Over two hundred liberal religious activists gathered for Jim Wallis’ “Pentecost 2008” conference in Washington, D.C. to prepare for the 2008 U.S. elections. As part of its “Vote out Poverty” campaign, Wallis’ Sojourners / Call to Renewal group is urging evangelicals to “broaden” their issue list to include expanding welfare state programs. Yet, in spite of this stated desire to grow its appeal, the Sojourners event remained predictably aligned with the goals and objectives of the Democratic Party, heaping praise on Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, and saving its criticisms for religious conservatives.
Perhaps realizing the enormity of the societal wonders that “Vote Out Poverty” promises to achieve through government, this year’s Sojourners event focused on national and local networking to mobilize voters. Sojourners’ Senior Political Director, Adam Taylor, explained: “I believe many of you feel the electricity in the air of what I think is the most important election of my entire life.”
“There is a lot at stake in this election,” Taylor said. “There is a lot more at stake after this election.” At Pentecost 2009, attendees will focus on pressuring elected officials to attend to issues supported by Sojourners. “This is a critical moment for us to become the church . . . to use our prophetic voice to put poverty at the top of the national agenda,” he said. Taylor encouraged the activists to hope for “a nation in which the church leads the effort to address the root causes of poverty.”
In speaking of the upcoming presidential election, Sojourners/Call to Renewal director Jim Wallis claimed that the “first consequence [of Pentecost] was a new economy. (File photo) |
Wallis celebrated that this was the 12th annual Sojourners/Call to Renewal conference. He recalled that in Fall 1996, Sojourners held its first Call to Renewal gathering across the street from where the Christian Coalition simultaneously held a much larger conference. Wallis joked about his adversary’s decline: “It’s twelve years later, and we’re here, and the Christian Coalition is, well . . . .”
According to Wallis, the Book of Acts’ description of the early church reports that the “first consequence [of Pentecost] was a new economy. The Bible says there wasn’t a needy person among them.” His remarks concurred with Taylor on the political necessity of grassroots pressure: “No matter who your favorite candidate is, they won’t be able to make the big changes without social movements pressing.” Consequently, Wallis explained, “We’re not making this a big national media thing—this is about training, equipping.”
Peggy Flanagan, Deputy National Field Director of Wellstone Action, instructed the Sojourners crowd, “Voter registration and voter turnout are going to be the keys to us building this movement. Only half the people in this country turn out and vote, and are those the folks turning out right now that we want to make decisions for us? Nope, because there’s still poverty.” She continued, “That’s why we’re doing ‘Poverty Sunday,’ [the “Vote Out Poverty” campaign’s voter registration, education, and pledge card drive] on September 21st; a lot of states have a thirty day [registration] deadline.”
Flanagan tutored the audience on how to register voters from local churches. She told participants to introduce themselves, comment on the problem of poverty, offer the solution of voting out poverty, and then make the “ask”—“Can I count on you to vote against poverty?” to potential voters. She encouraged her audience to “not be afraid” to make the ask, and to “signal that the church leadership is behind the campaign.” Flanagan asserted, “Being that this is faith-based, we have God on our side, and don’t be afraid to talk about it!”
Aaron Graham of Sojourners and Rachel Anderson of Boston Faith and Justice Network coached participants on the reason for and ways of building a local team to advance the campaign. Graham divided attending Sojourners activists into “cohorts” to make networking phone calls. The winning cohort set up 64 one-on-one meetings with community members about joining the “Vote Out Poverty” effort.
Subtitled “Training for Change,” the June 13-15 conference featured a Friday lecture by Dr. Marshall Ganz, civil rights movement veteran and Harvard professor. In his lecture on movement organizing, Ganz commented, “The work of fixing the system will not be done until the work of helping the poor is done because that is how we will know we fixed it.” Borrowing from Senator Barack Obama, he remarked, “Hope is not only audacious, as someone said; hope is substantial, because hope is what enables us to deal with problems.”
Chuck Gutenson, previously an Asbury Seminary professor, and currently Sojourners’ Chief Operating Officer, led a theological workshop on “Why Jesus Wants Us to Care about Social Justice.” He asserted that Christians must reject the “old definition of justice that Plato deploys, [which is that] you get what you deserve.” Instead, argued Gutenson, Christians should adopt the “Biblical notion of justice [which is] different from Plato’s . . . [that can be seen in] God’s goodness [that] gives without consideration of merit.” He also contended that Colossians 1:16-17 implies that God created government for this purpose. And he instructed participants to “look at public policy to achieve the goals that God” has.
Rejecting the notion that Christ was apolitical, Gutenson instead said that Christ was “not partisan . . . but was concerned about the life of the polis [city, political unit].” He said that atonement for sin may not have been the “primary” reason for Christ’s incarnation, that more importantly, “Jesus comes to show us the life that pleases God.” Not elaborating on what he considered God’s specific purpose for government, Gutenson seemed to indicate that it might play a greater role in redistributing wealth, as he criticized James Dobson for protesting that ‘high taxes are the reason we have double-income families’ instead of allowing a stay at home parent. Gutenson objected, “We normalize the market as the thing we build the economy around,” and he suggested that the preferable alternative would be to build the market around individuals.
When one conference participant questioned how “the pursuit of social justice brings people into a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ,” another questioned if such a pursuit really needed to do so.
Hailing the providential purpose of Barack Obama’s candidacy, retired United Methodist minister and activist James Lawson declared, “Whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not . . . our nation is experiencing one of those things that I like to call an infilling of God.” Clarifying the awakening’s source, Lawson explained, “By some convolution of history that no one understands—no one predicted this . . . pundits [said] two years ago that the inevitable candidate would be the Democratic candidate in 2008.”
Retired United Methodist minister James Lawson referred to Barack Obama’s nomination as a “Kairos moment,” and decried “the Jim Dobson and Pat Robertson version of Christianity” that “is not about Jesus, it is about white male domination.” (File Photo courtesy UMNS) |
“It was a part of this convolution that caused a young, 46 year-old man, to put his name forward [as a presidential candidate],” Lawson enthusiastically exclaimed. He warned, “It’s a moment of Kairos, and every moment of Kairosis a moment of peril and danger.” Lawson claimed that “according to sociologists, 50 million white Americans today live with this fundamental spiritual reality” of believing that black people were not “made by the same God.” He decried “the Jim Dobson and Pat Robertson version of Christianity” that, he asserted to much applause, “is not about Jesus, it is about white male domination!”
Following the triumph of black civil rights, suggested Lawson, the church said, “’There’s another sinner we can make scapegoat, and that’s gay and lesbian people.” Speaking of a lesbian clergywomen, he objected that “the United Methodist [Church] embraced a daughter for 40 years and then shunned her.” Lawson contended that people needed to “stop judging the impoverished for not working” because “poverty is structural, it is systemic; it has never been because some people are lazy or some people don’t work.”
“Emerging Church” guru Brian McLaren, author of the recent book Everything Must Change, addressed a group of young people at the conference’s “Emerging Leaders Dinner.” There he theorized that “we are right on the cusp of a huge shift . . . a shift in the Christian” world. He also echoed the sentiments of other speakers, saying “I’ve got a lot of hope about this election. I think some things could change . . . but you can’t put your trust in human beings. We [Christians] put our trust in the living God.”
McLaren exhorted his young audience to “Get your hope in the living God . . . and don’t let people look down on your youth.” He cautioned the audience about “what you say and how you say it, how you spend your money, what kind of lifestyle you live, how you treat other people, and . . . [concern for personal] purity” to earn elders’ respect. McLaren warned, “So many Christians disqualify themselves from what they could have been because they didn’t keep track of their personal private lives.”
Comparing current religious trends with the Reformation, McLaren observed, “We’re all quick to call each other heretics . . . maybe what we need to say is that we’re at a time” that corresponds to Protestant-Catholic conflicts of the Reformation. “Go back to the scriptures and really wrestle with what’s there; that’s what they did 500 years ago.” McLaren also suggested that labeling things right and left is not always helpful, and that some people on both sides care about the common good. He added, “That’s one of the brilliant moves of Bono; Bono will make friends with Jesse Helms.”
McLaren reinterpreted the Gospel parable of the shrewd manager as Jesus calling his followers to, “stop working for the manager and start working for the farmers. I think what Jesus is saying is stop working for the system that is hurting people and start working for the poor.” He said that political speech in the church “must teach what Jesus taught in the manner Jesus taught it,” and should “complexify dualisms and bipolarities and get us out of this binary thinking.”
“Jesus Christ came to liberate those who were in chains of all forms,” said United Methodist minister and panelist, Joe Daniels. Daniels lamented, “Ninety percent of what the church is about now has nothing to do with the Kingdom of God or Jesus Christ.” Christ’s liberating work to the impoverished, declared Daniels, included “those who are impoverished because they’re the wrong gender, those who are impoverished because they’re the wrong race.”
Reverend Daniels challenged listeners to action, charging, “For us to sit in the church and be content [for preaching] to not be agitating the powers that be . . . is an abomination!” He opined that in Peter’s healing of a beggar in Acts 3, “the real power of that text is that this [beggar] is someone marginalized, disenfranchised, who has risen to his feet to call to account those that seem to have it all together.”
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