A lot could be said today…

It is World AIDS Day, 30 years after the first case of HIV/AIDS was diagnosed in a medical journal.  Bishop Hanson released a formal statement here.  You can learn about the ELCA’s HIV and AIDS strategy here.  You can financially support healthcare related work of the church here.

I could also speak to the important climate change conference in Durban, South Africa.  I think I will have more to say when the conference finishes but for now I will say that the U.S. is not helping the conversation move forward (of course the obligations are asymmetrical–we hold a disproportionate amount of responsibility!).

Instead of delving more deeply into the previous two topics I would like to ask for the wisdom and insight of my readers.  I am perplexed.  I often wonder why we behave in less than rational ways.  For example, this last Sunday in the NYT, I read this fabulous opinion piece by Samuel Loewenberg on the current famine in the Horn of Africa.  The author notes that although the best way to avoid famine is to work on long-term development, we insist on waiting until there is a full blown crisis to respond.  Loewenburg reminds us that

A common misconception is that hunger crises are about a lack of food. Yet there is food in Kenya and Ethiopia, and even in many parts of Somalia. The real issue is poverty. The people affected are poor to begin with; when things turned bad, they had no recourse. In April the World Bank reported that 44 million people worldwide were pushed over the edge by skyrocketing food prices.

He continues,

Such a perspective is largely missing in our food-aid program. It’s like a health insurance system that waits until someone has a full-blown illness before he or she can get treatment.

What Loewenburg writes is not exactly rocket science (but it is very good!).  If you have systems in place to produce and distribute food effectively you will not be as subject to inevitable shocks.  We see this in the Horn of Africa, where the famine is most acute where the government is most dysfunctional–Somalia.  From the standpoint of the U.S. and people who only give to emergencies, why do we continue to work so ineffectively?  Why not start at the root of the problem (development) and work to create the systems and structures that will feed and support so many more people? (ELCA World Hunger recognizes that sometimes emergency aid is needed just to get to the next day, but it is part of a larger development strategy.)  So, faithful readers, are you more likely to give to an emergency or to support long-term development?  If it is the former, I would love to hear the logic.

Related, I was shocked to find that for ELCA World Hunger’s disaster appeal for the Horn of Africa, we had raised to date about $768,500 for emergency aid.  To date, our appeal for the tsunami in Japan has raised nearly four times as much (more than $2.8 million).  While I see the value in supporting people in Japan, and I know the money will be put to good use, I wonder why we are so moved to help a fully industrialized nation with it’s own emergency response and safety nets in place, but so slow to support the Horn of Africa where the need is much greater.  I have some ideas, but I would love to hear why you think a gift for Japan may be more compelling than a gift for the Horn of Africa.

The title warned you. Let the conversation begin!

David Creech

In October a friend from Holden Village spent a few days with me on her way to Alaska. It was like having a prophet visit. To my dinner table she brought her life as a worker for the Mennonite Central Committee in El Salvador, as a resident of a Catholic Worker house in Portland, Oregon, and as a peace activist who—like her fellow Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren—earns only enough to support herself but not so much that she has to pay the ‘war tax.’

Because she doesn’t own a car, she didn’t find my carless life strange. She was fine riding the bus and bikes everywhere and sleeping on the floor of my teeny little house. Many details of my existence that strike people as odd were completely familiar to her. But watching her move through life with such principle sent me back to my Bible of simple living, Doris Janzen Longacre’s 1980 book, Living More with Less.

This classic taps the wisdom of Mennonite missionaries who refined their simple living skills on international assignments and kept living that way when they came home. Like my Alaska-bound friend Lisa, they always, always walked their talk.

Rejecting the term lifestyle, Doris proposed that Christians should seek to live by five Life Standards. Her book offers wise suggestions for implementing each one of these standards:

1. Do justice. Living by this standard will always draw us more deeply into economics and politics. It’s up to us to draw the lines that link our consumer ways with environmental and justice consequences around the world.
2. Learn from the world community. Our global partners have a lot to share, if we would only listen instead of continually insisting we know it all! Longacre’s book lifts up “overdevelopment” projects proposed by global Mennonites who would like to minister to North Americans drowning in materialism and “maldevelopment.”
3. Nurture people. What could happen if we cared more about other people than we cared about price, convenience, or comfort?
4. Cherish the natural order. What could happen if we remembered that we are stewards, not owners—that God’s world demands our respect, not our thoughtless consumption?
5. Nonconform freely. What could happen if we were more like my friend Lisa and the Mennonites, and a little less worried about what other people think?

Longacre’s gospel-based Life Standards offer a path out of the lifestyle that is choking us. They are also a tool we can us to “occupy ourselves,” as David Creech suggested (quoting David Brooks) in this post. Occupying ourselves can mean recognizing the consequences of our own habits, actions and purchases instead of reflexively seeking to blame scapegoats.

Mikka said the other day that, from a global perspective, almost all of us reading this blog are the One Percent. Instead of insisting we’re not privileged, asking “who, me?” and pointing fingers, let’s start Advent by following what Longacre calls “the path of health outlined by faith: Repent by recognizing and accepting our guilt, be forgiven, and change!”

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

Happy Thanksgiving, Blogging Colleagues!

On Thanksgiving Day, we think about what we have and give thanks. However, sometimes this day seems increasingly like the “eve” to the real holiday, “Black Friday,” where we think about we do not have, but that we want.

Recently, I was sharing with a colleague about the last website I blogged about, and she suggested another—the “Global Rich List.” Very interesting…

From the site, “Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world. Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. But where would you sit on one of those lists? Here’s your chance to find out.”

According to the Global Rich List, I am the one percent (to use the catchphrase of the Occupy Wall Street Movement). The site uses a sliding scale to show your position of wealth within the global community. You can see your rich list position, as well as the percentage in which you fall. Simply select the currency of your salary, type in your annual income, and click “show me the money!”

So, I am the one percent. The site asks one follow up question, “how do you feel about that?” and then encourages us to give just one hour’s worth of our salary (calculated using the above information) to a worthy cause.

I will be giving ELCA Good Gifts this holiday season—a very worthy cause in my (admittedly biased) opinion. But on this day of thanks, I will be giving thanks for the many gifts of friends, family, good employment and yes, the wealth that is entrusted to me for good stewardship toward health, wholeness and fulfilling life for all. That is the mindset I want to take into the holiday frenzy…wish me luck!

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Check out the Global Rich List site, and post back your comments here. Looking forward to the conversation!

Privilege

This last weekend I was at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting. This is my one professional meeting that I am sure to attend each year because it provides an excellent opportunity to explore new ways to conceive of and articulate a Christian response to hunger and poverty. This year was no exception and as a result I am consolidating some new thoughts on 1) the role of the Bible in moral deliberation and 2) the apocalyptic imagination as a tool for resisting systems and structures that keep people impoverished. These will likely keep me occupied for the next year (or more!) and they will undoubtedly inform my seminary course at Trinity in Ohio this January.

Today’s post, however, will not explore such heady (and pedantic?) topics (I understand if you just breathed a sigh of relief!). I want to reflect on a dinner conversation I shared with old friends from seminary. Over the meal I suggested that in spite of its claims about liberating ideas and free thinking, the academy is an incredibly hierarchical institution. Your academic pedigree–where you studied and where you teach (God forbid you do not work in an academic institution!) determines your credibility. Both of my friends vigorously denied than any such criteria existed. One received his PhD from an Ivy League school and now teaches at a large and well respected seminary, the other from one of the best schools in the south and now teaches at a strong research institution. They denied my experience and assured me I was wrong… as the one who graduated from a good (but not great) university and now works in the church.

The awkward moment (and it was awkward!) revealed to me in a new way the power of privilege. My friends (who are intelligent and generally committed to social justice) are blind to the hegemonic forces of the academy because they are beneficiaries of the system. And they worked hard to maintain the system, insisting that my impressions were surely misguided. As a white, well-educated male who is financially secure and holds a position of (minor) authority in a national church office, it is not often that my experience is denied so flatly. I did not like it.

Here is the scary question, though. How often do I (who am generally intelligent and firmly committed to social justice) do exactly the same thing? Whose experiences have I unwittingly trampled simply because I am unaware of dynamics of privilege in a given situation? Race, gender, class, and age (to name a few–humans are exceedingly skilled at coming up with arbitrary ways to keep people disenfranchised) are all used to create and maintain (often unspoken) power differentials. In the case of my dinner it was an awkward moment. In more critical situations it can be the difference between being fed or going hungry, having access to medical care or suffering from preventable and treatable diseases.

I am not sure about the take aways from this experience just yet. Here are few initial thoughts: 1) Privilege does exist and too often we operate in it unconsciously. 2) The first step to addressing privilege has to be critical self reflection and repentance. 3) The system will work hard to maintain itself and those with privilege must actively work against it (through awareness and education, among other things). 4) If those who are privileged are unaware of the dynamic they need to be reminded. 5) If they are aware but unwilling to address the problem, perhaps they should be resisted.

David Creech

Hello Blogging Colleagues! Since we last shared “screen time” together, many things have happened. We celebrated All Saints Day, Día de los Muertos, Halloween or All Hallows’ Eve and Reformation Sunday just to name a few. But wait– I’ve missed one.

On October 31, we welcomed the 7 BILLIONTH person to this planet and place we call home (United Nations). In honor of this occasion, I have keyed a letter to our newest member:

Dear 7 Billionth Person,

“Happy birthday to you,” child born somewhere in the human family! Welcome! Welcome to this place that displays all the depth and breadth and beauty and chaos that God is and creates– the land and the sky and seas, the flora and fauna, all the languages and phenotypes.

The New York Times posits that you may have been born somewhere in India and opens with the question “Feeling claustrophobic?” The article goes on to haggle over statistics, but that is not the most compelling focus for me.

I am told* that the global population will continue to increase during my lifetime—10 billion people by 2083. I’m also told that currently, 43% of the global population is about my age. Isn’t that amazing?

However, it is also estimated that in the country I live in, the United States, we consume double the resources used by the rest of the world. That means that if the current population and current consumption trends continue, by 2030, we’ll need the equivalent of two Earths to support you, me and the rest of our global family.

Well, 7 Billionth Person, we’ve got our work cut out for us. And, for the record, I’m not “feeling claustrophobic.” Yes, I’m feeling a sense of urgency that to live my life is to live it alongside and with attention to 7 billion other people’s well being and fullness of life…but I’m not claustrophobic.

In fact, I’m feeling more connected than ever. I know that it is that sense of connected commitment that will help us work and serve together to find balance and promise in this place we collectively call “home.”

Your Global Sister,

Mikka

*Want to learn more about what I was “told?” Visit this great site to find out how many people were alive when you were born and much more. Once you’re “told” post it back here! I look forward to read more about your story.

“All those delicious Brussels sprouts, rotting!” I griped to my brother about a neighbor’s garden.

He shrugged and said, “Get used to it.”

In rural western Washington, not everything gets harvested. Something is always left over. There may be no time to cut something or no place to store it. Too much or too little rain. Too many or too few warm dry days. Nobody to pick. Or nobody to buy, if a crop tastes good but looks horrible, or because the same crop ripened elsewhere first—like potatoes in Idaho, this year—and the supermarket buyers have already filled their contracts.

So I’m glad the word gleaning has busted out of the Bible color plate of Ruth in Boaz’s field and is elbowing its way into national consciousness.  When I promised my mother in March  that the fruit trees on our farm wouldn’t just rot on the ground, I didn’t know I’d discover a national movement to connect what’s left in fields with food pantries and soup kitchens. After I tracked down Harvest for Hope of Skagit, which organizes and dispatches gleaners in our valley, I read Nancy Michaelis’s blog about Ample Harvest, matching gardeners and food banks on the national level.

Not the image I remember, but the right gleaning story!

This fall I’ve been living by Ample Harvest’s slogan: “No food left behind!” On a bike errand, I stopped to pick a bag of carrots declared too homely to sell by their growers. Every couple of days I help myself to zinnias and sunflowers whose flower farmer stopped cutting and told me, “Enjoy!” Gleaning for Harvest for Hope, I made new friends and froze a fall of beans for me. Harvest for Hope accepted the 12 pounds of beans I gleaned from my landlady’s garden and will accept the last of the apples from our family tree. (Thank goodness, because apples are the zucchini of Washington state: so plentiful you can’t give them away.)

At one end of this gleaning stand the field, the farmer, and the willing volunteer. At the other end must be cooks and canners—people who can prepare and preserve food—as well as food pantries with freezers, refrigerators, and efficient distribution systems. Without this important element, the beans I glean in Mt. Vernon will rot somewhere else. Fortunately a couple of activists helped persuade US food pantries to retool themselves to accept and distribute fresh produce. Goodbye, commodity cheese. Hello, beets and carrots.

“Canning is the new knitting,” someone said recently. And just in time, because almost everybody has forgotten how. Food preservation classes are popping up everywhere as people like me decide to recover the lost skills of freezing, canning and dehydrating. Or how to use every single scrap of a vegetable, as the New York Times feature  “That’s not trash, that’s dinner!” demonstrates.

Now if only I can convince my neighbor to let me glean her Brussels sprouts…

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

One of the most influential experiences during my first trip toSouth Africa as a college student involved a missionary from the United States I’ll call Anna. When I first met Anna, a middle aged woman from the Pacific Northwest, she had been living in Cape Town for a few months. On a year long mission trip, she came with the intention of spreading the gospel and helping people who were living in poverty. She ended up working with a group of teenage boys who were homeless, hungry and orphaned (whether physically or emotionally). The boys were not in school nor did they have any other support system.

Anna had a good heart and good intentions. She met with the boys fairly regularly and led traditional Bible studies with them. They would listen to Bible stories (remember, most of them had not been to school and therefore couldn’t read) and then try to participate in the reflection and questions that Anna posed to them. There was usually a small meal for them, too.

During her stay, Anna had to leaveCape Town for several weeks. In order to tide them over while she was away, she left a jar of peanut butter and a Bible for the boys. I was very disturbed by the fact that she left a group of homeless youth with nothing but peanut butter and a Bible. The fact that Anna left rather suddenly and without much notice had complicated ramifications (trying to develop lasting relationships and sustainable strategies takes consistency) but that’s not what bothered me. It was the fact that, to those boys, the church had only provided them with a book they couldn’t read and one small jar of food to be split between all of them.

This cannot be all that we, as Christians, have to offer. If it is, then I think we must seriously reconsider our understanding of the gospel.

In keeping with the theme of churches and development work, it saddens me that there is so much potential and possibility within the church and yet we often reach out in terribly impractical and unrealistic ways. Our churches are full of talented individuals who have wide ranging skills and interests that could benefit a group like these boys.

Poverty is extremely complicated. I certainly don’t have the solution. But I do believe that we must build the type of relationships that allow us to know each other’s needs—physical and spiritual. Homeless boys have physical needs that take priority over spiritual ones, at least initially. Have you ever tried to pay attention in a meeting or at school on an empty stomach? The Bible is full of power but handing someone who is illiterate a Bible is like handing me an email written in Chinese—pretty meaningless. We must take context and situation into account when building life-affirming relationships.  How do you think we can be most successful in our missions?

Emmi Gordon is in the second year of her M.Div. program at the University of Chicago.  Prior to her studies she lived for several years in South Africa and noticed the effectiveness of Christian aid programs and wondered why Christian programs in particular were so successful.  She is posting a series of reflections on this topic in the coming weeks.  Your own thoughts and reflections, as always, are welcome.

Raise your hand if you knew that October 16 was World Food Day.

Raise your hand if you, your congregation, your community or local news media did something to commemorate and remember the significance of that day.

In case you are wondering about my virtual hand…it’s trying to rise. This month, I quietly celebrated my second full month with ELCA World Hunger. I grow more and more encouraged each day. And yet…some things remain a challenge.

During the first weekend in October, I had the joy to participate in the ELCA World Hunger Region 7 Ethics of Eating event in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. We talked about domestic and global hunger, visited farms and talked with those who farm. We lifted up advocacy as an important priority and shared time of fellowship over delicious meals prepared by the staff at Men-O-Lan Camp. At the end, we all committed to doing something, one thing based on what we learned. It was important and inspiring to stand with others and commit.

Then, during the first week back from the event, I read this articlein Business Week. Here are my top three highlights:

• “The cost of hunger in the U.S., the world’s largest economy, was $167.5 billion last year […].”
• “The number of food-insecure and hungry Americans in 2010 rose 30 percent from 2007 […].”
• “The cost of hunger for every U.S. citizen was $542 in 2010 […].”

The “cost” of hunger cited above looks at cost factors such as additional health care costs ($130.5 billion), poor education outcomes ($19.2 billion) and private donations of food money and volunteer time ($17.8 billion).

Hunger is a complex issue. I know this. You know this. The question is, what do we do in the face of a multifaceted issue like hunger, like poverty? As a self-proclaimed “do-er,” I must admit to you on this rainy Chicago day that I am leaning toward the eschaton today based on a sermon shared with us yesterday by former bishop, Pastor Andrea DeGroot-Nesdahl who coordinates the ELCA Malaria Campaign.

During that service of healing, Pastor DeGroot-Nesdahl encouraged us to come with our hands open at our sides to receive the forgiveness and grace that we are given freely through Christ’s life, death and resurrection.

As hard as I try to raise my hand to the opening questions of this post, to the issues raised through the Ethics of Eating event or in protest of the staggering “cost” of hunger…today, I want to be found head bowed, heart and hands open to embrace the grace that allows us to continue onward in the call that Christ has put before. I want to re-join the journey.

As we hear in the story of The Anointing at Bethany (Matthew 26:11, Mark 14:7, John 12:8) “You will always have the poor with you…” This is the call that is set before us. Not a burden, but the call, and Christ would not call us to such a task alone. By grace through faith we are freed to serve, and we do that service in the most significant way possible– together.

Re-join the journey.

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More about the ELCA World Hunger Ethics of Eating Event:

Read another reflection about the event.

Visit the group on The Table (membership needed).

See my pictures.

Almost everyone feels empathy when they see pictures of a hungry child. This is not a uniquely Christian emotion. However, the response to such empathy-producing situations should be what sets us apart: we act. This action space is where I see the difference between faith-based responses and non-faith based responses.

In my limited experience of what I shall call development work, I have found that more often than not, it is the religiously-affiliated organizations that provide the most enduring and direct services to people who need them. This is not to say that Christians “save” those who are poor; rather we (should!) try to provide the means and access to resources for people to help themselves and maintain their dignity. We walk with our brothers and sisters. Most other development agencies are either top heavy and out of touch with the people they are trying to serve or run inefficiently by idealists who a) have little experience and b) suffer burnout early on. There are, of course, many exceptions but I would like to ask the question as to why these faith-based groups seem to endure and act much more effectively.

My own thoughts are that we, as Christians, are directed by more than just empathy, more than just our feelings and emotions. We have a real sense of right and wrong, just and unjust. Though we may have varying opinions about the particularities of what is right, we look outside of ourselves for the definition and for guidance on how to live out the definition. By turning to God, meditating on Christ’s life and resurrection, and reflecting on our scriptures and our traditions, we are able to situate ourselves in world much bigger than ourselves. When we see the world beyond our reaction to it, that is as something more than the empathy we feel seeing a hungry child, we start to see others as autonomous children of God and as such, deserving of relationship. From this foundation, I believe, Christians are able to sustain mission work and outreach. We see that it is truly God’s work, not our own, that is done through our hands.

Emmi Gordon is in the second year of her M.Div. program at the University of Chicago.  Prior to her studies she lived for several years in South Africa and noticed the effectiveness of Christian aid programs and wondered why Christian programs in particular were so successful.  She will be posting a series of reflections on this topic in the coming weeks.  Your own thoughts and reflections, as always, are welcome.

I present the following thoughts with a bit of fear and trepidation.  I want to say up front that I am not taking sides and that the reason I am posting is to provoke reflection and conversation.  I hope a healthy sense of ambivalence (in the literal sense of the word) emerges and that the ambivalence leads to constructive conversation.

I have watched with interest the recent occupy movements.  As you might suspect, because I am engaged in anti-hunger work (which is the result of a strong empathy for those who are poor and vulnerable) and because I am not in the top 1% of wage earners I was initially sympathetic to the occupiers.  It seemed to me to be a creative way to voice frustration about a prolonged economic crisis that has left many hungry and many more financially insecure.

As I have thought more about it, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the protests.  Part of it may be due to my general pacifist and conflict-averse tendencies (which, admittedly, are probably in need of more critical reflection, maybe in a later post?).  Another part may be due to the fact that I live in a pretty wealthy town (my wife works for a local church).

In my head though, what concerns me most about the occupy movement is that it is focused on others’ faults rather than one’s own.  While it may be true that some greedy bankers (note that just because someone works in the financial sector it does not follow that they are therefore particularly greedy) played a part in the current mess, and it may be true that the top 1% possesses more wealth than the bottom 50%, it is not entirely their fault that we find ourselves in this place.  If you are like me, in the good years you overleveraged yourself and are now cutting back, paying down debt, and trying to save more money.  Even in the midst of this crisis, I may not be in the top 1%, but I have assets and a lifestyle that I am working very hard to maintain.  Maintaining that lifestyle impacts my ability to work for the common good (and I am paid to care!).  I am just as much a part of the problem as the super wealthy.  So long as I blame it on others, though, I do not have to be critical of my own lifestyle and choices.  This is why the conclusion to David Brooks column yesterday deeply resonated with me—we need to occupy ourselves.  At the end of the day, if we are to move out of this morass, if we are truly going to address widespread hunger and poverty, it is going to take a whole lot more change than just at the top.  “Let’s occupy ourselves.”

-David Creech