Incarnate Forum | Geoff Ryan #2

Part 2 of 2

The first part of this essay appeared on Tuesday.

Political Implications
“Politics is who gets what, when and how.”

“Politics is important in determining whether a people will be at war or in peace. It is fundamental in the distribution of economic goods, including the definition of property rights. Politics is basic to the definition of crime and the determination of how it will be punished. It affects the degree to which people will be free to speak, to write, to worship. It defines who will be accepted as members of the community, and who will be placed at the margins. It seriously influences the rearing of children by determining the circumstances of family life and establishing much of the subject matter of their education. It enters into the self-awareness of a people, their self-identity, and it projects in large measure their sense of historic destiny and accomplishment.”

“When Christians seek to exclude politics from their thinking they are bound to distort their theologies, for politics is an inescapable aspect of human existence, with direct relevance to the divine/human encounter.”

E

ven the word, let alone the reality, of politics is toxic to many Christians, nevertheless it is unavoidable. The word idiot comes from idiotus, a term coined by the Greeks for a person who refused to involve themselves in public affairs. The Church, therefore, contains many idiots - those who believe that political involvement, indeed that participation in politics in any shape or form, is to compromise faith and that it is invariably detrimental to the church and its mission.

On the other hand, there are those who consider politics and faith to be virtually one and the same thing. Many of my evangelical cousins in the United States live in this strange-to-me paradigm in which faith, politics and economics are all intertwined and interdependent and mixed together with a resulting “Irish stew” that is quite unique in post-Christendom. Lest we become overly judgmental, however, it bears remembering that thanks to globalization, we are all culturally Americans and so, to greater and lesser degrees, are all wittingly and unwittingly complicit in this regard.

Again, we have here two extremes, but this time with regard to the issue of politics. Though most of us will lean toward one or other of these two poles, is there a middle-path, a third way? And further, how does an understanding of incarnational mission, as I have here defined it, mediate between these two, if indeed at all?

A bottom line for me is that politics impact the poor, usually negatively. I would also contend that it does so more sharply and directly, than with other sectors of society, and that this is especially apparent in urban communities. Taxes, welfare-subsidies, essential services such as transport, and utilities, policing, financial investment, social assistance in all its forms, zoning and by-laws, all these things and more fall under the purview of the political structures and they all play a defining role in regulating the life of people in our communities.

Now, these things all affect each of us, the difference is that the poor generally have no involvement or investment in the established political power structures that regulate such things. They have no voice and consequently no “say”. They are not participants in this process, merely recipients. Like children, decisions are made for them, that impact them, most often without their best interests in mind and they live with the consequences regardless.

An example of this occurred last year in our community. The Toronto Police Services and the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (the government “landlord” for everyone who lives in Regent Park) decided that they would clean up the graffiti marking the outside of many of the buildings in our community. This would make the neighbourhood look better, they reasoned, and so would be a good thing to do. They certainly would not want a lot of slogans spay-painted on the structures in the neighbourhoods where they lived, so it made sense to them.

The conversation, however, was one-sided, as the residents of Regent Park, the people who lived in the buildings marked by the graffiti, were not participants in the process. They were powerless in any case, because the TCHC owned the buildings and the police enforced the laws, so they could do what they wanted. The reasoning behind this decision expressed the essentially middle-class values that the landlords and the police shared and considered important. The plan to paint over the graffiti was a projection of their desires and of how they felt the world in this particular corner of the city should be ordered.

However, most of the graffiti in our neighbourhood are what we refer to as “RIPs” - they are symbols and initials marking the mostly young men from the community who have been gunned down in drug and gang-related violence. These constitute markers and memorials, functioning as totems and sacred places for the family and friends of these young men. They make the statement that these people once existed and are missed and that their lives had some value. But that message was not voiced in the corridors of power because the conversation never took place. Less than a week after the buildings were whitewashed by the police and the housing authority, the graffiti was back up three times as intense. The residents of Regent Park responded in a manner outside the parameters of the law, in reaction to an imposition of power upon them and their community. Overall it was bad politics and misuse of power, by everyone concerned.

The question of who speaks for the poor, therefore, is a very important one when we talk about politics. If, this indeed lies at the heart of the Missio Dei, namely that the good news is preached to the poor, that the widows and orphans are to be looked after, that the least of these, the “friends of Jesus” , are to be listened to and their voice worthy of being heard in the corridors of power, then an avoidance of all political engagement is actually a dereliction of Christian duty. Possibly any form of Christian mission that does not include at least elements of these imperatives might be rightly considered “unauthorized ministries”, in the words of Walter Brueggemann.

The problem for many Christians, however, is that Jesus is understood as having been apolitical when on earth. I personally have argued that power was one of the (few) things that Jesus was categorical in rejecting. Beginning with his rejection of Satan’s offer of power over all the kingdoms of the world and ending with his statement to Pilate that: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

“(Jesus) ministry was clearly defined, and the alternations to the illusion and temptation of the desert were spelled out. A choice was made - life abundant, full and free for all. Make no mistake about it, that day the choice was made, Jesus became suspect. That day in the Temple he sealed the fate already prepared for him. How was the world to understand one who rejected an offer of power and control?”

However, any discussion of politics is necessarily a discussion of power. As members of Jesus’ upside-down kingdom, where powerlessness is considered true power, the weak are actually the strong, the poor are the rich etc… how can we reconcile the reality with the rhetoric? I believe that as followers of Jesus we have various options at our disposal in regard to power but I also believe that the one option we do not have open to us, is to ignore it.

I understand power to be essentially neutral. The “rub” is in how it is used and how it is applied. It exists in our world and is wielded primarily through political means, structures and mechanisms (I understand that military power is also fundamentally political). So the questions then become: Who wields the power? How is it applied? Who are the participants, the beneficiaries, the recipients, the victims? In whose interest and to whose detriment is power being wielded?

“We are so used to thinking of spirituality as withdrawal from the world and human affairs that it is hard to think of it as political. Spirituality is personal and private, we assume while politics is public. But such a dichotomy drastically diminishes spirituality construing it as a relationship to God without implications for one’s relationship to the surrounding world. The God of Christian faith created the world and is deeply engaged in the affairs of the world. The notion that we can be related to God and not to the world-that we can practice a spirituality that is not political-is in conflict with the Christian understanding of God.”

As something of a pragmatist, I contend that though power is an essentially neutral commodity, it needs to be accessed on behalf of the powerless, lest the powerful misuse it for their own ends and against the poor. The desire on our part should never be to accrue power, but to direct and/or redirect it as needed. To apply it so that desired change can be accomplished. “Social change is the product of power applied effectively in the public arena.” The problem is that power is always a Faustian bargain and, like money, seems to be inherently corrosive.

“He hath put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble and meek” (Magnificat) whereupon, of course, the humble and meek become mighty in their turn and have to be put down…people achieve power, exercise power, abuse power, are booted out of power, and then it all begins again.”

To return to my earlier point, historically Christians have generally dealt with the political question in one of two ways, which I have characterized as either full engagement or varying degrees of separation and withdrawal.

Full engagement was most fully evident during the centuries of Christendom when the church was a state power and the Pope had his own armies, up through the days of the British Empire (we’ve all heard the quip about the Anglican Church being the Conservative Party at prayer) and now during the age of the American empire. The creation of the Moral Majority in the 1980’s in the U.S. as an intentional strategy to engage, influence (overwhelm, some would say) the political and legislative structures, continues in various forms today. I recently read an article about a school set up in Georgetown, outside Washington, which took Christian students to train them for political office. All of the students were Republicans and over 80% had been home-schooled (a hallmark of conservative, evangelicalism in many parts of the States).

Such over identification with one particular party is problematic in a number of ways that we don’t have the time or the mandate to explore in this paper. However, one of the inherent contradictions in this approach is that the political doctrine of secularism, that the state must use its power to limit the role of religion in the public sphere, originated among dissenting religious believers (Protestants, mostly) who suffered persecution by the established churches (Roman Catholics, mostly). In any case, corporate identification inevitably becomes corporate endorsement which in turn becomes corporate complicity and the church becomes co-opted and muzzled.

The withdrawal and disengagement camps are a little more creative and offer a number of varying approaches to the political question. These run the spectrum from the full disengagement that I referred to earlier (think Amish, think those who refuse to vote at all) to pressure/advocacy groups (think right-to-lifers, think those who wish to bring prayer back into the schools).

What Christians of this persuasion are really good at is the creation of parallel universes that journey alongside the dominant political culture and seek to influence it from the outside. Often referring to themselves as “prophetic” and their intent to “speak prophetically into culture”, such movements are actually inheritors of the counter-culturalism of the 1960’s and take much of their inspiration from the Civil Rights movement (”…the historic role of African-American churches - which constituted a community independent from the State - as a base for the civil rights movement).

Such alternate systems create a kind of “happy place” for believers, but are pretty much ignored by mainstream culture and the traditional political structures. They simply do not care about the causes we advocate (and we are always cause-focused) because these systems are immune to pressure of this type. They respond better to lobbying which means spreading money around to influence legislation, but Christians tend not to engage in this overly much, for a variety of ethical and practical reasons.

Examples of this type of approach to politics are Jim Wallis’ book God’s Politics (”Why the right is wrong and the left just doesn’t get it”) and his Call to Renewal movement on behalf of the poor; Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw’s Jesus for President book and tour across the States this coming summer timed to coincide with the US presidential campaign (”A different kind of campaign, a different kind of party, a different kind of Commander in Chief”). Both of these I would argue are clever and creative examples of political disengagement. They are alternative cultures, parallel universes, essentially revolutionary movements that exist outside the pale of the dominant culture. Wallis in fact, started out in his college days involving himself with the civil rights movement and as anyone who has ever met Shane can confirm he is definitely a 1960’s type of hippy.

“Social work bodies, voluntary agencies, settlements and the institutional church need constantly to be reformed so that they actually serve people, rather than simply maintain their life. Such reform needs the vision of those who have perhaps seen the system’s failures most clearly because they have stepped outside it. Some will find they can serve within such institutions; others can bring pressure to bear upon them. What they cannot afford to do, if they really want the well being of the city, is to write off the institutions, or to believe that a revolution which destroys the whole system will by magic produce a better life. Revolution is only another sort of withdrawal because it refuses to attempt the hard grind of working out, persuading and sustaining, that real polices which help real people entail.”

I suggest that an incarnational approach might look something like more active involvement with traditional, existing, political parties and structures, reforming from within and bringing the focus and resources and, yes, power of these institutions, to bear on the needs and problems and life of the communities that we serve.

“We take it for granted that political parties are vital to modern political life. They have shaped representative democracies since the late 19th century. Yet, their prospects are not bright in today’s large democracies. In fact, these powerful political machines may soon disappear.

The ground is already shifting underneath their feet. Political parties have based their platforms on ideological and class divides that are becoming less important, especially in more advanced societies. Although class consciousness still matters, ethnic, religious, and sexual identities now trump class, and these affiliations cut across traditional political party lines. Today, the labels left and right have less and less meaning. Citizens have developed multiple interests, diverse senses of belonging, and overlapping identities. Some political parties have managed to adapt. Think of the British Labour Party, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, or Brazil’s Workers’ Party, whose economic policy has very little to do with its trade union origins.

 

Others won’t be so lucky. Political dislocation exists alongside a growing fatigue with traditional forms of political representation. People no longer trust the political establishment. They want a greater say in public matters and usually prefer to voice their interests directly or through interest groups and nongovernmental organizations. The debate on genetically modified food in Europe, for example, can hardly be understood without reference to organizations allegedly representing consumer interests, such as Greenpeace. And thanks to modern communication, citizens’ groups can bypass political parties in shaping public policy. Political parties no longer have a lock on legitimacy.

Now while this may be the case in the future and each of us can see that Cardosa may be onto something, at the present time however, political parties continue to exist and regulate life in our neighbourhoods. Something of note from Cardosa’s thesis, however, is that it might actually make little difference with whom we choose to align ourselves. Parties rise to power and fall from power in cyclical patterns and when they are in power, their influences on the policies and laws that impact “our people” are neither consistently good nor consistently bad, regardless of political stripe. To associate one party in particular with the concerns and needs of the poor, be it Labour (UK), Democrats (US), Liberals (Canada), or with religious rights: Conservatives (UK), Republicans (US), Conservatives (Canada) or any other consistent approach to those things that matter most to us, is a misguided course of action, based on an erroneous assumption.

Therefore, I would suggest that the following strategies bear consideration, All are “incarnational” in the sense of Christians entering into established “worlds” in order to bring justice and transformation.

1) Formal, traditional political party involvement at provincial/state and national/federal levels. Pick a party and join it. Get involved with the local expression of your chosen party (in Canada it would be called a Riding Association). Work on a campaign team. Run for office.

2) Municipal political involvement. In Canada, municipal - city - politics are non-partisan and therefore not officially run along party lines. If indeed, “All politics is local” , then municipal politics offer an unparalleled opportunity to politically influence institutions which may most directly impact our urban communities. In Canada, running for school board trusteeship is a good example of an elected political position that is non-partisan in nature and that carries tremendous influence with the children and youth of our neighbourhoods.

3) Street politics. This is a term I use to refer to those informal, often grass-roots, networks and localized institutions that nevertheless play a significant role in the life of urban communities. At 614 Regent Park we have made it an intentional strategy to place people from the church on pretty much every board, association, and group that exists in our neighbourhood and to work in partnership with any and all agencies active in the community. These include the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) of various elementary schools; the CPLC (Community Police Liaison Committee), SCAARP (School Community Action Alliance Regent Park); various resident’s associations; the boards of different non-profits; participation in various sports teams; membership in service clubs; participation and involvement in community festivals and events; inter-agency strategy and case meetings.

Economic Implications

“Economics, as channeled by its popular avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and theodicy of our contemporary culture. More than religion itself, more than literature, more than cable television, it is economics that offers the dominant creation narrative of our society, depicting the relationship of each of us to the universe we inhabit, the relation of human beings to God. And the story it tells is a marvelous one. In it an enormous multitude of strangers, all individuals, all striving alone, are nevertheless all bound together in a beautiful and natural pattern of existence: the market. This understanding of markets - not as artifacts of human civilization but as phenomena of nature - now serves as he unquestioned foundation of nearly all political and social debate.”

Money and power tend to go hand in hand, and so the preceding political discussion invariably carries with it economic implications. In fact, the two intersect in so many ways and in so many places that it is often virtually the same conversation.

In my opinion, the core economic issue when thinking in the context of incarnational mission is that of lifestyle choices. Specifically those choices made by Christians who are seeking to live missionally and incarnationally, and how they converge and clash with the choices of the residents of our neighourhoods and communities.

This is also fundamentally a political issue as well. In the context of an examination of environmental consciousness, Madeleine Bunting wrote a brilliant piece last December in The Guardian. Permit me to quote it at some length.

“Is it enough to have halved family meat consumption, have foregone flights for several sun-starved years and arranged a life in which habits of cycling to work and walking to school are routine? No, it’s just scratching at the surface. If the developed world is to implement the 80% cuts in carbon emissions the UN demands as part of the talks beginning in Bali today, the lives of our children will have to be dramatically different from everything we are currently bringing them up to expect.

 

The much more controversial issue is whether that means consuming less or just consuming differently. In other words, does sustainability require an entire recasting of the good life, or can we continue on our way, our aspirations to comfortable homes, nice cars and fancy holidays unchecked, delivered by green techno-wizardry?

 

Government environmental policy is entirely built around the latter. But the problem is that there is no evidence that techno-wizardry can deliver the cuts in carbon emissions needed. In the past increased energy efficiency has only driven up aspirations: “If my fridge is more energy efficient and thus cheaper to run, perhaps I’ll now buy that air conditioning unit for these new hot summers.” Technological innovation is an important part of the solution, but it won’t be enough. Wizardry it is rightly nicknamed: there is an irrational faith at the heart of government thinking.

 

But the alternative of lower consumption is something no politician is prepared to consider. In one policy discussion on the subject, Treasury officials responded with contempt, and referred to it as tantamount to “going back to living in caves”. We have a political system built on economic growth as measured by gross domestic product, and that is driven by ever-rising consumer spending. Economic growth is needed to service public debt and pay for the welfare state. If people stopped shopping, the economy would ultimately collapse. No wonder, then, that one of the politicians’ tasks after a terrorist outrage is to reassure the public and urge them to keep shopping (as both George Bush and Ken Livingstone did). Advertising and marketing, huge sectors of the economy, are entirely devoted to ensuring that we keep shopping and that our children follow in our footsteps.

 

…hyper-consumerism is a response to insecurity, a maladaptive type of coping mechanism. Over the past few decades, the sources of insecurity have multiplied: in addition to the manipulation long practised by advertising, there are new sources of insecurity in highly competitive market economies, ranging from identity (who am I and where do I belong?) to basics (who will look after me in my old age?). This relationship between materialism and insecurity helps explain why countries as diverse as the US and China are deeply materialistic; they are places of endemic insecurity.

 

The brilliance of this economic system built on insecurity is that it is self-reinforcing. The more insecure you are, the more materialistic; the more materialistic, the more insecure. As Kasser has shown, materialistic values (which are on the increase among teenagers on both sides of the Atlantic) make you more anxious, more vulnerable to depression and less cooperative. Studies show that people know what the real sources of lasting human fulfilment are - good relationships, self-acceptance, community feeling - but they face a formidable alliance of political and economic interests that have a vested interest in distracting them from that insight to ensure they work longer hours and spend more money.”

As each of us seeks to live out a truly incarnational mission in our particular urban communities, we have to do so in the context of a political-economic system predicated on consumerism and materialism and on specifically promoted desirable lifestyles and, sadly, no one buys into this culture more than the typical urban, inner-city, ghetto dweller.

The answers, and there needs to be more than one, are far more complicated than simply berating ourselves for not living green enough or simply enough or justice-minded enough. I’m not sure I have much by way of an intelligent or cohesive strategy in light of this reality. Here are a few ideas, however, all of them closely inter-related.

1) Living smartly versus living simply. This is a tricky one. Life in the West in the 21st century is extremely complicated and increasingly complex. To live simply actually requires a huge amount of effort - the intentionality of it is time consuming and labour intensive. Further, most of the benefits of living more simply and “justly”, whether it be drinking only fair trade products or recycling waste, are primarily directed internationally, to causes and issues in the developing world. There is no real direct impact in our local community.

Further, it is my experience that urban residents are often the most consumer-driven and materialistic of people. They tend to be marketing victims who buy wholesale into the values of the market. Consequently the Christian “voice” of exampling a simple lifestyle might possibly and probably be drowned out by the louder voices of the neighborhood culture. It truly is a battle of competing values.

Living smartly versus living simply might be one answer. By this I mean examining ways that make sense to the members of your community, that are achievable for them and that positively impact them directly…and can be seen to do so. For example, take someone to the local grocery store with you on your weekly shopping trip, which would present them with an alternative other than running each day to the corner variety store and paying double the prices for basics such as bread and milk. This sort of thing.

2) Where do you “invest” your money? By invest, I’m not talking stocks and bonds as much as I am asking you decide to shop and spend your money: locally or outside of the community? Do you shop at a local grocery store or drive outside of the neighbourhood to shop? In our community the local grocery store is called No Frills and is two blocks north of Regent Park, easily within walking distant. The next closest No Frills is ten blocks to the west of Regent Park and necessitates either public transport or a vehicle in order to access it. The selection of foodstuffs is greater at the second store and the produce fresher. I have the option, because I have a car, to choose to drive to the second No Frills in order to get better, fresher produce for my family. However, this is not an option for the majority of the residents of Regent Park. Therefore, I am confronted with a choice. Do I shop locally and invest my money back into the local community or use the choices available to me to achieve something better for myself and my loved ones? It makes a difference.

3) Utilizations of the local underground economy. In 2006, Harvard University Press published a book by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh entitled: Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. The book is a result of Venkatesh’s decade-long study of a 10-block neighbourhood on Chicago’s South Side and details the “ghetto capitalism” of the underground economies that are endemic in most urban neighbourhoods. Now, such infrastructures border from the almost illicit to the definitely illegal, yet they are powerful entities that bind urban communities together more deeply than most of us can imagine. The question each of us needs to answer with regard to our acknowledgment and participation in these economies is whether or not unethical is the same as immoral?

At 614 Regent Park we often give cash loans to people. This is against stated Salvation Army policy, yet it is simply the way things work in our neighbourhood. We feel that as the church, one of the services that we should be able to offer our people is support when they hit a bad patch, as we understand that their options to obtain loans from either friends or recognized financial institutions are quite limited.

The past Christmas during our annual kettle appeal for the first time in the history of 614 we decided to pay some of our volunteers. The people we paid were all local community members, all of whom are on some form of welfare stipend or disability allowance. If we paid them a proper salary and ran it “through the books”, then it would have jeopardized their government subsidies. However, these allowances are not nearly adequate enough in order for them to live at anything other than subsistence level. We decided that for a one- month period leading up Christmas, we would be able to give them some extra money in their pockets and gain some more reliable volunteers for our church fundraising effort. So, we paid them cash out of our kettles, “under the table”, so to speak. Unethical? Possibly. Immoral? We don’t think so.

4) Attracting money - investment - into your community. There are two ways to do this. One is by accessing the old- school, service provision mechanisms such as government grants, private foundations, service clubs. I joined the downtown Kiwanis Club, an old and established presence on Bay Street, Canada’s financial district. Through my involvement as a member, 614 Regent Park has received numerous grants enabling us to buy a house for our youth worker interns to live in, a 12-seat van for our kids and youth programs and numerous other projects.

The second way is through the newer dynamics of social entrepreneurship, which takes a somewhat different approach from the philanthropic foundation which dispenses funds to service providers in order for them to deliver a service. It empowers the people who need the help, creating opportunities for them to help themselves such as job creation programs, apprenticeships with local businesses, start-up capital for small business ventures. For example, at 614 Regent Park we run a pre-employment training program funded by the City of Toronto that we call “Dreaming in Colour.”

5) Strategies to attract established economic structures (and therefore necessarily the political structures) to invest or your community. Funding for schools and extra-educational programs; recreational programs: community centres, sports teams, businesses and employment opportunities and provision of services such as banking facilities.

There are three used clothing stores (Thrift stores, we call them in Canada) in the Regent Park neighbourhood. The Salvation Army opened one of them a couple of years ago. I offered my opinion that this was an unwise decision, both as a financial move and in the area of service provision. From the Army’s, middle-class perspective they considered it a good plan, however. Offering, second-hand clothing cheaply to the poor would help the poor out and make money for the Army. The problem is, that poor people generally don’t buy “poor-people clothing”. They buy upscale, brand-name labels in keeping with their values that are materialistic and driven exclusively by concerns of the present and of image. They don’t generally budget or accumulate savings. No one in my community has a Registered Retirement Savings Plan. No one will really shop there and the Army would do better in making money and providing a service, if they opened their store in a more upscale, neighbourhood where all the university kids would undoubtedly shop at it.

In our neighbourhood it would make more sense to open a McDonalds. Everybody will eat there (and I mean everybody) so that it will definitely generate revenue and it will provide job training and employment opportunities if they stick to a local hire policy. No one, however - not McDonalds Canada or The Salvation Army (and I asked both) - are willing to invest the required million dollars in order to establish a franchise. Not in our neighbourhood.

Conclusion

In conclusion, to truly engage in incarnational mission we need to be willing to take upon ourselves the personal, structural, systemic sins of the people we have come to redeem, accepting the myriad of deaths, small and large, that this will entail, as a reincarnation of the Jesus we follow. Nothing less will bring redemption into the lives and of our urban communities.

After all, Jesus did say that in order to find our true lives, we need to be willing to give them up.

Most especially we need to live these ideas out, to incarnate them, in the political playgrounds and economic realms of our age. Neither withdrawing, disengaging, nor fully embracing, but with eyes wide open and shrewd as snakes bending circumstances and structures to the divine will and for the sake of the “friends” of Jesus.

“Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage-heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek; at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died and that is what he died about, that is where the church should be and that is what the church should be about.”

Click here to download a pdf (300 KB)
containing the entire article,
complete with footnotes and a resources/bibliography page.

Writer: Major Geoff Ryan is co-founder and publisher of theRubicon and co-ordinator of the 614 Network. Geoff and his wife Sandra minister in Regent Park, a social housing project in downtown Toronto, Canada.

3 Comments to Incarnate Forum | Geoff Ryan #2

1. Unfortunately, I had to leave the Forum after only 2 sessions due to other commitments, but have had the opportunity to interact with the above text over the last few weeks. Thank you Geoff for the excellent paper which has, along with other of the papers, certainly got me thinking about how to take the corps I run forward in this regard.

   One part of the paper that leapt of the page as I read it first time was the reference to God being unable/unwilling to present himself in a neighbourhood or community if the Church is not present in the way they should be. I’ve been tackling this self same thought myself over recent weeks and months. This has serious implications for how we consider our outreach to broken communities. It suggests that unless we actually are salt and light in those sort of communities then there is no way that God is going to move in them.

   It is no good parachuting into a community these day to ‘evangelise’ it if there is no understanding that there is a greater purpose in life than simply to survive it. Without accompanying revelations of God that immersed in the community then those who are stuck there in the darkness will remain ignorant of the light.
Graeme Smith on April 20th, 2008

2. It’s funny — we had an opposite graffiti incident here. A Christian outreach group planned a graffiti-as-art appreciation day, in which kids were encouraged to express themselves (on paper) through graffiti. It was not too popular with property owners, at least. I think it came across as a bit condescending.

   Anyway, thanks for publishing this paper here. It contains a lot of good points.
Catherine W. on April 21st, 2008

3. Geoff:

   This is a good starting point for discussion. I think though that there is a good-sized distance between serving on a board or volunteering on a socially recognized initiativ , being accountable and all that and being socially active on the street.

   The example of the RIPs illustrates this divide . For some members of the community might appreciate them as the heartfelt memorials they are. But others might them more ominous and threatening, see them as glamourizing violence. Might it not be more refreshing use of energy and memory for individuals posting these tags to volunteer to pull weeds and or pick up litter in the peace garden?

   thanks Andrea
Andrea614Regent on April 24th, 2008

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