M&J book study: getting to know you
August 18, 2010Welcome to the Parkwood Community Church blog! This blog was used most recently Pastor Peter’s incredible journey to Colombia and Mexico on a visioning trip to see community projects. (We hope to hear more from him in the coming weeks.) We’re excited to revive the use of the blog.
For the next few months, the blog will be used to help foster discussion between monthly Mercy & Justice team book study meetings of When Helping Hurts. It’s fitting that we’ll be blogging after Pastor Peter’s entries, given the upcoming Christian Community Development Association conference, as well as how the book tackles questions about the effectiveness of helping communities – including times when our help is not needed or may even be problematic.
*We welcome ANYONE’s contribution toward our discussions, since we’ll be discussing more than the book, and want to include the church in our thought process.*
We’re working on setting up a general Parkwood account for folks to use to make new posts, but for now, go ahead and post on the site using Comments.
Just to get the discussion juices going, I’ll pose an initial question: Was there a turning point / moment when you started to care more about social justice (implicitly, as it pertains to the gospel)? What happened, and where did it leave you?
I’ve done enough talking for now, so I’ll hand it over – I’d love to hear from you!
When did I start to care about social justice? For me, it was a slow process. It started when I moved to the city after graduating from law school. Suddenly, I was living outside of my comfort zone, rubbing shoulders every day with folks who were “different from me,” walking past homeless people on my way to and from my office building, while making more money than I knew what to do with for the first time in my life. It continued while I was attending First Evangelical Free Church on the north side of Chicago, the birthplace for Breakthrough Urban Ministries. It began to crystallize when I started attending the city south small group and was invited by our co-leader to attend Breakthrough’s annual benefit dinners. At first, I felt encouraged and convicted to help support organizations such as Breakthrough. For a while, I was attending a lot of benefit dinners. But eventually, I realized that my financial gifts and offerings served as a buffer to my really engaging with the least of these. So, that’s where I’m at right now. Although I “serve the underserved” at a non-profit social services agency, I still feel the tension between wanting to engage and wanting to avoid those who are suffering. As for the larger or more global issue of correcting systemic injustices, my thoughts are definitely still in their infancy. I’ve read a few books on social justice, but it can be a bit overwhelming at times.
“Do not be surprised or scandalized by the sinful and the tragic. Do what you can to be peace and to do justice, but never expect or demand perfection on this earth. It usually leads to a false moral outrage, a negative identity, intolerance, paranoia, and self-serving crusades against “the contaminating element,” instead of “becoming a new creation” ourselves (Gal. 6:15).” ~ from Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr.
Thanks, Jenn, for sharing!!
For me, I think caring for mercy and social justice happened gradually, too. It must have been a bunch of occasional thoughts or tugs in my brain that eventually caused me to participate in an inner-city missions trip the summer before I started pharmacy school. It was set right in Chicago (!!!) and it was probably one of the most eye-opening experiences for me. One day we were doing rebuilding projects, and I was completely dumbstruck that I could see the John Hancock tower from the curb of the neighborhood I was in. To think that I would go shopping in the glitzy stores on the Magnificent Mile and be completely oblivious that there are people who live in unsafe housing just blocks away was a sort of wakeup call for me. During that same week, we made platefuls of food to pass out to the homeless on Lower Wacker Drive. The people there were a community. As we passed out the food, they let us know if we missed someone or ask if we gave food to their friends a little ways away. I thought about how hard it was for some of them to have to accept a handout. I remember how one woman tried to keep her chin up as she quietly accepted the food for her family and quickly covered it under a blanket. I don’t think it was any single event or interaction I had that night, but I consider that entire evening one of the landmark moments in my life. When I went to pharmacy school, I tried to marry my profession and my new-found passion. I volunteered at an indigent health clinic (some are probably familiar with Lawndale) on and off during my first three years of school. Unfortunately, I have had a hard time finding a place where I can serve the poor on a consistent basis since then. Life events and my entrance into the workforce distracted me and the years passed quickly. So it’s been a long while, but I was hoping that being part of the M+J committee would be a good starting place for me!
This has been a lifelong journey for me. My home church participated in the CROP Walk and 30 Hour Famine when I was young and I participated in both as soon as I was able. These left me with a passion to fight hunger locally and world wide. I also participated in a short term mission to Jamaica when I was a senior in High School that began to open my eyes to other cultures. My journey toward a social justice gospel continued in college as I read Tom Sine’s “Mustard Seed Conspiracy,” heard Tony Campolo speak, and went on a short term “Urban Plunge” trip to Chicago. I was so moved by those experiences that some friends and I started a “Campus Hunger Action Team” (CHAT) at my college and a Social Justice Ministry Committee at my church. I came to Chicago, thinking I would study urban ministry, but found myself landlocked in Lombard without transportation. When I ended up at a suburban church doing children’s and youth ministry I felt unsatisfied. After years of soul searching I resigned to pursue an uncertain future that I knew would fulfill my passion for social justice. That is how I ended up working in Head Start. Now I oversee the social services provided to the families of 690 children in DuPage County, families who speak over 15 languages from many countries. Like Jenn, I sometimes feel tension. For me it is a tension between my life’s work and my desire to just live a normal middle class life. There is also a tension between desiring to help and wondering if the help I am offering is really the best for all involved.
This might be too late for anyone to see before our meeting tomorrow AM but I’ll still post for future reference. I feel as though God has slowly been raising awareness in me over the past 7-8 years about how important it is to His heart to care for the “least of these.” Spending time with Asian American leaders who are so passionate in these areas and learning about their own personal awakenings had a big impact. But I still felt as though it was all in my head–I knew it was the right thing to be committed to serving and loving those in need but wasn’t really doing anything tangible in my own life. Then a few years ago, I was reading Isaiah 58–the passage about what “true fasting” is–and I felt as though God was speaking straight to me, challenging me that what I considered correct Christian behavior was not in fact what He was looking for! That’s when I became with Regina a co-leader of the M&J ministry, acknowledging right from the beginning that I was doing so without any real experience or knowledge of how to lead that ministry. But at least it was a starting point for me to be more engaged in thinking about ways to connect with and love those who are poor or at-risk. I still feel like I’m learning, as I continue to meet with and read about people’s experiences in this area. But I think it’s pretty clear that if we are not building relationships with those who are in need, we are missing a huge part of the Christian life God intends for us. I want and need to grow much much more in this area of my life.
Hi all,
Thank you so much for your touching and inspiring stories of how God has worked on your hearts as it pertains to M&J. Each post is such a treasure!
I’ve always been easily moved with compassion, but it wasn’t until grad school when that itch made sense. Henry Lee was teaching Social Cultural Exegesis, and knocked us silly with info on history, economics, and culture. He explained everything from industrialization (and exploitation) to the skewing and exploitation of Census data to stereotype or even target people groups.
At one point, I remember being hard-hit with the realization that I, a product of great schooling and relative affluence and now completely secure, was only one generation removed from the immigrant experience, the very experience that leaves many in America vulnerable to exploitation. I was overcome with realizing that so many others had had everything taken away from them – not least of which were the Africans (forced immigrants) and Native Americans (America’s proper residents), upon whose backs and land and very lives this country was built – so that I could be one of their beneficiaries. Even if I never thought of myself as an exploiter, a colonizer, prejudiced, etc., I was reaping the benefits of generations of perpetuated abuse and injustice, and that realization left me no choice but to want, to need, to live a life of seeing righteous justice brought to earth.
The special passion I have for racial reconciliation / righteousness has led me to short-term cross-cultural church experiences and our denomination’s Journey to Mosaic experiences, as well as a continued desire to be exposed to injustice issues. With each exposing experience, I find my eyes have barely opened the pain that many people experience as a part of their inescapable reality. All that to say, thanks for being siblings with me on the journey, as we seek to find ways to honor the God-itch to care for those his heart is after.