Trying to follow

note: originally posted in January 2005 in the student newspaper at Wheaton College…

Already Forgotten

It’s Friday now, five days after the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday, and like many of us, besides rejoicing that it’s only a four day week, you have not given his legacy a second thought. If upon reflecting on King and his legacy, you only naively rejoiced that his “dream” has been accomplished, but did not weep at the complacency of, We, the Church in carrying out the work that Dr. King, in Christ, called us to; to bring Justice for the poor and oppressed, you are deceived.
The more I have learned about Dr. King the more I am shocked and disappointed at the lack of attention we give to this great hero of the Christian faith. Wheaton College, a school founded by abolitionists should know well the importance of standing up against injustice and for freedom. Dr. King stood bold as a Christian against the injustice of his day and we need to be challenged by this modern prophet of Christ to do the same.
It’s a wonderful thing to see that every year hundreds of students at Wheaton participate in ministries through CSC and their churches. Many of the ministries involve working with youth anywhere from near by Carol Stream to the city of Chicago. These sorts of ministries are tangible ways many students find to share the love of Christ with others. But this alone is inefficient and insufficient. We must not forget King’s example and stand against the systems that are persisting
You might have heard this story before. There was a community that built a school on the edge of a cliff. Upon discovering that a number of students where injured seriously from falling off the cliff, the community decided to build a emergency room at the bottom of the cliff. Though this did help care for the situation, it was reactive toward the outcome of the problem and did not deal with the root. Why did they not build a fence?!

Dr. King stood against the injustice of the Jim Crow laws and the segregated education system because he was compelled by the love of Christ. We too must stand against those structural sins in our society. I challenge every student involved in ministries to youth to become aware of the structural evils that we are a part of in our society. When a child receives an unequal education simply due to their location in an impoverished neighborhood, this is a structural evil. When your attempt to explain to that child the victories of Brown vs. Board in desegregation are in vain because every child in his classroom is of similar complexion, this is a structural evil. King once said, “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” Please deepen your understanding and act.
We are called to love our neighbor as ourself. This command requires far more then the few hours or minutes we tend to give it each day, indeed, in the words of King, “The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others.”

(also originally written some months ago)
Warning: Potentially untheological and possibly heretical thoughts to follow.

I don’t think what I am about to share with you will be heretical in any way, but just so that I feel at ease to speak freely I figured I should start with that disclaimer. I should also say that most of what I am about to share with you is not my theological foundation that I would bank on and argue for, it’s just some of the thoughts that have come to mind over the years. If you do not agree with what I share then please discuss, do not argue with me.

When I started to form my beliefs (heavily influenced by my involvement in a church youth group in high school), I was from the beginning a strong believer in the inerrancy of scripture (”All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”). If you doubt or call into question the reliability of the Bible then you could call into question the things recorded in the Bible, and then we’d have all kinds of problems. There is plenty of good arguments and evidence to put forth here, but I won’t bother you with that, if your interested you can find plenty elsewhere.

It wasn’t till later, after having taken Greek (more vested interest in believing in inerrancy), and spent a bit of time in some Bible classes, that I began to have some questions. Why all the male-centered, male-dominance of Scripture if it was God inspired? Why these letters and not others from the Early Church? And primarily, why so much time debating, expounding, and extrapolating on every dot and letter? I mean there is a lot of things in there that are pretty straight forward and clear.

First, the male-dominance of the Scriptures has come to bother me. It wasn’t always this way, I being a male did not have a difficult time seeing the Scriptures as meaningful and personal, but I have come to realize my sisters in Christ do not always have the same comfort.

How do you reconcile what you can see as inherent injustice of a patriarchal society with a book of “God Breathed” scripture? I’m not exactly sure.

What I’ve come to settle on, more then argue for or against, or spend time reading long theological academic journals, is that there are a number of things in the scripture that are clear as day to me. Jesus was real and the Sermon on the Mount is one of the most revolutionary texts I’ve ever encountered. I’m compelled to follow this leader. I could and probably will spend my whole life trying to put into practice the teachings of Christ in Matthew 5, 6, and 7, and I still won’t quite know how I perceive the Bible as a whole.

The Homeless Guy blogged about a great article by Malcolm Gladwell about ending chronic homelessness:

Why homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage.
From the article:

“We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

Don’t be surprised that the article is a year old. The solution to homelessness has been known for a long time - perhaps we’ve always known it. But, hey, if we can develop an industry that makes money around a social problem, why bother fixing it?

You’ll enjoy the article, the solution is different then one might think. We spend all this money on caring for the byproducts of homelessness (see Million-Dollar Murray’s hospital bill), why not be pro-active and actually prevent or at least make completely unnecessary, the possibility of being without a home?

the NY Times ran a neat article about websites raising awareness for the socially conscience. Seems like folks had the same idea I have with Fair Consumers.

The main site they reference is dotherightthing.com which from what I can tell has a pretty neat interface. Basically users submit stories (mostly news stories) about organizations making positive or negative changes in the world. One of the stories I found on there is that Whole Food is the first major US company to convert all of its energy to green sources.

I think this will probably be a good resource for those readers who want to stay up on the news of companies doing social good in the world, but it isn’t so much a site to go and find links to wear to buy fair trade undies. Maybe there is still a niche for Fair Consumers (is that a dumb name?).

Below is a stack of grocery bags, the kind we use as a disposable resource to get our food from the store into our house. It’s not that big a deal, they are expendable, and their just paper right?

Click on the image above to see what all of our little grocery trips each hour add up to.

(Depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number consumed in the US every hour.)

To see more depictions of our consumption check out Chris Jordan’s “An American Self-Portrait”