THE BIRTH OF GOODNESS

They gathered to birth a future. Not just any future, but one they would actually like to inhabit—a future worthy of their life’s investment.

I got to welcome a new life into the world this week. After 30 hours of helping my friend labor, I watched in amazement as a new child was born. Having lost a baby to stillbirth 14 years ago, I witnessed this live birth as a healing deep in my soul.

When one has experienced great loss, new birth is all the more dramatic, miraculous, and earth-shattering.

The birth of my new friend came on the heels of another dramatic event. I had been present a few days earlier as 75 young Christian leaders wondered together why an “active faith matters.” This was FTE’s second Christian Leadership Forum—our theme celebrated the faith-impetus of justice movements over the past fifty years. Young leaders aged 18-35 joined pastors, ministers, scholars and academics to embody an intergenerational, multiracial microcosm of the church across North America. They gathered to birth a future. Not just any future, but one they would actually like to inhabit—a future worthy of their life’s investment.

Most conferences are far from dramatic. What made this forum so was the contrast between great loss and new birth.

When we look at “church” these days, we see great loss. We hear about “the nones”—those masses of Millennials who’ve taken a hike from organized religion despite a spiritual hunger. And I, as one of their elders, empathize. My peers and I know the reasons they’ve walked out: “Church” often looks like buildings and outdated structures that reinforce walls rather than break them down.

We also felt great loss when we saw the breaking news. On the same day and a mere 25 miles from the celebration that closed out our FTE gathering, a different party ended with yet another alarming incident of police brutality against black teenagers. We count enormous loss.

Loss makes these images seem a little more miraculous, dramatic and hope-filled:

• Contemplative worship at a graffiti wall, where the liturgy was literally “the work of the people” drawing their hopes and dreams of racial justice, the end of poverty, and kin-dom of heaven on earth to the beats of a DJ.
• A visioning session in which followers of Christ called out the headlines they want to help shape by 2020, including “Income Gap Narrowing,” “Climate Change Reversed,” and “Earth Finally Free of War.”
• A few moments with United Methodist Bishop Minerva Carcaño in which she reminded us that, “If you imagine a circle of the world’s most vulnerable children, the closer you get to the center of that circle, the closer you are to Jesus.”
• Geographical clusters who named next steps such as: a gathering in Seattle to bring together “all these cool Christians doing interesting stuff in their basements, so we can see each other, and see that ministry doesn’t look like dying churches,”; a gathering in DC to “motivate more young leaders to go outside the norms,”; and a dinner in Atlanta where “ecumenical and multi-racial partners can seek connections between theology and issues in their neighborhoods.”

We were only together for 72 hours. But something was born. It was the birth of a small but growing goodness, connecting faithful people to a hurting world, one act of God’s justice at a time.

WILL MILLENNIAL CHRISTIANS SAVE OUR CITIES?

I spend a lot of time talking to diverse 20-something Christians who are looking for ways to make a difference in the world. That work takes on stark urgency this summer, in light of Ferguson, Baltimore, and other recent events that tore the mask off the myth that we live in a post-racial society.

The young adults I encounter span the racial, ethnic, socio-economic, and theological spectrum. They are part of a generation that’s drifting from organized religion, according to the recent Pew Research Center study on American religion. But they are often deeply spiritual, drawn to ancient sources that awaken holy longings to build hope, rather than ignore the despair around them.

Connecting this spiritual hunger to real-world practices is key to the work of the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE), a leadership incubator for Christian ministry where I serve as a research fellow. Through FTE’s recent Christian Leadership Forum — Active Faith Matters — more than 70 Millennials committed to justice and ministry gathered with lay leaders, pastors, and scholars to design a future they would like to see, using the stories and songs of faith-based social justice movements of the past 50 years for inspiration.

Many of these sacred activists will engage their cities this summer, putting into practice real-world skills that help them address fatal flaws in the society in which they are coming of age.

Here are four of the ways young adults are building up an “infrastructure of hope” by living and leading through their Christian faith to strengthen communities — in a time when news of social unrest seems unending.

1. They are working at Freedom Schools.

This summer on a farm near Knoxville, Tennessee, the Children’s Defense Fund will train some 2,000 college-aged students to step into the lives of school children, helping close the achievement gap that occurs in underserved neighborhoods during the languishing months of summer.

Hiram Jamison IV, a 26-year-old Pentecostal from Oakland, California, will spend his fourth summer in a row teaching in a Freedom School. This year, he’ll be using math and science to help fifth graders “begin to think like little engineers, all the while tying it into our culture as people of African descent in America and beyond.”

There are 32 Freedom Schools in California alone, and hundreds across the country: they all need volunteers to lift up this hands-on program — based on Christian principles and values — that aims to eliminate the effects of poverty while empowering children of color to “make a difference in themselves, their families and communities.”

2. They are taking twenty-first century Freedom Rides.

Fourteen people — six of them under the age of 30 — just completed a deep-dive through the Southern sites where non-violent protesters challenged racism and won the Voting Rights Act 50 years ago. Hosted by the Raleigh, North Carolina-based School for Conversion, these journeys amount to a holy pilgrimage — time for learning, lamentation, and relationship-building that gives birth to action around contemporary justice issues.

Katelyn Chapman, a white 26-year-old who took a Freedom Ride a few summers ago, describes how the trip helped her understand the life of an undocumented friend: “I realized a totally different reality that my friends and neighbors here are living with, having to be in fear of the very people who are supposed to keep them safe.”

Chapman, a member of the Evangelical Covenant Church, tells of the simple difference made by the relationships born on the journey: “The social gap just seems to be bridged if people become friends with the people the news talks about.”

3. They are partnering with local activists.

The Dream Catcher Summer Listening project in Richmond, Virginia pays urban teens a small fee to get to know their neighbors. They send teens out to interview elders, block by block, learning what they like about where they live and what they would change if they could.

At the end of the summer, the community gathers for a party and listens to what the young people learned. Out of that party will form an action group to create achievable goals. Last year’s actions included the birth of a block club, a creative and performing arts youth project, and a peace and justice circle.

Based on the principles of Asset Based Community Development, the Dream Catcher project will employ 20 teens and six young adult interns this summer as researchers, interns, and story-catchers as part of Embrace Richmond.

4. They are intentionally weaving themselves into their cities.

A longer list would include young adults serving as pastoral interns at vibrant team-led ministries where they help create what one D.C. pastor calls “liturgies of the streets.”

It might also include the young adult who is living in an intentional community in Philadelphia while she investigates “sustainable ways of being in the world, ways that are nourishing and satisfying” but not driven by financial success alone.

Or young adults who are finding a mentor who’s creating new forms of community while building networks of urban farmers or working through a local court system to introduce restorative justice.

Or taking a seminary class behind bars in classrooms where both inmates and non-inmates study scripture together and witness new meanings emerge. I’ve recently met pastors doing all of these things — and taking young people along with them.

It is, in short, an exciting time to be a young person who wants to make an impact and ignite change in the world.

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Instead of heading off to build homes in Belize or dig wells in the Dominican Republic, some young people are answering a call to work in Detroit, Richmond, Oakland, Atlanta — the list goes on — to address some of the root causes of poverty and other forms of systemic injustice very close to home.

They are savvy and street smart. They are fueled by deep passions and connected to wide streams of spiritual sustenance. And they are looking for older Christians as role models.

As, Genevieve, a 20-something white Quaker woman recently told me: “I am looking for models of Christianity about which I can say: these people understand and are led by the Christ that I understand and want to be led by.”

If you are committed to the church and have a desire to help Millennials find their way back to Christian community, I challenge you to consider how you might support the ways they are engaging in meaningful, sustainable, hands-on justice work and then help create spaces for them to reflect on the work they are doing.

Notice them. Help them name their gifts. Nurture the leadership, power, courage, and compassion they already hold to address the systems of injustice that drain life. This is the way toward hope, the way toward a future God is calling us to create.

Vocation in Between the Aftermath of Violence and a Hoped-For Future

What future does God envision for us? What future do we long to see? What are we willing to do to give shape to it?

These questions, written by FTE President Stephen Lewis, are ringing in my ears as I follow on-the-ground reports of what’s happening in Baltimore through my FTE friends writing on Facebook and Twitter. What immediate future does God envision for us? What immediate future do we long to see? What are we willing to do now to give shape to it?

We are heading into summer, a time when people go outside to celebrate, organize, and simply be together in their highs and lows. I have a sickening feeling that it will be a summer of violence. Those of you who have experienced firsthand militarized police forces, deeply disenfranchised young people, and our desperately skewed distribution of wealth and privilege: do you share a feeling of inevitability?

It is inevitable—and a good thing—that there will be more outrage, more speaking out and more seeing the stark reality of injustices, now that the cumulative deaths of Trayvon, Michael, Eric, Freddie and so many others have ripped the mask off the myth that we live in a post-racial society.

But is violence inevitable? And what are we called to do in the aftermath of now if we want to see a future filled with hope? Is there a way that we—a strong network of faith leaders whose friendships and histories of collaboration belie the words “racial divide”—might strategize and intervene to create an infrastructure of possibility, an architecture of hope?

Our vocations equip us to act now in our communities to mindfully create zones of hospitality and nonviolence where cops, parents and youth gather to see one another face-to-face before another death occurs. We could prototype what it looks like for diverse churches to proactively build and strengthen relationships across the sectors of a town, neighborhood, or community that might prevent another violent death—instead of only being there to provide funeral services in the aftermath of the next one.

While I don’t really know what such a movement would look like, I do know that we are —thousands strong—people of all races, denominations, and ages who care deeply about racial injustice and are powerfully situated as agents of change in communities large and small across North America. I’ve witnessed hundreds of FTE gatherings where you have created temporary congregations around our common call as Christians to a common good for all.

Why has God given us Facebook, Twitter, and each other? How might we use our connections—virtual and real—to co-create the near future we would all like to inhabit?

When speaking about faith, vocation, and leadership, Stephen says: “There is a future that mourns if we don’t step into our own sense of meaning and purpose.”¹

Might there also be a future that rejoices because we heeded Esther’s call and stepped forth boldly for such a time as this?

Some of you are actively shaping a hoped-for future now. What does this look like? What success are you seeing, particularly in the wake of moments like Baltimore, that can be instructive to others?

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¹Lewis, Stephen, “Called to Shape the Future,” in Being Called: Secular, Sacred, and Scientific Perspectives, eds. David Yaden, Theo McCall, and J. Harold Ellens (Westport, CT: Praeger, Forthcoming, 2015), Chapter 19.

Do you ever fall asleep while meditating?

Do you ever fall asleep while meditating?

Yesterday I had lunch with Buddhist priest and novelist, Catherine Gammon. Ten Sweet Briar students gathered with me, pausing in the middle of a busy day to hear her story. Catherine gave away her three beloved cats, sold her house, and drove across the country to take up residence at Green Gulch Farm, a Soto Zen retreat  in Northern California. She did so because she wanted to find a way to live that made sense in the midst of layers of violence.

At one point in our conversation, a student asked, with some urgency "Do you ever fall asleep while meditating? You know we're all thinking it!"

Catherine gave us a technical answer, describing the position of the spine in meditation and the triangular folding of one's body on a cushion that awakens her not if, but when, she sometimes begins to nod off. 

And then she said something like this: After seven days of deep practice in community, the world around you changes. It becomes brighter, more vibrant, more alive.

What practices do you have that keep you awake to the world around you? What practices do I engage that make my world  brighter and more alive?" Those are the questions with which Catherine's visit left me. You can find more about her and her books here. http://catherinegammon.wordpress.com/writing/

Worried about the Church? Meet these young Christian leaders.

If you are concerned about the lack of young leaders in the mainline church, walk with me for a few minutes.

I spent a day earlier this month on the streets of Atlanta with more than 60 young adult Christians. We
covered 3 miles in the blazing sun, learning about undocumented immigrants--more than 33,000 of them--who are currently detained in the United States. As we walked, we talked and sang and prayed.

A thick, rich, modern version of "The Canterbury Tales" unfolded. In Chaucer's literary classic, travelers entertain one another with their life stories as they make pilgrimage toward the shrine of the martyr St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury, England.

Led by immigrant-activist Anton Flores-Maisonet, we too enacted the ancient practice of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is a way of seeking God on a path to a holy place, and it creates community out of strangers as they journey together -- either to the Holy Land or to one of many holy places made sacred by the lives of saints, apostles, martyrs or prophets.

My colleagues and I at The Fund for Theological Education gathered these young people together, seeking nominations from networks of congregations, volunteer service organizations, campus ministries and intentional communities from across the U.S.My colleagues and I at The Fund for Theological Education gathered these young people together, seeking nominations from networks of congregations, volunteer service organizations, campus ministries and intentional communities from across the U.S.

Our goal was simple: to create space for young Christian leaders to find each other, support each other and receive strength for the journey.Our goal was simple: to create space for young Christian leaders to find each other, support each other and receive strength for the journey.

Our destination on this pilgrimage was the resting place of the 20th-century prophet the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose “I Have a Dream” speech celebrates its 50th anniversary this week. But as is often the case, the journey itself was holy.

The vision to which King gave voice on Aug. 28, 1963, inspired us as we traversed the sidewalks. We began at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, where we learned that immigrants without documentation often appear in court without legal representation.

Between stops on the route -- as if built to do this -- a 20-something would sidle up to someone and say, “So tell me your story.”

The young leaders I journeyed with don’t see the borders, the divisions, the walls, the pews or the collection plates. In fact, they are drawn to the edges between race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, worship style, denomination, cherished biblical passages, paid work and volunteerism.

They dream of establishing nonprofit agencies and entrepreneurial ministries that gather communities and reunite neighborhoods around shared meals, celebrations and lament. They are hybrids.They dream of establishing nonprofit agencies and entrepreneurial ministries that gather communities and reunite neighborhoods around shared meals, celebrations and lament. They are hybrids.

I met Joe Davis, a spoken-word poet wearing an “I have a dream” T-shirt. He lives in an artists’ residence hosted by Redeemer Lutheran Church in North Minneapolis. There, Davis wants to create “a thriving community of empowered individuals who have moved from silence to expression.”

Charlene Brown, a former atheist turned evangelical progressive, also walked with us. She is seeking ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and leads a community of Christians on the campus of an elite public university. First 30 and now 300 people gather to study the Bible with her and call into question the university’s dramatically declining ability to retain racial/ethnic minority students.

I also met a young man who purposely got arrested as part of a movement to challenge immigration laws. A graduate of Kenyon College, Marco Saavedra is an adept interpreter of Scripture. He is helping create an “immigrant theology” based on Exodus and the Jesus story while he organizes for immigrants’ rights. He’s a prophetic leader wearing shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt that reads “I am undocumented.”The T-shirts and tattoos of my fellow pilgrims tell a story of 21st-century Christian revival: “I heart LOVE,” “Revolution,” “I am with the nuns on the bus,” “All shall be well” and “Ubuntu” (a South African Bantu term translated as “human kindness”).

At one point in our pilgrimage, we paused in front of Grady Memorial Hospital. We learned that this formerly public hospital dropped kidney dialysis when it became for-profit, leaving undocumented immigrants without a ready source of critical life support.

Outside the hospital, an elderly woman approached Demarius Walker, one of our group. She asked him why he cared about immigrants -- an issue she saw as being about “outsiders” and clearly not his own people.

Walker, an undergraduate at Boston University, suggested that there might be a connection between the pilgrimage we were walking and the civil rights marches of her era.

Perhaps, he said, the rhetoric that separates “us” from “them” falls flat in the face of a universal longing for freedom to cross borders, get an education, work hard and pursue a dream of self-sufficiency. She got it, Demarius told us later. And she thanked him for his time.

A little farther down the road, another young man was questioned by an elder at the front door of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, which is near King’s grave site. Again, a rising Christian leader explained with loving tenderness a real-time awareness of King’s words that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Later, as we reflected on the experience, one pilgrim exclaimed, “The people on the streets were confused by the fact that we were black, Latino and white people marching together.” A moment later, he added, “We are world changers. We were so intertwined: we reflected the kingdom of God yesterday.” A fellow pilgrim reminded us, “Courage does not skip generations.”

A movement of young Christian leaders is afoot, and -- like it or not -- they are taking church “into the wild.” This is a concept that pastor and hip-hop scholar Michael W. Waters uses to describe the places occupied by a generation of young people completely unaffiliated with organized religion but achingly hungry and surprisingly responsive to the gospel when it’s wrapped up with the language, customs and concerns of their lives.

Perhaps they are prophets of what social entrepreneur Linda Kay Klein predicts will replace the “service economy” with a “purpose economy” -- one made up of young people who build lives based on personal meaningfulness, doing good for the world and choosing community over isolation.

These social activists may be a minority among young Christians, but they are gaining strength and voice, using social media with savvy and dreaming up new markers of success on an economic horizon in which they’ve been promised little.

Young Christian leaders are rising up. Churches, pastors and laypeople from across the theological spectrum have given them birth. Causes worth fighting for call forth their purpose.

Now, stand by -- or better yet, join in -- as they build their own dreams.