The View from the Balcony

On a recent trip to the west coast, I pulled out a book to help pass the time during flights and layovers.  It was a novel that had been recommended by several friends over the years: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.  People who knew I had been to Africa several times and had "inherited" a Congolese son-in-law in recent years thought I should read this.  They were certainly correct ... I wish I had read it years ago, but I'm also glad for the recent timing of engaging this masterfully disturbing and challenging work.

In short, the book is a work of historical fiction involving a missionary family from Georgia that travels to a village in the Congo, fueled by the father's passion to save Africa for Jesus.  It powerfully unpacks the destructive realities of western colonialism and the distorted understanding of gospel/mission fueling its rise in Africa. Underneath the story is an accurate representation of the cultural-social-political situation of the Belgian Congo in the 1960's and the ongoing impact of colonizing power.  It is a story of complicity in the exploitation of people and place.

I want to mention here only a couple of things that I found instructive.  First, there is an understanding that emerges in the main characters of shared participation in brokenness and evil and injustice.  One of main characters gives voice to this.  At one point she says: "Tall and straight I may appear, but...inside...[I'm] a crooked little person trying to tell the truth.  The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes."  Later, speaking of having an abusive, misguided father, she writes: "We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions.  He was my father.  I own half his genes, and all of his history.  Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story."  I am grateful, as we reenter the drama of holy week, that a cross stands at the center of a world encompassing story, a reminder that God in Christ has addressed and absorbed in himself our participation in unspeakable violence.

Second, in light of the last post (in January), the presence of a colonized (and colonizing) gospel lingers in our own cultural context.  It comes in the form of white privilege masked as well-intended charity.  The fact that we have an African-American president and a quickly diversifying population has not yet greatly altered social, political decision-making systems favoring the Anglo population, especially at the local level.  Take another look at key social indicators in West Michigan...and you will find huge disparities related to economics, education, safety, and health...in spite of the presence of nearly 4000 nonprofit organizations in Kent County alone.  This again raises important questions for many of us: What is our understanding of gospel (and "mission")?  How are we complicit in systems of injustice?  Which of our assumptions need to be challenged so that "good news" is actually heard and experienced by all neighbors/citizens?  Why are we hesitant to address unequal power relationships in our own programs/ministries?

This is all messy business.  The Poisonwood character mentioned above reflects on her (and her family's) engagement with another culture: "We constructed our lives around a misunderstanding, and if I ever tried to pull it out and fix it now I would fall down flat.  Misunderstanding is my cornerstone.  It's everyone's, come to think of it.  Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.  They are what we call civilization."  Do you agree?  Given our entanglement with "illusions," how might the truth of God's restoring purposes in our world subvert deeply embedded error and challenge our own imagination(s) for life and "ministry" in neighborhood places?

A church leader recently reached a point of unusual honesty in a group discussion.  When asked to identify his hopes for participating with others in community transformation, he responded: "I am not sure I am ready to dream dreams for West Michigan yet.  I will let you know when I do."  He did not say this because he lacked hope or faith.  He said this because decades worth of healing racism summits, prayer and worship conferences, city wide serving events, charitable giving, evangelistic efforts, and outreach programming have not fundamentally altered underlying causes of injustice or limited growing social fragmentation.  Like other leaders, this pastor recognizes he and his congregation are part of the problem and the potential solution, but he is fatigued by large scale attempts to bring about needed changes.

The significant racial, cultural, and economic separation of people living in metropolitan Grand Rapids and surrounding Kent County is well documented.  A quick look at social research websites produces the following facts.  In a county with a population of 600,000, there are 3149 nonprofit organizations and 760 religious congregations.  Even with more than 40,000 nonprofit jobs and hundreds of churches, most non-Caucasian residents live in an urban environment, and huge disparities with regard to health, economics, and education remain.  For example, the infant mortality rate of African American infants is triple the rate for white infants, the Income Disparity Index measuring the gap in household income by race is well above the national index, the poverty rate is more than three times higher among African Americans than in the Caucasian population, and there is a twenty percent difference in standardized test scores between urban and suburban students.

It is also interesting to note that the public school system in Grand Rapids, with twenty-one percent of students being Caucasian and eighty-three percent falling into the "economically disadvantaged" category, stands in stark contrast with the private Christian school system which mirrors suburban school districts where more than ninety percent of students are white and less than ten percent are considered to be at an economic disadvantage.  In 2007, it was reported that Kent County congregations supplied 2827 volunteers for educational programs, but only a third of the congregations were involved with public schools.  A couple of other tidbits: 1) less than fifteen percent of employees with the City of Grand Rapids are "minorities" when forty-one percent of the total population falls into this (awful) demographic category, 2) only twelve Christian congregations of over one hundred people come close to meeting the formal definition of multi-racial (i.e. eighty percent or less of the regular participants are the "dominant" race).

This limited data is only given here to raise important questions for leaders in churches and faith-based nonprofits.  Why, in an unusually religious community that has so much social service programming, has so little changed with regard to basic health and fairness for all citizens?  Which of our approaches and strategies need to be reconsidered?  What kind of Gospel are we living and proclaiming?  Are we ready to imagine new ways of working with each other and with other community organizations and with our actual neighbors?  Do we need to start with "little" initiatives and creative experiments before forming grandiose visions (which can easily overwhelm and intimidate)?  Have we neglected solidarity and advocacy and sustained relational presence in our community engagement?

I would be interested in your responses to these questions.

I sat down, tired but filled with joyful anticipation.  My wife Vicki and I were about to "marry off" our daughter Jessica, the last of our four children to get married.  It was the third weekend in July, the ceremony was a couple of hours away, and I was taking a brief break from all the last minute preparations.  There was a flurry of activities all around me as friends and family members devoted themselves to making this a special occasion.

As you can imagine, memories of special times and events with my daughter flooded my mind.  I remembered the joy I felt when she made her entry into this world, a tiny bundle of energy showing up in the middle of the night, determined to put her own stamp on things.  I thought of a trip to Mackinaw Island with her and her third-grade classmates, of the hikes she and I had gone on during family vacations to the U.P., and of a life-changing trip to Africa we had taken during her early teen years.  I reflected on the inevitable changes that had come as she moved into early adulthood and on moments of unexpected grief, moments that included the premature deaths of close friends.  I was struck by the "color" and "variety" of her life story at such a relatively young age and wondered what the future held for her and our new son-in-law.

I was also struck by the multiple narratives converging around this event.  The intersection of generational, cultural, familial, collegial, and communal stories was simply fascinating.  Just among immediate and extended family members were sub-plots of faithfulness, betrayal, brokenness, accomplishment, forgiveness, poverty, addiction, courage, disease, health, pain, faith, doubt, and hope.  Some stories had been "playing out" for decades, others were at the introductory stage.  Most were "ordinary" in terms of day-to-day living, but there were definitely enough "spicy" details to keep things interesting.

Shaking off my nostalgic thoughts, I got back to final preparations.  Things went well.  The ceremony was marked by celebration, and the reception was filled with storytelling.  Much to my surprise, I heard several tales about my daughter's life I had never heard before.  Friends, co-workers, and family members recalled events and experiences that only deepened my love for her and my appreciation to God.  As close as Jessica and I had been through the years, there were parts of her journey hidden from me, and it was in an environment of shared stories that I discovered more about her.

What does all this have to do with church life, community-oriented ministry, and neighborhood transformation?  I'll connect some of the dots in the next blog entry.  In the meantime, you can "chew on" an old quote by Leonard Sweet.  "Without a story, one is without a self, and without a community.  Story is the beginning and continuum of community, for it is by adding voice upon voice to story upon story that communities are built.  In fact, a 'narrative culture' is perhaps the most succinct definition of a 'community.' The push to narrate is as strong if not stronger than it ever has been.  Stories function in postmodern culture where 'propositional truths' once functioned in modern culture.  The development of a moral life depends on one's capacity to hear and tell significant stories" (Faithquakes, pp. 109-110).

"In the beginning is the relationship" (Martin Buber, I and Thou).

As I gain more coaching/consulting experience in the work of church and community development, I am becoming more alert to the difficulty many nonprofits and congregations have in deepening relationships with "others."  Quite often, this difficulty can be traced to an organizational environment that places a high value on efficient programming, measurable outcomes, and functional participation.  In addition, there can be an underlying anxiety about how to "follow up" with others and connect with them outside an established structure.  For example, it seems much easier for board and council members to support a capital campaign or approve a project than to have meaningful conversations with other community leaders.

Kenneth Gergen, author of An Invitation to Social Construction, addresses many of the reasons why we currently think and act in fundamentally non-relational categories.  One area on which he focuses is that of "learning and knowing."  For a long time, those of us living in the Western world have been taught to: 1) remain dispassionate, 2) control our surroundings, 3) convert observations to numerals, 4) search for the answer, and 5) separate truth from practice.  If we are to learn about our world and gain "true knowledge," this approach must be taken and other approaches dismissed as "subjective."  As Gergen points out (in critique of this approach), it is increasingly hard to make the case that "we know most about each other when we care the least, when we are cool and distant."

Different ways of "learning" and "understanding" are emerging that honor the relational realities of "what is."  These include: 1) narrative expression, 2) collaborative inquiry, and 3) action research.  In short, we can't discover who we really are and what our world is like without "getting inside" our own stories and those of others, without working with others for greater awareness, or apart from actual participation in "making a difference."  Knowledge is thus embedded in and through the relational efforts of actual people who are "making contact" with their particular environment(s).  This is all very encouraging to me (and my VIS colleagues), since our coaching and training methodogies reflect the importance of shared discovery, conversational relationships, and active partnerships on the journey of community transformation.  We are beginning to see new insights and creative actions emerge as organizations (and their leaders) give priority to relational engagement.

What about your situation?  Can you identify with the difficulty of cultivating a deeper appreciation for relationships in your organizational context?  What are the specific challenges (if any)?  What are the particular benefits of "going relational"?  How might these "new" ways of learning increase involvement in neighborhood/community transformation?  Your comments are welcome.

In his latest book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of two medical researchers, who in the late '50's and early '60's, stumbled across a Pennsylvania town where residents were far healthier than any other town/city in the United States.  Their research concluded that these residents "were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills."  Gladwell describes the initial resistance of the medical community to their findings.  "Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were - that is, our genes.  It depended on the decisions we made - on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system.  No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community."

The researchers "had to convince the medical establishment to think about health...in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn't be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual's personal choices or actions in isolation.  They had to look beyond the individual.  They had to understand the culture he or she was part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from.  They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are."  Not surprisingly, Gladwell goes on to tell multiple "success" stories that demonstrate why several things really matter: when people are born, where they are born, what their parents did for a living, the specific circumstances of their upbringing, the traditions and attitudes they inherited from their ancestors, the cultural legacies of which they are part, and a host of other "environmental" factors.  He completely destroys the common myth(s) that individuals arrive at places of great influence and find success simply by being smarter, working harder, and having more ability than everyone else.

This attention to multiple factors in a given context (or "environment") resonates with those of us who are involved in the work of church and community development.  We know, first hand, that place and time and relationships and family backgrounds and cultural heritage and institutional histories and vocational opportunities/experiences and a host of other realities contribute (or not) to the "success" (shalom?) of neighborhoods and communities.  In fact, an asset-based approach to community development involves identifying the best, most life-giving dimensions of diverse stories and varied resources.  Paying attention to the many details of a given environment (and discerning what God might be up to) is vital to sustaining meaningful transformation.  So then..........why does "looking beyond the individual" seem like "heresy" to many church, agency, and governmental leaders?  What produces resistance to planning and acting out of a deeper awareness of multiple community narratives and systemic issues?  How might we grow in our discernment of environmental factors and uncover "hidden" resources for community success?  I have some hunches about all this, but I would love to hear from you via the comment section or e-mail.