labor force is neither justice nor mercy. What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God? Our leaders must learn to serve. We must hold them accountable. Voting is one way to do that, but just voting will not do the job. We also must help them be accountable to the people throughout their terms of service. The world is not as it should be. Our calling as the church is to discern the movement of God and help the world understand how it needs to be changed.

But how about our own leading? What kinds of leaders must we be? Jesus has told us to be servants. So we can’t let our families become the house of Omri. A family is not a place for people to form factions, manipulate and dominate. Divide and conquer will lead to disaster in the family. God has no role for a tyrant in the family. We do not lead by lording over one another. If we cannot find a way to talk with one another in loving ways, to work together in mutual submission toward fulfilling the calling of God, we have missed out on why God has brought us together.

Leading in the family is service. There is no place for violence. When the guys on the job say you have to hit a woman now and then to let her know who is boss, then say “Get thee behind me Satan.” That is a temptation to sin. It is not the word of God. When the women in the coffee room say, “She must have brought it on herself,” say “Watch out, and beware the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” If you can’t see that using violence to build love is wrong, you are blind to what Jesus has done. The path to loving relationships is through loving actions. If you want to lead, you must learn to serve. If someone can’t lead without violence, then he or she is no different from the ones who crucified our Lord. It must not be so among you, for to be great you must serve.

To be continued . . .

The Land of the House of Omri--Part 1
Psalm 146
I Kings 16

In the official inscriptions of the ancient kingdom of Assyria, archaeologists have discovered a phrase that names a character from the Old Testament. That phrase refers to a kingdom, and it calls that kingdom “the house of Omri.” Who was Omri—O-M-R-I--Omri? Did Omri have a famous family?

Well, fame is a relative thing. About 3000 years ago in the hills of Samaria, Omri was pretty well known. He was the sixth king of the northern kingdom of Israel. He moved the capital of the kingdom from Tirzah to a new city he built called Samaria. He reigned for about twelve years and seems to have built some buildings. He was mediocre in his ability to maintain good relationships with neighboring kingdoms. He seems to have solidified one relationship with a strategic marriage for his son. Elsewhere he lost some cities to Syria and took some cities from Moab. And he got his name into the records of Assyria, a kingdom on the rise toward a becoming a great empire. His successors as King of Israel would ultimately have to face a reckoning with Assyria, and it would be their downfall.

But what I’ve just told you is much more than the book of 1 Kings bothers to tell us about Omri. Omri is one more in a series of rulers who are most memorable in the Bible for the way they went wrong. Of course, that is the overall story line of the entire period of kings in Israel and Judah. Some people began to demand a king. Samuel tried to stop them, and he warned them it would not be good for them. Against God’s true purpose for Israel, God let them have a king, and what follows is one sad example after another of why we need to understand what Psalm 146 is saying: “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans will perish.”

Let’s think back across that history. God selected Saul, from the tribe of Benjamin, as the first king. He had the look of a leader. He showed an inclination toward godliness as was manifested when he joined up with the traveling prophets. He took up the task of leadership with confidence. Pretty soon he was fighting wars. The longer he stayed in office, the more he worried about who might be trying to take over his place as king. This concern seems to have pushed him toward depression and maybe even mental illness. He could not figure out that the best thing he had going for him was a friendship with young David. Instead, he let the waves of public opinion rock him back and forth. It’s a tragic story, but not an isolated incident of failure on the throne.

Saul was replaced by David after his death. Sometimes the Bible makes it seem that under David everything was great. But closer attention to the story shows us it was not. David’s leadership was tied up with his effective use of violence. God did not want him to build the temple because of his violent ways. Moreover, while he seems to have started out with the blessing of the people and of God, David quickly dissipated his political capital and his divine favor. He decided that being king put him above the law. He stole a man’s wife and killed the man. He did not maintain a harmonious household. The household disagreements poured over into political factions, and the land became divided and went into civil war. Although we see David repenting of sin and seeking to reconcile the divisions, even on his deathbed he plotted revenge.

His successor Solomon is praised for his wisdom, but where is the wisdom in having so many wives and concubines? He sounds more like a rich, powerful man out of control. Some of his marriages were for political alliances, and these brought the powerful influences of other kingdoms and other faiths into the land. Although Solomon is revered for building a temple to the God of Israel, he also built temples to the gods of the neighboring kingdoms. And the way he built so many fine buildings was by drafting the people to do forced labor for the kingdom. It was hard to raise your crops and keep your animals if you had to spend months away from home building fancy buildings for the king’s wives to live in or for the priests of foreign gods to practice their religion. People were angry by the time Solomon died.

One of the popular critics of Solomon’s policies, Jereboam, helped to split the kingdom into north and south, and he became king of the northern tribes. He went back to the wilderness precedent of erecting a golden calf as a symbol of the throne of god. He mixed up the gods of the land with the worship of the God of Israel. His was the first of many disastrous kingships in the northern kingdom. His son and successor, Nadab, was murdered on the battlefied by another northerner, Baasha, and then the whole family was rounded up and slaughtered. Baasha did not know how to stay out of fights, and he had plenty of trouble with his neighbors. When he died, his son Elah succeeded him. That’s where 1 Kings chapter 16 picks up.

I would hate to be Elah in the history books. The Bible gives us one fact about his life. While a war was going on somewhere else, he was back at home with half the army in the capital. And he was drinking himself stupid with his buddies. In that state of inebriation, he probably never knew what hit him. The commander of the troops in the capital came to the place where he was drunk and assassinated him. The kingdom went into chaos. Zimri, his assassin, proclaimed himself the new king. Then he did just like Elah’s father had done. He rounded up the whole family of Elah and executed them.

After this assassination and usurping of the throne, the people began to rally around popular leaders. The part of the army that had been off at war chose Omri to be the new king. Omri took the army off the battlefield and marched back to the capital. When Zimri, the assassin who was claiming to be king, saw the troops arrayed against him, he gave up hope. After being king for only seven days, he set fire to the palace and burned it and himself in it. So Omri claimed to be the new king.

But he could not fully claim it yet. Even though the army was backing him, about half the people of the northern kingdom were backing another fellow, Tibni, for king. Putting the dates from 1 Kings 16 together, it seems that for four years, two people claiming to be king were locked in a struggle for power. Finally, Omri’s party overcame Tibni’s party, and Tibni’s death let Omri reign unchallenged for the next eight years until his death. What inheritance did he leave the kingdom of Israel? He left them his successor, his son Ahab, who led the people down many wrong paths.

Omri came to power in the midst of war, in the wake of assassinations, and when the country was divided. I Kings says that half the people backed Omri and the other half backed Tibni. Omri and Tibni battled it out in an intractable struggle for four years. Then Omri got the undisputed title, and Tibni went to the grave.

This does not sound so unfamiliar to me. Half the country was for one leader, the other half for another. The controversy went on for four years, and finally one of them emerged the victor over the other. It sounds like the last six years of U. S. politics. This country’s voting populace is so evenly divided between two parties that every election ends up with a dispute over who won. And with the margin of victory so narrow, who knows what people are willing to do to sway a few votes. Some try to intimidate voters to keep them from going out to vote. Others use mailings or phone calls to lie about where and when the vote is taking place. Some throw out perfectly good ballots that could hurt their party’s cause. Others take election results to court. Many of us wonder whether the coming use of electronic voting machines will bring an end to having our vote count if the machines can be programmed to ignore our decisions and mark ballots for whomever pays the programmers the best price. We face uncertainty, conflict, and division. So did the people who ended up with Omri as their king.

It was that chaotic reign that the Assyrians recorded as their name for the northern kingdom of Israel. Even after Omri’s descendents lost the throne, the Assyrians called this kingdom “the house of Omri.” They did not call it the house of Jereboam. They did not call it the house of Baasha. They did not call it the house of Jehu, even though Jehu was the one who unseated and executed the family of Ahab, son of Omri. So forever in the archives of Assyrian history, the northern kingdom has been known for a king whose reign was built on chaos and civil conflict.

The Psalmist’s words are an important reminder for those of us who find ourselves living in the house of Omri today. Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. As Samuel warned, and Jeremiah reminded, depending on armies and violence and putting one person in charge over everyone is a bad plan that is bound to fail. One person is not capable of exercising that much power. Armies and violence produce more armies and violence. Autocratic leaders become self-centered and self-serving. They help their friends while everyone else pays the price. They talk as if they are for the people when behind the scenes they are robbing them of their prosperity and their dignity.

In our day leaders are promoting the use of torture, putting the energy companies in charge of the energy policy, taking away the right of habeus corpus, allowing unlimited imprisonment without charges, imprisonment without the right to communicate with a lawyer, allowing wiretapping of citizens without probable cause or a warrant, spending billions on a war of aggression while leaving hundreds of thousands of hurricane victims to fend for themselves, creating education policies designed to shift billions of dollars to private companies. In these times of chaos and division, leaders can manipulate the system to the great disadvantage of the common people.

This is the world we have been living in. We have been living in the house of Omri. And do not be fooled. It has not changed overnight. One day of voting did not transform a troubled and broken system into the Kingdom of God. When Saul died and David took his place, the problems did not go away. Solomon may have tried to be a uniter and not a divider, but when his son took power, the country split and civil war ensued. One election did not remove the dangers and turn the U. S. into the land of eternal happiness. For generations after Omri’s reign, people still called the northern kingdom of Israel “the house of Omri.” And when they stopped calling it that, it was because the kingdom had been defeated, destroyed, and deported.

To be continued . . .

Writing a final report on my sabbatical grant project was a challenge and a learning experience. I spent four days hammering away at my keyboard, looking back at notes taken here and there, recently and not so recently. I reviewed comments from other professors. I gained some insights. I hope there will be much more that I can say about it than my formal report. The opening section of my report follows. I hope my colleagues and I can somehow grasp from this research some pieces of an appropriate pedagogical response. That would be one more reason to be thankful to God.

The “Teaching Political Engagement” project has provided excellent opportunities for learning about political engagement on the level of everyday practices of churches and church-related organizations. The fall political season in the United States presents exaggerated images of partisan conflict, overstuffed with fear-mongering and mudslinging, funded by mountains of wealth. But that is only one angle by which to look at political life. In communities all over the United States, neighborhood organizations, civic clubs, ad hoc committees, coalitions, political associations, and churches engage one another in transforming their communities and in affecting the decisions of businesses, large corporations, school boards, city and county governments. Their local work may ultimately reshape state and federal policies.

Of course, this kind of neighborhood-based political engagement is often the exception rather than the rule of life in the United States, as noted by Marcia Riggs, Cornel West, Mark R. Warren, and Robert Putnam,(1) who have examined the breakdown of community and neighborly structures and the possibilities for rebuilding them. Churches are often either oblivious to this loss or helpless and ineffective in their efforts to swim against this stream. The culture of individualism provides few tools for analyzing the structural problems of society, nor does it encourage sympathy for other people’s problems. For churches who do not recognize their calling to be rooted in the inaugural public statement of Jesus’ mission to the world, recorded in Luke 4:16-21, the initial task will be to undergo what James B. Nickoloff calls “conversion to the neighbor” in his comments on Gustavo Gutierrez’s theology of neighbor love: “that love of God is inseparable from [and] . . . unavoidably expressed through love of one’s neighbor.”(2)

There are many churches and church leaders who have a basic theological understanding of their duty to love the neighbor through offering grace in relational and tangible form. Providing food, clothes, and other assistance in times of crisis is not an uncommon practice by churches who may create organizational structures or may respond as cases arise. Sometimes these sorts of actions receive the name “mercy ministries,” a term derived in part from Micah 6:8, which summarizes the prophetic message with a threefold calling to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Mercy ministries address the immediate crisis needs that people may face, but on their own they do little to confront structures which may be perpetuating the sort of crises that people in the neighborhood keep having. Justice ministries address structural injustices and seek to create structures of justice in the neighborhood, sometimes through the effort of the church and its neighborhood partners and sometimes through addressing governmental and non-governmental systems which affect the situation of injustice.

In my conversations with students about their churches and their responses to drug abuse, gangs, poverty, drop-outs, and crime, they usually tell stories of mercy ministries and efforts to help this family deal with its immediate need. Seldom are they able to articulate strategies or plans for addressing structural or systemic change. If the conversation shifts to systemic change, then often the focus becomes national political issues and elected federal officials. In contrast, Cornel West has insisted it is local grassroots community action, not neglecting state and federal influence, which will be able to bring about transformation.(3)

Many of the student ministers in my theology and ethics classes have an inclination toward grassroots action for community change, but their ecclesial training has seldom prepared them to innovate in ministry, to develop a workable ministry plan, or to use good organizational practices. Thus, a range of needs emerges for “Teaching Political Engagement.”

• A theologically grounded understanding of the relation of churches to their neighborhoods, communities, and other political and social organizations should effectively communicate the calling of the church to embrace the mission Jesus proclaimed as the Reign of God, sometimes contextualized in recent U. S. history as “the beloved community.”(4)

• A critical analysis of structures and systems in relation to the problems and needs of particular people should enable teaching the communal or corporate mission of he church, the church’s ways of using power, and models of social and political engagement with structures and systems.

• Studying and participating in good organizing practices and intentional community-building should support the development of habits that are flexible and foster the building of effective and sustainable organizations that are needed for longer-term personal and community transformation.

• Educational processes must accommodate formation in theological vision, communal identity, analytical insight, organizational tools, and vocational commitment.

(1) Marcia Riggs, Awake, Arise, and Act (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1994) 87, 93ff; Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994) 29-30; Mark R. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) 16-18; Robert Putman, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000) 42, 56ff, 73-74.

(2) Gustavo Gutierrez, Essential Writings, ed. by James B. Nickoloff (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996) 149, 154.

(3) West, Ibid.

(4) Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, ed. by James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986) 140; Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community (New York: Basic Books, 2005) 49-50, 207-210.

"Re-Envisioning Baptist Identity" began to circulate roughly a decade ago. It received its greatest attention in the next couple of years among Former Southern Baptists, being published and debated in a news magazine called Baptists Today, and a scholarly journal of the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion called Perspectives in Religious Studies. Discussions were held at academic conferences and with student and faculty groups at several universities and divinity schools. I will now make some rambling remarks that may not in all cases be even-handed.

Pastors and leaders among the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship were divided. Some resisted its criticism of individualism, while others thought the criticism was misguided. Some feared it presented a spectre of authoritarian church polity with official interpretations coming from people holding official positions. Some thought it sounded too Anabaptist for the mainstream. Some thought it accommodated itself too much to Roman Catholicism. Some said it undermined separation of church and state, even at times saying its views would lead to the neo-conservative renegotiation of the disestablishment of the church. A good deal of the controversy had to do with interpretations of key persons and historical periods and themes of Baptists.

Most of the original signers of the document were from among Former Southern Baptists. Some Baptists from the North and West, along with Black Baptists, resisted signing it because it seemed to be about concerns that were not the most central in their communities of Baptists. Still, some of them appreciated aspects of the document and agreed to sign in order to help foster a conversation. The issue of requesting signatures itself became controversial. Some thought that it made the document take on a kind of "creedal" status, which they saw as a serious offense against Baptist tradition. Most who signed it did so in the spirit of John Leland's description of the negotiated confession of the Union of Separate Baptists and Regular Baptists in Virginia--not to indicate complete agreement with every detail by every person.

The document had many weaknesses--for example, an overabundance of academic language, occasional bold use of language which left too many possibilities for diverse interpretations or misinterpretations, the cloud of ideas which was an effect of having been written by committee, and references to specific ideas and historical figures which were received as personal attacks by some scholars and pastors. It was too brief to cover all that might be important to say. But it was too long to be read and discussed in many ecclesial settings. It was written by academics who for the most part come from the context and background of Former Southern Baptists, and therefore it lacked a kind of consciousness of race, class, region, and variant traditions that would make it a more comprehensive statement. Few Canadian Baptists or Puerto Rican Baptists took an interest in it.

It's strengths, on the other hand, included its boldness, its willingness to raise criticisms of sacred cows, its reflection of scholarly work that reassessed officially orthodox interpretations of Baptist history, and its attention to certain reforming movements in contemporary theology and culture. In defense of its limitations, every theological statement reflects a certain history and context. This Manifesto did not attempt to speak for everyone nor to address every context. It especially aimed to address the English-speaking North American context. Even so, it was not a document to summarize the Baptist Moment of the turn of the millennium. Even some participants in the process of writing parted ways over the document. It was one statement, I hope an important one, to address a period of crisis among Baptists and across the culture of the U.S. Surprisingly, groups among English Baptists, Australian Baptists, and New Zealand Baptists found the document invigorating for discussions their churches were dealing with.

Some of the more vocal critics have claimed that the Manifesto attempted to address Baptists in language and categories from academic discourse and not in the language of the tradition. Bruce Prescott, who expressed some sympathy with the statement but had too many disagreements with it to sign it, wrote a briefer, more linguistically familiar alternative statement. Some prominent scholars have responded that the interpretations of Baptist history are incorrect. Another scholar has expressed that the revisions to Baptist identity should take a different trajectory than the directions charted by the Manifesto. Others from various circles have insisted that the genius of the Baptist movement IS the idea of religious individualism.

One writer has spent a good deal of time and ink fighting a surrogate battle from the 1980s. His latest essay calls the authors "Dixieland Postliberals," a caricature or straw enemy which becomes a foil to promote a version of Baptists-Come-Of-Age-To-Be-Power-Brokers-In-The-Real-World. The surrogate battle is between two academic camps identified with two sides of a disagreement between James Gustafson and Stanley Hauerwas.

I am a student of Stanley Hauerwas, and I admire his contributions to Christian theology. My work shows the mark of my teacher. I have admired James Gustafson's work as well, and his writing shaped my earliest studies in theology and ethics. I parted ways with his theological work at the point of his denial of the Trinity, of the divinity of Jesus. If Jesus is not God, then there is a whole different vision of theology and of the church in the world. I'm not hiding that by any means, so I don't need to fight a surrogate battle. I do need to serve God in such a way that the church is faithful to following Jesus.

It is the scandal of Jesus that makes Gustafson cringe about Christian theology. It is an old problem, going back to the battle between the Arians and the Trinitarians. It is at the heart of the Constantinian highjacking of the church. His god who bears up and bears down is available to us more in nature, reason, and culture than in the narrative of God in Israel, Jesus, and the church. Gustafson concludes that the European-style established church described by Troeltsch is the church we've got and the church we are stuck with, so we had better get on board with that kind of Culture Church if we want to have any influence. I don't believe that is our only option for influence. I don't think that is anything like the tradition of Baptist thought.

The disagreements of teacher and student between James Gustafson and Stanley Hauerwas grew over the years after they were both at Yale, and Gustafson sought to explain those differences by clarifying the charge that Hauerwas can be positionized through the label "sectarian." (James Gustafson, "The Sectarian Temptation: Reflections on Theology, the Church, and the University," Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 40 (1985): 83-94.) Many articles and books have been written to debate this question ever since. This writer, as a self-appointed surrogate for Gustafson, has treated the Manifesto and its authors as surrogates for Stanley Hauerwas in an effort to convince Baptists that they need to adopt the methodologies and perspectives of James Gustafson. I hope Baptists do not ever choose one theologian from whom they will learn. I also hope we never accept the pejorative label "sectarian" as an accurate description of disestablished, post-european-style churches, calling them dangerous, and ultimately unfaithful to God. If that is what it means to be a come-of-age, responsible Baptist, we had better pack our bags and get evangelized by African indigenous churches. That is probably a good idea anyway.

Fundamentalist Baptists, or Baptists of the Conservative Resurgence, as some prefer to be called, have mostly been uninterested in the Manifesto. Usually it gets classified as another sign of liberalism. Some have seen it as an inadequate critique of liberalism. Recently, I found it on blog that calls it an interesting example of internal critique among moderate Baptists, yet still bearing the taint of moderate theology.

I sometimes thought that the Baptifesto, as it has sometimes been called, would fade away and be forgotten. But periodically it seems to resurface. That is still happening. So to the extent that it can further conversation about what Baptists have been, are, and should be, I say long may it live. That would be enough. The point of writing this is to make note of the ongoing small conversations about this document. Below are a few links. If you know of others, important or trivial, I would appreciate your adding them to the comments.

A Recent Southern Baptist posting

Another recent Southern Baptist posting disinviting the authors of the Manifesto to be Southern Baptists

A recent compliment from Timothy George

Another recent posting

An essay by Walter Shurden

Bruce Prescott's links, first and second

A Southern Baptist essay on Baptist Identity which says the Manifesto departs from recognizable Baptist thought

A recent statement responding to charges that the Manifesto is "unbaptistic"

A recent comment related to the previous post on the Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank site

"The Unintended Consequences of Dixieland Postliberalism"

Confessions of a Dixieland Postliberal

A Baptist World Alliance discussion that footnotes the statement

A comment and question from a Presbyterian at a Catholic University

An odd argument that says the Manifesto's criticism of soul competency is unbaptistic and thereby should not be used to undermine the author's contention that Baptists should not teach abstinence toward alcohol

An essay from SBTS assessing E. Y. Mullins and the Manifesto's interpretation of him

What's wrong with this headline from a Duke press release? "Women's Golf Advances to Finals of Hooters Collegiate Match Play." Many people have worked hard, across decades, to establish the dignity of women in athletic events. How much money does it take for universities to agree to sponsorship by a business named and organized around leering at women? When Duke is trying to polish up its image from student parties with hired strippers, isn't anyone paying attention to the event sponsors? It's not really an issue of PR, but of respecting people for their hard work. These athletes deserve better.

I don't often keep up with the news on various Baptist groups, but now and then I get connected to some stories and try to follow them. Once again, Mainstream Baptist has brought my attention to a matter that started me thinking. It has to do with a former employer of mine, the Baptist General Convention of Texas. It relates to church starting, which is an important topic for many of my students to learn about.

Let me say first of all that I admire the BGCT as one of the best examples of leadership, organization, and stewardship to which we can turn. I admire its leaders and its programs. As a former employee, I have found the organization to be compassionate, visionary, and accountable. Even so, in every organization, problems can arise. The test is in whether the organization deals honestly with them and learns from them. I have faith that the BGCT will do that.

The math on the supposed 258 church starts raises a red flag itself. I realize that a church can start in a home by word of mouth, and that little in the way of additional cash is required. But an organized effort to plant churches through training and supervision of leaders, with hundreds of starts as a goal in a short time, would clearly take some funds. Maybe there were other sources of funds for this effort from the Piper program, and here I am ignorant.

The BGCT's contribution, according to a little mathematical analysis of the article, was about $5,000 per church start. I wonder how many of the readers' households operate on that amount for even two months.

Like so many church leaders who have high expectations for attendance and growth and make promises of numbers, this looks like a case of wishful thinking. Building relationships takes time. Building organizations and institutions takes people and money. I don't know how many churches could be expected to start on about $5,000. If there were a movement of the Spirit, what Jonathan Edwards called a "surprising work of God," maybe dozens or hundreds would start with very little expenditure. If the process is based on good planning and organizational efforts yet do not coincide with an "irruption of the Spirit," a term from Gustavo Gutierrez, then I think more people, time, and money might be required.

I'm not saying that churches can't be started using tried and true methodologies. Where the gospel is preached and lived, people will be drawn to it. But if what is desired is measurable, structured, lasting institutional existence, then the work of the gospel can't be undergirded by being tempted by a bargain and talking a lot of wishful thinking.

By comparison, I observe academics who get grant funds and promise to have big conferences to change the way people think and reach hundreds of people with their important message, even seminaries trying to attract large numbers of ministers to a conference.

What they so often fail to do is build the relationships and do the hard ground-level work to get the public or the ministers aware of and interested in what their conference is about. So they promise even larger numbers than before, only to struggle to reach the same small number they had at their last conference. Doing the hard work of organizing takes time, effort, and money. It does not amount to a few phone calls, a mailout, a list of speakers, and a printed program.

No amount of money will start a church when the "seed falls on the road." And money may make little difference when the "seed falls among thorns" or "on rocky soil." And when the "seed falls on good soil," little or no money may do the job.

I'm just saying that anyone who claims to be able to start 258 churches in a short time using about $5,000 per church sounds like a "low-ball" bidder. Usually low-ball bidders are cutting corners and using processes that are not according to Hoyle. Sometimes we hide behind "having faith and trusting God" as a way to spend less than it takes to do a good job.

Phil Reed of Voice of Calvary Ministries in Jackson, MS, says that one of their key biblical texts is Philippians 1:9,

And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God (NRSV).

In it he says that they are reminded that the church's calling is both to spread abroad the love of God and to have that love show knowledge and insight to let that love be demonstrated by doing things in the very best way. In common parlance today, that would mean that our love should learn from best practices financially, structurally, and relationally.

I know that is the way that the BGCT tries to carry out its work. The best practices must not close the door to the overflowing of love, and the wisdom of love must ever seek to do its work better.

Peace Pumpkin time--Naomi, Lydia, and I carved pumpkins on Tuesday evening. We had a great time talking, carving, and setting up candles so they would glow. Then we gave out candy to the few kids who came by our house. And we ate candy while we enjoyed the cool air of the evening. Here are a couple of pumpkin pictures. If you can't make out the symbols in the peace pumpkin, it reads, "Heart Stop Gun," which being translated means something like, "Love, not War."

Bruce Prescott got me thinking some more about why he and I are writing different kinds of warnings about what churches need to be concerned about in the current day and age in the U.S. I agree wholeheartedly with his critique of the Christian America crowd and their more extreme cousins, the Reconstructionists. So it is a bit puzzling, as his comment on my previous post indicated, that we are talking about such different problems for the church. He wrote:

We must not be living in the same country.

I saw the culture-warrior Christians in the Religious Right rallying the troops for war with Iraq.

You write as if it were the ACLU, Americans United and progressive Christians.

So here are my musings, posted as a comment on Mainstream Baptist.

Bruce says that I seem to be living in a different country. You may be on to something, so I want to experiment with that idea.

Your earlier remarks had highlighted the prominence of Reconstructionist ideas in Oklahoma. You also encounter them on the web, a place where everyone can become a published author with a little time and access.

I know these people meet and write and organize. I've taught about them in my classes. I have a colleague who researches them. But they are speaking a language that has not made much sense to my undergraduate students (a few years back) nor to my divinity students now.

Moreover, when I deal with public high school teachers and students and with college or divinity students or professors from the other universities in our area, this kind of Reconstructionist idea is the farthest thing from their view of the US. If it is true that about 40% of the people in the US go to college, as I recall (the figure I found was 35% of people at the age to start college in 2002, see http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i27/27b05001.htm, which would not include those who go later in life) then one could assume that many of these people find themselves in a milieu similar to mine. Of course, prominent Reconstructionists include many college graduates, so I am not trying to claim that going to college is an absolute indicator of whether someone would be attracted either to Reconstructionist or to Secular supremacist ideas.

A second angle to take on living in different countries could be affected by the generally progressive politics of my county and city. Maybe a better argument would be that in Durham, NC, there are not many Reconstructionists to be found (even though one prominent Baptist pastor may be in sympathy with them). Your experience in Oklahoma may be different, and no doubt Idaho has attracted such people.

One might construe the two countries according to different kinds of churches and their agendas. As for the threat of conservative so-called Christians believing in a renewed crusade, in a war to bring on Armageddon, or in a revived Imperialism of the US as the supercession of Israel, I am with you fully that this is the current great threat to peace in the US and the world. Many of these people have so many doctrines wrong about the nature of the church and the nature of the state, sadly built upon certain versions of Puritan heritage of the Reformed tradition. That is part of what I was trying to address in my earlier post about non-violence.

On the other hand, churches who are engaging in grassroots democracy and community transformation, whether conservative evangelical or progressive evangelical or mainstream protestant or Roman catholic, are recognizing the failure of conservative or liberal politics-as-usual to help the poor or deal with white supremacy. Christian Community Development, IAF/DART/Gamaliel/PICO, Leadership Foundations of America, and a variety of local churches are making changes through their own efforts and by joining efforts with others to leverage social change. That is happening all over the country, and it is something I have focused my attention on. But nowhere that I have looked have these efforts managed to eliminate poverty or racism completely.

When I look at church-state issues from the point of view of what churches must do to faithfully be the presence of Christ here and now, in this country, under this government, then part of what I want churches to know is that they don't have to accept the hemmed-in, domesticated role assigned them in the doctrine of the spheres. On pilgrimage in the world, such churches and their people engage the thrones and dominions through participatory democracy and representative government, and also by building their own structures for social change. This latter is their calling regardless of what political order they are living in--one where the secularism of eastern universities shapes the thought of many, or one where Reconstructionists can get the ear of a regional newspaper.

When I look at church-state relations from the point of view of how government policies can maintain a proper relationship toward churches and "religions," then I still find 1st amendment jurisprudence which promotes benevolent neutrality a good place to hang my hat. Neutrality will never quite be neutral, so the effort has to be asymptotic. Practical reasoning of the highest care is required. I still tell my friends they are better off not taking the "faith-based" money from the government to do their ministries. I work to stop the attack on schools that "No Child Left Behind" legislation has put in place to redirect government funds to for-profit corporations and private religious groups wanting to get in on the government purse through vouchers. But this is a defensive effort, a way to maintain detente. It is not a constructive ecclesiology. It helps keep the civil society from going too far off the path of the common good. But it does not put the church on the path of Kingdom building.

Finally, when national elections are falling out 50-50 and opinion polls are falling out 40-40, then that might be one more reason to feel that we are talking about different countries.

A few of my friends got an exchange going, in robust graduate school style, about how to talk about church and state in relation to a pluralistic vision of the good society. It took place on Bruce Prescott's blog, so if you want to know the context, here is where I posted first posted my comments. It all started on October 25.

I spent enough time writing it that I decided I ought to post it here as well. Most of what comes after the opening paragraphs could make pretty good sense on its own. But the backgroud is all available on the previous links.

Dr. Prescott and Dr. Freeman are actually both giving important insights true to the writings of Roger Williams. Williams does provide much fodder for political thought, and his political thought is especially concerned with the protection of a free church.

This particular aspect of the debate about church and state in recent decades has battled around an impasse. Part of the reason for the impasse is the broad reassessment among Baptists, the Reformed Tradition, Anabaptists, and Roman Catholics about the shortcomings of their own traditions and about the way they characterize one another's doctrine.

I find that there are still haters of the Roman Catholic Church among Baptists. Neither of these scholars is numbered among them. On the other hand, neither of them is ready to bend the knee to the supremacy of Rome or its bishop. Those are not the only two possibilities.

Nor are the only two possibilities in church-state relations (1) to accept the supremacy of pluralist visions of the good society as a necessary corollary of faithful ecclesiology and separation of church and state or (2) militaristic, theocratic absolutism. It is not either (1) nation-state as divinely appointed umpire of the limits of religion, or (2) Muenster. One can doubt the competence of the nation-state to be a fair arbiter of faith without throwing out the valuable traditions of church-state separation which Baptists rightly treasure. One can even doubt that the pluralistic telos of U.S. culture is aligned with proclaiming the Reign of God without wanting the Reign of God to be enforced through Reconstructionist or other heretical models of coercive Christianity.

What was said in only muted terms in the original remarks by Dr. Newman was that a church which affirms the Lordship of Jesus as its political order can do so faithfully only in an authentic commitment to follow Jesus' path of non-violence. To claim, "Jesus is Lord," can only have integrity if the church disavows violence. Seventeen centuries of willingness to bear arms against the enemies we love has produced enough Muensters and Auschwitzes that we ought to be able to get it through our thick skulls that separation of church and state must mean separation of church and violence. I admit that this is a minority position in Baptist theology. But it is a minority position for the very reason that most Baptists accepted the Reformed Tradition's doctrine of the Divinely Sanctioned State as holding hegemony over bodies, leaving the inward life of the mind to be ruled by the church. Yet the New Testament says to present our bodies a living sacrifice, not only our minds.

Setting aside violence does not mean that churches have to leave the social realm to governments and corporations to rule as they will. In the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, Lawndale Community Church has reshaped life by transgressing the imposed distinctions between politics and religion. Getting housing up to code, providing health care, educating children, creating jobs, can't merely be left to the powers and authorities which are dominated by the rich who seek their own self-interest. The church steps out and joins God in making a way where there is no way.

The result often is, as Yoder says, a kind of spiritual osmosis, by which the government, the corporations, the world's social structures get on the bandwagon and do their part to build a better community. This is a fully political model of ecclesiology, but not one that is built on a theocratic absolutism. It is a teleological understanding of God's Reign as already and not yet. It is the irruption of the Spirit, to transform the social existence, the political order, in which people live. It is what John and Vera Mae Perkins did in Mississippi. It is what the Latino Pastoral Action Center is doing in the Bronx, New York, and what St. Paul Community Baptist Church is doing in Brooklyn, New York, what Mission Waco is doing in Waco, Texas, and what Friendship West Baptist Church is doing in Dallas, Texas.

It is not Christian Reconstructionism. It is compatible with strict separation of church and state as an institutional arrangement by which churches do not depend on government to do their work nor does government select one or some churches or religions to be its agents. Such an ecclesiology recognizes that governments and churches both make all-encompassing claims on human lives, but can agree that the church has no intention or permission or birthright to make those claims under threat of violence. It does not judge worldly government as competent to make the expansive claims that it makes, for the kingdoms of this world are passing away.

Such a church can agree with Dr. Newman that church-state separation is a good worth protecting as well as that "Jesus is Lord" is our confession without reservation.

The high level of rhetoric in this exchange reminds me a bit of why I am a former Southern Baptist and also a former Southern Baptist Exile. I don't mean that the Baptists with whom I share regular fellowship are not equally capable of harsh exchanges.

Associating now with National Baptists, Progressive National Baptists, and Lott Carey Baptists, I also remember that my Southern Baptist upbringing led me to believe Black Baptists were a deficient form of Baptist life. I don't think anyone in this discussion believes that now. But I do believe that the differences between Black Baptists, English Baptists, American Baptists, Southern Baptists, and Moderate Baptists, among many others, are often ignored and belittled by the claim that one stream of Baptist thought represents true Baptists.

Helwys and Smyth, as two candidates for the founders of the Baptist Movement, should make plain to us that the debate over the willingness of Baptists to kill, when commanded by the ruler of their geographical location, has been and remains a lively issue among Baptists. Strong claims for non-violence remain prominent in the past half-century of Baptist life in the U.S. And on the acceptance or rejection of cooperating in state violence hinges much of how we interpret the Lordship of Jesus Christ while we observe the strict separation of church and state.

I visited John and Vera Mae Perkins in Jackson, MS, this week. It is hard for me to express the extent to which my understanding of the church, its relation to the world, and its approach to living out the Reign of God, have been challenged and changed since coming to know these people. By God's grace I read an essay by Dr. Tammy Williams, written when she was still a graduate student at Fuller Theological Seminary. The book was Virtues and Practices in the Christian Tradition, edited by Nancey Murphy, et al. In it, Tammy wrote about virtue ethics in relation to race relations, and her essay focused around the story of Voice of Calvary Ministries and the work of John and Vera Mae Perkins.

It was an awakening to me. I had studied academic theology, plowed through many books, and processed the traditions of church-state relations in theological writings. I had latched onto certain approaches to ecclesiology as crucial for a critique and construction of the church amidst the context of the modern nation-state. But I had only begun to scratch the surface of what the form of such an ecclesiology would be in the setting of the United States. And then I read Tammy's essay.

I remain convinced after seven years of further study that there is not more faithful witness to the calling of the church to follow Jesus than the movement with which the Perkins's are so intricately associated--Christian Community Development. It is a movement which appeared by the coming together of many churches and ministry leaders who had come to understand the church's mission as bringing the whole gospel to the whole person and the whole community, or as Latino leaders said, an integral approach to ministry.

This Tuesday, John Perkins talked to me about the gospel as God's loving way of coming to meet us at the deepest level of our need. For him, it was a need to know he was significant to someone, having lost his mother to death and having his father leave him to live with relatives. He grew up thinking he was not as "special" as other kids with mothers or fathers to live with. In the back of his mind, he wondered if he was not as good as other kids, causing his dad to leave him. But the good news came to him that God loves him and wants to live life with him. Learning this to be God's way, Perkins realized that he was to be the bearer of this good news to others. If they were having health problems, he was to demonstrate God's live by taking them to a clinic, or even convincing a doctor to come set up a clinic to serve the poor. If they had no place to live, he could be God's love by getting them a place to stay, and even building or renovating housing that can be affordable for the poor. The gospel reaches the deep needs of people and changes them into its agents.

He has written elsewhere that he also came to see that the gospel was not about a solitary life with God. It was about community. The gift God has offered us as the very purpose of our existence is community, a shared life, a life of growth through mutual accountability, a life of love and care for one another. There is no higher end. God calls us together to be brothers and sisters, to have power to bring change by being a united people serving a God of love and justice.

Perkins formulated his understanding of ministry around three Rs. The three Rs are part of the eight principles of Christian Community Development. They are Relocation, an incarnational ministry of living among the poor; Redistribution, a sharing of gifts and talents in communities where leadership and professional services are absent; and Reconciliation, briding the divisions across racial and class divisions. The three Rs are a challenge to every church to re-examine its mission and practices.

I thank God for another chance to learn from John and Vera Mae Perkins.

Today was the unveiling of a new historical marker in Raleigh, NC, in front of the building where I teach. It commemorates the Leonard School of Medicine which began at Shaw University in 1882, then eventually closed in 1918, having trained over 400 African American physicians to serve all over the South and beyond.

We heard stories from family members of Leonard Medical School graduates. They were the kinds of stories that make one feel honored to be in the presence of goodness, to follow in the footsteps of greatness. Shaw University Divinity School now operates in the historic Leonard Hall. Next door is the Leonard Hospital, now called Tyler Hall, where much of the university administration is housed.

More information on school homicides is available with a little digging around. I had heard a commentator make a vague statement about 100 school shootings since Columbine, and later I started wondering what it meant. I tried to locate an audio recording of the original statement, but I can't figure out when or where I heard it.

But I did find out some other things. I found out something that confirmed my undocumented impressions--school violence is not something new. The worst recorded incident of school violence in the US, the homicide of 45 people, occurred in Michigan in 1927 when a man blew up a school building. I have read and heard stories of rural schools in which teachers were threatened or harmed by unruly students as far back as the 1800s. The US has been a violent place for a long time.

Moreover, the current period, notwithstanding the last couple of weeks, has shown a significant decline in school violence and homicides. In both 1992-93 and 1993-94, there were 42 homicides on school grounds. Even 1999-99, the Columbine year, was much lower than that with 25 homicides. Recent years have mostly had 10 or fewer homicides at schools. I am still disturbed by any homicide, at school or away from school. But some things, probably including better safety policies, have improved the situation of violence in schools.

Are there trends which contradict these homicide figures? I certainly read anecdotal accounts from teachers and principals of a greater level of fear of student violence toward them, but I don't have data to agree or disagree. One graph, on the same page as linked above for homicides, claims that students have become less afraid at school over recent years.

None of this changes my concerns about a violent society, disturbed conceptions of manhood, and violence against women. But it does show that our awareness of school violence has changed dramatically in recent years.

The growth of news as entertainment, voyeuristic news, and live and no longer live videotapes running over and over, round the clock, has changed our understanding of violence in schools. Dramatic televised reports of school violence have raised our perception of the frequency of school violence even though the actual incidents have declined.

The spate of school shootings in the past week has left me reeling. I have two teen-aged daughters who attend public schools, and this week's events make me shake and weep for them and the world they live in.

I previously had categorized school shootings in a certain way in my mind. I saw them as reflecting the society's promotion of aggression as the essence of manliness, combined with the rage of young people, especially young men, who find themselves in a world of shifting sands and uncertain identity. All that was connected to a militarized, warmaking society both in the official government policies and in the self-centered nihilism of corporate boardrooms and street gangs.

Always vaguely tied to that framing of the issue was the degradation of women in popular culture and media. I also knew that the violence against women and children in homes was one aspect of what I heard Ched Myers call "a nation addicted to violence." But this gendered aspect of the problem had remained somewhat in the background for me until recently.

A few weeks ago I read Martha Mendoza's study of the prevalence of sexual assault on young women and men by military recruiters who have legally mandated access to public schools. The schools are forced to allow these outsiders, many of whom have been protected by the continued lack of concern in the military ranks about mistreatment of women. This angers me no end and has raised my level of anxiety about my daughter's safety.

Now these killings in Colorado and Pennsylvania have shaken me up again. In Colorado, a man walked into a school armed, and freely made his way into a classroom where he selected six girls as his victims, sending out the boys, some other girls, and the teacher. The news stories quote one girl as saying he seemed to be preferring primarily smaller girls with blonde hair, although a girl with brown hair was also in the group. Objectifying these girls by their age, body type, and hair color, he proceded to molest them.

What does this man's story tell us about the malformation of men in our society? What drove this man to act? Was it some sort of hatred of young women? Fear or resentment of the power of women? Desire for power over the weak? Sexual desire distorted and perverted toward violence? The news stories report that he designed and ran "haunted houses" for Halloween, another artifact of a society addicted to violence. He reportedly encouraged workers to make their scenes and acts as disturbingly scary as possible. Maybe his actions at the school were his way of taking one last overdose on an addiction to causing people to be terrified. When a human being becomes habituated to horror for thrills, then the whole complex of emotion, reason, and brain chemistry becomes intertwined in it.

Under pressure from the SWAT team's attack, he shot and killed one of the girls. Why he shot only one, we don't know. Maybe he felt the horror of what he had done, and therefore turned the gun on himself. Or more likely, he ran out of time and wanted to control his own death.

The Pennsylvania story is equally horrifying and even harder to interpret from the news accounts. At the heart of it is a similar story. The man entered the school with guns. He sent out the boys, the adult women, and the very young girls. Eleven girls between first grade and eighth grade, perhaps including an older teen who served as a teacher's aide, were bound hand and foot and lined up by the chalkboard. When the police showed up, the man decided to finish his plan, shooting all of the girls execution style before killing himself. Three girls died on the site. Seven more went to the hospital, and stories indicate that most if not all were shot in the head. Already at this writing, two more have died. All five others remain in critical condition. Very little information is available, but two who died were as young as seven years old.

The names of the five who have died are as follows: Naomi Rose Edersole, 7; Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12; Marian Fisher, 13; Mary Liz Miller, 8; Lina Miller, 7. The last two are sisters. How terribly tragic that he stole away their young lives and their families' joy in them.

Why kill only girls? Why kill children? Neighbors described the man as a caring father and husband, so obviously something beneath the surface was horribly wrong. News accounts only talk about his expressed need to avenge something from his childhood, twenty years ago. It has something to do with his molesting of young children when he was 12 years old. No one seems to think that the particular neighbors or the particular children were anything but a "target of opportunity," easy to get to and use for his purposes. People also speculate that the death of a child in his family may also be related, but if so, why? He is said to have stated he was angry with life and God. Does this act somehow pay God back?

Did his past create in him a deep-seated hatred for young girls? It is widely observed that some people become sexually fixated on teens or even preteens. Psychoanalytic theorists might offer some explanations that would make sense. Theories of moral and spiritual formation and development can also give some insight. Addiction and recovery models shed some light, but these are not fully explanatory.

Something has gone terribly wrong in the formation of these men and boys who become murderers, and the fact of the prevalence of similar cases means that more than an individual explanation is needed. What conditions produce this kind of explosion of hatred and desperation? The Pennsylvania attack was the 100th school shooting since the Columbine High School tragedy of 1999. One hundred school shootings in seven years can't be called a series of isolated events. The formation of men in this culture has been undermined and overwhelmed by corrupted convictions and practices about manhood, identity, and strength, and over and over young girls and women are paying the price as recipients of violence. Nothing could be more clear after the past week.

God, please protect my precious daughters, and the daughters of all others who must live in a world where evil can rise up and strike in the unlikeliest of places, when we least expect it, against your will for which we pray to be done on earth. And please shield my beloved son, and the sons of all others from a world where being a man seems to necessitate aggression and violence, both of which are against our true nature revealed in the Incarnate One. May my children and the children of others live in peace, with the joy of family and community, in the midst of your love, and may they grow old in gratitude for your provision, among friends and loved ones until that time that they may be raised in a new body to your presence forevermore. Amen

Christian Community Development is one of the most promising movements of faithfulness in the U.S. church, and beyond, in the current time. I have been in Philadelphia at the annual conference of the Christian Community Development Association. It has included inspiration, encouragement, and training for a wide range of concerns for churches.

The opening session's keynote speaker, Rev. Alyn Waller of Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church in Philadelphia, set a tone of high expectation for what churches should dedicate themselves to do in their communities. The next evening, Tony Campolo spoke on leadership as service rather than titles. He quoted his pastor who said we much choose how we want to be remembered--do we want titles in our obituaries or testimonies from the people whose lives we touched through loving service. He said he would choose the testimonies.

Also on the topic of leadership, Ted Travis of Neighborhood Ministries in Denver, Colorado, said that churches need to give young people opportunities to lead, and that adults need to get out of their way to let them learn to think on their feet, make their mistakes, and grow in confidence.

Ecclesiology came up often in the sessions I attended, and more than one speaker referred to the parable of wine and wineskins. If churches are going to make room for the gospel to speak in any time and place, they will have to be willing to change the wineskins so that the new wine of the gospel can be free to do its work.

Local ministries such as the simple way, Camden House, and Yes! And . . . CAMP, all demonstrated the power of new wineskins for preserving the gospel.

As always, John Perkins was inspiring and powerful in his witness.

On September 11 I posted a letter and some documents about military recruiting. As a follow up, I'm posting the response I received from the Superintendent of the Durham Public Schools. It is a good response which shows that he has made sure the policies are in place for distributing information. He has contacted the school board and the executive leadership of the district to remind or inform them of the same information. And he promises to ask the principals to bring this up with the PTAs of their schools and put it in their student newspapers. It does not, however, make any response to my remarks about sexual assaults by military recruiters.

I don't really expect the school system to become my advocate in opposing military recruiters in schools, and so this prompt, judicious response is what I had hoped for. Other steps, such as counter-recruitment, will have to originate outside the school administration. I'll try to be more alert and prepared when these events come up.

Here is the letter.

September 15, 2006

Dear Dr. Broadway:

Thank you very much for your letter of September 10 regarding the release of student information to military recruiters. I agree with you that it is important that we communicate with parents regarding all of their options for their children, including making sure they are aware of the availability of a form to request that DPS withhold student contact information from military recruiters without prior written consent.

Following are the steps we are taking to ensure that parents know of the option to request we withhold their children's information from recruiters:

• We have made the form available on our district Website, as well as referenced the form in our student/parent handbooks;

• We have provided all high school principals a letter to send to their students' parents reminding them of the option and where they can access the form to complete, return and file at their school; we also will encourage principals to publish this letter and advertisements that we prepared in their student newspapers;

• We included an article reminding parents of this option in our September Parent DirectLink newsletter; and,

• We will ask principals to work with high school PTAs to get this message out to their parents.

Dr. Broadway, it is refreshing and encouraging to hear from parents who are involved and concerned about increasing the awareness of options not only for their own children, but for others. Thank you for your commitment to the students of Durham Public Schools.

Sincerely,

Carl E. Harris, Ed.D.
Superintendent

c: Executive Leadership Team
Board of Education Members

I also had responses from school board members, so I think this action had at least an overall good result. Now for a few more thoughts on the issue.

The language of "opting out" frames this as if it were not a life and death situation or a first amendment issue. A doctrine of non-violence is an interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount and the command to love the neighbor. It is, therefore, a doctrine central to the confession of many Christians. No doubt, people of other faiths or convictions may also hold this doctrine.

For that reason, government sponsored proselytization of youth with the purpose of converting them to a doctrine of state-sponsored violence is an infringement on the free exercise of religion. Moreover, I would characterize it as an establishment of religion in that it is a moral, even theological, doctrine about how human beings must live in the world. Participating in state-sponsored violence may be a kind of service and sacrifice to a god resembling Ares or Mars from ancient European religions, or perhaps merely the deification of imperial goals or the almighty dollar, "idols" in the language of Christian tradition.

I doubt many people would go along with me on the second claim about establishment because the whole tradition of modern liberal democracy, the nation-state, republicanism, and capitalism claim (again I would call this a theological claim) that the state and the economy are outside the realm or sphere of religion. That is a theological challenge to those who would claim that there is only one Lord in whom, through whom, and by whom are all things.

Pauli Murray's autobiography--I finally finished it yesterday. It was a very interesting, impressive, and insightful account of both a gifted actor in history and a historical period.

I speak for my race and my people--
The human race and just people.

These words appeared in the front pages of her book of poems, Dark Testament. Carolyn Ware offers them in tribute to her in the Epilogue of the book.

I was fascinated by her early life in part because of its constant references to Durham, NC, where I live. The later years of her life become amazing because of the range of activity, leadership, and accomplishments.

She became an authority on laws concerning race across all the states of the U.S. She taught in Ghana at the opening of their first law school and influenced major figures in the interpretation of constitutional law and civil rights. She wrote decisive papers on the application of equal employment laws to women, and influenced the key legislation on this matter in the Civil Rights Act. She helped to initiate the meetings which led to creating the National Organization for Women, and she was a founding member. She helped Benedict College in South Carolina create programs to move their students from marginal to capable in college level work. She was a pioneer in the fields of African American Studies and Legal Studies while teaching at Brandeis University. She helped to press the World Council of Churches and the Episcopal Church toward acceptance of women in ministry. She was one of the many women ordained to Episcopal ministry during the first weeks of 1977 when the church officially allowed ordination.

Ironically, it seems to me that she barely managed financially for most of her life, often searching for employment to support her main work as a writer, activist, and scholar. Certainly some of her opportunities in the last couple of decades of her life were more financially adequate, but even then her jobs were not long term and left her future support uncertain.

With reference to my life, my imagination has been captured by what seems to me to be a necessity of finding a job I can count on to make my way. Perhaps it was not at all by choice for Pauli Murray that she did not live this way. But part of her situation also was her commitment to deal with the work at hand. Her unwillingness to put off the tasks that pressed themselves on her is a compelling witness. I find myself looking at that kind of life and saying with those Greek seekers of Jesus, "Lord, I do believe. Help my unbelief."

Today Is a Day for Reflection

While taking care of some business matters this morning, I was listening to live broadcasts of the commemoration ceremonies for the people who died in the planes and buildings on September 11, 2001. It was a solemn occasion, and the voices of people talking about the fears and pain of that day still usually put a lump in my throat and bring tears brimming in my eyes. The pain of people who have lost family members is something that always gets inside of me. In addition, I also am stirred by the pain of remembering the constant cry of those who suffer because of the level of hatred and bloodthirstiness in the powerful Western Nation-states and of the radical anti-Western Middle Eastern movements.

As I listened to the speakers at the site of the crashed airliner in Pennsylvania, I was more than once troubled by the public officials who spoke, giving hollow words of sympathy and representing the solidified machines of violence. I remembered my brief visit to the Spring Hill Community of the Bruderhof in April of 2002, when I learned that the children of this Bruderhof community had become involved in efforts to memorialize those who died in that crash. I knew that there must be members of the Bruderhof present, but I did not spot them when I now and then looked at the pictures on the screen. (For more information on the Bruderhof, go to the end of this post.)

At the end of the speeches and other observances, the speaker announced that the last event would be songs from a combined choir of children from a local school and from the Spring Hill Bruderhof. I was filled with joy in seeing the children gather in the tent to sing, and heard their voices. My heart was troubled by the contrast between certain public officials who wanted to assure the toughness of the U. S. government and people, and this beautiful song which called on all children of the world to gather for peace. The first song they sang was written partly in one of the languages of the Philippines, and partly in English. I am sure I have heard it before, but here are the lyrics of "I Am But a Small Voice." I can't vouch for the spelling of the foreign words.

I Am But a Small Voice
(r. whittaker/d. batnag)

Akoy munting tinig
May munting pangarap
Samyo ng bulaklak
Sa hanging malinis

May ngiti sa araw
At kung umuulan
Makapagtampisaw
Malayang daigdig
Ng kawalang malay

I am but a small voice
I am but a small dream
The fragrance of a flower
In the unpolluted air

I am but a small voice
I am but a small dream
To smile upon the sun
Be free to dance and sing
Be free to sing my song to everyone

Chorus:
Come young citizens of the world
We are one, we are one
Come young citizens of the world
We are one, we are one

We have one hope
We have one dream
And with one voice
We sing...

Coda:
Peace, prosperity
And love for all mankind

Peace, prosperity
And love for all mankind

(instrumental)

I am but a small voice
I am but a small dream
To smile upon the sun
Be free to dance and sing
Be free to sing my song to everyone

Come young citizens of the world
We are one, we are one
Come young citizens of the world
We are one, we are one

We have one hope
We have one dream
And with one voice
We sing, we sing

Peace, prosperity
And love for all mankind

Peace, prosperity
And love for all mankind

This event again reminds the rest of us of the importance of a peace witness, which among many things that make more mainstream Christians uncomfortable, is surely one thing that the Bruderhof continue after a century to have gotten right again and again.

A second matter for commemoration today is the hundredth anniversary of the first act of satyagraha by Mohandes Gandhi and a group of 3000 who protested the institution of the Asiatic Registration Act, part of the structure of apartheid in South Africa. On September 11, 1906, they held a public protest and civil disobedience in Johannesburg, South Africa, the first trickles of what would become a mighty rushing stream of non-violent resistance in the 20th century and beyond.

About the Bruderhof, if you are wondering who I was talking about. The Bruderhof are a community of Christians which originated in Germany about a century ago and advocated a radical form of community life in the tradition of certain Anabaptist groups. They were persecuted by the Nazis and immigrated to the UK, to Paraguay, and ultimately to the US and Australia. They have several thriving communities in Pennsylvania and New York. Their best known public figure is Johann Christoph Arnold. The Bruderhof experimented with a significant internet presence for several years, but have removed most of their links from the web in the past year or so. They became well-known especially for the Daily Dig, an inspirational quotation and discussion board which was very widely cited until it ended last year. They still maintain a welcome page and a collection of online publications, including many excellent books which a person may download free of charge. Many church and school workers know them for their furniture manufacturing called Community Playthings and Rifton Equipment.