ELCA World Hunger

Anna Smith

If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God’s love? It disappears. And you made it disappear. – 1 John 3:17 (The Message)

This past week, I was able to head to Wrigleyville, a Chicago neighborhood, to witness the Chicago Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup victory celebration. Throughout the night I observed a great number of unsettling scenes unfolding. One in particular that deserves reflection occurred on the way home via public transit. I was transferring trains and walked through a tunnel among the sea of boisterous fans. Up ahead, someone caught my eye. There was a man sitting on the side of the tunnel. As I moved closer, I noticed he had signs made of cardboard. The two I remember said: “$1.00 for my daughter to eat,” and “$1.00 for the Blackhawks.” The man was sitting there, holding a cup and staring at the wall across from him. My attention was quickly drawn away from him by the several fans shouting, “GO HAWKS!” I saw that every one of these people were walking straight by this man without sparing a dollar or even acknowledging that he was there. In particular what resonated with me about witnessing this occurrence is that most of us had probably spent dozens of dollars already that night on food, drinks and victory merchandise. Admittedly, I, too, fell victim to the pressure of my surroundings and continued to walk by this man just like everyone else. I spent the rest of my train ride home attempting to process what I saw and how I am called to respond as a Christian.

As I reflect on this, what first comes to mind is a late-night discussion I had while studying abroad in India last fall. We were discussing the practice of untouchability, an attitude based on the belief that certain people are “impure” that translates into a variety of behaviors, norms and physical acts. People in the Dalit community, with whom I spent my time, are most often considered “untouchable.”

During that discussion someone posed the question, “Does untouchability happen in the United States?” After a brief moment, we listed several examples, such as avoiding the “bad part” of town and sidestepping people who appear to be homeless.

What I witnessed that night – and, frankly, more often than not when I see people facing hunger on the street – looks a lot like untouchability. There is a sense that the person on the side of the road is unclean, unsafe or unworthy of our attention.

The Bible proclaims that we are ALL created in God’s own image. As Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “So in Christ, we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” As Christ commands, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” As Martin Luther wrote in “Freedom of a Christian,” “Therefore, we should be guided in all our works by this one thought alone – that we may serve and benefit others in everything that is done, having nothing before our eyes except the need and advantage of the neighbor.” And we as Lutherans speak of the model of accompaniment, or walking in solidarity with and among our brothers and sisters of all walks of life. How do we practice this outside of our church walls or away from planned mission trips or service events? What does it mean for us to recognize each person – every person – as the very image of God?

Reflecting on that experience on my way home, I wish I wouldn’t have followed the crowd. This wasn’t a matter of not giving a dollar, but rather the inner feeling that I, too, had ignored the humanity of the man with the signs. What would it look like for us to go from ignoring the person, to offhand giving and finally, beyond this, to really seeing the image of God in our brothers and sisters? How does our choice to give or not to give reflect our belief that God has created us in God’s image and marked us as God’s own? Maybe that means giving a dollar, or maybe it means asking a person his name or listening to her story. Maybe it means recognizing even those whom society deems “untouchable” as people worth knowing, worth listening to and worth seeing.

Anna Smith is an ELCA World Hunger intern working with Hunger Education this summer. She is currently a student at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn.

Raymond Pickett

In this series of posts, we will take a closer look at some of the areas of work ELCA World Hunger supports domestically and internationally. Previously, we looked at relief, education and advocacy. This week, we take a look at community organizing, and we welcome guest blogger and New Testament expert Dr. Raymond Pickett. Dr. Pickett is an ordained Lutheran pastor and Professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. In addition to several articles and book reviews, he is the author of The Cross in Corinth: The Social Significance of the Death of Jesus and is a contributor to the multi-volume Fortress series entitled A Peoples’ History of Christianity, published in November of 2005. He also did the new SELECT DVD New Testament Introduction course with two other ELCA seminary professors.
What Is Community Organizing?

Building relational power to transform communities!

Community organizing is a strategy and set of practices to build relational power with a view to bringing about social change that improves the quality of community life. The primary goal of community organizing is to connect with people around their values and passions in ways that engender collective public action. In community organizing, issues follow relationships. The foundation of community organizing is the relational meeting, which is a one-to-one conversation focused on learning the gifts, interests, energy, and vision of the person you are talking with. The aim of one-to-one conversations is to build relationships that motivate people to participate in public life.

As individuals, the social and economic issues that diminish the quality of our common life can be overwhelming and lead to a sense of futility and powerlessness that prompts people to withdraw into private life. Community organizing brings people together around their shared interests to form bonds of mutuality and accountability that empower them to take action to improve their communities.

Historically community organizing has worked with existing communities, especially faith communities, to effect social and political change by focusing on specific issues of concern. The ELCA has a longstanding involvement in congregation-based community organizing. One way to think about community organizing is as a practical strategy for enacting the church’s mission “to bear witness to God’s creative, redeeming, and sanctifying activity in the world” (ELCA Constitution, Chapter 4.01). Some congregations use the practices of community organizing to get know their neighbors and become more involved in their communities.

Congregations that are involved with community organizing also frequently discover that it is an effective way to identify and train leaders, and also a process for developing a relational culture within the congregation. Working with community organizing networks and partnering with others for the sake of God’s justice in the world is also a way of becoming a more public church empowered by the Spirit to effect transformation in the world.

Roots of Community Organizing

Throughout Scripture God is depicted as the One who creates, and first and foremost what God creates is a people, a community, that embodies in their life together the divine reality. Scripture in all of its diversity presupposes the existence of a covenant community that God calls into being and liberates from slavery. It is a community of people defined by relationship with a God who is experienced as loving, merciful and just. The Torah provides a vision for how to structure the life of the community, and the prophets hold those in power accountable to this vision that is predisposed to its most vulnerable members.

From the beginning to the end of Scripture God raises up leaders who faithfully embody God’s purposes for the covenant community. In the Gospels Jesus is anointed by the Spirit and empowered to “to bring good news to the poor … proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:18). In his Galilean ministry Jesus was leading a social movement to renew community life. In addition to restoring to community people on the margins of Israelite society such as “sinners and tax collectors”, Jesus also addressed the physical and material needs of colonized people who were disenfranchised by imperial policies and practices.

A good example of community organizing in the Gospels are the meals and feeding stories which presuppose hunger as a constant reality in peoples’ lives. The sharing of meals was part of Jesus’ program to restore, from the bottom up, a society fractured by urbanization and commercialization. In Mark 6:30-44 and 8:1-10 the appetites of five thousand and four thousand people respectively are satisfied by the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. While these stories serve to declare God’s abundant provision in the midst of what looks like scarcity, they also highlight underlying structural issues of unjust distribution of resources.

Jesus goes to Jerusalem as a prophet to address issues of poverty and exploitation in Galilee by performing what community organizers call an action in the Temple where he cites Jeremiah’s Temple sermon as he confronts the Jerusalem aristocracy: “‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” Power brokers in Jerusalem attempted to stop the movement Jesus started by crucifying him, but the movement continued when his followers encountered the risen Jesus.

The earliest documents in the New Testament are the letters of Paul written in the 40s and 50s of the first century. Paul’s letters portray someone who is establishing counter-cultural communities by building relationships in the public square with people from varied backgrounds. In other words, he was a community organizer.

A thread which ties the story of God’s people together in the First Testament with its continuation in the Gospels and Paul is the command to love God and to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18; Mark 12:28-31; Romans 13:8-10). One way to imagine community organizing is as a practical approach for getting to know and loving our neighbors.

Examples of Community Organizing

The Organizing for Mission Cohort is a national network of pastors and leaders in the ELCA who are using the arts of community organizing in creative ways to develop and re-develop communities of faith by building relationships with people from diverse backgrounds who may be reluctant to go to a traditional church but who yearn for a connection with God and others and want to make a difference in their communities.

In the last 10 years, hunger has increased 40% in Missoula, Montana. The Missoula Interfaith Collaborative Hunger Initiativeis building a network of 15 congregations to coordinate 15 food drives, producing 45,000 pounds of food. This network is also working together to raise community awareness about the root causes of hunger. Lastly, organizing people who utilize the food bank and people in congregations, MIC will build an advocacy network in preparation for the 2015 Montana State Legislature. The MIC Hunger Initiative is supported in part by ELCA World Hunger.

Transportation is a critical foundation to preventing hunger and food insecurity in Jefferson City, Missouri. A lack of evening and weekend services creates major obstacles to people getting to work and to other important services, including community education programs. The congregations involved in Jefferson City Congregations Uniting want to help improve access to transportation for Jefferson City residents who are transit-dependent, especially those who are elderly, disabled or poor. By working with the City Council to create a task force of community stakeholders, including transit riders, they will help develop creative solutions to expand public transportation in Jefferson City. This project is supported in part by ELCA World Hunger.
The ELCA World Hunger blog is edited by Ryan P. Cumming, program director for hunger education. He can be reached at Ryan.Cumming@ELCA.org.

This summer, ELCA World Hunger welcomes three new interns to our team at the churchwide office!

Anna Smith- Hunger Education
Hello! My name is Anna Smith. I come from the town of Osceola, Wisc. I am will be a senior this fall at Concordia College. I am studying Global Studies-Development and Psychology. This upcoming year will be busy for me as I serve as the Social Justice Coordinator for Campus Ministry Commission and the Co-Service Lead for Better Together Interfaith Alliance. A fun fact about me is that I actually spent my first year of college in San Antonio, Texas, at Trinity University.

I have always been passionate about social justice issues but that really came to the forefront of my life after I spent the fall of my junior year on the Social Justice, Peace, and Development Program in India. We intensively studied class inequality, food insecurity, and the implications of war, among other things. It was during my time in India I saw the world’s great need for justice and I committed my life to working towards that in every way I can. That commitment along with my deep Lutheran faith is what led me here this summer.

I have spent the past three summers of my life working at Luther Point Bible Camp in Grantsburg, Wisc. I am looking forward to this summer and finding new ways to live out my faith in a different environment. I love the big cities and I foresee enjoying living in the Windy City very much so. Although I haven’t been to Chicago since I was in Elementary school –way back when Willis Tower was still the Sears Tower. I can already tell my time here will be one filled with adventure, learning and spiritual growth!

Jennifer (Jenny) Sharrick- Constituent Engagement

Hi everyone, I’m Jenny! I am so absolutely thrilled to be the newest constituent engagement intern. In my life outside of Chicago, I am a master’s in public health student at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska. My concentration is focused generally around Maternal and Child Health, but my specific passion areas are domestic rural food insecurity and hunger, as well as reproductive health and comprehensive sexuality education. My undergraduate education focused on biopsychology and religion. Then I took a quick detour to medical school, before landing in the amazing field of public health.

My call is somewhere in the intersection of medicine, ministry, and justice. And while I am still discerning exactly what that means for the future, continuing my work with ELCA World Hunger seemed an appropriate fit.

My work within the Church has been varied, but bountiful. I have served as an intern in a parish for youth and young adult ministry and Campus Ministry Associate for Nebraska Lutheran Campus Ministry at Hastings College. I have also been on my synod’s hunger team for several years now. Additionally, I am a member of the ELCA Young Adult Cohort which went to the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women this past March.

Service learning and volunteering have been integral to my background (my Dad is so proud to say that my very first meeting with a service organization was within a week of my birth). This has taken on various forms over the years. One organization I am especially proud to be associated, offers free chlamydia and gonorrhea testing and treatment as well as reproductive health education to inmates in the county jail (unfortunately the county where I currently reside has an epidemic associated with both of these STIs). While that likely doesn’t sound all that appealing to many of you, the men and women I have met have had a profound impact on my life and have taught me much more about life than what I’ve learned in the classrooms of medical school and public health. Empowering and educating people to make the best health decisions for themselves has truly become a passion of mine because of this.

In my spare time, I love spontaneous dance parties and going on adventures whilst wearing my sequined fanny pack. My seven-year-old goddaughter likes to tell everyone that my favorite color is “glitter” and I have a special affection for beautiful shoes.

Ben Brown- Fundraising

Hi my name is Ben Brown, and I am the ELCA World Hunger Fundraising Intern and I will also be working some with the ELCA Malaria Campaign. I am a rising senior year at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio in the fall studying
Religion and Political Science. I come to Chicago after spending the spring semester studying in Washington, DC with students from other Lutheran colleges where I interned with the Lutheran Volunteer Corps (LVC) as the Public Policy and Fundraising Intern. When not at Wittenberg, I call Indianapolis home.

I am passionate about issues of social justice, specifically hunger and food justice and the ways in which faith can play a role in that work. At Wittenberg I spend my time in Weaver Chapel with Campus Ministries and in the community through my work in our community service office. Through my experiences in Springfield’s community gardens and Promise Neighborhood and with Wittenberg’s CROP Walk I have come to learn a lot about the realities of hunger and the ways communities come together to end it. In the future I hope to pursue a career in advocacy, but first hopefully a year with one of the many service-year programs, like LVC!

For fun I have recently discovered a love for the Indy 11, Indianapolis’ soccer team. I also really love eating and look forward to exploring Chicago by way of its food.

I am really excited to be with ELCA World Hunger this summer and hope to learn a lot and grow while I’m here!

Humanity and hunger

Exploring: Community Organizing

Welcome to ELCA World Hunger’s 2015 Summer Interns!