I’ve always thought of myself as a justice-oriented, do-gooder-type person, but over the years, I’ve become a bit fuzzy about what exactly that means. For example, most people would say it’s good to donate to charities and worthy causes, but how many times have charities and worthy causes misspent, misappropriated, or misjudged? What about donating goods after natural disasters? International adoptions? Microloans? Many things that sound good on the surface—and that are almost always well-intended—aren’t necessarily doing the good work we think they are. It also seems that far too often when someone says “justice, ” what they really mean is good intentions and a quick fix.

In his new book, Slow Kingdom Coming, Kent Annan makes clear that good intentions can only take us so far, and that the work of building God’s kingdom is anything but quick. He writes, “we don’t want to think … that our good intentions are enough, as though God wouldn’t expect us to love our neighbors in the best possible way.” And the best possible way, he continues, is by creating deep and lasting change that, almost by definition, comes slowly.

Annan does know a thing or two about implementing deep and lasting change; he is the co-director of a non-profit focused on education in Haiti, where he has worked within the same community for over a decade. In fact, he and his wife lived within that community, getting to know its power dynamic, its practices, and its unspoken but understood ways of living. He has lived as those in the community have lived—with no electricity or running water, for instance—while keeping in mind that for him it is a choice, and one he can undo at any moment. For those around him, it is a way of life. In a world of quick-fix, summer-only mission trips, this type of long-term commitment and self-awareness is refreshing.

All of this said, Annan is sure not to use his expertise as a sledgehammer, condemning those who engage in one-stop justice shopping. Instead, he takes care to call out the quick-fix, rescue mentality far too many ascribe to, while also noting that the desire for a quick-fix rescue is coming from a place of care, compassion, and desire to build God’s kingdom on earth, as in Heaven. The truth is, he writes, too few people know how to make that happen in a way that is deep and sustainable.

To demonstrate this dilemma, Annan opens Slow Kingdom Coming by describing the frustrations of people who have awakened to the need for justice, but aren’t quite sure what to do to implement it. Their attempts fall flat, feel empty, somehow don’t seem to truly fit their desires to faithfully answer God’s call to help others. In answer to their question of “what now, ” Annan presents what he calls “five faithful practices” essential for deep and sustainable change. These practices—attention, confession, respect, partnering, and truthing—shun the urgency that desires quick fixes, and instead put forward an urgency and hope rooted in faithfulness.

By pulling from a wide variety of real-life stories, Annan ensures that each practice can be applied to an individual as well as a church or group effort. They may have to be tweaked a bit depending on the circumstances—for instance, most people cannot choose to live in another country for an extended period of time, or even travel back and forth with great frequency—but Slow Kingdom Coming is certainly not a “how-to” book with a limited audience. Anyone called to the work of justice can find a way to implement these five crucial practices within their own context.

The first practice, attention, is rooted in a true awakening to injustice. Most people want to do good, but it takes intentional focus on the injustices that surround us to determine which of the many we are called to address. This is not done in a vacuum. Instead, we awaken to injustice by “thoughtfully choosing who we talk with, what stories we read, what trips we take, what art we take in.” Importantly, Annan points out that part of this intentional action includes “church members [choosing] to put themselves in situations where their eyes would be opened.” This is an uncomfortable spot to be in; we may truly want to help, but are we willing to be among those we hope to care for?

This is the sort of issue Annan tackles in the second practice: confession. We aren’t always willing to commit to all that it will take to effect true change, and none of us come from a singular place of desire to do justice. Instead our desires are both altruistic and selfish, in that doing good makes us feel good, as well as makes us look good to others. Annan may be writing a book about the “right” way to help, but he by no means excludes himself from the need for confession. He admits, among other things, that he is now focused mainly on what is good for his family and that often times his protests of injustice are weak. These were confessions I could especially relate to at my current stage of life, and I appreciated the openness with which Annan exposed his own weaknesses rather than hide or ignore them.

This is one way that confession helps us and others: it binds us together to lift one another up. Also, by performing confession we move to a place where we recognize our faults, acknowledge that we are not “heroes, ” and therefore become more receptive to the third practice: respect. Respect, Annan writes, is the “golden rule” for helping. Annan pays special attention to the need for respect in personal relationships as those relationships are the “primary ways our imaginations are transformed so we can move from sympathy to empathy.” But the practice of respect means more than respect between individuals. It also means respect between justice-seeker and community. For example, will giving away free shoes put local shoe vendors out of business? It is only in considering the full range of implications for those we are trying to help that true help can be given.

Respect also means talking to and partnering with local leaders and any agencies already working in the community. The practice of partnering takes away the self-designation of “hero, ” and puts in its place a deep respect for peoples’ ability to find their own ways to flourish. Through partnering, a common vision is born and we move away from doing for other people to doing with other people. This is another area of Slow Kingdom Coming where Annan doesn’t shy away from pointing out the tendency of North American Christians toward quick fixes, yet he does so in a way more likely to bring enlightenment than offense. Case in point, Annan uses as an example the popular practice of child sponsorship. This, he writes, is an “unequal, ” or “rescue” partnership: just send a small amount of money each month, and a young child will get an education, food, and be rescued from a life of poverty. Donations to these sponsor-a-child charities come from an “impulse of compassion, ” but sponsorship programs ignore the child’s family and community, and the efforts both are putting into raising the child. This creates a “savior” situation in which the donor feels, consciously or otherwise, that he or she is solely responsible for “saving” the child whose picture hangs on the fridge. This is not a true partnership; it’s a hero complex. This is fueled by our lack of knowledge; we are seldom told or given the opportunity to learn what exactly it is that the parents and community are doing for that child. They infomercials don’t show us, and the monthly letters don’t tell us. That’s where truthing comes in.

Truthing is a word Annan uses to mean checking the big-picture assessment against the reality on the ground, and is a practice tied directly into respect and partnering. By providing the respect to listen intently and intentionally to the needs and life stories of others, and by partnering with communities and pre-existing agencies, we can learn what’s “on the ground.” The practice of truthing also allows us to see what justice efforts are or are not working, so that the same ineffective efforts don’t continue to be made, and so that effective efforts are given more resources.

Truthing is one of the hardest practices in many ways, because it does require an on-the-ground presence, which can be uncomfortable for many, and because it’s not always easy to realize the full implications of what one sees while on the ground without knowing the community’s history. And knowing that can take years, if it can ever be fully done at all.

Which is why, among other reasons, Annan says God’s is a slow kingdom coming. We all want to help now, and preferably in a way easy and comfortable for us and our families. Unfortunately, things seldom work out that way. As Annan makes clear through his many real-life examples and analogies, reaching deep and sustainable justice is a long, hard process. There are undoubtedly some of us better suited to the quick fixes when those are needed, and others who are better suited for the long, slow haul. To find out for which area we are best suited, we must start at practice number one: attention. Faithful attention will show us what breaks our hearts, and where we fit in the hard work of kingdom building.

Annan writes at the end of Slow Kingdom Coming that this book is for him a lament, a commitment, and a declaration of hope: We confess that we want change and we want it now; we commit to the the faithful ways that avoid shortcuts and live out the kingdom vision; and we proclaim that, despite the snail’s pace at which justice sometimes seems to move, we believe justice will come, and we are willing to give our lives to living out that belief.

Brian Zahnd is the co-founder and lead pastor of Word of Life Church, a non-denominational Christian congregation in Saint Joseph, Missouri. Brian is known for his focus on embracing the deep and long history of the Church and wholeheartedly participating in God’s mission to redeem and restore His world. He is also the author of several books, including, A Farewell To Mars, Beauty Will Save the World, and Unconditional?: The Call of Jesus to Radical Forgiveness. Today, as we in the US prepare to celebrate Independence Day, Brian talks to us about the conflation of flag and cross, Christianity’s long history of accommodating itself to the pressures of nationalism, and the transformative hope of local churches to overcome both of these distortions of the true message of Christ.

You’ve said that for many American Christians, the American Way and the Jesus Way are essentially the same way of being human. What do you mean by that?

Many American Christians would be hard pressed to identify five examples of how the Jesus way differs significantly from the American way. In the civil religion of America, the Jesus way and the American way have been conflated into the same mode of being human. In essence this means Christianity exists primarily to support the supreme idea of America. Put just so it sounds ludicrous, nevertheless it remains the tacit assumption of American civil religion. But authentic Christianity is a radical challenge to all other allegiances.

Christians confess that Jesus is Lord and thus “We the People” are not. Christians are far more committed to the Beatitudes than the Bill of Rights. Christians believe that only Jesus has a manifest destiny to rule the nations. Christians proclaim that “the last best hope of the world” is Jesus, not America. And that most American Christians would view these assertions as controversial reveals just how deeply the Jesus way has been subverted by the American way.

Since Constantine, Christianity has a long, sad history of accommodating itself to the pressures of nationalism. By baptizing the assumed cultural values of empire, Christianity is made convenient, and the cross is abandoned for the sword. This is the matrix of Christendom. We’ve seen this phenomenon in all the so-called Christian empires of the West—Rome, Byzantium, Russia, France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, Germany, America—and often with disastrous results. Instead of being a prophetic witness to the kingdom of Christ and challenging the arrogant assertions of economic and military superpowers, a compromised church perpetuates the shopworn myth that “God has raised up our nation.” But God has done no such thing. What God has raised up…is Jesus from the dead! And God has given Jesus dominion over the nations. The task of the church is to bear witness to this reality and embody the reign of Christ here and now.

But when nationalism subverts a radical commitment to the kingdom of Christ, the church is prone to salute the flag and turn a blind eye to sins like colonial conquest, imperial expansion, aggressive militarism, economic injustice, and racial oppression. When the church has pledged its loyalty to national self-interest, Jesus is no longer truly Lord. In civil religion, all allegiances are subordinate to the nation, which is why you see churches flying the American flag above the Christian flag. It’s a bit of unintended truth-telling on the church lawn. Jesus is still worshiped, but his role has been demoted to Secretary of Afterlife Affairs. The nation reigns supreme. This is how the American civil religion subverts the Jesus way.

I understand that you’ve lost quite a few congregants for preaching against war and the military, and for explaining that America does not equal the Church nor is the cross interchangeable with the flag. Why, then, do you continue to spread this message, and how has this impacted your understanding of your role as pastor?

My understanding of the pastor’s vocation is that I am to help form people in Christlikeness and lead a congregation into becoming an authentic expression of the kingdom of Jesus. My task is not to gain a crowd or amass an audience by simply baptizing the assumed cultural values and slapping a Jesus fish sticker on Americanism. But to pastor this way requires a certain amount of courage. To lead a church as a Christ-informed countercultural movement is a daring venture. I know this because it scares me all the time.

But I wouldn’t say I’ve preached against the military—in fact, I haven’t done that. I’ve been especially mindful to always show respect for soldiers. The Christ-informed prophetic critique of militarism and war is never directed at the young men and women who have enlisted in the military. They are often acting from noble motives. Unfortunately, the principalities and powers are skilled in manipulating noble aspirations for unholy purposes. This is why the church needs to be a prophetic voice that challenges the masters of war—or what President Dwight Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex.” What I’ve done in my sermons is to preach Jesus and help people come to see him as the Prince of Peace.

But it is true that contrasting the message of Jesus, and particularly his Sermon on the Mount, with an idolatrous allegiance to nationalism, militarism, violence, and war has cost me church members. This has been very painful. They’re not just “members, ” they’re my friends. But I have to be true to my conscience and the call of Christ. I didn’t go into the ministry to be a politician and pander for popularity—I went into the ministry to lead people in the Jesus way. Jesus’ call to discipleship involves carrying a cross. So there is always the possibility we will be rejected and vilified, or even crucified.

Your latest book, A Farewell to Mars, is about removing violence and power from our understanding of faith, and of realizing Jesus not just as Savior, but also as Prince of Peace. Yet you won’t call yourself a pacifist. Why?

First of all, I don’t like labels. Søren Kierkegaard was right when he said, “When you label me, you negate me.” Just call someone a pacifist, and you can dismiss them with a wave of your hand. Labels are often a way to avoid thinking. “Oh, he’s one of those.” Case closed. Mind closed. That being said, I have no problem with Christians who adopt the label of pacifist. If nothing else, they provide an alternative witness to that of the Christian militarist whose numbers are legion. But I actually don’t claim the label of pacifist for this reason: pacifism is an ethical or political position on violence. It’s a position one could adopt apart from Jesus Christ—as for example, the great writer and humanist Kurt Vonnegut did. But I am not an ethical pacifist. What I am is a Christian. And as a Christian, we can talk about how Christ informs humanity on the subject of war and violence.

In my spiritual journey I’ve come to understand that to live gently in a violent world is part of the counterculture of following Christ. This is not something I would ever have arrived at on my own. I am not by nature a gentle person. For most of my life, I viewed “heroic violence” with a kind of affection. In my youth I got in plenty of fights. I enjoyed violent movies. Cowboy justice held a romantic appeal. Until about ten years ago I supported nearly all (if not literally all) of America’s military ventures. As a pastor I prayed war prayers and preached war sermons. I’m certainly not a pacifist by nature. If my views on war and violence have changed—and they have—the blame falls squarely on Jesus! It’s not like I just woke up one day and said, “Hey, I think I’ll adopt a position of Christian nonviolence just for the fun of it. I bet that will be popular!” That’s not what happened. What happened was once the red, white, and blue varnish was removed from Jesus and I learned to read the gospels free of a star-spangled interpretation, I discovered that my Lord and Savior had a lot of things to say about peace that I had screened out. I was as surprised as anyone! But once you’ve seen the truth, you can’t unknow what you know and be true to yourself.

Pacifism can come across as some exotic idea that belongs, if at all, on the margins of Christian faith. Peace, on the other hand, is central to the message of Jesus. So I’m more interested in exploring the implications of Christ-informed peacemaking than wearing the badge of pacifist. Besides that, there is the unfortunate fact that pacifism sounds too much like, and is thus often confused with, “passivism.” Many people don’t know there is a difference between pacifism (peace-ism) and passivism (passive-ism). But there is nothing passive about following the path of Christian nonviolence. It’s a hard road that calls for courage and demands determination. So if today I’m trying to walk the narrow path of nonviolent peacemaking, it’s only because it’s where I find the footsteps of Jesus. It’s an uncrowded path, perhaps at times a lonely path. But it’s worth travelling because I keep catching glimpses of Jesus father up the road.

Is American militarism to blame for the existence of ISIS?

Probably. I’m no expert on Middle East politics (though neither are most American policy makers), so I cannot speak definitively. But from my layman’s point of view it seems that the lasting outcome of American military incursions in the Middle East has been to dangerously destabilize the region while increasing anti-Western sentiment. In any case, Jesus teaches us that the “quick fix” of violence only leads to more fiery Gehennas. Violence as problem solving is the highway to hell. The idea that we can eradicate evil by dropping bombs on it is the height of hubris and reveals a dangerous naïveté. It’s sad to think that the lasting legacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq may be the near elimination of historic Christianity from many Arab countries.

Your last few books are your attempt to look at Christianity through three lenses: forgiveness, beauty, and peace. These are, of course, more than lenses through which to view a faith; they are ways to live a gospel life. What is your practical advice on how we can work to rebuild our social structures—currently built on vengeance, western modernity, and violence—with these ways of living?

I think this kind of practical work is best done (and perhaps can only be done) in the context of the local church. This means we need to start our rehabilitation with our churches. I support Christian activism, but until our churches become an embodiment of Christian forgiveness, beauty, and peace, I’m afraid our “change the world” rhetoric will be little more than shallow sloganeering. If we can’t make the church more Christlike, we will have little chance of making our broader social structures more Christlike. So I would like to ask churches to evaluate their work in terms of forgiveness, beauty, and peace. Perhaps we could ask ourselves these three questions:

Do we come across as a genuinely forgiving people?

Is the wider culture likely to recognize the beauty of Christ in our public witness?

In a hostile and violent world are we contributing to creative peacemaking?

If we cannot answer at least somewhat in the affirmative, we need to focus on restoring our witness by actually becoming a credible expression of Christ in the world. Our task is not so much to change the world, as it is to be that part of the world already changed by Christ. If we can become famous for forgiveness, attractive because we embody the beauty of Christ, and ambassadors of a peaceable kingdom, then we can be agents of redemptive change in the world.

I hold to a deep hope that the church in North America is beginning to move in a new direction—a direction of forgiveness, beauty, and peace. Hopefully we are beginning to turn away from a politicized and polarizing faith characterized by finger-pointing moralism, insipid kitsch, and bellicose warmongering. Over the next few decades it seems inevitable that the church in North America will become far less of a cultural assumption (and thus smaller). But this gives us an opportunity to become much more of a counterculture witness to the radical alternative of the Jesus way. I want to see the church seize this opportunity. Anyway, this is my hope and prayer.

Carolyn Custis James is president of the Whitby Forum, a ministry dedicated to addressing the deeper needs that confront both men and women as they work together to extend God’s kingdom in a messy and complicated world. She is also the founder of Synergy Women’s Network, a national organization for women emerging or engaged in ministry leadership. She is the author of six books, including Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women, and Malestrom: Manhood Swept into the Currents of a Changing World, which is scheduled for release this month. In Malestrom, Carolyn explores how our culture’s narrow definition of manhood is upended when we consider the examples of men in the Bible and Jesus’ gospel. She shares with us today how Jesus’ gospel liberates men from the strictures of patriarchy and restores them to their true calling as God’s sons.

What is the malestrom?

The maelstrom—a powerful whirlpool in the open seas that threatens to drag ships, crew, and cargo down into the ocean’s watery depths—offered the strong image I needed to represent the power and seriousness of what men and boys are facing. A slight alteration in the spelling, and Malestrom was born. Put simply,

“The malestrom is the particular ways in which the fall impacts the male of the human species—causing a man to lose himself, his identity and purpose as a man, and above all to lose sight of God’s original vision for his sons.”

These currents can be overt and brutal, leading to the kinds of atrocities and violence we witness in the headlines—wars, school shootings, ISIS beheadings, and the trafficking of men and boys for sex, forced labor, and soldiering. The number of male casualties on the giving and receiving ends of the violence is beyond epidemic. But these currents also come in subtle, even benign forms that catch men unawares yet still rob them of their full humanity as God intended.

The repercussions of such devastating personal losses are not merely disastrous for the men themselves, but catastrophic globally as the world is depleted of the goodness and gifts men were originally designed to offer.

Your prior works have focused on women in the Bible, the world, and the church. What caused you to switch gears and focus on men?

I actually didn’t “switch gears” to write a book about men. There is a profound connection between my earlier books and this one. Malestrom isn’t starting a “different” discussion, but expands that original discussion about women to include men. God doesn’t have separate visions for women and for men. His vision for humanity includes both men and women. We can’t adequately understand or fulfill the one without the other. Men have a lot at stake in the discussion I’ve been having with women and (as I have argued) are beneficiaries of what God is doing through his daughters. But there is also lot at stake for women and for men if we don’t have an equally robust discussion of what is happening to men and how the Gospel speaks with power and purpose into their lives.

Ironically, the women I’ve written about in my earlier books were the ones who led me to write about men and the malestrom. As I studied stories of women in the Bible, I kept encountering incredible men whose stories have been overlooked, downsized, or distorted—men who battle the malestrom and emerge to display a gospel brand of manhood that can only be described as “other worldly.” They give us hints of what Jesus meant when he said, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

I wanted to tell their stories.

Also, as I researched what is happening to women and girls globally, signs of the malestrom were already surfacing. If 70% of human beings trafficked are women and girls, then a staggering 30% men and boys are trafficked for sex, forced labor, and as soldiers—roughly the population of New York City proper. Every Sunday in our churches countless men are marginalized because they don’t arrive with the right portfolio, bank account, academic pedigree, social status, or passion for books. Every day, countless men are on both the giving and receiving ends of violence in wars, on city streets, and behind closed doors. When Middle Eastern experts began linking the stream of young western men into the ranks of ISIS to a search for “identity, meaning, purpose, and belonging, ” I realized I was looking at a global crisis of epic proportions that the church needs to engage.

You write that patriarchy is the principal expression of the malestrom and marginalization of men. How can a system by men, for men, push men to the margins?

Trace any current of the malestrom to its roots and you’ll end up talking about patriarchy (“father rule”). Patriarchy is a fallen social system that establishes the male as the primary authority figure over females and depends upon female subordination. Half the Church discusses the destructive impact this has on women, both in biblical times and globally today. But patriarchy is also destructive to men at both ends of the power continuum by establishing the rule of some men over other men. Cain’s murder of his brother Abel (a crime of violence sparked by jealousy when the younger brother bested the older) was the beginning of patriarchy’s violence, abuse, and injustice toward other men.

However, because patriarchy is on virtually every page of the Bible, it is easy to assume that patriarchy is divinely ordained. In Malestrom, I argue that patriarchy is not the Bible’s message. Rather, it is the cultural backdrop to the Bible’s message, that the Bible stands in sharp relief to that cultural system and actually dismantles it. So it is essential for us (especially as Americans and westerners who are foreign to that culture) to understand patriarchy better if we hope to grasp the power of the Bible’s message.

Is the church a complicit and/or active participant in perpetuating the fallen notion of manhood you’ve described?

To the degree that we embrace and promote even mild forms of patriarchy, yes, we are complicit. When Jesus said “my kingdom is not of this world, ” he meant it. He didn’t come to give his sons a kinder-gentler version of any cultural, social or political system, but to put them back on mission—the global mission God unveiled when he created them to be his image bearers. No matter how we nuance patriarchy, any version falls woefully short of the gospel of Jesus and of the kingdom Jesus calls us to embody and advance.

The fact that a milder form of patriarchy is embraced by the church and in many sectors of evangelicalism is viewed as a pillar of the faith means this crisis requires the courage of us to ask the hard questions and engage this important discussion honestly. This is no academic matter. Lives are at stake. The church needs to reclaim her prophetic voice in a world of violence and injustice. If any of our beliefs are wrong, we should be the first to admit it. If our beliefs are true, the truth will hold firm.

In what ways do western notions of maleness and power color the American church’s reading, interpretation, and application of the Bible and the imago dei?

American manhood is only one of a myriad of manhood definitions throughout the world. “Anthropologists describe a continuum of manhood that ranges from machismo … at one extreme to cultures completely unconcerned about masculinity issues at the other.” American evangelical definitions of manhood (all claiming to be biblical) are scattered all over that continuum.

To complicate things further, manhood is a moving target. Throughout our relatively brief American history, manhood has transitioned from man as the head and legal representative of the household, to centering on a man’s occupation, to today’s celebrity, athletic, and ornamental manhood as exemplified by People Magazine’s annual “Sexiest Man Alive.” Many American men are juggling more than one definition, as they move from one cultural context to another.

According to these definitions, manhood must be earned. It can be missed or lost or forfeited. In contrast, the imago dei is a birthright that no man or boy can ever lose, no matter who he is or how his story plays out. It gives them an indestructible identity, as well as meaning and purpose. Not only does it elevate every man and boy to the highest possible dignity and significance, it defines his mission. He is here to reflect who God is and his heart for the world, and to look after things on God’s behalf. This mission encompasses all of life and is shared with God’s daughters. It also raises violence, injustice, and atrocities perpetrated against men and boys to a cosmic level as an offence against the Creator whose image they bear.

The imago dei places Jesus at the center of the discussion of manhood as the perfect image bearer and the only antidote to the malestrom. Jesus defines and embodies true manhood. He is every man’s perfect role model. His brand of manhood will challenge the best of men and runs counter to every other version of manhood.

What practical ways are there for us—everyday people of the church—to begin dismantling patriarchy, forging a blessed alliance, and reinserting the life and example of Jesus into our lives?

As basic as this sounds, we have to start with the gospel. The gospel is not a call to power over others, but a call to sacrifice and servant-hood, to put the interests of others ahead of ourselves. It is not a call to build our own power base, but is antithetical to claims of power and authority over others. Jesus was uncompromising and rebuked his disciples’ thinking when they raised the question of who would be first in his kingdom. Following Jesus means to be the kind of man he was—in how he related to women, to children, to men in the margins, to the powerful and to the powerless.

“Jesus’ gospel liberates men from the strictures of patriarchy and the power of the malestrom. It restores them to their true calling as God’s sons. And when the gospel gets hold of a man, the world will know that Jesus has come and his kingdom is not of this world.”

In recognition of foster care awareness month, this month’s Red Letter Carpet features Aaron and Amy Graham. Aaron and Amy have a career-long history of helping those in need: prior to moving to DC, Aaron started the Quincy Street Missional Church in a low-income neighborhood of Boston where he served for five years, and Amy served as a foster care social worker. In 2013, they co-founded DC127, a faith-based non-profit with a mission to unite churches around reversing the foster care wait list in Washington, DC. It both recruits and supports foster and adoptive homes and prevents children from entering the child welfare system by supporting families in crisis through its partnership with the national Safe Families for Children movement. Aaron and Amy also founded the The District Church, where Aaron is lead pastor and Amy is the discipleship pastor. They have adopted two children, Elijah and Natalie.

Your organization, citing James 1:27, calls upon the Church and church members to provide support and care to foster youth. Do you see this care as something that all Christians are, in one form or another, under a duty to perform?

We do not believe that all Christians are called to adopt or foster but all Christians are called to care for orphans in their distress as it says in James 1:27. Not everybody is in the position to bring a child into their home, but everybody can do something to help a child in need, whether that is by providing babysitting, mentoring, or donating money or items to a family adopting or fostering a child.

We believe that there are no orphans in Heaven, and so we should work to ensure that everybody has a family here on earth, especially here in our nation’s capital. As Jesus taught us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”

Children in foster care are some of the most vulnerable children in our city. They are often the most susceptible to dropping out of school, being trafficked sexually, being unemployed, and having their own children enter the foster care system. So to care for these children is to care for a wide range of social issues that are close to the heart of God.

We have public agencies staffed by trained professionals to care for and protect abused and neglected children. However, case workers for these agencies are notoriously overburdened, and are often criticized for various reasons: needlessly removing children from their families; leaving the children home when they should have been taken into protective custody; and for children coming to harm, sometimes even fatally, while in foster care. At a policy level, what change is needed to remedy this?

There are so many professional social workers and lawyers doing heroic work to care for children in need in the foster care system. They do not get enough credit and typically just get blamed in the media when something goes wrong. We need to do a better job of supporting and honoring them for the long days they work and the burdens they carry.

At the same time we need to work to eradicate the foster care system. It doesn’t mean we stop recruiting foster parents and don’t respond to the existing needs, it just means we need to go upstream. The system is not working for kids. It is either removing kids too late, too soon, or keeping them in the system for too long.

In ancient Rome, babies were often abandoned on the outskirts of the cities. The practice was called exposing. The child was usually unwanted because they were the wrong gender or had a disability. They were literally taken outside the city walls and left to die. Yet Christians, who were often a persecuted minority at the time, made a practice of going outside the city walls, finding these children, and bringing them home, sometimes even raising them as their own. Jedd Medefind, President of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, says, “Throughout history, Christians at their best have reflected the same commitment. Candidates for leadership in the early church were to be “lovers of orphans” and this heart has always been visible in healthy Christian communities.” (Becoming Home, Barna Frames)

This is what we are praying for here in DC. We’re praying that the sacrificial love of Christ is put on display to our city. We are praying that the church is known for how we care for children in foster care and their families. DC127 is truly a citywide initiative, not simply an initiative of our church, The District Church.

Lack of community support for at-risk families is often cited as leading to abuse or neglect. How does lack of community correlate to harm of a child, and how can we—people who may not be connected to those most in need—provide authentic community?

The government and professional social service agencies have had to step up because the church has not. We need a revival of practicing radical hospitality in our churches where we open up our homes to families in crisis. If volunteers in churches would help provide care before the state has to intervene and remove kids from their homes, we would have fewer kids in the foster care system. This is why we recently launched the Safe Families for Children initiative in DC through DC127 to address the root causes of why children enter foster care. Social isolation and the lack of a supportive network is the biggest reason families come to Safe Families for Children. The church at its core is a community of people who care about one another and when we open this community up to our neighbors and those in crisis, we can very practically intervene before a family hits the point of crisis where a child would need to be removed into foster care.

At the policy level, we need more attention, financial support, and the support of local Child Protective Services to go towards empowering local communities and churches to providing volunteer support to families in crisis. We’ve received amazing support for the Safe Families initiative in DC, but national-level awareness and local support in other cities certainly is not always there.

The problem of abused and neglected youth and at-risk families speaks to a wider variety of social concerns: drug abuse, mental health issues, sex trafficking, poverty, and lack of opportunity, to name a few. As they say, “children are our future.” Yet the Barna Group reports that only 3% of Christians have provided foster care. What’s going on here?

Foster care is tough work. It is a calling. Children have often spent time in a number of homes. They have experienced trauma and separation from their biological families. It’s not as simple as: open your home, provide a loving environment, and put food on the table. Many of these wonderful children are behind in school and have medical issues. Parenting is hard enough, fostering is even tougher.

Churches need to come around and support the families that are already fostering and adopting. Get volunteers cleared with background checks so they can provide babysitting for foster parents so they can have a night out. Send volunteers to a training and orientation to understand the challenges in the foster care system so that they can have more empathy and understand what these families are going through.

What ends up happening in many churches is that you have people who are “fans” of families that foster and adopt, but these foster families end up having very few “friends.” People who really are seeking to understand the unique parenting challenges they are facing and coming alongside them to support.

We are advocates of churches having foster care and adoption ministries that focus on providing support for these families. This support is even deepened when the pastor is willing to preach about the Biblical call and back it up with empowering leaders with the structures and finances to support these families.

What long-lasting, forward-looking change do you hope to bring about by increasing the number of families committed to helping foster youth and families at risk?

Our dream is to live here in a city where there are more families that are waiting to adopt and foster children than there are children on a wait list to be fostered and adopted. We dream of a city where the church is united around this common call to provide every child in foster care a loving and stable home until they can return home or be welcomed into a new family. We dream of a city where families in crisis can rely on local churches to be places of refuge and sanctuary when they experience crisis. We dream of a headline that reads, “DC churches unite to reverse the foster care wait list!”

The Reverend Stacy Martin has made a career living out the ELCA tagline: “God’s work. Our hands.” Once the Vice President of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, she is now the National Policy and Advocacy Director for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. In that position, Stacy is responsible for shaping advocacy issues and impacting public policy, both nationally and internationally, for one of the largest denominations in North America.

What do you personally feel the top three advocacy/policy issues are for the church today?

The top three advocacy issues for the church today are income and wealth inequality/poverty, racial justice and reconciliation, and environmental justice.

The ELCA has been involved in immigration issues for quite some time now. You, personally, have worked on these efforts and have seen first hand the needs of immigrant families and children. Does President Obama’s executive action meant to protect about 4 million undocumented immigrants from deportation go far enough? Does it go too far?

Regrettably, Congress’ refusal to act forced the President’s hand in the matter of pushing toward much-needed immigration reform. Although in June of 2013 the Senate passed S.744, a comprehensive immigration reform package, House leadership refused to take up the effort. This stalemate meant that the President was unable to work with Congress to pass a package that, while not perfect, would have gone a long way in fixing our broken immigration system.

The Executive Order goes as far as the President’s power allows. Setting aside any dispute about the legitimacy of the President’s action, which is currently under adjudication in a legal suit brought against the Administration by 26 states, the President’s attempt to provide some relief to millions of desperate and deserving people should be applauded. Of course it doesn’t go far enough—only Congress can carry forward the reform that is really needed—but it is a step in the right direction and provides some degree of safety to millions of people who need it.

The ELCA’s official statement on racial reconciliation asserts that racism, “both blatant and subtle, ” denies the reconciling work of the cross, and that church leadership must “name the sin of racism and lead us in our repentance of it.” When racism is blatant, it’s fairly easy to name. But how do leaders on the ground level call out the more insidious, subtle forms of racism? The kind that allows us to say we “aren’t racist, ” yet continues to maintain the great divide between black and white in this country?

Racism is a systemic problem in this country, one that affects our criminal justice, educational, immigration and healthcare systems, to name a few, and sits at the core of hunger and poverty in the U.S.

By fighting for justice within their communities and doing so in an informed way that understands how racism works in this country and how it has been constructed within our systems, leaders call out the more insidious forms of racism.

It quite honestly doesn’t matter how “not racist” one wants to define her- or himself. Until our systems are reformed, racism exists whether or not we are open minded and open hearted individuals. We most certainly need to combat individual prejudices and work to educate individuals when they allow fear and ignorance to lead in the formation of their opinions, but that level of awareness and education, while helpful, is not enough. Solidarity with marginalized communities is essential, as is garnering enough of a critical mass who understand the contours and depth of racism in the U.S. context to maintain the momentum and energy needed to change our country’s systems for the better.

The nature of sexism is also both blatant and subtle, but the blatant variety is widespread and the number of women impacted by gender-based violence is astounding. The ELCA is currently working on a Women and Justice project, as well as a statement on gender-based violence that will be presented later this year. Can you give us a preview of the results of these efforts?

As you note, gender-based violence is a critical issue both in the U.S. context and abroad. From the use of rape as a method of war to the denial of educational parity between genders, sexism abounds. The ELCA has a long history of working toward gender justice and, while we are certainly proud of that, we know that there is still much work to be done. This project will attend to our history in gratitude to those who have laid the groundwork for the progress made thus far and will offer areas of still-needed work.

Tell me about the Shoulder to Shoulder campaign and what the ELCA is doing to address anti-Muslim sentiment in the US.

The ELCA is committed to strong ecumenical and inter-religious partnerships. As we saw the level of anti-Muslim rhetoric and sentiment rise, the ELCA knew that we needed to work to help correct the misinformation and misunderstandings about our Muslim brothers and sisters so prevalent in public discourse. We also knew that the problem of continued stereotyping was larger than ourselves and needed to be approached in coordination and solidarity with others, most especially Muslim partners. As such, when the Shoulder to Shoulder campaign began, we gladly lent our support and continue to do so.

Beyond our work with Shoulder to Shoulder, we work with the Islamic Society of North America in a continued effort to denounce anti-Muslim sentiment and find areas of shared work that displays our solid relationship with a respected partner.

What is your best advice for how we can all use our hands for God’s work?

Civic engagement is an essential component to living out one’s faith. More than one’s hands, one’s voice is the single most powerful instrument for the changes needed in our society to move toward God’s vision of peace and justice in the world. As such, my best advice is to stay informed beyond sound bites about what is happening in the world, to search for news that is as objective as possible and to get involved in advocacy efforts close to one’s heart. Without an informed and engaged citizenry, any hope for our marginalized sisters and brothers is lost. Be informed, vote wisely and in accordance with sound information, advocate directly with local, state and national lawmakers, and work to educate congregational and community members.

Marco Saavedra is an artist, poet, writer, and sometime-dishwasher at his parents’ restaurant in the Bronx. He’s also an undocumented immigrant and one of nine Dreamers who, in 2013, turned themselves over to border patrol at Nogales, AZ to lift up the plight of two million deported immigrants under the Obama administration. The previous year he had put himself in the hands of Florida immigration agents to infiltrate the Broward Detention Facility and expose the abuses occurring there. Dozens of detainees were released as a result. Today Saavedra’s deportation case is still pending, but he continues to make art, to voice protest, and to lift up the urgency of the lives of those around him. He speaks with us today about how faith has influenced his actions past and present, and how the current debate over immigration is not simply a matter of politics, but rather a matter of the spirit.

By purposefully placing yourself in the hands of border guards, you could have been deported to Mexico, a place you haven’t been since you were a baby. How did your faith impact your decision to take such a personal and possibly life-altering risk?

Yes, of course, faith has always been crucial in my migration journey. The last words I said before turning myself over to border patrol two years ago were:  “There is no fear where there is perfect love” (to loosely quote St. John), and I meant that. And to go further into my past, faith was the only thing left after my parents and I first came into this country illegally 20 years ago; we had already left behind our language, native home, extended family, culture and everything known until that point. Our migration started (as I believe most all do) with faith and was sustained by it. And so when I turned myself over to immigration 20 years later—in order to raise up the plight of the deported—it was only adding to that faith that instructs us to “love one another as [Jesus] has loved us” (John 13:34).

Is social justice activism of this extent the province of the young? What about the middle-aged, the old, those with small children, aging parents, etc. Do the social justice teachings of Jesus require such action from these folks as well? Why/why not?

What I see in my community is folks taking risks ALL THE TIME, of all ages and at all levels—sometimes by faith alone—to survive in this country and provide for their families. What we’ve begun to develop is a consciousness that recognizes that driving without a license, working without permits or false papers, crossing and re-crossing borders are all forms of civil disobedience because, to quote Dr. King quoting St. Augustine, “an unjust law is no law at all.” I think that as immigrant dreamer youth we have been put in positions of privilege to perform these higher profile actions that then advance our agenda further, but the community has already paved the way.

Our position is akin to Moses or the youth in Babylonian captivity (Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) who are privy to insider knowledge on how the empire works, and also witness to the cry of the outsiders since we are “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh” of those who live in the shadows (to quote DuBois quoting Genesis).  Indeed, if we forget to witness the great sacrifices made by own our community “may our right hand forget its cunning and our tongue cleave to the roof of our mouth” if we do not maintain that “our chief joy” (from Psalms 137).  Of course, Jesus is born to a people under Roman captivity and perfects the prophetic calling to:

Proclaim good news to the poor. Proclaim liberty to the captives . . .

Set to liberty those who are oppressed (from Luke 4:18)

What has the outcome been of your own deportation case, which came about after your 2012 arrest?

Right, so I first turned myself into immigration agents in the summer of 2012 to expose the abuses happening in Broward Transitional Center. We were able to secure the release of dozens of detainees. After being kicked out of the detention center because of the publicity we garnered, I continued my case before Judge Bain in New York, where I was offered Deferred Action. I turned it down, claiming “I had done nothing wrong when I crossed the border at age three” and therefore did not think that the burden of providing relief should be on me but on the government.

The following summer (2013), I self-deported to Mexico to reconnect with dreamers who hadn’t been able to qualify for Deferred Action because they had either been deported or self-deported prior to its announcement. Again, we leveraged the press and advocacy networks to make our request for asylum based on credible fear even more powerful, and were paroled into the country after two weeks in detention. All nine of us are now waiting on the outcome of our asylum petition. My final court date will be in the summer of 2017 and in the meantime I’m eligible for a work permit.

On January 27th, House Speaker John Boehner announced that he will take legal action against the Obama administration to challenge President Obama’s executive action on immigration. How is this anything but political suicide for Republicans given the increasing numbers of Latino voters?

I would be wary to consider it political suicide given that voters are very forgetful of most issues except for the economy, and Republicans have mastered the discourse of neoliberal economics by blaming the poor. Undocumented immigrants like any other disenfranchised group will find it hard to raise our plight in this upcoming election cycle, and perhaps that shouldn’t be the goal. Here I turn to St. Paul’s call to not be conformed to patterns of this world but be transformed by the renewal of our minds. In that same letter, St. Paul implores the church to “share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality” (Romans 12:13). Radical hospitality that would even feed one’s enemy (Romans 12:20), and provide relief for their suffering. My undocumented people have been chosen to prevent Republicans from an even deeper spiritual suicide.

What role will immigration play in the 2016 election?

I really do not know and to a certain extent the question is almost meaningless because one has to choose between a spineless Democratic party that has seen the largest number of deportations by any president (here one must remember that the recent executive actions do not provide a pathway to citizenship, but mainly puts one at the end of the line for deportation), and an equally unchristian Republican party that places national interest over divine grace. So the only alternative is to lift up the urgency of our lives, saying: No more deportations, no more family separation, no more criminalization of people of color, STUDY WAR NO MORE. We must vote our conscious every day and choose to follow the Prince of Peace and not the god of war. We must be challenged every day to let God’s will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Beyond what happens in 2016, churches have a biblical mandate to offer sanctuary to the persecuted; a timeless mandate that equates civil disobedience with moral obedience. To welcome the strangers around us for by doing so “some have entertained angels” (Hebrews 13:2).

I invite you to take the pilgrimage with the immigrant towards Zion, towards our heavenly home.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Marco Saavedra has engaged faith-footed action as a 21st-Century Freedom Rider. Learn about how you can join this year’s 21st-Century Freedom Ride.

Nadia Bolz-Weber is the founding pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints, an ECLA mission church in Denver, Colorado. She is the author of three books, including the New York Times best seller, Pastrix, and has been dubbed a leading voice in the emerging church movement. Her next book, as of yet untitled, will be released in September of this year.

The cool thing to say today is that one is not religious, but spiritual. As someone who has been labeled as speaking for a post-modern generation, what’s your take on this?

The way I hear this is that they’ve self-selected certain practices or philosophies that give them a sense of well-being. I think that’s what people mean by spirituality. When people delve into what we call spirituality, there’s often this idea of self-improvement, which I’ve always rejected, whether it’s Christians thinking they can accomplish progressive sanctification, or it’s some yoga aficionado thinking he or she can transcend the irritations and inconsistencies of being human. On either end, I’ve never seen that actually be pulled off by anyone—it would require from us a great deal of pretending that we’re not irritated by something, or pretending we’re not inconsistent, rather than actually transcending those things. I’m the first to give a full-throated opinion about what’s wrong with religion and I agree that horrible things are done in the name of religion—obviously we’re in the middle of that right now with Charlie Hebdo—but my experience is that my stuff—whether it’s my self centeredness, or my insistence that I only want to be around a certain kind of person—those things are often subverted through being around God’s people who can be endlessly wonderful and endlessly irritating at the same time, as well as through Biblical text and through the practices that we have as the church: The liturgies and the church year and receiving Eucharist.

Right… where does the power of liturgy come from?

One thing that liturgy has going for it is that I didn’t make it up. Liturgy itself has its own integrity and doesn’t demand my integrity in order to be efficacious. It has its own integrity in that it’s something that’s so deeply rooted that it’s been worn smooth over generations of the faithful. It works upon us like water on rocks, slowly forming us, and slowly forming our prayer into not just the prayer of ourselves, but the prayer of the church. When you’re in a situation and all the sudden you encounter some sort of horrific thing or really tragic event and your response is to say Kyrie, eleison—Lord have mercy—you are expressing the prayers of the faithful that have risen to the heavens for 2000 years rather than your own opinion or own desire for something.

If there’s both a right way and a wrong way to preach politics from the pulpit, what’s the right way?

Here’s where I’m a really lousy social justice Christian. Probably the worst one out there. I am not a social justice preacher. I’ve been criticized for that, but I don’t feel like that’s my calling. My calling is to be the preacher for a lot of activists. We have a lot of activists—a lot of people who are staffing all the non-profits in Denver—in my church. My calling is to be their pastor and their preacher. Now if I were in a suburban church where the most broken realities of the world weren’t being brought into the realities of our space every week, I would need to be preaching social justice, but these people are doing it. What they need is a place to be broken themselves. They’re holding the world’s most broken realities all week long, and when they come to church they don’t need to hear about how they should be fixing the world. They need to have a place where they can confess how they are unable to live up to even their own values, even though they work in this social justice world. So confession and absolution are a huge part of our worship life together. What they need from their preacher is some good news. They need the gospel. They need some good news so they can go out and do it again. They don’t need somebody pridefully up there preaching to the choir about what’s wrong with the world. Everybody in that room gets it. They need freedom in order to endure living in that world, and that requires a very different kind of preaching. I did bring up Ferguson, and Treyvon Martin, but only in a very confessional way. If I’m going to bring something up, I’m going to do it in a way where I say, “here’s how I’ve failed to be a person who has successfully had all kinds of integrity around this issue.” Like maybe bring up my own internalized racism as a way of opening a space for other people to deal with the truth within themselves. People end up considering themselves to be prophetic by preaching about things that are wrong in the world, and I’m not prophetic. My congregants love that they have a pastor who is so clearly preaching to herself and letting them overhear it. I also get that there are people in my congregation who don’t see eye to eye. We have a kid who just got back from his second tour at Guantanamo Bay. He’s an Iraq combat vet, and he’s really into his guns. And this kid is really struggling with true, legitimate PTSD from being a combat vet. What’s he going to do? Have me as his pastor stand up there and completely discount his views of the world and say God agrees with me? That doesn’t feel like being a good pastor to that kid.

You’re the founding pastor of a church, but you’re also an author and a speaker, which allows you to reach a much wider audience than does preaching on Sunday. How do you balance the life of leading a church proper with spreading God’s message on a greater scale?

It’s pretty clear if you read one of my sermons online—which might be shared 10, 000 times by the end of the week—that I wrote it for the 200 people in my congregation. There are inside jokes and I’m referencing things going on in our lives, so in no way am I ever in the process of writing a sermon speaking for a wider audience. If those sermons end up having an impact on people outside my congregation, that’s just a bonus. It’s really rare that I ever miss a Sunday at my church. If people want me as a speaker they know I’ve got to get home by Sunday night. And some people have asked if I think I’ll ever be just a speaker and a writer, and I say, “what am I going to write about? Working out?” Because that’s literally the only other thing I do. Being grounded in a congregation is the only thing that gives me any authority to say anything. I’m half time in my church and half time what my bishop calls a “called and sent public theologian, ” so I have lots of support to do both things and they’re very related.

In a dichotomous church world of traditional/conservative, weird/liberal, how do those in the latter camp resist the urge of a sort of reverse snobbery?

I don’t know that I’ve ever really resisted it. It’s still there, but it’s in bad from to assume I’m right about it. I feel it and think it, and I’d be lying to say I didn’t. The problem comes when I think God agrees with me or is co-signing on it, or it’s somehow the prophetic thing to assert that my snotty opinions are God’s truths. What is lacking on both sides of the equation—fundamentalism of the left or fundamentalism of the right—are two things that I won’t do without in my life anymore since I was raised in a fundamentalist setting, and those two things are joy and humility. I don’t see a lot of joy and humility being allowed when your main thing is holding some sort of line. I saw an advance screening of the Selma movie and it was incredible. I put up on Twitter the next day that I couldn’t wait for the rabid liberals to tell me why me thinking the Selma movie is amazing actually makes me a horrible racist. There is incredible pridefulness in social media. You aren’t really allowed to say if you like anything, because immediately someone will have some article about “What Selma got wrong.” It’s unbelievably prideful. You know, I enjoyed the movie and thought it had a lot to recommend it. But there is a lot of joy stealing out there in terms of no one being allowed to say they think anything is good, because someone will immediately come place themselves above you, saying “here’s why you got that wrong.” It’s not helping anyone. With Charlie Hebdo we’re talking about freedom of expression, but how much is that limited at this point because you’re afraid you might use the wrong word or say the wrong thing? It’s crippling.

Geoffrey Chongo is the Head of Programs at the Jesuit Center for Theological Reflection (JCTR), located in Lusaka, Zambia. JCTR is a church-affiliated civil society organization that conducts evidence-based advocacy on political, social, and economic issues. The JCTR works through four main programs: economic equity and development, social conditions, faith and justice, and outreach, and uses the social teachings of the Church as the basis for its advocacy. 

JCTR has written that the social teachings of the church are a rich resource for empowering people to work for social justice, yet this is often the church’s “best kept secret.” How can we, as people of the church, help expose this secret for the powerful tool that it is?

Church Social Teaching is commonly referred to as Catholic Social Teaching. It is a set of knowledge resulting from careful reflection on the complex realities of human existence. It espouses principles such as the inherent dignity of human beings. Other principles include the common good and God’s option for the poor. If these principles where honored and to become the basis of our action, both in private and public life, they could promote interest all in society.

JCTR tries to create awareness of these principles especially among people who occupy public life and whose decisions affect many people. JCTR also refers to the principles as Church Social Teachings and not Catholic Social Teachings as they apply not only to Catholics but to all churches and human beings so that all people can identify themselves with them.

Your organization has developed one of the most widely-cited statistical tools for evaluating poverty in Zambia: the basic needs basket (BNB). How does the BNB work, and how has it helped lessen the impact of poverty on the average person in Zambia?

The Urban Basic Needs Basket (BNB) is a tool that helps JCTR to monitor the cost of living in 15 selected urban towns throughout Zambia. Prices of selected essential and non-essential items that constitutes an urban BNB for an average family of five (as determined by government official census statistics) are surveyed and analyzed on a monthly basis and results used to advocate for policies that improves the living conditions of people. Stakeholders such as employers and trade unions use the urban BNB data to bargain for decent wages.

The urban BNB has had positive impacts on the lives of average individuals. Recently, Government introduced a minimum wage law for lowly paid workers such as shop workers, making reference to the JCTR Urban Basic Needs Basket. JCTR has also used the urban BNB data to push for tax measures that reduce the cost of living such as increase of tax free threshold for salaried employees and removal of VAT (Zero Rating) on selected goods on which poor people spend most of their income.

The BNB and its accompanying survey—the Satellite Homes Survey—have also given birth to wider surveys such as the Households Access to Selected Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ESCRs) in various towns in Zambia (2012-2014). These have resulted in building awareness in communities on ESCRs. We have seen communities such as those from Livingstone and Monze districts (in Southern Zambia) demand their rights and engage with duty bearers to receive access to water and electricity, respectively.

As regards the rural BNB, this is a tool that looks at food and nutrition security as well as access to various social services through a household and key informant questionnaire that is administered quarterly. This research has helped provide platforms for community members to engage with local/district leaders in setting the agenda for Constituency Development Funds as well as to give service providers and local leaders information on needs as presented by the community. Though development in these areas is slow, progress has been seen where toilets and boreholes have been sunk to provide better sanitation such as in Masaiti (Copperbelt province), Kazunula (Southern province) and Mambwe (Eastern province).

I know that debt relief is a topic important to you and to JCTR. How has government debt impacted the everyday life of the average person in your country, and what can be done to alleviate the negative consequences of debt?

Government debt has had adverse impacts on the lives of the ordinary Zambian people, especially prior to debt cancellation in 2005 under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries and the Multilateral Debt Relief initiatives. The Zambian Government used to spend over US$150 million annually on loan repayment, which was more than the health budget. Loan repayment therefore diverted resources from needy and priority areas such as health and education sectors to loan repayment.

Immediately after debt was cancelled, Government put over 100, 000 HIV/ AIDS patients on free Anti-Retroviral drugs and removed user fees for primary health and education services.

To alleviate the negative consequences of debt, Government should promote domestic resource mobilization as opposed to borrowing. The economy has been growing at an average annual growth rate of 6% and yet tax to GDP remains low, below 20%. Zambia is said to be losing US$ 2 billion annually through tax evasion and avoidance which is over two times the annual health budget.

Secondly, Government should invest in projects with high economic returns, which will enable the government to easily repay the loans without seriously diverting resources from social sectors.  

The World Bank has deemed Zambia a “middle-income” country, with a projected average economic growth rate of six percent. That said, Zambia’s Human Development Index—which measures life expectancy, education levels, and income indices—is below that of countries in the low human development group, as well as below the average for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Why is that, and what can be done about it?

The economic growth that Zambia has been recording has been very narrow—concentrating only in a few sectors such as mining where its redistributive effect is very weak. The mining sector in Zambia is highly mechanized and thus employs very few people. The mining sector also contributes minimal tax revenues to the treasury for government to redistribute and create positive impacts on human development indicators.

Government should therefore promote broad based and more equitable economic growth by supporting sectors that have a huge labor force and would create many jobs if promoted, such as agriculture, where the majority of Zambian people work. Government should also collect more tax revenues from the growing economy and redistribute to social sectors to be able to improve human development indicators.

Why should the church care about this kind of economic inequality?

Jesus in John 10:10 tells us that He came to earth so that we can have life in full. The Church exists partly to fulfill Christ’s mission of removing the heavy burden of inequality and social, political and economic injustice so that people can live their lives in full. By promoting economic equality, the church is therefore responding to Jesus’ bidding of us to care for the poor.

Alasdair Groves is the Director of Counseling and a member of the faculty at Christian Counseling and Education Foundation (CCEF) in New England. He has a passion to foster genuine relationships in the local church, especially through counseling and counseling training, and his hope is for a church-based movement toward providing robust, Biblical pastoral care.

Paraphrased, CCEF’s stated mission is to bring “Christ to counseling and counseling to the church.” Can you explain what this means and what it looks like in practice?

Good question. When we talk about bringing Christ to counseling, we mean that to counsel well is to take seriously that the Bible has the deepest, richest framework for all of life. Ultimately, whether we are dealing with schedule stresses or schizophrenia, Jesus is our only hope and the wisdom he gives must ground and direct all the help we give. This doesn’t mean that we never use Google calendars to help the disorganized or that we are against Prozac for someone who’s depressed. But it does mean we will counsel best when our goals and methods of helping people spring directly from Jesus’ goals and methods for helping people: relationship with, worship of and obedience to him.

In practice, bringing counseling to the church means equipping pastors to do rich, insightful, compassionate, and just pastoral care. It means training para-church counselors like me who work hand in hand with churches to care for congregants in the context of the community of Christ’s body rather than in an isolated corner of the congregant’s world. Finally, I think it means developing the best content we can on connecting problems in living to Christian faith. We want to influence the culture, both in the mental health world in general and in the church in particular, toward a higher view of how the Bible meets us in our times of greatest need with powerful, non-simplistic help.

With 1 in 4 Americans suffering from some form of mental illness, it only makes sense that the church would want to be on the forefront of providing mental health services to those in need. Why have so many churches been slow to provide these services, and what is CCEF doing to help those diagnosed with mental illness?

I think that we, the church, have sometimes (though not always!) been slow for three reasons:
 

Discomfort. People with diagnosed mental illness tend to feel “different” from the “normal” people. Human beings are rarely good at handling relationship with those who seem different. I believe the church aims to be helpful, but it can be confusing and frustrating to minister to someone who responds differently than one is used to, and many times this means not recognizing the depth of help people need.
 

Refusal to De-humanize. Another reason the church has been hesitant to embrace a therapeutic model for pastoral care is a sense that our culture is off in its response to mental illness. Specifically, our culture tends to only be able to show compassion by removing responsibility. For example, in the 80s the secular therapies tended to show compassion by blaming a person’s behavior on her family of origin. Now genetic or chemical roots of behavior are much more in vogue. Of course, both can have significant influence on us. But as people of grace, we know that compassion is actually at its deepest when it is shown to a sinner who is responsible for some of her problematic actions.

Now, we can go too far here and blame all a person’s problems purely on her own choices, and that’s wrong too. We should hold a 6-year-old, a depressed teen, and a wise 70-year-old pastor to very different standards and applications of loving their neighbor! Yet no relational damage or disorder of the brain removes our human need and calling to love our neighbor.

The church is sometimes accused of making people who are mentally ill feel bad. And sometimes this is a fair and tragic charge. But often the church is actually prophetically counter-cultural when it refuses to de-humanize people by removing responsibility. There is hope if you are part of the problem because you can do something about it.
 

Over-simplification. Finally, we in the church can fail to provide robust care for people with diagnoses because we swing to the opposite extreme, effectively ignoring a person’s family history, physical weakness, hurts from the church, and so on. Sadly, churches have sometimes assumed that simplistic or pat spiritual answers suffice for people’s problems in living. This ignores the two millennia of rigorous thinking about pastoral care that the church has done, as well as the insights of contemporary psychology. Further, it does not capture the biblical picture of people as embodied souls whose physical maladies, relational betrayals, personal weaknesses and overwhelming emotions matter enormously for how we live out ultimate spiritual loyalties.

So, we’re calling the church to a compassionate and nuanced response to the people among us who feel “different” because of mental illness. But we also try to teach two complimentary ways of loving those who’ve been given diagnostic labels:

Normalize the abnormal. Ok, maybe you as a counselor, pastor or small group leader haven’t been diagnosed with an OCD fear of germs, but you do know what it’s like to be afraid of being sick or to be afraid of a world where dangerous things really do happen. Connecting to this person’s experience will make you more humble, more compassionate and more able to offer encouragement that fits and loving challenge that doesn’t overwhelm.
 

On the flip side, we want to understand people as individuals. Don’t assume your experience of grief or anger or temptation is the same as someone else’s. Early in my counseling career I worked with a young man who had a very similar story to mine: we both were oldest sons of large, Christian families whose fathers died when we were the same age, both from cancer. But I quickly realized our experiences of grief were radically different. We train our students to know this person, not to generalize from a label or assume they know what someone means by “fear” or “depression, ” etc.

You view your counseling model as different from the traditional “doctor/sick patient” therapy model. What is the difference and the thinking behind that concept shift?

This is one of my favorite parts of what I do. I believe I am not a healthy expert with answers for treating a sick patient with problems fundamentally different from mine. Instead, I am a fellow struggler in need of the same gospel, the same compassion, the same wisdom from God, the same help in temptations, the same encouragement in trials as those I speak with. I ground this perspective in scriptures like 1 Corinthians 10:13 that says that nothing is tempting me that isn’t common to all people, as well as the example of someone like Paul saying he is the chief of sinners (rather than lording his knowledge and apostleship over those he disciples). This humbles me and makes me more empathetic.

I have had many encounters with those who have been told by their pastors and others that they can simply “pray away” the needs that have brought them to counseling. And if prayer doesn’t work, then perhaps these folks are doing something “wrong, ” or are simply meant to suffer. How does CCEF respond to this notion?

This is such a tough question to respond to because, on the one hand, people are sinners who always have places in their lives they can and should be praying about. On the other hand, there are numerous times when sin is not the primary issue that needs to be addressed!

Sometimes simple, compassionate grieving-with, or a steady IV drip of hope and encouragement will be the appropriate form of Christ-like ministry. Discerning when to speak to sin and when to speak to suffering is difficult. My colleague, Ed Welch, has given a helpful rule of thumb though. He says that when listening to people, “We’re interested in the good, the hard and the bad—usually in that order.”

But sometimes what is behind a comment like this is the idea that “if you only had more faith” then your problem would go away. Lots of suffering doesn’t go away when you pray, even when you are crying out to God night and day. Just read the psalms! At the same time, people (myself included) are always going to be tempted to use their sufferings as an excuse for their sins–or at least as an excuse not to deal with their sins right now.

Learning to walk with and help people who are suffering without ignoring their sin and the damage it causes is one of the great challenges and privileges of life in the body of Christ. Our aim is to love each other enough to speak out where we see wrong in those we love and to be confident enough in God’s good purposes that we don’t abandon people who don’t “get better” on our timetable.

Give us a snapshot of where you see “the church” now in terms of counseling, and where you would like to see it in the near future.

I’m excited about the current state of counseling in the church. From where I sit, biblical counseling seems to be spreading like wildfire. As people come in contact with the intensely personal, transforming love of Christ in a way that meets them in their darkest hour, they naturally want to learn how to extend that love to others. CCEF currently has 800 students from over 20 countries enrolled in our classes (600 online) this fall. The vast majority are motivated lay people who want to get better at understanding how the Gospel can transform them and those around them, both in their daily struggles and their deepest trials. And we are just one of many organizations equipping biblical counselors.

Where are we headed? In the next ten to twenty years, I’d love to see:

• Churches thinking of a shepherding or counseling pastor as a vital priority, or, for smaller churches, equipping their sole pastor and/or assistant pastor through a robust biblical counseling program which few have historically gotten in seminary.

• Denominations, especially in my own evangelical and Reformed neighborhood, placing a more significant emphasis on preparedness for pastoral care in their ordination process. Good theological, exegetical, and church history knowledge are vital for a pastor—the wise care of souls is equally important.

• People in the pews feeling more equipped and taking more ownership of how they can help each other in trials. I want to see an ever-increasing atmosphere of collaboration and gathering round troubled and troubling people, both when they are laboring under burdens of suffering and when they are stuck in sins. This happens vastly more than the church gets credit for in the public eye, yet I think we will do this all the more if churches get a vision for equipping key lay leaders to walk along side members of their congregations more wisely.

• The church has a long way to go in its counseling, which is to say in adopting a rich model of how we can treat our trials as an opportunity to grow together and love each other. But I am deeply encouraged by how far we have come in the last half century. It gives me great hope for the church and for the biblical counseling movement.

Rev. Michael McBride, known simply as “, ” is the Director of Urban Strategies and Lifelines to Healing Campaign for the PICO National Network. The Lifelines to Healing Campaign is a national effort committed to addressing gun violence and mass incarceration of young people of color. Pastor Mike is deeply committed to empowering urban communities, families, and youth using the principles of a relevant and liberating Gospel message that transforms lives.

Lifelines’ ultimate goal is to achieve policy reform around guns and incarceration: fewer guns and less incarceration. Some would argue that more guns and more jail time is the answer to reducing violence. How is it that Christians—who share the same faith and the same Bible—can have such startling different views on guns and incarceration?

Well, let me say that our ultimate goal is to use Proclamation, Policies and Programs to create communities where people can live free from the fear of gun violence, mass incarceration and lack of opportunity. We believe the church has a unique role to play in this call, which makes your question so profound and challenging.

It should be no surprise that Christians who share the same faith and Bible have different perspectives on these matters. There has not been a monolithic expression of faith and belief in the history of the church on many matters of ultimate concern like doctrine, practices nor worship. Our Christian tradition seems to support the observation that experience and social location have just as much to do with our biblical interpretation and practice as the written text. Adding to this complexity is the recognition that we all drink from the same postmodern wells of radical individuality that deeply skew our ability to see one another rightly, as created in the image of God.

It is precisely this reality that makes Christian discipleship such an important contemporary enterprise. Because even in the face of such difference, how we read the text and how we practice our faith—dare I say how we follow Jesus—requires community and proximity. Discipleship must be a deeply relational and communal practice, which forces us to not simply double down on our views and beliefs that have often been packaged and handed down to us by political parties, human-constructed documents or even individual experience. What does it mean to do life with one another in such a way that it produces shared empathy and common understanding? This ever-elusive empathetic space is the most troubling reality in my mind for the American Christian, not divergent views on guns and incarceration. And I really believe it’s destroying our public witness in a post-Christian culture.

Do you see a way that our factious law-making bodies can actually reach an agreement on how to address the problems facing urban youth today? Where can opposing viewpoints find a common ground that might lead to impactful solutions?
We must never forget that our law-making bodies are a reflection of the people they represent. So in some sense, unlocking the awareness and power of people to powerfully influence these bodies is really what our campaign is all about. The hyper-politicized and partisan perspectives that frame issues like guns (gun rights vs. gun control) or incarceration (soft on crime vs. hard on crime) rob us all of our humanity and soul. Because we are not talking about human beings in those frames, we are talking in political terms that are not meant to unify, but rather to divide. This again is where I see an opportunity for the church to lead on finding common ground.

We are an institution with power and the potential to be a champion for the poor. We are a called out people who should heed the words of Jesus when he tells the disciples to “allow the children to come to me.” What would it look like if we had open arms to receive our distressed youth and their families in the very same ways Jesus did? Urban youth are our youth. Suburban youth are our youth. Rural youth are our youth. They belong to us all. They don’t just belong to urban families, suburban neighborhoods, or rural churches. They are not the responsibility of just Democrats or Republicans, Libertarians or Independents. They are children…young babies…sons and daughters…and they belong to THE CHURCH! We have a responsibility to fight for their well being, regardless of where they live or who their parents are. This common ground should force us to ask different questions about our shared responsibility in solving problems for the many vulnerable and hurting youth in America, whether urban, suburban or rural.

One of my mentors and colleagues, Jeff Brown, says it best: the children caught in cycles of violence and incarceration are the children and grandchildren of the young people we kicked out of our churches in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. We have a task to recover, repair and restore these broken relationships. Through this process of recovery, I believe we build consensus and power that serves as a counterbalance to the intractability of law-making bodies. By collecting stories of triumph, pain, struggle, resilience and healing, we defeat the lie that perpetuates a dehumanizing and simplistic view of one another that can be used as a tool for our destruction rather than our construction.

Given the high level and persistent nature of violence in some urban areas, it seems almost unbelievable that changes in Washington could translate to changes on the street, at least in our lifetimes. How do you see policy impacting what has become a way of life for so many, and in what time frame?

I can see how some would believe that, but policies are moral documents that make concrete our words, values and aspirations. Rhetoric and narratives fade away long before policy does. We cannot surrender policy to a small number of elite, uber wealthy individuals who are overrun by lobbyists, corporate interests and blood money. Policies structure resources and power that need to be brought to bear on behalf of the poor. So, we must embrace policy as a tool for justice.

In our lifetime, if there was a policy framework that incentivized restorative justice and rehabilitation, rather than punitiveness and incarceration, we would have profoundly better public safety and social services for poor and impacted communities. We’re gonna’ pay for it either way, on the front end or the back end. So let’s push for the investments on the front end.

Since the cost of gun violence is between $2M-$5M per homicide, can we imagine structuring a formula that allows us to incentivize the reduction of homicides by investing in people and not prisons? Can we end the failed drug war that criminalized a whole group of individuals and use the savings to reinvest in those same communities most in need? Ted Heinrich, a US Attorney from the Department of Justice, explains that with $500M committed over 5 years to the top 25 most violent cities to fully implement strategies like Ceasefire and other targeted group violence strategies, we can cut the number of homicides by as much as 60%, save money that can then be invested in neighborhood services, jobs and education, and, most importantly, keep folks alive. This is a worthwhile policy remedy and the church should be at the front of the line amplifying such strategies and investments.

Lifelines has a large focus on providing opportunities to urban youth. What is the correlation between lack of opportunity and increased levels of violence?

I think it goes without saying that where there is a lack of hope and opportunity, there is a cesspool of misery and trauma. Providing opportunities for young people and their families to achieve their highest calling is a critical solution. As a country we must take seriously the legacy and continued reality of structural oppression that is largely racialized. The Atlantic’s Ta-Nahisi Coates has recently written a powerful and thought-provoking essay entitled In the essay, Coates attempts to make the argument that it is indeed policy structures that systematically block black people from opportunity, thus making the call for reparations not just a remedy for our past sins of slavery, but our continued complicity in reinforcing its destructive and damaging effects.

I encourage every one to read this essay and come to your own conclusion, but I believe the historical reflections laid out by Coates reinforces the correlation between the lack of opportunity and presence of violence. Father Greg Boyle, a priest in Los Angeles who started Homeboy Industries, coined the phrase, “nothing stops a bullet like a job.” William Julius Wilson writes a powerful and exhaustive book called When Work Disappears that further makes the argument about the correlation between lack of opportunity and levels of violence. I commission these sources to the readers to gather more information that can demonstrate these truths. We must resist the implicit biases and unconscious racial anxieties fed to us that would have us believe that criminality and violence is equated with what it means to be poor and a person of color. The most definitive indicator of violence is lack of opportunity. We can and should change that.  

Gun violence does not impact all communities equally. Do you think Newtown awoke more affluent Americans to the issue and has lead to a greater belief that guns are a collective societal problem?

I would like to push back against this premise just a little bit. Certainly there is a daily reality of gun-related homicides in our country largely concentrated in poor neighborhoods where people of color are often confined to live. And yet if you look at the data, you see that gun related suicides is the highest gun-related death category in the country, with the largest number of casualties being white males between the ages of 18-35. Domestic violence incidents are also a significant category pertaining to gun-related homicides.

This means gun violence is an issue that impacts us all and requires a unified response. Certainly, no one can deny the impact of Newtown on people’s consciousness related to gun violence. And yet, we see this was not sufficient to move enough people to make sure Congress enacted common sense policies that over 90% of Americans agree with. This leads me to believe that there is something more than awareness that needs to be raised. I am convinced that Christians need a conversion to the peaceful ways of Jesus, that calls into question the need for us to feel like guns are a solution for solving problems or engaging in pleasure and sport.

Given the overwhelming evidence in other countries where gun-related deaths, whether by suicide, homicide, or accidents are so low, what does it mean for Christians to lead the charge in ushering in a new era where we all can Live Free from gun violence. I say it often: “how can people who follow the Prince of Peace be so obsessed about owning a piece?” I know it’s a constitutional right, yet there are ways to get to common sense gun laws that do not infringe these constitutional rights. How do we as Christians challenge one another to not be driven by the fear-based, marketing ploys of NRA executives and gun manufacturers in other countries who sell Americans guns they would not even allow to be sold in their own country? It’s an opportunity to be on the right side of history. I pray we will be faithful to the call to be peacemakers.

Obviously there were no guns in the Bible. What analogy can you draw between then and now to demonstrate a “what would Jesus do?” solution to the issue of gun violence and mass incarceration?

Well, a couple of examples jump to mind that can be instructive and helpful. Pertaining to gun violence, I recall the incident when Jesus was being taken into custody by the Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane and Peter attempts to defend him with violence. Jesus told him to put his sword away, for those who live by the sword will die by the sword.

We see that our country is awash in guns, thus making us a prime candidate for one who seems to live by the sword. And the numbers are bearing out that we are indeed dying by this sword. I believe the solution lies in the ability of Jesus followers to really become disciples of the non-violent ways of Jesus. To challenge ourselves to disciple and be discipled in such a way that our trust lies in the power of God to take good care of us. This does not mean violence will not visit our life. At the same time, I find that our best efforts to arm ourselves for purposes of protection are resulting in more deaths of those closest to us we love and hold dear. I think we must become less afraid of loss, so we can gain that which continues to allude us: peace!

Now I speak to you as someone who lives in what is called “The Kill Zone” of Oakland, CA; someone who has had to bury many teenagers; someone who has experienced a home invasion while family members have been present. And even in all of this, God has been there to carry me and my loved ones through every moment of loss, violation and worry. These situations have forced me to be reminded of the fallen world we live in and ask God for more mercy, justice and compassion. And thankfully, while experiencing these situations, we did no physical harm. Could it be that our greatest solution to the issue of gun violence lay in the follower of Jesus to respond in our present context with the same response Jesus did to Peter? Put your sword away!

Regarding mass incarceration, Jesus tells a parable about the prodigal son who left his father’s home in pursuit of rebellious and riotous living. After hitting rock bottom, the prodigal son humbly returns to his father’s house in search of restoration. Despite the prodigal son’s insistence on returning as a lowly servant, the father welcomes him with open arms and restores him to a place of honor and dignity within the family. The brother of the prodigal son, who never left the father’s home and always lived according to his father’s rules, expresses his displeasure and bitterness at how compassionately his brother is received. As we consider how and when to allow hundreds of thousands of incarcerated individuals in our country to return back home to our communities, we must ask ourselves whether we want to resemble the son or the father in this parable. Will we stand with open arms, opportunity, restoration and joy? Or will we be driven by fear, resentment, unforgiveness and rejection?

To follow Jesus and his red letter admonitions is impossible without continual reflection, humility, prayer and endowment by the power of the Holy Spirit. I pray we will move with great care to not just be hearers of his words, but also doers.